Absorbing, Rip-Roaring and Fascinating.

"It's a rip roaring page turner," said the RNZ (Radio New Zealand) reviewer before adding the magic words, "time travel/alternate history". Being something of a fan of this genre I was in.

It goes like this: Iraq army officer is displaced by the war on terror and becomes ever more disaffected. Eventually radicalised he joins ISIS and becomes a specialist in torture and interrogation.

A hapless Syrian antiquities expert is captured and under duress gives up a closely guarded secret. Many years earlier while evacuating a temple in the ancient city of Palmira he uncovers an incantation that opens the doors to time, past and future. He understands the dangers and tells no one until he finds himself being tortured for no other reason than he is an academic and thereby an enemy of the ideology of ignorance expounded by ISIS.

Ayman Rasheed (the torturer) is by his own account an extremely erudite intellect and decides that Allah has chosen him (because of this quality) to set things right. He uses the incantation to further the cause of Islam by changing history. He picks a moment in time, develops a plan and lets loose a radically different future.

Fast forward to now. The West does not exist, Europe is Islamic and ruled by a oppressive Ottoman emperor from his palace in Istanbul. Rasheed is well pleased with the success of his plan but when he travels into the future to get treatment for a heart ailment he inadvertently lets slip his secret to his Dr whose wife is an activist lawyer fighting the dark oppressive rule that hallmarks European life.

Dumbfounded by this information she wrestles it into submission and decides to return history back onto to its natural course. Aided by her brother in law, a highly trained police operative, they charge across time battling the manipulative and somewhat psychopathic Rasheed in their quest for justice.

Khoury's book is, as the RNZ reviewer said, a thrilling page turner but he also manages some decent and biting commentary about the current state of the Islamic world and the patriarchal conceits that are handicapping Islamic society. Turkish president Erdogan comes in for some especially virulent criticism as does Trump, the confidence trickster (Khoury's words) that America elected to the Presidency. All in all an absorbing and informative read (the historical element is fascinating)

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