Tawacores, The
29 January '14
Yusef is living in Buffalo, New York with a group of Muslim punks. A pot-smoking mohawked Sufi called Jehangir plays the rooftop call to prayer on his electric guitar, while debates rage downstairs about the Quranic sources for Iggy Pop songs. With a living-room serving as mosque by day and hosting punk parties by night, […]
In Praise Of Hatred
29 January '14
1980s Syria, our young narrator is living a secluded life behind the veil in the vast and perfumed house of her grandparents in Aleppo. Her three aunts, Maryam the pious one; Safaa, the liberal; and the free-spirited Marwa, bring her up with the aid of their ever-devoted blind servant. Soon the high walls of the […]
Sinbad the Sailor: Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor
29 January '14
This is a well-known story is taken from “The One Thousand and One Nights”.
Prisoner of Love
29 January '14
Starting in 1970, Jean Genet—petty thief, prostitute, modernist master—spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Always an outcast himself, Genet was drawn to this displaced people, an attraction that was to prove as complicated for him as it was enduring. Prisoner of Love, written some ten years later, when many of the […]
Koolaids
29 January '14
Fleeing the war in Beirut, Mohammed finds his fortune in America and meets Samir, born in America but raised in the Lebanon, who has returned to the US to study. One is Muslim, the other Christian, but both are gay and experience similar transitions in the search for love, self and “home”.
New Voices of Arabia – The Short Stories
29 January '14
The formation of Saudi Arabia in 1932, with the unification of the two Kingdoms of the Hejaz and Nejd, not only unified parts of the Arabian peninsula which had until then remained disparate, loosely related ethnic and tribal groupings, but also led to the development of a distinct Saudi Arabian literature. In an era when […]
Battle of Poitiers, The
29 January '14
It is the year 732 AD. Ten years after the Arab conquest of Spain in 711AD, Emir Abd al-Rahman Governor of Spain, conquered and became Governor of southern France. He is moving northwards towards Poitiers to confront the Franks under Charles Martel and then overrun Rome and Constantinople and reach Damascus, the capital of the […]
Caliph’s Sister, The
29 January '14
It is 803 AD in Baghdad in the closing years of the glorious reign of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid best known in the western world as the caliph whose court is described in the Arabian Nights. His reign represented the peak of ‘Abbasid power in a caliphate full of pomp, splendor and learning that is […]
Time-Travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and Sweets, The
29 January '14
Ibn Shalabi, like many Egyptians, is looking for a job. Yet, unlike most of his fellow citizens, he is prone to sudden dislocations in time. Armed with his trusty briefcase and his Islamic-calendar wristwatch, he bounces uncontrollably through the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk periods, with occasional return visits to the 1990s. Along the way, he […]