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...

The Indus rises in Tibet, flows west across India, and south through Pakistan. For millennia it has been worshipped as a god; for centuries used as a tool of imperial expansion.Empires of the Indus follows the river upstream and back in time, taking the reader on a voyage through two thousand miles of geography and more than five thousand years of history redolent with contemporary importance.

Kashmir is one of the most protracted and bloody occupations in the world-and one of the most ignored. Under an Indian military rule that, at half a million strong, exceeds the total number of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, freedom of speech is non-existent, and human- rights abuses and atrocities are routinely visited on its Muslim-majority population. In the last two decades alone, over seventy thousand people have died. Ignored by its own corrupt politicians, abandoned by Pakistan a...

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...

‘This book investigates the Islamic revolution and tries to understand the fundamentalist zeal that has gripped the young in Iran and other Muslim countries . . . He is a modern master.’ – Sunday TimesReissued in the Picador Collection, Among the Believers is V. S. Naipaul’s classic account of his journeys through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. ‘The believers’ are the Muslims he met on those journeys, young men and women battling to rega...

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 fabulous piece of writing . . . I recommend it unreservedly' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE'A brilliant book' CHRISTINA LAMB, author of Farewell KabulOne of the first things I was told when I arrived in Kabul was never to walk...When journalist Taran Khan arrives in Kabul, she uncovers a place that defies her expectations. Her wanderings with other Kabulis reveal a fragile city in a state of flux: stricken b...

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...