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Historical person
1842–1918
Abdul Hamid II was the Ottoman sultan who ruled from 1876 to 1909. He suspended the first Ottoman constitution, centralised authority, promoted pan-Islamic legitimacy and faced nationalist movements, foreign pressure and the Young Turk Revolution that restored constitutional government.
Tariq Ali’s The Stone Woman is set in 1899. Members of an Ottoman family gather at the summer residence of Iskender Pasha outside Istanbul while the empire faces political decay, nationalism and pressure for reform.
In non-fiction, Abdul Hamid II is discussed in Ian Rutledge’s Sea of Troubles. Ian Rutledge’s Sea of Troubles approaches the subject through empire, conquest and resistance, political ambition and government, and exploration, travel and cultural encounter.
Series
The Islam Quintet is Tariq Ali’s cycle of five historical novels examining encounters between Islamic societies and the Christian West across more than five centuries. Moving from the fall of Muslim Granada and the Crusades to Norman Sicily, the late Ottoman Empire and the modern transnational world, the…
All books in this series
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
