Category Archives: Books You Should Read

Travels of Sir John Mandaville, 2

Books You Should Read, Islam and Christianity


Silk Road

[One of the most widely read Holy Land travel narratives of the 14th century was attributed to a certain Sir John Mandaville. Some scholars believed it was compiled from writings of It appears to have been compiled from the writings of William of Boldensele, Oderic of Pordenone, and Vincent de Beauvais. Whoever the author, it is a fascinating read for the positive depiction of Islam. But part of the praise is to heap shame on the Christians for not keeping faith as well as these Saracens. Martin Luther used the same tactic, even accusing the Catholic Church of being worse in keeping faith than the Turks of his day. The entire book is online, but here is the part comparing Muslim and Christian devotion. For part one, click here.]

And, therefore, I shall tell you what the soldan told me upon a day in his chamber. He let void out of his chamber all manner of men, lords and others, for he would speak with me in counsel. And there he asked me how the Christian men governed them in our country. And I said him, “Right well, thanked be God!”

And he said me, “Truly nay! For ye Christian men reck right nought, how untruly to serve God! Ye should give ensample to the lewd people for to do well, and ye give them ensample to do evil. For the commons, upon festival days, when they should go to church to serve God, then go they to taverns, and be there in gluttony all the day and all night, and eat and drink as beasts that have no reason, and wit not when they have enough. And also the Christian men enforce themselves in all manners that they may, for to fight and for to deceive that one that other. And therewithal they be so proud, that they know not how to be clothed; now long, now short, now strait, now large, now sworded, now daggered, and in all manner guises. They should be simple, meek and true, and full of alms-deeds, as Jesu was, in whom they trow; but they be all the contrary, and ever inclined to the evil, and to do evil. And they be so covetous, that, for a little silver, they sell their daughters, their sisters and their own wives to put them to lechery. And one withdraweth the wife of another, and none of them holdeth faith to another; but they defoul their law that Jesu Christ betook them to keep for their salvation. And thus, for their sins, have they lost all this land that we hold. For, for their sins, their God hath taken them into our hands, not only by strength of ourself, but for their sins. For we know well, in very sooth, that when ye serve God, God will help you; and when he is with you, no man may be against you. And that know we well by our prophecies, that Christian men shall win again this land out of our hands, when they serve God more devoutly; but as long as they be of foul and of unclean living (as they be now) we have no dread of them in no kind, for their God will not help them in no wise.” Continue reading Travels of Sir John Mandaville, 2 →

Travels of Sir John Mandaville, 1

Books You Should Read, Islam and Christianity


portrait of Sir John Mandeville, from 1459


[One of the most widely read Holy Land travel narratives of the 14th century was attributed to a certain Sir John Mandeville. Some scholars believed it was compiled from writings of It appears to have been compiled from the writings of William of Boldensele, Oderic of Pordenone, and Vincent de Beauvais. Whoever the author, it is a fascinating read for the positive depiction of Islam. The entire book is online, but here is the part on Islam.]

NOW, because that I have spoken of Saracens and of their country — now, if ye will know a part of their law and of their belief, I shall tell you after that their book that is clept ALKARON telleth. And some men clepe that book MESHAF. And some men clepe it HARME, after the diverse languages of the country. The which book Mohammet took them. In the which book, among other things, is written, as I have often-time seen and read, that the good shall go to paradise, and the evil to hell; and that believe all Saracens. And if a man ask them what paradise they mean, they say, to paradise that is a place of delights where men shall find all manner of fruits in all seasons, and rivers running of milk and honey, and of wine and of sweet water; and that they shall have fair houses and noble, every man after his desert, made of precious stones and of gold and of silver; and that every man shall have four score wives all maidens, and he shall have ado every day with them, and yet he shall find them always maidens. Continue reading Travels of Sir John Mandaville, 1 →

Rebellion in the Ottoman Empire

Books You Should Read, Environment, Islamic History, Turkey


Last year I had the privilege of serving on the Albert Hourani Book Award Committee for the Middle East Studies Association. There were a number of excellent books submitted, but in the final analysis it was unanimous for a remarkable historical study by Sam White entitled The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), parts of which are available on Google Books. For an interview about the book, click here.

