Dubai International Festival of Literature: James Waterson

Not one of the big names of the festival (Waterson is charmingly surprised we have turned up at all, given that Jung Chang and Robin Sharma are speaking at separate sessions during his slot), but the topic is tantalising: 'A Mongol Khan of Europe?'

The battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 is not one I am familiar with, but Waterson manages to weave together the central theses from his two books, The Knights of Islam and The Ismaili Assassins, into an amusing and compelling narrative. In defeating the Mongols and preventing the fall of Cairo, Waterson argues, the Mamluks inadvertently also save Europe (then a 'cold, forested peninsula full of sheep, on the rump of Asia') from Mongol devastation.

With the aid of a broad and engaging selection of slides (including stills from PlayStation's 'Assassin's Creed'), Waterson takes us through the rigorous training of the Mamluk slave soldiers, including instruction in the arts of the furusiyya (horsemanship, archery and swordsmanship); the covert use of Assassins by the courts and caliphates of the near East (Polo's accounts of the use of hashish by the sect is dismissed as 'romantic nonsense'); and the rise of Baibars from the slave markets of Damascus.

Both Mongol and Mamluk were ultimately war machines, and in some ways more similar than dissimilar. Waterson cites a contemporaneous account of the defeat of the Mongols at Ain Jalut which observed that 'to everything there is a pest of its own kind', and uses details from the baptistry of Saint Louis (once used to baptise infants of the French royal family, but an object of Mamluk origin) to demonstrate the distinct oriental facial features of the Mamluks.

The difference in their legacy, Waterson argues, lay in their creed. Whereas the Mongols razed the great Islamic centres of Herat and Baghdad, the Mamluks had been steeped in the precepts of Islam from their earliest training and, having usurped the Ayyubids in Egypt, needed religious legitimacy - hence their contribution to some of the great classical Islamic architecture of Egypt.