Leo Africanus

If you enjoy cozy armchair travel not only in time and space, Maalouf's fascinating tale invites to experience life in late fifteenth-century Europe and Africa as if you were Leo Africanus' sibbling and life-time traveller. From the dusk of Islamic Spain to the height of Christian Rome, the reader follows in the adventurous steps of the tireless traveller, from birthing and circumcision to funeral rites, capturing engrossing scenes of brutal persecution of Moslems in Christian Spain and wondrous appreciation of the Moslem savant in Rome, his marriage to a Jewish-born convert Maddalena, the story moves all readers with time to appreciate an old-fashioned, lingering prose of a quietly erudite writer.

The story of Leo Africanus or Hassan Al Wazan is a truly fascinating tale. Amin Maalouf has done an outstanding job in creating a very readable largely biographical work of a remarkable man. While a fiction there are no historical inaccuracies and a tremendous degree of accuracy in corroborating the event of this magnificent work with actual history. A wonderful aspect of Leo Africanus is the pitfalls it avoided. Amin Maalouf did not attempt to paint a picture that support a certain vision of history or advances a certain agenda. This is a common theme in modern day work on history and especially historical fiction. The one agenda that Amin Maalouf may have had in mind and advanced beautifully is that the world is full of wonderful people; they come in different religions, different colors and different ethnicity and they speak different languages. The world is also full of many awful people from different religions, cultures and colors.Reading Leo Africanus one feels a direct witness to the fall of Andalusia to the Spanish and its aftermath, the fall of Cairo to the Ottomans and its aftermath and the fall of Rome to the Lutherans. Globalization and the "global village" and easy travel may have made the world smaller in our time, for Hassan Al Wazan too, nearly 600 years ago traveling the globe and fitting in was a way of life.Exceptional historical and cultural education, beautifully written and well translated.

Aaaah that story... those characters?? I'd be a fool if I didn't compare Leo's times with our times today.. How they lived Islam then and How we live it today. This book is a story and a half, but if you're looking for a moral in this book, look elsewhere my friend.. This book is unique and is on a class of it's own...This is the bedtime story you've always wanted your parents to read you when they were tucking you in bed.. Have you ever woken up in morning not knowing where life is going to take you.. Have you ever woken up one day and found out that life is your driver and you're the passenger in the backseat? You're here today.. you're somewhere else tomorrow.. And then, one day, when you're fixing your dentures, you look at yourself in the mirror and think.. My life?? My life so far has been..This story is life, as we know it...We don't look for morals in life.. They just hit us as we go.. We choose our road and we're on our way to seek the unknown, discover new places, new faces and above all, we discover ourselves, our soul within. Leo's journey is our journey, because at the end of the day, when we trip on that bump in the middle of the road, we choose to either stand up again, wipe the dirt off and start marching down that road again, or sit and cry at our failures. We develop into our own characters.. our own individuality..Maalouf has intricately described but one man's journey through life. He has painstakingly tossed the settings, the times, and the places in the right proportion for this recipe. An Arab-Muslim would know that some of the descriptions, be it from traditions or ceremonies, differ tremendously from today and yet some remain the same, while some simply don't exist.A history Lesson?? Indeed, who ever paid attention in history class? We're talking about the late 1400s, and we're not talking American History here, try North African or maybe Italian history.. The Fall of Granada is just one among a few.. A description on Islam? Do not take this book as a solid description on Islam, it is merely an extract of it. An extract does not do a religion THAT vast any justice. If you want to learn more about that I'd suggest a book on its history and never a story that describes it through its characters... It's a book that truly draws the reader within. Quenching his/her thirst with each and every line.. It's a book that you wouldn't want to put down, because it's a lovely adventure of hardship, love, war, travel and family. What's going to happen? What is he going to do? Is he going to survive this? Questions like these, you'll find yourself asking as you're reading...The sad thing is we seldom seem to ask ourselves those same questions. We concentrate only on our footsteps without looking ahead at the horizon, living for today and not for tomorrow...Life in the eyes of... Leo, Maalouf, you and me.

The book's characters are from the late 1400s, but you would think Mr. Maalouf interviewed and/or lived with each of them. His character development is fantastic. His book gives the reader a different perspective on Islamic life than one tends to get from today's media. You'll hear Muslims described in appropriate human terms (good and bad) as opposed to the sterotypical and fanatical terms we often hear today. It reads like a history lesson, a travel essay, and a novel wrapped up into one. I suggest it to anyone planning or completing a trip to Southern Spain or Northern Africa. Hearing the Alhambra Palace described as a place of life, commerce and government instead of ruin was a treat. Being able to visualize the rooms, fountains and greenery with each line in the book was even better.

I normally do not read novels these days because so much of my time is taken up with other studies, but I am very glad that I read this one. I could have read 360 more pages. It was never boring. It follows the life of Leo Africanus year by year for 40 years. And what a life! I don't see how anyone with any interest at all in good historical fiction could not find a lot to enjoy here. And if there was ever a book that should be made into a long movie or a miniseries, this is it! I intend to read every work Mr. Maalouf has written.