The second of half of Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, by Tariq Ali, moves much faster and is filled with more action and urgency than the first half. The first half of the novel was focused on character building, general exposition, and laying the framework for the philosophical issues of religion, justice, and morality that confront the characters throughout the text. By the second half of the novel, however, this slow build-up of character and background information explodes into action with Zuyhar riding into battle and al-Andalus being attack by the Christian Knights. This intense and sudden shift in narrative is important to consider when thinking about the overall meaning of the book.

The burst of action that occurs after approximately Chapter 8 is twofold. First, it involves a great deal of physical movement by characters from one place to another—Zuyhar sets out for battle in Granada, Hind marries and leaves home, Ama dies, and the Christian Knights storm into al-Anadlus. What does this sudden burst of physical movement to different locations in the novel show? First of all, the sudden use of movement physically embodies the change that has been foreboded since the beginning of the novel. The characters all sense that great change is coming, and that once it does everything they’ve known will completely destroyed. The use of movement in the second half of the novel is used to show definitively that this change has in fact come. Second, and more straightforward, the movement of characters shows, in the microcosmic sense, the greater dispersion of the Islamic culture in the Iberian Peninsula. Through history we know that the Jews and Muslims of Spain were either killed or forcefully driven out during the Reconquest, and the dispersion of the Banu Hydal family shows this.

The intense action also involves a rather violent mixing of the past, present and future. Towards the end of the novel, characters desperately trying to grapple with their imminent destruction describe this moment as a sort of collapsing in of past, present and future into one moment of destruction. Umar, realizing his town and his family is about to be destroyed, thinks “Their homes, their past, their friends, their future, everything has been destroyed,” (230). In this sense it’s like time is collapsing in on itself in this one catastrophic moment. This furthermore now brings attention to Ali’s treatment of time throughout the novel: is this strictly a historical fiction piece? Or is he playing with time more liberally, suggesting that the barriers between the past, present and future are not as solid as they may at first appear?