A novel of the deep roots of the clash between Islam and the West.The savagery of the Reconquest tore apart the world of the Banu Hudayl family. For the doomed Muslims of late-fifteenth-century Spain, the approaching forces of Christendom bring not peace but the sword. Capturing the brutality of a war both military and cultural — and the price paid by the innocent — Tariq Ali opens his Islam Quintet with a harrowing and profound historical fiction.