Anfal is an Arabic word from the Quran meaning “the spoils of war.” Saddam Hussein gave the name to his 1988 campaign against Iraq’s Kurds — eight stages of chemical attack, mass arrest and mass execution that killed some hundred thousand people, and that a later tribunal would call genocide. Joost Hiltermann helped document the…
Iranian tradition held that the first, ancient dynasty of kings had mastered all the useful sciences, from astronomy to medicine, and recorded them in books of wisdom. Some claimed the prophet Zoroaster himself to be the ultimate author. These books were well guarded in the great palace we call Persepolis. In one terrible night of…
This century’s “forever wars” have nothing on the Crusades, which lasted some three centuries and had to be numbered. Lay interest in the Crusades seems to diminish after the clash of heavy hitters Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third and the disrepute engendered by the Fourth, in which the Franks turned on their…
Lebanese novelist and poet Rashid El-Daif is one of the leading voices in contemporary Arabic literature, perhaps best known in English for Dear Mr Kawabata (1995) which addresses the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War. His most recently translated work, Paving the Sea (originally written in 2011), satirizes the aspiration for Western liberalism and nationalism,…
The Book of Damascus, an anthology of ten short stories and one non-fiction piece, gives English-speaking readers a chance to see the world through the eyes of Damascenes. The non-fiction piece, I Write to You from Damascus, by Khaled Khalifa serves as a preface. Khalifa, the internationally-renowned author of novels such as In Praise of…
Classical Persian literature offers very few autobiographies. We tend to admire the works of great poets in that tradition, in this case Amir Khusraw, without knowing much about them as individuals. If Khusraw’s poems are like flowers, “Exquisite Things and Strange Wonders” shows the gardens where the flowers grew. Alyssa Gabbay’s fluid translation brings to…
Many of us have watched the classic 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, the somewhat fictionalised work based on the life of T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt and the First World War. But Lawrence was part of the Arab Bureau, an effort to better understand and influence the region as Britain fought the Ottoman…
Joost Hiltermann’s new novel is a powerful exploration of the 1988 Anfal genocide, launched against the Iraqi Kurds by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. It may have resulted in up to 100,000 civilian murders during what was officially a rural counter-insurgency campaign. The novel deals with both the devastating impact the Anfal had at the time…
Nahai, who hails from Iranian Kurdistan, is regarded as one of the leading contemporary novelists writing in Kurdish. Birds in a Gale, originally published in 2002 and set in the Iran of the 1990s to consider the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979, is one of his most celebrated novels and demonstrates both his…
In 1971, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi threw a party to celebrate the 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian Empire. It was planned to be a massive party, with tents set up in the desert, and invitations sent to just about every world leader across both the Western and Soviet blocs. Robert Templer writes about this celebration–and…
Karl Marx famously argued that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Fahmida Riaz’s Fortress of the Forgotten Ones, a historical novel set in 5th-century Ctesiphon, capital of the Persian Sasanian empire at its zenith, shows that this struggle existed long before its appearance in The Communist Manifesto. The…
Iran is, once again, in global headlines, following U.S. strikes on the country earlier this year. Operation Epic Fury, as the Department of Defense called it, is the latest twist in Iran’s modern history, starting from the coup that brought the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power, through the 1956 coup against Mossadegh and the…
In 2006, Mohamed Mansi Qandil won one of Egypt’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Sawiris Cultural Award, with his breakthrough novel, Moon over Samarqand. In 2010 A Cloudy Day on the Western Shore was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His latest novel, The Country Doctor’s Tale, has now been made available in…
“The Persian learned men,” wrote Herodotus in his Histories, “say that the Phoenicians were the cause of the feud.” Historians have been trying ever since to understand the series of wars that set Europe and Asia against each other, going back to the Trojan War. In The Race for Universal Monarchy, Ebru Turan argues that,…
Slavery was a key part of pre-modern Islamic society, spanning from soldiers to concubines. And one of the most revealing repositories of evidence we have for how slavery worked in practice comes from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of hundreds of thousands of discarded documents from a medieval synagogue in Cairo. Craig Perry examined these…