Amin Maalouf is a writer of significant cultural importance, but unfortunately in the English-speaking world, his works do not often see the acclaim that they deserve. Born in Lebanon, but having spent most of his professional career in Paris, his fiction encapsulates a Western readership with a living history told through the legacies of men from forgotten and obscure worlds within Islamic history.
His first novel, Leo the African, tells the story of al-Hassan al-Wazzan, otherwise known as Leo Africanus, the mediaeval Andalusi adventurer and diplomat. The book is divided into four parts denoting different periods in his life, from his upbringing in the south of modern-day Spain, to his life in Morocco with the expulsion of muslims from the Iberian peninsula, all the way through his adventures into the Songhai Empire and Egypt, and eventual capture and slavery in the Vatican.
Maalouf portrays the Mediterranean as a knife-edge frontier between Islam and Christianity, interconnected by both trade and war, separated by faith. In this period, the Muslim world is presented as a decayed setting, wrought with corruption as characters long for bygone days before the caliphates divided it. This starkly contrasts the Christian world to the north, lit with burgeoning renaissance.
His second novel, Samarkand, instead uses temporal contrast between the past and present. The first part tells the story of Omar Khayyam, the 11th century Persian poet and scholar, beginning with his escape from an angry mob for writing purportedly blasphemous poems. Maalouf fictionalised his character as being caught between the two forces of Nizam al-Mulk, vizier of the Seljuk empire, and Hasan-i Sabbah, religious leader of the “Order of Assassins.” This fight is essentially one between Sunni and Ismailite Islam, and therefore existentially relevant to the future these worlds inhabit.
In the novel’s second part, this conflicted future is seen through the eyes of a cultural outsider, Benjamin O. Lessange. Iran is in the midst of its bitter early 20th century constitutional revolution, as this second protagonist searches the country for Khayyam’s lost manuscript. Here the boundary between West and East is more opaque, casting an American alone in an unfamiliar setting, battling to make sense of a world wholly different to his own. Khayyam’s manuscript becomes symbolic of a lost past which collective ideals are projected onto, yet the reader knows that this past world was as turbulent as the present. It sheds some light onto Leo the African, perhaps suggesting that the golden age constantly referred back to in that novel was no more than a cultural fiction.
Tensions across both historical and geographical divides are explored by Maalouf using the idea of legacy. Writing great works allows both novels’ protagonists to become relevant beyond their immediate realities. This occurs both within the books, as seen with Lessange desperately searching after Omar Khayyam’s lost works hundreds of years after they were published, but also beyond them, with Maalouf’s novels introducing these characters to contemporary Western readers. This is especially relevant in a time of Western cultural hegemony, with both novels’ chronologies reminding us that all empires inevitably fall. It makes us, as readers, briefly appreciate the sheer enormity of our world, one that has been shaped by a rich and dynamic tapestry of characters over the course of time.
“Gur Emir Mausoleum, Samarkand” by Fulvio Spada is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.