Night of the Golden Butterfly concludes the Islam Quintet—Tariq Ali's much
lauded series of historical novels, translated into more than a dozen languages,
that has been twenty years in the writing. Completing an epic panorama that
began in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, the latest novel moves between the
cities of the twenty-first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to
Beijing. The narrator is rung one morning and reminded that he owes a debt of
honour. The creditor is Mohammed Aflatun—known as Plato—an irascible but gifted
painter living in a Pakistan where "human dignity has become a wreckage." Plato,
who once specialized in stepping back from the limelight,