Saïd the Fisherman

Saïd is a poor, quick-tempered fisherman of the Syrian coast whose fortunes rise and crash with dizzying speed. Cunning and impulsive by turns, he abandons his patient first wife, chases wealth and women, prospers as a merchant, loses everything, and is swept up in the violence of the nineteenth-century Levant before his wanderings carry him as far as London. Marmaduke Pickthall knew the Arab world intimately, and his 1903 novel was praised by writers such as D. H. Lawrence for the warmth and authority with which it renders Muslim life from the inside rather than the outside. It is a vivid, unsentimental portrait of a flawed and very human man, and of a society an English author had come to love. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB.