The Book Smuggler

May 1, 2021

Set in the early 1000s AD (early 400s AH), Saudi Arabian author Al-Khamis's richly detailed work joins Mazid al-Hanafi, a self-professed seeker of knowledge, as he flees Baghdad with a chest full of philosophical and putatively heretical tomes that he carries for a mysterious freethinking group called the Voyagers. His caravan is headed toward Jerusalem, and though he would like to stop at Damascus, whose Syriac Catholic priests "left no book by the Greeks they encountered untranslated," mercenaries near there are carving crosses in the backs of the unwary. Mazid's world boils over with intellectual ferment and religious conflict. His grandfather, from whom he learned his love of books, was that rare imam to mix Sunni and Shiite phrases in his prayers, and as a young man in Baghdad, Mazid observes religious dissenters challenging the sheikh whose discussion groups he attends. When the blacksmith who introduced him to noncanonical ideas is murdered, Mazid hurriedly departs with his bounty, heading toward an unpredictable, if exciting, future. VERDICT Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, this deeply informed view of the medieval Islamic world will absorb readers of serious historical fiction, and knowledge lovers like Mazid.

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