The Crusades and a Marginal History of Islam: Tariq Ali’s Activism and Alternative World in The Book of Saladin

Abstract

This chapter contextualizes Tariq Ali’s The Book of Saladin against the literary return of Anglophone and postcolonial fiction to historical forms. Pheng Cheah’s normative theory of postcolonial literature as world literature and Hamish Dalley’s notion of the dialectic between typification and singularity in the postcolonial historical novel will be significant for the chapter’s textual analysis of the novel. As a postcolonial historical novel, The Book of Saladin undermines the EuroAmerica-centered world system and imperialism in the existing world by returning to the contested histories of the Crusades in the twelfth century by representing typical/normative characters of Muslims and Christians. Blurring the line between history and fiction, it furthermore embeds, within the story of Salah-ud-din ibn Ayyub (known in the West as Saladin), a variety of imagined nonrepresentative or singular characters, including Salah al-Din’s Jewish scribe and his wives, whose voices were rarely heard in medieval histories. By looking critically inward into Salah al-Din’s court, this chapter argues, Ali’s novel not only narrates a marginal history of Islam but imagines an alternative world which is built on reflexivity and empathy rather than imperial expansion.