Category Archives: Books You Should Read

The Merchant Houses of Mocha

Architecture, Books You Should Read, Islamic Economics, Tihama, Yemen

The most important historical port on Yemen’s Red Sea coast is no doubt the old port of Mocha, which gained fame in the West for its association with the Yemen coffee trade. In a new book, The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port, Nancy Um provides a fascinating social history of the trade through this seaport during the Ottoman period. Here is how the book is described on the publisher’s website.

Gaining prominence as a seaport under the Ottomans in the mid-1500s, the city of Mocha on the Red Sea coast of Yemen pulsed with maritime commerce. Its very name became synonymous with Yemen’s most important revenue-producing crop – coffee. After the imams of the Qasimi dynasty ousted the Ottomans in 1635, Mocha’s trade turned eastward toward the Indian Ocean and coastal India. Merchants and shipowners from Asian, African, and European shores flocked to the city to trade in Arabian coffee and aromatics, Indian textiles, Asian spices, and silver from the New World. Continue reading The Merchant Houses of Mocha →

A Poet’s Recipe

Books You Should Read, Food and Drink, Iraq, Miniatures


A host tending to the needs of his guests, Maqâmât al-Harîrî, 1236 CE

As richly illustrated in Geert Jan van Gelder’s delightul God’s Banquet: Food in Classical Arabic Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), Arab poets loved food and wrote extensively on the adab of cuisine. There are poems devoted to specific foods, but even a few recipes for the cook with a wit as well as a greasy thumb. Here is van Gelder’s translation of a recipe poem by the Baghdadi poet Kushajim (died 961 CE):

You have asked me about the best of dishes:
You’ve asked today someone who is not ignorant!
Now take, my friend, some ribs of meat,
And after that some meat of leg, and fat,
And chop some fat and succulent meat
And rinse it with sweet and clear water. Continue reading A Poet’s Recipe →

Reviewing the Review

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Islam: Introduction, Islamic Texts, Orientalism, Scholars, Sufism

In 2005 I published Islam Obscured, a critical assessment of four books widely read as “the” anthropology of Islam. The books I examined were by Clifford Geertz, Ernest Gellner, Fatima Mernissi and Akbar Ahmed. Having wielded an iconclastic hammer over the first four chapters, I concluded the book with a brief question-and-answer survey of the ways in which “Islam” has and should be studied by anthropologists who value the role of ethnographic fieldwork. At the time, the publisher failed to send the book out for review, although some review copies finally went out over a year ago. There are many, many books out there on “Islam,” but my text was, to not mire myself in humility, somewhat unique. It faulted these texts for not using ethnographic data but rather essentializing their own views of what Islam should be.

I recently received a lengthy review by Ken Lizzio, whose research was on Sufi texts, in The Journal of North African Studies (14:309-316, June, 2009). Having written my book in large part for non-anthropologists, I was quite interested in how a specialist in Near Eastern Studies would react to it. The thrust of the reviewer strikes me as quite positive, especially when he states: “As Varisco proceeds to fell some of the giants in the anthropological forest, he does so with an axe sharpened with impeccable logic and refreshing intellectual honesty” (p. 310). The reviewer agrees with me that both Geertz and Gellner both fail to apply data from fieldwork to their assertions. So far, so good. Continue reading Reviewing the Review →

Hashish in the Muslim World

Books You Should Read, Ethics, Islamic Law, Plants, Scholars, Sufism

Webshaykh’s note: In the process of researching the medical aspects of the chewing of qât (Catha edulis) leaves in Yemen, I consulted an important study published almost forty years by the distinguished historian Orientalist (in the best sense — and there is a best sense — of the word) Franz Rosenthal. This was his The Herb: Hashish versus Medieval Muslim Society (Leiden: Brill, 1971). Appearing at a time when hashish had become a household word in America, Rosenthal sorts through legal, medical and literary sources to provide a historical overview of the issues surrounding the use of hashish, the plant known as qinnab in Arabic (Cannabis sp). This is a valuable resource, but also worth a good read to get a sense of how an addictive socially popular drug was viewed for almost the last full millennium. Fortunately for those of us who cannot afford massive libraries, this book is available as a Google Book online. I quote from the conclusion.]

Hashish, the Individual, and Society

In conclusion we must state again that our knowledge is very limited. The gaps are tremendous. The nature of the information we do have is not easily assessed. Its applicability to the realities prevailing over the immense extension in time and space of medieval Islam is often suspect. Partisanship pro or con, coupled with a seemingly widespread ignorance of hard facts, obscures everything. Statistics naturally are non-existent.

