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(More customer reviews)This surprising novel breaks new ground as it follows the life of the monk Sergius, and of Mohammed the founder of Islam, to whom he was secretary and advisor, at least in this fictionalised account of those turbulent times. It witnesses the transmission and reshaping of ancient wisdoms at the birth of a new civilisation, with consequences that resonate across our world today.
As an account of seminal events around the year 600 AD, it is an informative and highly accessible work, serving to educate all but the most knowledgeable historian. Based on researched sources on Sergius, and a depth of cultural knowledge, the author highlights the flow of ideas through Judaism and early Christianity into Islam, challenging all three great religions with the origins and history of their tenets, some of which have been conveniently forgotten. The focus on major events, profound belief, and lives lived in earthy technicolour, all in the same prose, is the most unusual feature of the novel. We find an unexpectedly sensual view of existence, colouring the progress of characters with an abundance of love and loyalty, mixed liberally with graphic sex and violence, bringing agonies to the body and the spirit. The scribe emerges from a licentious yet scholarly past, having been the first to recognize the prophet, as the disciplined éminence grise of the new religion. Mohammed himself is a successful trader and family man, whose epilepsy is both a sickness, and a mark of his other-worldliness. By the end he is a formidable, even terrifying leader, whose decisions in battle shock those around him.
Kartal's startling narrative transports the reader through time and space into the mid-east world at a crucial moment. With a modern unsparing eye he reveals a plausible version of the inside story that some will find compelling and others troubling, even unacceptable. Unlike the Satanic Verses this not a work obsessed with literary form or self-conscious exploration of taboo, but rather one that the uses the freedom of the modern novel to illuminate a story shrouded in the reverent mists of centuries. By revisiting such a galactic collision of religious ideas and human passions, with the intellectual rigour and research missing from the Da Vinci Code, the Prophet's Scribe will have an explosive effect on historical and religious orthodoxies of every kind, echoing the magnitude of the original events.
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