When thinking of intrepid travelers from past centuries, we don't usually put Muslim women at the top of the list. And yet, the stunning firsthand accounts in this collection completely upend preconceived notions of who was exploring the world.Editors Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Sunil Sharma recover, translate, annotate, and provide historical and cultural context for the 17th- to 20th-century writings of Muslim women travelers in ten different ...

Few westerners will ever be able to understand Muslim or Afghan society unless they are part of a Muslim family. Twenty years old and in love, Phyllis Chesler, a Jewish-American girl from Brooklyn, embarked on an adventure that has lasted for more than a half-century. In 1961, when she arrived in Kabul with her Afghan bridegroom, authorities took away her American passport. Chesler was now the property of her husband's family and had no rights of citizenship. Back in Afghanistan, her husba...

A biography of the Sufi poet that's "a dazzling feat of scholarship . . . the book restores Rumi to the glories and hardships of his momentous age" ( The Washington Post).Ecstatic love poems of Rumi, a Persian poet and Sufi mystic born over eight centuries ago, are beloved by millions of readers in America as well as around the world. He has been compared to Shakespeare for his outpouring of creativity and to Saint Francis of Assisi for his spiritual wisdom...

Sultana’s Dream, first published in 1905 in a Madras English newspaper, is a witty feminist utopia-a tale of reverse purdah that posits a world in which men are confined indoors and women have taken over the public sphere, ending a war nonviolently and restoring health and beauty to the world."The Secluded Ones" is a selection of short sketches, first published in Bengali newspapers, illuminating the cruel and comic realities of life in purdah.

How different is Pakistan's culture from that of India? Exploring various aspects of the arts, literature and heritage of Pakistan, Raza Rumi argues that culture in Pakistan is not particularly unique to the nation, but rather a part of the cultural identities shared by South Asians. From the songs of Kabir and the ballads of Bulleh Shah to the cult of the feminine in the Sindh region, Rumi takes a kaleidoscopic view of the deep-set cultural mores that tie India and Pakistan together. Goin...

A firsthand account of the private world of a harem in colonial Cairo—by a groundbreaking Egyptian feminist who helped liberate countless women.In this compelling memoir, Shaarawi recalls her childhood and early adult life in the seclusion of an upper-class Egyptian household, including her marriage at age thirteen.Her subsequent separation from her husband gave her time for an extended formal education, as well as an unexpected taste of independence. Shaar...

Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri was born in the Iraqi holy city of Karbala, sacred to the whole Muslim world. Educated in Europe, living in the USA, working for many years in the oil industry, he has developed a unique perspective on the social and political history of the region. Interwoven with episodes from his own life, and meetings with prominent politicians, theologians and Sufi masters, he traces the collapse of the old way of life as dictators, often propped up by western c...

What is Pakistan? The name refers to a seventy-year-old post-colonial product of the bloodiest partition of territory and population that accompanied the end of British empire in South Asia. But the region of the Indus Valley has a four-thousand-year-old history, and was the site of one of the earliest and greatest riverine civilisations in the world. Although the modern nation of Pakistan as we know it was created as a homeland for the Muslims of British India, it is impossible to underst...

Bangladesh is the world's eighth most populous country. It has more inhabitants than either Russia or Japan, and its national language, Bengali, ranks sixth in the world in terms of native speakers. Founded in 1971, Bangladesh is a relatively young nation, but the Bengal Delta region has been a major part of international life for more than 2,000 years, whether as an important location for trade or through its influence on Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim life. Yet the country rarely figures in...

Afghanistan is situated at the crossroads of Asia, a strategically important location that connects the Middle East with Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Down the ages it has been subjected to continuous foreign invasion and intervention—from Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan, and as a pawn in the struggle between the British and Russian Empires—making its people wary of outsiders. That history is being repeated in the twenty-first century. Afghanistan has always been seen from ...

Modern Arabic literature remains little known and poorly understood despite growing curiosity among European readers. This brief introduction offers a unique overview, focusing on developments over the last fifty years. It provides a guide to the literary landscape, indicating the major landmarks in the shape of authors, ideas and debates. The picture that emerges shows that the literature of the modern Arab world, Europe's closest neighbour, is not so far from us as we are sometimes encou...

A history of partition seen through the life and fiction of one of the subcontinent's most important modern writersSaadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) was an established Urdu short story writer and a rising screenwriter in Bombay at the time of India's partition in 1947, and he is perhaps best known for the short stories he wrote following his migration to Lahore in newly formed Pakistan. Today Manto is an acknowledged master of twentieth-century Urdu literature, and hi...