Category Archives: Art

1001 Dreams

Contemporary Art, Gender and Sexuality, Morocco


Dream #1 by Yasmina Alaoui and Marco Guerra

Yasmina Alaoui is of French and Moroccan descent, born in New York in 1977. She studied Fine Arts at the Carousel du Louvre in Paris, and earned a BA in Sculpture from the College of William and Mary. She currently lives in New York city, and exhibits internationally.

The underlying themes behind all her works deal directly with her experiences of multicultural upbringing and aims to bridge extremes by embracing opposites: secular and holy, classical and contemporary, order and chaos, repulsion and attraction. She is known to create complex and intricate visual works using a wide variety of techniques, which she combines in an authenticate manner.

Yasmina has collaborated with photographer Marco Guerra on the Tales of Beauty and 1001 Dreams series, which have been and collected and exhibited internationally since 2003.

Wellcome Library Arabic Manuscripts Online

Islamic Sciences, Islamic Texts, Miniatures, Teaching Resources


عجايب المخلوقات وغرايب المخلوقات الموجودات

The Arabic manuscripts collection of the Wellcome Library (London) comprises around 1000 manuscript books and fragments relating to the history of medicine. For the first time this website enables a substantial proportion of this collection to be consulted online via high-quality digital images of entire manuscripts and associated rich metadata.

This has been made possible by a pioneering partnership between the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Wellcome Library, and King’s College London, with funding from the JISC Islamic studies programme.

These manuscripts are part of the Wellcome Library’s Asian Collection, which comprises some 12,000 manuscripts and 4,000 printed books in 43 different languages. The Islamic holdings include Arabic and Persian manuscripts and printed books, and a small collection of Ottoman manuscripts and Turkish books. The core of these collections relates to the great heritage of classical medicine, preserved, enlarged and commentated on throughout the Islamic world, stretching from Southern Spain to South and South-east Asia.

A Wolff in Shepherd’s Clothing, #3

Bible and Holy Land, Books You Should Read, Ethics, Islam and Christianity, Kurds, Lithographs, Orientalism, Travel, Turkey


Dervish,; photograph by Sevryugin Anton (1830 – 1933), the official photographer of the Imperial Court of Iran

In the early 19th century there was a florescence of Protestant missionary interest in saving Muslim, Jewish and other kinds of Christian souls in the Middle East. This thread continues excerpts from one of the earliest accounts from the 19th century, that of Joseph Wolff (1795-1862), a convert from Judaism to Christianity. In 1837 he published a diary of his travels. Like a number of Christians visiting the Muslim world, Wolff is more impressed by Muslim sobriety and devotion in their ritual than he is by the Christians he sees:

There is also an intriguing encounter between the Christian missionary and a Kurdish Muslim dervish:

Chalk one up for the Kurdish dervish over the atheists of Europe.

Tabsir Redux: The Prophet’s Medicine, Part 1

Islamic Sciences, Miniatures, Muhammad


[Illustration: Miniature illustrating the treatment of a patient, Serefeddin Sabuncuoglu. Jarrahiyatu’l-Hâniya. Millet Library, Ali Emiri, Tib 79.]

In the 7th century Muhammad set in motion one of the world’s great religions, Islam. As an Arabian prophet, Muhammad spoke of the same God known to Jews and Christians for centuries. The message received by Muhammad, and revered today by over a billion Muslims, is contained in the Arabic Qur’an. Although the focus of this scripture is on the spiritual health of mankind, there are also numerous statements regarding physical health and emotional wellbeing. Muhammad himself often spoke regarding medicine and diet, and his words are accepted as authoritative only beneath the level of God’s revelation in the Qur’an. As Muslim scholars in later centuries encountered the medical traditions of classical Greece, Syriac tradition, and India, they compared this indigenous knowledge with the Qur’anic view of man and the prophet’s statements about health. Eventually, a specific literary genre called the “Prophet’s Medicine,” or al-tibb al-nabawi in Arabic, came into existence. In the texts of this genre Muslim scholars tried to merge the most accepted and current scientific knowledge about medicine with the folklore of Muhammad’s Arabia. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: The Prophet’s Medicine, Part 1 →