This comparative study provides an overview of the textbook production chain, starting with its origins in the curriculum, and suggests ways in which policymakers can make improvements at every point in the chain. With evidence from a range of countries, mainly in Asia, the study is intended as a resource for policymakers and as a reference and benchmark for education systems. Although the study focuses on textbooks, which are the priority for governments and teachers and represent the gre...

This volume provides an overview of the themes and challenges in curriculum thinking and practice that currently engage policymakers and practitioners across the East Asian and Southeast Asian region. It addresses issues of policy development and implementation, and considers the notion of transversal in a broader sense, including whether the implementation of non-academic concepts can indeed traverse disciplinary, cultural and contextual boundaries.Consisting mainly of contribution...

“I have returned to settle my account. . . .”Told through the voices of a group of close friends and spanning a generation, The Smiles of the Saints is an epic story condensed into a short, intricate novel. Twenty-year-old Haneen has just returned to Egypt after an absence of fifteen years spent mostly in a Parisian boarding school, cut off from all family save for sporadic visits from her father, Rami. She has been summoned back by her father’s twin sister, who gives her an envelo...

Osama bin Laden's former sister-in-law provides a penetrating, unusually intimate look into Saudi society and the bin Laden family's role within it, as well as the treatment of Saudi women.On September 11th, 2001, Carmen bin Ladin heard the news that the Twin Towers had been struck. She instinctively knew that her ex-brother-in-law was involved in these horrifying acts of terrorism, and her heart went out to America. She also knew that her life and the lives of her ...

August Book Sense PickA fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed 'scientist of women.' A purring, voluptuous siren. A young shop-girl enduring the clammy touch of her boss and hating herself for accepting the modest banknotes he tucks into her pocket afterward. An earnest, devout young doorman, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism. A cynical, secretly gay newspaper editor, helplessly in love with a peasant security guard. A roof-squatting tailor, schemi...

Readers of Princess Sultana's extraordinary biography Princess were gripped by her powerful indictment of women's lives behind the veil within the royal family of Saudi Arabia. They were every bit as fascinated by the sequel, Daughters of Arabia.Here, the princess turns the spotlight on her two daughters, Maha and Amani, both teenagers. Surrounded by untold opulence and luxury from the day they were born, but stifled by the unbearably restrictive lifestyle imposed on them, they rea...

After taking an Islamic Studies course in Boston, G. Willow Wilson quietly found herself adopting the tenets of the religion as her own. This intellectual and emotional exercise created a unique challenge; how could she reconcile a devout and conservative lifestyle with the highly secular society in which she was raised?Taking a leap of faith, Wilson accepted a position to teach English in Cairo, where her guide to the bustling city was a student of astrophysics named Omar. Led by ...

"In this satisfying, lyrical memoir," an American woman discovers her true faith—and true love—by converting to Islam and moving to Egypt ( Publishers Weekly).Raised in Boulder, Colorado, G. Willow Wilson moved to Egypt and converted to Islam shortly after college. Having written extensively on modern religion and the Middle East in publications such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine, Wilson now shares her remarkable...

Meet the people of Cairo's Gamaliya quarter. There is Nabqa, son of Adam the waterseller who can only speak truths; the beautiful and talented Tawhida who does not age with time; Ali Zaidan, the gambler, late to love; and Boss Saqr who stashes his money above the bath. A neighbourhood of demons, dancing and sweet halva, the quarter keeps quiet vigil over the secrets of all who live there. This collection by pre-eminent Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz was recently discovered among his old pa...

**A blistering debut that does for the Iraqi perspective on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan what Phil Klay’s Redeployment does for the American perspective“[A] wonderful collection.” —George Saunders, The New York Times Book Review**The first major literary work about the Iraq War from an Iraqi perspective—by an explosive new voice hailed as “perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive” (The Guardian)—The Corpse Exhibition shows us t...

From 'Morocco's greatest living author' (The Guardian) comes a heartbreaking novel about parents and children, the powerful pull of home and the yearning for tradition and family. Mohammed has spent the past 40 years working in France. As he approaches retirement, he takes stock of his life - his devotion to Islam and to his assimilated children - and decides to return to Morocco, where he spends his life's savings building the biggest house in the village and waiting for his children and ...

Khartoum, according to one theory, takes its name from the Beja word hartooma, meaning meeting place . Geographically, culturally and historically, the Sudanese capital is certainly that: a meeting place of the Blue and White Niles, a confluence of Arabic and African histories, and a destination point for countless refugees displaced by Sudan s long, troubled history of forced migration.In the pages of this book the first major anthology of Sudanese stories to be translated into En...