The Monk, the Moor and Moses Ben Jalloun
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Saeed Akhtar Mirza
Fourth Estate
256 pages, R450
I have always had a deep distaste for ideas that create barriers between people…. This ‘novel’ of mine is an attempt to dismantle one such insidious barrier. Is it fiction or non-fiction? I do not know and will let the reader decide.
Using intersecting stories, soliloquies, legends and characters such as Avicenna, Copernicus and Dante Alighieri, Mirza creates a compelling narrative that dismantles the carefully manufactured European myth about the making of the modern world and brings to life a flourishing medieval Islamic civilisation.
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