Category Archives: Books You Should Read

The Walled City of Sanaa

Architecture, Books You Should Read, Sanaa, Yemen

The Walled City of Sanaa
by Ronald Lewcock

[Note: This is an excerpt from Ronald Lewcock;s 1986 UNESCO book. The book is available online in its entirety in pdf format at http://www.worditude.com/ebooks/unescopdf/sana_eng.pdf.]

Viewing the old walled city of San‘a for the first time creates an unforgettable impression. And this vision of a childhood dream world of fantasy castles is not dispelled even on closer acquaintance. In the farmlands outside the city, on either side of the roads leading to it, buildings of all shapes – circular, rectangular, square – rise out of the flat highland plain to seemingly impossible heights constructed of apparently weak materials. Not merely does the stonework of the lower levels consist of rough rubble with loose mortar, but for most of their height the buildings are made of mud – layered mud, mud bricks of all sizes – and of mud-straw plaster, infinitely eroded by the monsoon rains until deep indentations mark the channels down which the autumnal torrents find their passage to the earth. Continue reading The Walled City of Sanaa →

Reading Orientalism on Rorotoko

Books You Should Read, Literature, Orientalism, Orientalist Art, Teaching Resources

Rorotoko? Yes, Rorotoko. Forget about the name, but enjoy a relatively new website which allows authors to describe their books. As the site suggests:

• Rorotoko is an online venue for engaging the ideas and elaborations serious books are made of.
• Rorotoko is exclusive authors’ interviews on some of the most fascinating books coming out of some of the finest nonfiction and scholarly presses.
• But Rorotoko is not about books, it is about what books are about.

The April 3 edition of Rorotoko features an article I wrote about my Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid, published by University of Washington Press in 2007.

Reading Orientalism is literally a re-reading of the late Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said’s powerful critique remains a milestone in the critical theory of academic bias three decades after its first publication. As the years go by, Orientalism survives more as an essential source to cite rather than a polemical text in need of thorough and open-minded reading. Read by academics as well as the general public in almost three dozen translations, Said’s text analyzes novels, travelogues and academic books to argue that a dominant imperialist discourse of West over East has underwritten virtually all past European and American representation of a so-called “Orient.” The debate over these views of Edward Said, a prominent intellectual of Palestinian heritage, continues unabated even after his passing in 2003. Continue reading Reading Orientalism on Rorotoko →

Captain John Smith and the Turks

Books You Should Read, Islam in America, Orientalism, Travel


John Smith led into captivity to the Bashaw of Nalbrits by a “Drub-man” (interpreter). From The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Affrica, and America, from Anno Domino 1593 to 1629. London, 1630.

by Timothy Marr

Islam has figured in the fashioning of North American cultural definitions since as far back as the first years of European settlement. Inaugurating instances in colonial British America can be seen through brief biographical sketches of the Virginian leader John Smith and the Quaker preacher Mary Fisher.…

John Smith gained experience and credentials fighting Turks in Ottoman Europe well before he ventured across the Atlantic and he prided himself as a hearty crusader against the Muslims. After successfully launching incendiary devices against the Turkish armies in Hungary, for example, he reveled that “the lamentable noise of the miserable slaughtered Turkes was most wonderfull to heare.” Continue reading Captain John Smith and the Turks →

A Call for Heresy

Books You Should Read, Ethics, Islam in America, Islamic History, Wahhabi

[Note: The following excerpt is from Anouar Majid’s “A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 1-2, 47]

by Anouar Majid, University of New England.

“A Virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian.” Benjamin Franklin

“The atheist from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.” Martin Buber

This book is both an attempt to treat Islam over and above the confines of the familiar extremist/moderate dichotomy and an extension of my reflections on ways to divert Muslim and other cultures toward more progressive formulations. In the past I called for a progressive interpretation of Islam and its canons, urged both Muslims and Westerners to question their orthodoxies, and argued for a polycentric world of ‘neoprovincials’ questioning dogmas at home, reaching out to progressive elements in other cultures, and forging global alliances in the building of a genuinely multicultural human civilization, one in which economics are integrated into the broader aspirations of nations, not ruling over them like ruthless, insatiable deities. Here I am taking the discussion to its outer limits, calling on both Muslims (who consider their religion to be God’s final word in history) and Americans (who often think of themselves of having received a special dispensation from the Creator) to embrace heretical thought, or freethinking, as the only life-saving measure left to avoid an apocalyptic future. Continue reading A Call for Heresy →

