SOURCE: Williams, Ranti. “The Heart of a Warrior.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4992 (4 December 1998): 23.

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...