Below is the statement released by the committee:

Our committee reviewed over eighty books for this year’s Albert Hourani Book Award. Manycommittee members commented on the large number of high quality works from the incredibly rich and diverse body of nominations. Finally settling, unanimously, on a single work of superior scholarship could not have been achieved without the conscientious, diligent and professional attention my four fellow committee members gave to their colossal task: Michael Bishku of Augusta State University, Terri DeYoung of the University of Washington, Devin DeWeese of Indiana University, and Daniel Martin Varisco of Hofstra University.
The committee has chosen Sam White’s masterful work, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press as the 2012 recipient of the Albert Hourani Book Award. Sam White is an assistant professor of history at Oberlin College. Continue reading Rebellion in the Ottoman Empire →

On the beauty of late medieval florilegium

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Literature, Orientalism, Scholars


Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Le charmeur des serpentes, 1880

In 2007 I published Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid with the University of Washington Press. The build-up to its publishing is a story that spans almost six years. Originally I had planned to include a chapter on Said’s Orientalism in a book I was writing called Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation, which was published in the SAR series of Palgrave in 2005. But as I began to work on the chapter, it quickly took on a life of its own. I had first read Orientalism when returning from ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen in 1979. It sat on my bookshelf and I dutifully included the author’s “introduction” (the most readable part of the book for undergraduate students) in my course on Middle East anthropology. But as I delved back into Said’s book and started collecting the original reviews (which turned out to be more than 50) and the plethora of writings about Orientalism, I discovered that this dense book was fraught with errors of fact and methodological missteps.

While working on both books-to-be, I delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2001 entitled “Dissing Orientalist Discourse: What Said Said and What Ethnographers Did,” followed by talks on my evolving text at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, the University of London and New York University. The AAA talk prompted a young employee of Routledge to ask if I was thinking of writing a book on the subject. Naively, I said yes and after another year had a draft ready to drop off in their New York office. Time went by and by and there was no word from Routledge. Eventually, after several months, I received a letter from the Sociology editor noting that Routledge at the time no longer had an Anthropology editor and my manuscript was not of interest to him. I thus learned that there were sociologists who seemed not to know much about Edward Said. But they did send the reviewer’s comments and these were well taken. In fact my first draft was in need of major revision.

So revise I did and then I accidentally stumbled across a website of a book agent inviting queries. Continue reading On the beauty of late medieval florilegium →

Johnsen on Yemen in New York

"Arab Spring", Books You Should Read, Conferences and Talks, Terrorism Issue, Yemen

Book Night With Gregory Johnsen

12 November 2012 – 6:00pm – 7:30pm

40 West 45th Street, Club Quarters, New York, Free admission

by Sonya K. Fry, Overseas Press Club of America

The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia [W.W. Norton & Company, November, 2012] is an eye-opening look at the successes and failures in fighting a new type of war in the turbulent country of Yemen, written by Gregory D. Johnsen, who is an OPC Foundation Scholar, a Fulbright fellow in Yemen, part of a 2009 USAID conflict assessment team and is now a doctoral candidate in Near Eastern studies at Princeton University.

Johnsen takes readers into Yemeni mosques where clerics in the 1980’s recruited young men to jihad to fight the Russian invaders in Afghanistan. These men eventually formed the basis for the Al-Qaeda movement. The story also leads to the presidential palace in Yemen where the country’s military dictator, Ali Abdullah Salih vascillated between helping the U.S. get rid of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and hindering the process. Salih himself called this delicate balancing act of staying in power a “snake dance.” For years this dance included concealing Islamists from the prying eyes of U.S. intelligence and yet later he allowed the U.S. to conduct attacks that killed dozens of Al-Qaeda operatives including Abu Ali al-Harithi, who was known as the “godfather” by U.S. intelligence. The dramatic story sounds like a Hollywood movie: Haritihi turned on his cell phone as he left a secret meeting which signaled a predator drone to track him. The first missile from the drone exploded next to Harithi’s speeding car. He threw the phone out of the window and screamed at everyone to get out, but there was nowhere to go since they were in the middle of the desert. The drone fired its second missile and the car exploded in flames. Continue reading Johnsen on Yemen in New York →