Acclaimed Sudanese novelist Al-Tayeb Saleh dies

Books You Should Read, Literature, Sudan

Acclaimed Sudanese novelist Al-Tayeb Saleh dies
The Associated Press, February 18, 2009

KHARTOUM, Sudan: Al-Tayeb Saleh, one of the Arab world’s top novelists who excelled at portraying characters torn between East and West, died Wednesday in London, Sudan’s official news agency said. He was 80.

Saleh was born in 1929 in the northern Sudanese town of Marawi to a poor family and was educated first in Islamic schools and then later British institutions. He left Sudan to pursue graduate studies in the U.K. and went on to live in various European and Arab capitals, rarely returning home.

His works reflected the Arab and African quest for identity, especially in the period of 1960s, which were marked by the end of colonialism and the rise of nationalism across the region.

His 1966 masterpiece, The Season of Migration to the North, can be described as one of the earlier writings about the idea of a clash of civilizations. Continue reading Acclaimed Sudanese novelist Al-Tayeb Saleh dies →

Memoirs Recount Limitations Of Life In Modern Iran

Books You Should Read, Gender and Sexuality, Iran, Shi'a


Azadeh Moaveni, left; Azar Nafisi, right

Memoirs Recount Limitations Of Life In Modern Iran

NPR, Morning Edition, February 10, 2009
Two new memoirs chronicle life in pre- and post-revolution Iran and offer a glimpse of a people struggling to find pockets of freedom within a repressive regime.

Azadeh Moaveni, a California-born journalist who lived in Iran from 1999 until 2002 and again from 2005 until 2007, is the author of Honeymoon in Tehran, in which she recounts the complexities of moving in with her boyfriend and becoming pregnant — before getting married — in a restrictive Islamic regime.

Moaveni describes modern Iran as an “as if” society, where young Iranians avoid the rules by acting as if they don’t exist and where what people do in private tends to be very different from the way they are forced to behave in public.

“For example, you have a middle class of young people who has premarital sex, drinks alcohol — behaves as young people around the world, and this is something the regime can’t do anything about because, for the most part, it all takes place behind closed doors,” Moaveni tells Morning Edition’s Rene Montaigne. Continue reading Memoirs Recount Limitations Of Life In Modern Iran →

These Sons of Adam

Animals, Books You Should Read, Humor and Satire, Lithographs, Palestine, Travel


Arnaut Blowing Smoke at His Dog by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1882.

In two previous posts, The Immovable East and An Unbelievable White Man, I published excerpts from the first-person narrative by Philip J. Baldensperger, published in 1913 about experiences in Palestine during the last half of the 19th century. His sense of humor was acute. Here are the words he imagined that a dog would bark out about life as a canine in an Arab village.

“The sons of Adam disdain dogs, but in many places they raise us up and utilise us. Thus, in the camp where I lived, there were shepherd dogs, with thick fur, and watch dogs, with a smooth coat all over, and the tall, thin greyhounds which are raised for hunting the gazelles on the broad plains of Philistia, near my first home.

I was born in camp, south of Beersheba, and belonged to a family of Azazmeh Arabs. On account of my jet black fur the called me Lail – Night… Continue reading These Sons of Adam →

American Christians and Islam

Apocalypse Watch, Bible and Holy Land, Books You Should Read, Islam and Christianity


Author Thomas S. Kidd

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, many of America’s Christian evangelicals have denounced Islam as a “demonic” and inherently violent religion, provoking frustration among other Christian conservatives who wish to present a more appealing message to the world’s Muslims. Yet as Thomas Kidd reveals in this sobering book, the conflicted views expressed by today’s evangelicals have deep roots in American history.

Tracing Islam’s role in the popular imagination of American Christians from the colonial period to today, Kidd demonstrates that Protestant evangelicals have viewed Islam as a global threat–while also actively seeking to convert Muslims to the Christian faith–since the nation’s founding. Continue reading American Christians and Islam →