Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree
Tariq Ali
Verso, 1993
244 pages
ISBN 978-0860916765
Recommended by: Jesse




Finally, a book that I have actual problems with and didn't just love wholeheartedly. Now I can sound like I actually think critically about the things I read.

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree sounds like a really cool book: it's about a Muslim family in late 15th-century Moorish Spain, during the reign of Queen Isabella. Ali uses this family as a means through which to examine the history of Moorish Spain in this time period, which is pretty fascinating-- especially since Ali is a noted political theorist, historian and activist, you can take what he says about this stuff pretty seriously. Historical fiction is, I think, an excellent enterprise for teaching those who don't want to take an entire BA about important historical events, especially when the reader can feel confident in the author's scholarly credentials. Ali does provide an interesting analysis of the fate of the Moors in Spain, namely that things may have turned out differently had the Spanish Muslims been more united instead of dividing themselves over trivial issues and thus becoming much more vulnerable to the violence of Queen Isabella and the Inquisition.

Unfortunately, it is fairly obvious that Ali is a theorist, not a novelist. His historical exposition and analysis suffers as a result of inexpert prose and, possibly, rather shoddy editing-- I noticed a lot of words that were simply used incorrectly, which should have been caught at a fairly early stage in the publication process. This was very distracting for me as a person who trying to train herself to notice these things. In addition to these purely mechanical problems, I was distracted by his use of the third-person omniscient, which jumped from character to character in a matter of sentences with no warning and thus seemed not very purposeful. My biggest problem, though, was with his characterisation of the al-Hudayl family. I really dislike it when writers of historical fiction, in any sense, are so squeamish about the "dated" views of the time that they can't stand to write characters who hold these views, and thus make them unusually progressive in their opinions about race, sexuality, gender, whatever. And I mean, maybe Spanish Muslims in the fourteenth century were more liberal in these matters than I assume they would have been-- it happens, and I'm always surprised-- but I have a hard time believing that it wouldn't have been a huge deal for a young girl in a wealthy family to lose her virginity to a man, even one to whom she was (maybe) engaged to at the time, but they all seem pretty chill about it. This is one of the reasons I think Mad Men is so successful-- every character, every single one (except maybe Peggy, but she is kind of an outcast) is a product of their time and place, philosophically, politically, whatever (and if there are any dated opinions to be squeamish about, it's those of rampant capitalism in the early 1960s). As are we all.

So, while I'm philosophically interested in the rest of Islam quintet-- because Islamic history is pretty fascinating-- I'm not sure I'm capable of struggling through prose and characterisation that are less than artful. It's a story that needs to be told, with all historical, theological and political depth that Ali provides, but it needs to be literarily beautiful as well.