SOURCE: King, Bruce. Review of The Book of Saladin, by Tariq Ali. World Literature Today 74, no. 1 (winter 2000): 245.

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...