Bridging Cultures: Muslim Journeys Bookshelf : Bridging Cultures: The Muslim Journeys Bookshelf

Shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, Matar's debut novel tracks the effects of Libyan strongman Khadafy's 1969 September revolution on the el-Dawani family, as seen by nine-year-old Suleiman, who narrates as an adult.

In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq.

In the summer of 2006, racing through Lebanon to report on the Israeli invasion, Anthony Shadid found himself in his family's ancestral hometown of Marjayoun. There, he discovered his great-grandfather's once magnificent estate in near ruins, devastated by war. One year later, Shadid returned to Marjayoun, not to chronicle the violence, but to rebuild in its wake.

Merging the personal with the political, Broken Verses is at once a sharp, thrilling journey through modern-day Pakistan, a carefully coded mystery, and an intimate mother-daughter story that asks how we forgive a mother who leaves.

In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth - women who, deprived of access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. Dreams of Trespassis the provocative story of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex in the recent Muslim world.

Peters traces the three faiths from the sixth century B.C., when the Jews returned to Palestine from exile in Babylonia, to the time in the Middle Ages when they approached their present form. He points out that all three faith groups, whom the Muslims themselves refer to as "People of the Book," share much common ground. Most notably, each embraces the practice of worshiping a God who intervenes in history on behalf of His people. This book covers the similarities and differences inherent in the religion of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

This very short introduction provides a superb introduction to the major aspects of Muhammad's life and its importance, providing both Muslim and Western historical perspectives.

An essential introductory text for the study of the Qur'an, its content, and its place in Muslim society. An insightful and authoritative introduction to the book at the heart of Muslim life, written by a well-known Islamic scholar.

Professor R. A. Nicholson translated this inspiring collection of mystical poems shortly before his death. It contains delicately rhythmical versions of over a hundred short passages from Rumi's greatest works, together with brief yet illuminating explanatory notes.

'It is laid down in the Qur'an that at least once in their lives Muslims should undertake the annual spiritual pilgrimage;the Hajj;to the holy city of Mecca. There, within a sanctuary, lies the Kaba;a cube of black granite that is the literal center of a Muslim's world and the compass point towards which daily prayers are made. Features illuminated manuscripts, wall paintings and photographs, calligraphy, textiles, scientific instruments, decorative tiles, maps, ceramics, metalwork, and powerful works by contemporary artists.

Stewart Gordon has fashioned a fascinating and unique look at Asia from A.D. 700 to 1500, a time when Asia was the world, by describing the personal journeys of many travelers-the merchants who traded spices along the Silk Road, the apothecaries who exchanged medicine and knowledge from China to the Middle East, and the philosophers and holy men who crossed continents to explore and exchange ideas, books, science, and culture.

A myth-shattering view of the medieval Islamic world's myriad scientific innovations, which preceded-and enabled-the European Renaissance.

Undoing the familiar notion of the Middle Ages as a period of religious persecution and intellectual stagnation, Marla Menocal now brings us a portrait of a medieval culture where literature, science, and tolerance flourished for 500 years. The period covered here is extremely relevant to understanding some of today's most terrible conflicts.

Leo Africanus is a beautiful book of tales about people who are forced to accept choices made for them by someone else...It relates, particularly at times and often imaginatively, the story of those who did not make it to the New World.--New York Times Book Review

Combining shrewd observations with painstaking historical research, Ghosh serves up skeptics and holy men, merchants and sorcerers. Some of these figures are real, some only imagined, but all emerge as vividly as the characters in a great novel.In an Antique Landis an inspired work that transcends genres as deftly as it does eras, weaving an entrancing and intoxicating spell.

In this remarkable work, Terry Alford tells the story of Abd al Rahman Ibrahima, a Muslim slave who, in 1807, was recognized by an Irish ship's surgeon as the son of an African king who had saved his life many years earlier.

