Bridging Cultures: Muslim Journeys Bookshelf : Literary Reflections

Now as sumptuously packaged as they are critically acclaimed- new deluxe trade paperback editions of the beloved stories. Husain Haddawy’s rapturously received translation of The Arabian Nights is based on a landmark reconstruction of the earliest extant manuscript version. Readers of this classic will also want to own Sindbad, a collection of four later stories associated with the Arabian Nights tradition, including “Sindbad the Sailor” and “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.”

The acclaimed translation of a magnificent work of Persian poetry—now updated with new material Composed in the twelfth century in northeastern Iran, Farid Attar’s great mystical poem is among the most significant of all works of Persian literature. A marvelous, allegorical rendering of the Islamic doctrine of Sufism, it describes the pilgrimage of the world’s birds in search of their ideal king, the Simorgh bird, and the arduous journey they take to reach him. This masterly translation preserves the poem’s rhymed couplet form and nuances of language.

A spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings;for love, art, power, and God;set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order. Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world.

In a book as evocative as anything found in A Thousand and One Nights, Mernissi, who was born in a harem in 1940 in Morocco, writes with great wit and color of the politics of seductions, of the harem as a metaphor, and of the world beyond--every woman's inaccessible obsession.

In her Muslim hijab, with her down-turned gaze, Najwa is invisible to most eyes, especially to the rich families whose houses she cleans in London. Twenty years ago, Najwa, then at university in Khartoum, would never have imagined that one day she would be a maid. A novel about class, faith, and family.