Why I Wrote... The Hated Chapters
By Alexander Rooksmoor.
I had long been interested by how sophisticated the culture of the Muslim states of southern Iberia had been in the Middle Ages. The University of Córdoba, founded in 786, was the oldest university in Europe. Pope Sylvester II (946-1033; Pope from 999) graduated from it and it attracted the children of Christian monarchs to study. I was riled when people kept citing Bologna as having the oldest (they now temper it to ‘oldest still running’) university in Europe, while dismissing Muslim universities as ‘simply madrasas’ at a time when Christian ones of the time were largely just seminaries. Still, in our world, the university was closed down following the Castilian conquest of the city in 1236.
I thought it would be interesting to explore what might have happened if a Muslim state in Iberia, Al-Andalus, had persisted. There had been 80 libraries and colleges in Córdoba, holding 400-500,000 books at a time when an average abbey held 600 books. Yet, the steady advance of the Reconquista down to 1492, led, to a large extent, an erasure of the Muslim states’ history – beyond admiring pretty buildings in southern Spain, as not all that had been created by the Muslim emirate was deemed as inappropriate for Castile and instead ended up being repurposed. The current cathedral of Córdoba was built as a mosque between 785-787. This made it a bit easier for me when tracking around Córdoba as capital of Al-Andalus rather than of a Spanish region.
Analysing what was needed for a Muslim state to persist in Iberia, I went back to the Battle of Tours (Poitiers) of 732. I envisaged a victory by Umayyad forces who went on to conquer what is modern-day France. It is imagined there would still be a reconquest – La Reconquête – by Christian forces, but naturally it would have taken longer to advance far down Iberia. By the time it did, I felt it probable that the Reformation would have broken out, further blunting the Crusader spirit and leading to wars among different Christians rather than them eliminating the Muslims in the south.
In addition to not snuffing out Al-Andalus, I believed the partial failure of the reconquest would have meant enduring tensions between the Christian states on the peninsula. Especially I felt with Navarre influenced by Queen Jeanne III and King Henri III – the genuine rulers of the kingdom in our history – it would have remained Huguenot. In our world, Henri famously converted back to Catholicism on being named King Henri IV of France. In this alternative he only ruled a small Protestant outpost in south-west Europe. I thought subsequent reorganisation of the northern Iberian states following the defeat of Napoleon, however, would have left it as a grand duchy.
Moving into modern times I drew on the experiences of states of North Africa, hence the removal of the monarchy in the 1960s and its replacement by an army officer seemed a highly probable path for the Al-Andalus to take. Thus, in 1967, Brigadier General Hamzah Salhi has become military dictator after the overthrow of the last emir. He was very much shaped by Gaddafi of Libya, but also Nasser in Egypt, Boumédiène in Algeria and Ben Ali in Tunisia that all appeared to add weight to my assumption.
Other aspects also inspired the novel. I lived in an area with a notable Muslim population and had been fascinated by the impact of the 1979 Iranian Revolution on people in my town, notably in terms of dress and the display of texts from the Koran. I wanted to explore how it would similarly have affected a state that bridged Europe and North Africa.
The journey taken by the American characters in the novel was useful in showing how Al-Andalus, as heirs of the Almoravid state, also retained Morocco as an integral part of itself and held control over Western Sahara. That made it logical that the Canaries, Madeira, parts of Algeria and Ibiza could also have been held by Al-Andalus. I drew on Moroccan examples from our world, for example for the telephone company and the various police forces of Al-Andalus. It was clear that changing what happened in Iberia would alter outcomes in the Americas, so the Leónese dialect is the language of Latin America, e.g. Bons Ventos rather than Buenos Aires, and genuine French control of parts of Texas grew, hence the US state of Têchsas.
I also lived through the period of the declaration of the fatwa by Iran against author Salman Rushdie following the publication in 1988 of The Satanic Verses. I wondered how this would have worked if flipped around so that a Muslim author was being condemned by Christian fundamentalists. People seem to forget the rise of such fundamentalism in the same period, notably in the USA. This provided the basis of a jeopardy to write an adventure story around.
In August 2022, however, nearing completion of this novel, Rushdie, who had been able to return to public life, was stabbed. Thus, I sat on the novel for 12 months, feeling it would be in bad taste to submit it. I only did so when we knew Rushdie would survive and his attacker secured. Rushdie published on the incident himself in Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024), so it seemed alright for me to progress my own book.
In The Hated Chapters, Al-Andalus author, Maryam Hamdi, has produced an English-language novel called Palm-Strewn Road. Its protagonist is Joe Carpenter living on Cypress Avenue in New York in the 1980s who is killed at a crossroads with a nail gun. As Rushie’s The Satanic Verses was seen as offensive to Islam, so, some Americans see Hamdi’s book as unacceptable to Christians. Ironically, perhaps now, in the era of social media, such a development as the novel shows, would be more, rather than less, likely than was the case in 1990.
