Disclaimer: there is no English translation of this book
The setting is 14th century Syria witnessing a stand-off between the usurping Mameluke Sultanate, and the Mongol Ilkhan whose forefathers invaded from the East, and who, having converted to Islam, is seeking to govern the holy sites of Mecca and Medina.
However, amid the grusomeness of the scenes delicately described and narrated, there is an overarching theme which the author fixated on: that is History.
The author does not accept history at face value. There are political ramifications at play that go largely unnoticed by positivist scholarship in the field. For the production of history is neither an objective nor symmetrical process: not everyone has the privilege of writing history, not even one's own history for that matter. The historian's discretionary power in selectively choosing what to convey and what to silence from the past precludes him from being a disinterested observer. History does not merely transmit events and happenings, but rather imposes lessons, ideologies, philosophies and entire worldviews. More precisely, the production of history translates, depending on the context, into the reproduction of the status quo.
The Mongol invasion is exemplary of this particularity of History. This event went down in history as the most horrific massacre in the premodern age; indeed, some historians go as far as to equate it with the Holocaust. This evaluation has been widely accepted and deemed uncontroversial by the scholarship of the last few decades, both in the East and the West.
However, since the twenty-first century, there have been efforts by some scholars to dissect those ramifications of history mentioned earlier within the widely-accepted narrative of “Mongol genocide.” Anja Pistor-Hatam for instance argues that the collective memory of the societies which experienced the invasion has to a certain extent exaggerated the degree of violence commited by the Mongols. What the premodern historians have transmitted secondhand in their books do not conform to archaeological evidence. Though if the extent of the destruction brought by the Mongols is not as significant as it was thought to be, “the trauma was very real” (Lane, 2008). The idea of foreign invasion was more fatal than the act itself, sending the affacted civilisations into existential crisis. The paranoia of the Foreign, the Other, is very well evinced by Al-Zahabi when the novel's characters who pondered on many occasions about the nature of the Monhol soldiers, concluding every time that they were not humans but mythical animals.
While endless literature is dedicated to the Mongol invasion itself, its aftermath and the cultural legacy of the Mongols in Iran and Iraq is rarely acknowledged. The Ilkhanids in fact contributed a lot to the enrichment of art and architecture, one of the perks of the cosmopolitan and diverse constituencies of the Mongol courts. Among the rulers' servants and elite were not only Muslims, but also Christians, Zoroastrians and Buddhists; for the Mongol rulers were more concerned about one's loyalty to the empire rather than religious or ethnic affiliation. Yet, especially in the Muslim world, this perspective remains ignored.
Reviving the bygone past, Al-Zahaby vividly shows the Ilkhan's fear of history, or more accurately his concern over the image that will be left of him by the chroniclers to the later generations:
History is an invincible enemy, for when life creeps into it one would be buried in the ground, stripped of awe and undesired.
The Mameluke Sultan knew of the Ilkhan's weakness and thus surrounded himself with historians and chroniclers, his strongest soldiers against the imminent invasion. He gasps and declares:
O God, may History be my friend and not my enemy.
Bibliography / Further Reading
Al-Zahaby, Khairy. “The Trap of Names” (2009).
Lane, George. “The Mongols in Iran” (2008).
Pistor-Hatam, Anja. “History and its meaning in the Islamic Republic of Iran: The case of the Mongol invasion(s) and rule” (2012).
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Silencing the Past:Power nd the Production of History” (1995).
