In an extended essay for The National—part profile, part review—Robyn Creswell assesses Tariq Ali's Islam Quintet and, in particular, Night of the Golden Butterfly which completes the acclaimed series of historical novels about Islam and the West.
Creswell singles out The Book of Saladin as the best volume in the series, and describes the Quintet as a whole as a "kind of double-bladed heresy, cutting against Western ignorance on the one hand, and Muslim pieties on the other. In the face of those pundits and politicians who trade in stereotypes of Islam as a religion of puritanical violence and backwardness, Ali evokes the most cosmopolitan eras of its history."