Particularly after writing Byzantium Express (2020), I have acknowledged that one reason why I like writing AH stories quite distant from the point of divergence is because they allow me to envisage how a culture would have developed over the centuries. For this one I had the inputs of historic Córdoban culture; styles, music and fashion of the 1990s in both the West and Arab worlds; Berber culture because of the close connection to the North African littoral – the Almoravids who ruled southern Iberia, 1085-1147, were Berbers rather than Arabs – and, of course, the Iranian Revolution.
There are two points of view in the novel. One is that of Kaima Ziani, a woman journalist increasingly attracted, as she ages, to Islamic fundamentalism, but, showing as with Muslim women colleagues I have had, that this did not prevent her from engaging with the modern world and using contemporary technology. She stemmed from a combination of women I have met, studied or worked with over the past 30 years. As was the case with Muslim states that were not Iran or ultra-conservative ones like Saudi Arabia, Al-Andalus is an example of how they can mesh interpretations of traditional perspectives with what in the West are seen as modern views. Ziani is representation of that cultural syncretism, though highlighting some of the tensions inherent in it. As I progressed, I realised the geo-political/cultural situation of Al-Andalus meant having to engage, in place of simply ‘Western’, with a concept of ‘Northern’ society, as, for a lot of the book, much of Europe is viewed from the Al-Andalusian perspective.
Ziani’s, and indeed Hamdi’s, antagonist is US Army veteran, Brandon Travis, a militant Christian fundamentalist who had served in Vietnam, the war for the USA only being over 15 years by 1990. Travis is part of the Independent Fundamental Bible Church which, though fictional, was based on me researching Christian fundamentalists of the southern USA over the past forty years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of Travis’s story revolves not simply about carrying out a hazardous terrorist mission, which does not always go smoothly, but also the challenges in ‘robust’ Christianity between the crusader zeal and the humane aspects of Jesus’s preaching. Ironically, that tension does seem to have come more into public discourse in the years since I completed the book.
Given how many books I have written and, by definition, the characters in alternate history are never from the world I know, I need to represent a whole spectrum of people s across genders, ages, ethnicities and beliefs. While, due to common traits with them, some might feel they have a connection to particular people of the past, in fact, we are not even like our own parents in what we have seen or experienced, even what we believe, let alone people from further in the past, or existing in a world none of us has lived in.
As my plans for the novel proceeded, though, I was conscious that it might be criticised on grounds of cultural appropriation. I am not an American, nor a Christian, so I had to rely on what I read and about such men while reminding myself that, despite apparent parallels, attitudes of the late 1980s were not precisely the same as those of the mid-2020s. The same applied to the two Arab women characters. In all three cases, I had to read and watch what people of these backgrounds say and do, though recognising that characters should never simply be an edition of a stereotype.
Maryam Hamdi almost ended as the third protagonist. As people will know, I am always keen to try (though do not always succeed) to have a 50/50 male/female balance in my novels or across them as a whole. In this case, with Hamdi at the centre, but Ziani providing a point of view, I could compare and contrast how two women, old friends, now in early middle age, had reacted differently to the shifts in Islam that the 1980s had seen. Perhaps optimistically, the novel suggests that, despite such differences, people can remain friends, especially when faced with danger.
Beyond the characters, maybe I derived the greatest fun in developing the novel from working out the arts culture of the Republic of Al-Andalus. Having a multi-lingual, well-read, well-travelled author who is very much in the current scene allowed me to plug into a diverse range of cultural references from both the Westerm and the Arab worlds. In addition, I had set out from this basis of celebrating what was lost when Al-Andalus was absorbed by Spain. Thus, I was naturally keen to highlight historic writers such as Wallada bint al-Mustakfi and Abu al-Hasan Al-Mas'udi plus things like the traditional café story-telling, Hakawatiun, which has seen a revival for real.
From the perspective of 1990, I also looked across popular and literary culture from the Tunisian/Egyptian pop singer Latifah to Spanish literature, such as from Ana María Matute, to US culture including Dallas, L.A. Takedown and the Golden Axe computer game. With an author as a prime character, I then had to let rip conjuring up a range of fictional, but genuine sounding, Arabic and Berber literature to have emerged from such a historic literary setting as Al-Andalus.
While when writing an AH novel about a place, people are often quick to say you have made it all up. However, I did hope that, in some way, as well as my primary purpose which is always to provide an entertaining story, I would rouse people’s interests in a history and culture which, even before the most recent uptick in Crusader rhetoric, was being dismissed in Western discourse as somehow lesser. In fact it was well ahead of the state of its Christian neighbours of the time and if it had endured would have had a fascinating place in history.
The Hated Chapters is on sale from Amazon now.
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