The story of the seventh-century warrior queen, the Amazigh ruler known as Al-Kahina, or “The Diviner,” has been used, over the years, to undergird stories glorifying early Muslims, settler colonialists, and anti-imperial uprisings. The figure of Al-Kahina has appeared in world-building narratives by authors as diverse as the 14th-century historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun, French colonial apologist Ernest Mercier, and Algerian novelist and playwright Kateb Yacine. Believed to have been an Amazigh Jewish leader who opposed early Muslim generals, her story has been put in the service of Muslim, French, Israeli, and Amazigh nationalisms. She has alternately been portrayed as a thoughtless city-destroyer, a “Jewish Khaleesi,” and a feminist resistance fighter.

In The Night Will Have Its Say, celebrated Libyan novelist Ibrahim al-Koni relays the same story told by Ibn Khaldun in his 14th-century Tarikh, his multi-volume opus on history. Yet the novel, now in a lucid and precise translation by Nancy Roberts, broadens the scope of the story, which follows both Al-Kahina’s people and the invading Umayyads. Al-Koni—both a member of the Tuareg community and a Sufi Muslim—thus changes the binary. What has been used to tell a story about choosing sides now becomes a story that elevates diversity: in language, religion, and culture.

The basic story is this: a long-lived Amazigh ruler, called Al-Kahina because of her famed prophetic abilities, controlled a territory that centered on the Aures mountains in what’s now eastern Algeria and western Tunisia. Around 700 CE, her forces defeated Hassan ibn al-Nu’man, who had been sent by the Umayyad caliph to wage a holy war in Africa. After this win, Al-Kahina made the surprising move of adopting one of her key prisoners of war, bringing the foreigner into her family. She continued to govern this part of North Africa while Hassan ibn al-Nu’man waited an impatient five years for assistance to come from his caliph. As he waited, al-Kahina ordered the destruction of several of her own cities, as well as the melting down of gold and silver, which cost her crucial support. In the end, with defeat on the horizon, she sent her own sons to join the invading forces of Hassan ibn al-Nu’man.

Most tellings of Al-Kahina’s story share these core facts. Some writers, like Ibn Khaldun, don’t tell us what came before Al-Kahina’s hostility toward the Muslim forces, which help us make sense of her scorched-earth policy. In al-Koni’s novel, we see the massacres, kidnappings, and humiliations of Amazigh people by early Muslim generals, including many attacks on Amazigh leaders who converted to Islam. From the opening pages of the novel, we see many reasons why Al-Kahina might have fiercely opposed the arriving Muslims.

We also see what happened after Al-Kahina’s defeat. One distraught father, for instance, is crushed by the new leaders’ “jizya” tax, which is levied even on African converts, in order to fill the Umayyads’ coffers. For those who can’t pay, their daughters are stolen. A group of these new Amazigh Muslims eventually travel to Damascus to make their plea for justice and recover their daughters. And while the caliph rules in their favor, al-Koni suggests that this turn toward human justice is only temporary. In this story, greed has fiercer allies than justice.