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?
Middle East
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.
While war is a perennial subject for historians, stories of friendships and exchanges, especially when set aside in the dustier corners of contemporary memory, make equally memorable material for history. A case study is the story of India and Egypt, the subject of East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars in which Erin MB O’Halloran recounts the relationship between the leaders and movements of the two countries between 1919 and 1939, a particularly interesting period that witnessed events such as the abolition of the Caliphate, the Abyssinian crisis, and the partition of Palestine.
The Louvre Museum’s recent major exhibition on the Mamluk Sultanate explores the dynasty’s rich legacy in terms of the art and architecture of Egypt and Syria. The exhibition—a first for Europe—comes more than forty years after a touring exhibition in the United States curated by Dr Esin Atil. “Mamluks (1250-1517)” brings together 260 works from the Louvre’s own collections, alongside national and international loans.
A fluent Arabic speaker, Justin Marozzi has spent much of his career as a journalist and author trying to understand the Middle East through an historical lens. His earlier books include Islamic Empires, a history of Islamic civilisation told through some of its greatest cities, and Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, which won the 2015 Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize.
Mesopotamia is having a moment. Moudhy Al-Rashid’s Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History, joins among others Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000-Year History of Iraq by Bartle Bull, The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present by Allen James Fromherz and, some more esoterically, Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author by Sophus Helle, all released in the last 12 months or so.
The new exhibit at Hong Kong’s Palace Museum is somewhat undersold by its title: “Wonders of Imperial Carpets”. There are indeed carpets—marvelous and quite extraordinary carpets—but the lesson of the exhibition—that of the two-way artistic and cultural influence between China and Islamic world—is mostly carried in the other exhibits, the bronzes, pottery, books, drawings and paintings drawn (with a few exceptions) from the collections of the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar.
Few cities in the world can be as unknown to outsiders as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and The Book of Sana’a is the first major collection of Yemeni fiction in translation.
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