Our sources give the impression of a westward march of hashish that had its serious beginnings int he twelfth century and gathered speed during the thirteenth century. Continue reading Hashish in the Muslim World →

What Students are Reading in Dayton

Books You Should Read, Islam in America, Islamophobia, Teaching Resources

Book about Islam required reading for UD freshmen

By Dave Larsen, Dayton Daily News, July 26, 2009

More than 1,700 incoming University of Dayton students are required to read “War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims” before they arrive on campus Aug. 22 for first-year orientation.

The book, an award-winning collection of essays about young American Muslims, was written by Melody Moezzi, a 1997 graduate of Centerville High School and an American Muslim of Iranian descent.

UD is a Marianist Catholic university.

Moezzi’s book will serve as the basis for a series of student dialogues on the issue of diversity and differences, said Kathleen Webb, UD dean of libraries. Continue reading What Students are Reading in Dayton →

Edward T. Hall (1914-2009)

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Scholars

One of the most readable anthropologists of the 20th century passed away earlier this month on Monday, July 20. Most known for his The Silent Language (1959) and The Hidden Dimension (1966), Edward T. Hall specialized in the analysis of body language and established his theory of proxemics. Hall received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1942. In 1979 Hall was interviewed by Kenneth Friedman in the August issue of Psychology Today for an article entitled “Learning the Arabs’ Silent Language.” His comments on Arab culture are worth revisiting:

Kenneth Friedman: Do we Americans understand the Arabs, or do we tend to caricature or stereotype them?
Edward Hall: I don’t think we understand them. We ten to think of Arabs as underdeveloped Americans – Americans with sheets on. We look at them as undereducated and rather poor at anything technological. All we have to do is make believers out of them, get them the proper education, teach them English, and they will turn into Americans. Continue reading Edward T. Hall (1914-2009) →

Poster Martyrs

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Books You Should Read, Contemporary Art, Lebanon, Shi'a


A poster commemorating the second anniversary of the assassination of Sheikh Ragheb Harb, by Merhi Merhi, 1986 (Hizballah Media Office)

by Hicham Safieddine, The Electronic Intifada, July 6

Author Christopher Hitchens might have saved himself a beating had he read Zeina Maasri’s book Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War. Hitchens, a self-proclaimed expert on all matters theological and Middle Eastern, was attacked in the streets of Beirut last February after defacing a political poster. The power of posters apparently touched Hitchens himself, who felt compelled to express his vindictiveness by attacking an image. But in a war-ravaged place like Lebanon, images can be a lot more than mere symbols. As Fawwaz Traboulsi explains in Off the Wall’s forward, they can serve as weapons, and Hitchens’ attackers must have understood that quite well.

The power of posters, as not merely symbolic weapons but also sites of hegemonic struggle during Lebanon’s civil war, is a central theme of Maasri’s book. A mix of text and image, the book is a rich and visually engaging work that tackles a dimension of war long-neglected by Lebanese historians. A sample of 150 posters (out of 700 the author has examined) in full color and printed on laminated paper occupies the center of the book and it is hard to begin reading before going through them: portraits of “heroic” leaders of all factions, clenched fists facing enemy guns, silhouettes of martyrs and landscapes of religious and nationalist symbols overlooked by dominant war figures, many marked with slogans that range from the racist to the revolutionary. But the book is a lot more than a slideshow of images summing up defining moments of the war or a straightforward critical review of the posters. Maasri delves into questions of theory, representation and meaning that shaped and defined the art of poster-making and the politics of their interpretation during times of conflict.

For the rest of this article, click here.

Flipping through Yemen a Millennium Ago

Books You Should Read, Islamic History, Yemen


Mosque in Jiblah, Yemen

There was a time when books were hard to come by. Either they cost too much or were inaccessible in a private or exclusive university library. Whatever else the world wide web has done (and that is a mouthful), it now functions as an archive. More and more, the rare and out-of-print books I used to be forced to read in a library reading room are becoming available online. Mr. Gutenberg might roll over in his Grab at the very thought of a pdf file, but print has taken a new and universal turn. I especially enjoy the “flipbook”, which simulates turning the pages of images of the original. For an enjoyable read on the early history of Yemen, there is the flipbook version of Henry Cassels Kay’s translation called YAMAN, ITS EARLY MEDIAEVAL HISTORY, published in London in 1892. This has excerpts (not always trustworthy in their translation) from Umarah ibn Ali al-Hakami (1120/21-1174), Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406); Muhammad ibn Yaqub al-Janadi (d. 1332?).

The sad thing is that well over a century ago, Kay lamented that there was virtually nothing available on the history of Yemen, which had become of strategic interest to the British empire. Continue reading Flipping through Yemen a Millennium Ago →