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which the pieces were taken" except for "changes in language, continu–
ity and the modification of detaiL" He has remained faithful to his
sources, which are meticulously provided for every chapter at the end of
the book-too faithful, I would say, for it to be called a historical novel,
in which the novelist usually makes liberties not allowed the historian.
The reader may wonder (as I did for a while) why Makiya didn't sim–
ply present his narrative as history. Well, he tells us, no amount of schol–
arship will be able to do justice to the fraught history of the emergence
of Islam, its conquest of Christian Jerusalem, and the complex relations
among Judaism, Islam, and Christianity in the seventh century. He is
faithful to his sources, but "the outcome is unmistakably fiction, mim–
icking the assembly of a building to a new plan, using the detritus of
greatly esteemed predecessors as its raw material-predecessors that
were designed to ce lebrate the much revered site." The metaphor of the
building is what one might expect from Makiya, a trained architect,
who has an architectonic sense of the composition of the book. It also
reminds us of the splendid passages which describe the architecture of
Jerusalem and in particular the Dome of the Rock. But I don't see how
assembling a building to a new plan distinguishes the making of fiction
from the making of history. Historians also assemble their sources to
plans that differ from the plans of other historians.
What makes the difference is Makiya's choice of a character to nar–
rate the story. Unlike the historian, who aims for an objective narration
of events (whether he can achieve it is another matter), Makiya entrusts
his story to a participant in the events who, by virtue of his participa–
tion, cannot claim objectivity. In the historical note at the end of the
narrative, Makiya focuses on Ka'b, a convert to Islam and the source of
the stories his son recounts. What Makiya has to say about Ka'b is very
much in the spirit of fiction. Ka'b does not have a reputation as a reli–
able truth-teller. Makiya is attracted to his modus operandi, his imagi–
native relationship to the truth. Makiya writes: "I think of the historical
Ka'b as an entertaining rogue, a man with an agenda but also who liked
playing to the ga ll ery." He adds: "The most delightful thing about Ka'b
from my point of view is that in telling stories about the summit of
Mount Moriah he did not favor one source or religious tradition over
another. Like Ka'b, I ardently hope my readers have a difficult time dis–
cerning whether a given tale in this book . .. is Jewish, Muslim, or
Christian in origin." No character, Christian, Jew, or Muslim, not even
the narrator, the son of a Jewish convert to Islam, can be said to possess
the Truth . The quarrels that arise between Christian and Muslim, Mus–
lim and Jew, Christian and Jew are never resolved as they would be by
