[In the following review, King surveys the strengths and weaknesses of The Book of Saladin.]

Tariq Ali is not only a journalist and filmmaker; he is also an old-fashioned novelist who likes to write large books on important issues and big themes. The Book of Saladin is the second novel in an intended quartet treating the confrontation between Islam and Christianity. The first novel, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, concerned the fall of Islam in Spain. The Book of Saladin is the story of the rise of Sultan Yusuf Salah al-Din's family and how Salah al-Din united the twelfth-century Islamic world for the liberation of Jerusalem from the Crusaders. The conquest and reconquest of Jerusalem has been the subject of many epics, although seldom seen through Islamic eyes.

This is very much a postcolonial book, one in which the Europeans not only invade a foreign land but are also barbarians with filthy habits, defilers of holy places, liars, and killers of women and children and especially of Jews. This is a novel shaped by modern sensibilities as well as facts. It is intended as an allegory for the next Islamic liberation of Jerusalem; Ali's introductory “Explanatory Note” alludes to its application to the present. The implications are that Arab leaders should stop quarreling among themselves; they must unite behind a single authority, or one ruler must have the single-mindedness, virtue, cunning, strength, and patience to bring about unification. (Ali is a politician, not a moralist.) The novel is also designed to show that the peoples of the region, such as the Jews, Copts, and other “people of the book,” share a common culture, and tolerance, and were united behind Saladin's liberation of Jerusalem. Is Ali suggesting that while Western Christianity and European Jews (and the state of Israel) are alien to the region, those who have in the past lived under Islamic regimes should be accepted as brothers?

One of the main (invented) characters in the novel is Isaac Ibn Yakub, a Jewish scribe recommended to Saladin by Rabbi Musa Ibn Maymun (the famous Jewish philosopher Maimonides). Yakub becomes the Sultan's historian, entrusted by him to write the real history of his life and times in contrast to the literary pufferies of his official secretary and Islamic scholars. Eventually Yakub becomes part of Saladin's inner circle, even, toward the end of the book, his advisor. We are often reminded that Christians persecute Jews because of the Crucifixion. Other invented characters include two beautiful, intelligent women who provide the love story within the novel. One is a skeptic, a lesbian, raised by her father on the rationalism of the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd (whose work is considered heretical by those who hold religious power). She seduces and educates the other woman, who has lost her true love and been made part of the harem. Besides lesbians in the harem, homosexuality is shown to have been commonplace at the time, although Ali's characters tolerate it more as amusing than as an alternative life-style.

Ali's prose can be careless; there are sentences that do not mean what he intends, and the narration can sound like a political editorial or a textbook summary. There are other flaws that make the novel feel like a middlebrow Book of the Month Club choice from the 1940s or 1950s; but once you get used to its clumsiness, it has the excitement of an old Hollywood epic.