With this highly informed, real-life portrait, Curtis provides a crucial corrective to the rhetoric of suspicion and fear surrounding current discussions of Muslims in the United States and emphasizes Muslims' continuing impact on American society and culture.

Acts of Faith is a remarkable account of growing up Muslim in America and coming to believe in religious pluralism, from one of the most prominent faith leaders in the United States.

Richly insightful, intricately drawn, and passionately argued, this absorbing story of the veil's resurgence, from Egypt through Saudi Arabia and into the West, suggests a dramatically new portrait of contemporary Islam.

The Butterfly Mosque, journalist G. Willow Wilson’s remarkable story of converting to Islam and falling in love with an Egyptian man in a volatile post–9/11 world, was praised as “an eye-opening look at a misunderstood and often polarizing faith” (Booklist) and “a tremendously heartfelt, healing crosscultural fusion”

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.

The Nobel Prize–winner’s second novel to appear in an Everyman edition is a spellbinding story of a poet seeking his lost love in a remote Turkish town riven by religious conflict and cut off from the world by a blizzard. Returning to Turkey from exile in the West, Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head scarves in school. But the epicenter of the suicides, the eastern border city of Kars, is also home to the radiant and newly divorced Ýpek, a friend of Ka’s youth whom he has never forgotten and whose spirited younger sister is a leader of the rebellious schoolgirls. As a fierce snowstorm descends on Kars, violence between the military and local Islamic radicals begins to explode, and Ka finds his sympathies drawn in unexpected and dramatic directions.

" I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco... " So begins Fatima Mernissi in this exotic and rich narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth - women who, deprived of access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. Dreams of Trespassis the provocative story of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex in the recent Muslim world.

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. An upper class westernized Sudanese, her dreams were to marry well and raise a family. Then a coup forces the young woman and her family into political exile in London. Soon orphaned, and her only remaining family, her twin brother, in jail, she finds solace and companionship within a Muslim community. It is when Najwa meets Tamer, the intense, lonely younger brother of her employer, that she must test who she has become. For Tamer and Najwa find a common bond in faith and slowly, silently, begin to fall in love, a love that should not be. A novel about class, faith, and family, "Minaret" is an illuminating glimpse into a culture few westerners understand.

A global contest reading of the Quran by young Muslim children that takes place in Cairo, Egypt annually during Ramadan. A coming of age story about Muslim kids in modern times.

A comprehensive survey that brilliantly captures the essence of Islamic culture. Islamic Arts, a comprehensive survey covering a thousand years, highlights those characteristics that connect the various arts of the Islamic lands without minimizing the differences. The book is divided into three time periods - 600-900, 900-1500 and 1500-1800 - and each section analyses architecture, the arts of the book, decorative and applied arts.

The film explores the richness of Islamic art in objects big and small, from great ornamented palaces and the play of light in monumental mosques to the exquisite beauty of ceramics, carved boxes, paintings and metal work. It revels in the use of color and finds commonalities in a shared artistic heritage with the West and East. The film also examines the unique ways in which Islamic art turns calligraphy and the written word into masterpieces and develops water into an expressive, useful art form.

In 1788 a slave-ship set sail from West Africa, its berth laden with a profitable but fragile cargo: hundreds of men, women and children bound in chains and headed for American shores. Eight months later the survivors were sold in Natchez, Mississippi. Among them was the 26-year-old Abdul Rahman Sori, heir to the throne of one of the largest kingdoms in Africa.

'It is laid down in the Qur'an that at least once in their lives Muslims should undertake the annual spiritual pilgrimage;the Hajj;to the holy city of Mecca. There, within a sanctuary, lies the Kaba;a cube of black granite that is the literal center of a Muslim's world and the compass point towards which daily prayers are made. Features illuminated manuscripts, wall paintings and photographs, calligraphy, textiles, scientific instruments, decorative tiles, maps, ceramics, metalwork, and powerful works by contemporary artists.

Islamic Art Spots (short films designed, written, and presented by D. Fairchild Ruggles, developed especially for the Muslim Journeys Bookshelf)