[In the following review, Williams asserts that The Book of Saladin vividly depicts the sweep of history, but fails to develop its characters adequately.]

Saladin is one of the few figures to have emerged from the bloody, brutal history of the Crusades with any measure of dignity. Legend and history concur in presenting the Kurdish warrior who led the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem in 1198 as a man whose integrity and compassion more than matched his sense of religious destiny and military skills. [In The Book of Saladin,] Tariq Ali's fictional account of Saladin does not attempt to sully history's portrait of this liberal Muslim hero. Instead, it attempts to add to the conventional view of this humane, generous leader a sense of indecision and loneliness by presenting the contradictions at the heart of the great man.

The historical Saladin was the first Muslim leader to see the recapture of Jerusalem as part of a greater jihad. Ali's Saladin, despite an eventual sense of religious destiny, has a history of youthful scepticism—much is made of his failure to visit Mecca, which is seen as a conscious youthful decision, then a constant adult regret. Similarly, despite the historical Saladin's reputation for clever military strategy, Ali's version is strangely indecisive, poignantly susceptible to the opinions of those around him. Finally, Ali transforms the historical Saladin, the habitual frequenter of his large harem, into a man who, even in middle age, nurses the broken heart inflicted on him by an adolescent rejection. For all these attempts to make Saladin a more complex human being, Ali's Saladin does not live on the page and simply serves to prove that a mass of contradictions does not a character make.

The novel is in the form of a fictional memoir dictated by Saladin to Ibn Yakub, a Jewish scribe who talks to family and friends to gain a fuller picture of his subject. Of the fictional characters Ali creates to support his stellar historical cast, Ibn Yakub is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the best realized. Even as he is chronicling the lives and histories of the great and good, the humble scribe is fighting his own battles of wounded pride and bitterness occasioned by his wife's adultery. After a time, however, Ali seems to lose interest in his fictional alter ego, and so do we.

The other imagined characters in the novel do not fare anywhere near as well as the narrator. Ali points out in his introduction that “Women are a subject on which medieval history is usually silent”. To remedy the historical balance, he creates two particularly spirited member of Saladin's harem—Jamila and Halima. Jamila, the more attractive of the two, is as radical in her religious philosophy (she is a sceptic) as she is in her sexual orientation (she is a lesbian). But the problem with Ali's portrayal of life beyond battles and councils of war is that his women and eunuchs, rather like his constant references to homosexual practice, all seem part of a worthy educational exercise. His efforts to portray those marginalized by history are commendable, but this should not have kept him from making them something more than ciphers or symbols. Considering the vibrancy of the period and culture chosen, The Book of Saladin is surprisingly flat. Ibn Yakub's uninspired style and a dialogue laden with platitudes do not help; neither does a strange lack of any sense of the passage of time.

Unlike Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy, which conveys Alexander's military genius and personal vulnerability, The Book of Saladin manages the grand historical sweep with a fair amount of colour and incident, but the core of the novel, where character should be, is empty.