In 1924, the Al-A‘waj, also known as the Crooked, set sail from Kuwait on a trading journey around the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, to Western India and, eventually, back to the Gulf. Dhows had sailed this route for centuries—and would continue to sail it for a few more decades still.
Middle East
Slavery has been a ubiquitous practice throughout much of world history–and the Muslim world was no exception. Slave soldiers, concubines, and eunuchs can be found throughout Muslim writings—which, as Justin Marozzi points out in his book Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, ends up giving us a selective and narrow view of who slaves were, and what they did.
The Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) is a literary festival and cultural event for the general public, but it is preceded each year by the Sharjah Publishers Conference, a rights marketplace and networking opportunity for publishers from around the globe.
Our beliefs about the past pass through filters both ideological and physical. Cotton, leather and papyrus all disintegrate with time, but fired clay does not. Hence museums filled with jugs and bowls instead of scrolls and clothing. Still, such a vessel inspired one of England’s most celebrated poems, John Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. It seems that Fahad Bishara had a similar epiphany when he beheld a century-old ship’s logbook, or ruznamah. Although written in prose, Monsoon Voyagers evokes Keats by bringing a lost world to life, combining a scholar’s rigor with a poet’s voice.
In 1923, archaeologist Leonard Woolley stumbled upon a room that dated back to 530BC, the time of the Babylonians. Oddly, the room was filled with artifacts that were thousands of years older. A clay drum led Woolley to speculate that he might have stumbled across the world’s first museum.
In an epilogue to his new book Assassins and Templars, Steve Tibble says (or, perhaps, protests) that his book really has nothing to do with the video game “Assassin’s Creed”, that any similarity is not so much coincidence as common intellectual and cultural ancestry. Readers of a certain generation might entertain some skepticism, especially in light of Tibble’s colloquial (albeit steadfastly rigorous) approach to the subject. Tibble might nevertheless have been aware of some pop-culture competition for reader mind-space, for he has written a page-turner of a history.
Even the idlest stroller will be awestruck by the beauty of Cairo’s City of the Dead. Yet this gem of 14th and 15th century architecture, a Unesco World Heritage site, leaves the visitor wondering about the sultans, beys and princesses for whom these elaborate monuments were built. Stones can tell stories, but objects bring the past to life. The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s exhibition, with over 250 pieces, aims to provide a fuller sense of these patrons, the Mamluks: who were they and how did they see themselves?
Between the First and Second World Wars, activists across the British Empire began to think about what their homes might look like as independent nations, rather than colonies subject to the control of London. Sometimes, these thinkers found refuge and common cause in others elsewhere in the Empire—such as between India and Egypt, as Erin O’Halloran explores in her book East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World Between the Wars. India was the jewel in the British Empire’s crown; Egypt was the strategic artery that connected Britain’s eastern possessions with the metropole.
Just around the founding of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews were forced out or pressured to leave their countries of birth; one of these was Yemen. These Mizrahi Jews have traditionally been treated as second-class citizens in Israel.
Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) was an Egyptian novelist, short-story writer and screenwriter. He spent his entire life in Cairo, the setting for almost all his fiction. He is best known for The Cairo Trilogy— Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957) and Sugar Street (1957)—which follows succeeding generations of a Cairene family, the Abd al-Jawads, from World War I until the Egyptian revolution of 1952. In 1988, Mahfouz became the first, and so far, the only, Arab writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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