A Muslim Manual of War

Books You Should Read, Islamic History, Islamic Law, Islamic Texts, Scholars, Terrorism Issue


A Muslim Manual of War
being Tafrij al-kurub fi tadbir al-hurub by ‘Umar ibn Ibrahim al-Awsi al-Ansari
Edited and translated by George T. Scanlon
Foreword by Carole Hillenbrand

Free online facsimile anniversary edition

One of the first three books published by the AUC Press after its founding in 1960 was A Muslim Manual of War, an annotated editing and translation of a hitherto little-known fifteenth-century Arabic manuscript on the art of war, prepared by George Scanlon, then embarking on his career to become one of the most respected scholars in the field of Islamic art, architecture, archaeology, and history. Now, in celebration of 50 years of the AUC Press, and in honor of Professor Scanlon’s recent retirement after an illustrious career, most recently as professor of Islamic art and architecture in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo, the AUC Press is proud to make available once again this long out-of-print book, as a freely accessible scanned facsimile with a new Introduction by the author and a Foreword by eminent scholar Carole Hillenbrand, a former student of Professor Scanlon.

The Quran as a Great Book: Muslim Perspectives

Books You Should Read, Calligraphy, Islam: Introduction, Qur'an


The fatiha in an Arabic manuscript of the Quran


[The following is a lecture presented in the Hofstra Great Books Series on December 5, 1993].

بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ

الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ
الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ
مَالِكِ يَوْمِ الدِّينِ
إِيَّاكَ نَعْبُدُ وَإِيَّاكَ نَسْتَعِينُ
اهْدِنَا الصِّرَاطَ الْمُسْتَقِيمَ
صِرَاطَ الَّذِينَ أَنْعَمْتَ عَلَيْهِمْ غَيْرِ الْمَغْضُوبِ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا الضَّالِّينَ

In the name of God, the infinitely Compassionate and Merciful.
Praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds.
The Compassionate, the Merciful. Ruler on the Day of Reckoning.
You alone do we worship, and You alone do we ask for help.
Guide us on the straight path,
the path of those who have received your grace;
not the path of those who have brought down wrath, nor of those who wander astray.

What I have just recited in Arabic is the Quran’s opening or fatiha, consisting only of seven short verses, the first of some 114 chapters of varying length. This is the most oft repeated part of the Quran, recited daily by millions of Muslim men and women during each of the five regular prayers. So integral are these opening words in the revelation of Islam that they have been called the “essence” (literally “mother”) of the Quran (Umm al-Quran ), or as some say, “the Lord’s Prayer of the Muslims.” This fatiha is the opening salvo of a scripture revered as God’s most basic message by more than one billion people on earth today. For these Muslims, most of whom live outside the Middle East, the Arabic Quran is not only a great book but quite literally “the” great book. While non-believers would not approach this book as a true revelation, no one can deny that it is a scripture that has been influential in shaping history across continents for almost 15 centuries and will continue to influence the lives and politics of many of the world’s peoples for a long time to come.

My interest tonight in talking about the Quran differs somewhat from most of the lectures in this series. I feel no need to convince you as an audience in an academic setting that the Quran is a significant text, one of those few great books that we cannot afford to ignore. This is made even more poignant in light of the perceived threat by many in our society of a so-called “militant” Islam on the march against Western Civilization. In our collective cultural ignorance, the Quran is portrayed only as a manifesto, not because non-believers do not take the time to read it carefully but simply because Islam has been branded as a hostile and uncompromising worldview. Continue reading The Quran as a Great Book: Muslim Perspectives →

Cavorting with Cazotte #3

Books You Should Read, Humor and Satire, Literature, Orientalism

Here is the continuation of a previous post the story of Habib the knight from Jacques Cazotte’s Mille et une fadaises, Contes a dormir debout (The Thousand and One Follies, Tales to Sleep Upright), which was later translated into English. The English edition published in the year of his death is available in that magical resource for book lovers: archive.org. There are several volumes, but the excerpt here is from volume 3. Enjoy.

For the continuation of the story, you will need to consult volume 4 on the archive.org site.