"The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" (original Spanish title: "El acercamiento a Almotásim") is a fantasy short story written in 1935 by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. In his autobiographical essay, Borges wrote about "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim", "it now seems to me to foreshadow and even to set the pattern for those tales that were somehow awaiting me, and upon which my reputation as a storyteller was to be based." Background Written in 1935, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" was first published as an essay in Borges's 1936 philosophical essay collection, A History of Eternity (Historia de la eternidad). It was labeled a short story when it was reprinted in 1942 in Borges's first short fiction collection, The Garden of Forking Paths (El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan), which became a subsection of Ficciones when that was published in 1944. Borges described his story as "both a hoax and a pseudo-essay." He borrowed from Kipling for some of the plot of the fake book. The supposed publisher of the fictitious book described in the story was an actual publisher, Victor Gollancz, as was the supposed writer of the preface, Dorothy L. Sayers. Plot summary The story is a review of The Conversation with the Man Called Al-Mu'tasim: A Game of Shifting Mirrors, the second edition of an earlier work, The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim. Written by Mir Bahadur Ali, an Indian lawyer, and published in 1934, the second edition is described by the narrator as inferior to the first edition, published in 1932. The reviewer gives a history of the book, first describing the success of the first edition, the publishing of the second edition by a respected publisher in London, and the positive and negative reception given to it by critics. Borges states that though both books have been popular, the first had an original printing of 4,000 copies and was never reprinted, while the second is by far the better known, having been reprinted several times and translated into English, French, and German. The second has often been criticized for poor writing and for its obvious allegory to the quest of finding God. The narrator then summarizes the plot of the novel. The book is a detective story about a freethinking Bombay law student of Islamic background. He becomes involved in a sectarian riot in which he impulsively kills a Hindu, after which he becomes an outcast among the lower