The Polymath: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Literature)

This award-winning historical novel deals with the stormy life of the outstanding Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun, using historical sources, and particularly material from the writer's works, to construct the personal and intellectual universe of a fourteenth-century genius. The dominant concern of the novel - the uneasy relationship between intellectuals and political power, between scholars and authority - addresses our times through the transparent veil of history.

We meet Ibn Khaldun as a man of the mind, a man of the heart, and finally as a man of action, trying to minimize the imminent horrors of invading armies and averting the sack of Damascus by Tamerlane, only to spend his last years lonely and destitute, having been fired from his post as qadi, having lost his wife, and his attempts at saving the political situation having come to nil.