The Great Book Robbery →
Documentary sheds light on large-scale pillaging of books from Palestinian homes in 1948, when Israel was founded…continue at AlJazeera
The Great Book Robbery website.
Posts tagged book
On shelves in Jordan soon.
Out now. Get it. Read it. Learn about some remarkable women through a political, cultural, social and work journey of Jordan.
Cover illustration by Syrian calligrapher Saleh Nasab.
The Caliph’s House. By Tahir Shah.
Inspired by the Moroccan vacations of his childhood, Tahir Shah dreamed of making a home in that astonishing country. At age thirty-six he got his chance. Investing what money he and his wife, Rachana, had, Tahir packed up his growing family and bought Dar Khalifa, a crumbling ruin of a mansion by the sea in Casablanca that once belonged to the city’s caliph, or spiritual leader.
By Karen Asfour Anzeh al-Azeeza Cleans Up Petra (review at Mich Cafe). Order your Arabic or English copy from Jamalon.
Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Islam
Book review by Dana Sajdi
Elyse Semerdjian. Off the Straight Path: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. xxxviii + 247 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8156-3173-6.
The content of Off the Straight Path is less juicy than its title suggests. The reader with an appetite for stories of sexual scandals and dangerous liaisons of people now long dead will not have her/his gossip-driven curiosity satisfied. But, it is precisely the seriousness of the project and its honest and responsible execution that renders it thoroughly admirable.
Based on juridical writings, fatawa literature, imperial laws, and court records from Aleppo (the last spanning four centuries), the book is divided into two parts, of two and three chapters each. The first part deals with
