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Acquiring Books for the Greatest Libraries in the World
In 1685, years before his translation of The Thousand and One Nights would win him enduring fame, the French scholar Antoine Galland was living in Istanbul. Trained in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, he...
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Laila Lalami: “I Think Evil Needs to Be Called Out.”
Shortly after Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami sent out the galleys for her magnum opus, The Moor’s Account, in the summer of 2014, she headed to Wyoming for a well-deserved sojourn. “I took a...
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In a Sudan Where Literature is Often Smuggled, the Short Story is a Perfect Form
It was June 2, 1934, when a group of young men published the first issue of al-Fajr. This twice-monthly magazine followed the short-lived Nahda, which closed after its founder’s death in 1933....
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Mama Hissa’s Mice
If my mother began her sentence with “By God,” that meant it was a divine decree. I was seven years old when Dad gifted me my first bike for good grades. Mom forbid me from riding it in our courtyard...
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On Thomas Jefferson and the Little-Known Presence of Enslaved Muslims in the US
On October 3rd, 1807, Thomas Jefferson’s evening at the President’s House was interrupted by the arrival of a cryptic note. Scribbled by a traveler from the “Territory of Louisiana,” this note was a...
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The Wound of Multilingualism: On Surrendering the Languages of Home
That morning in London in the early 1990s, I was on my way to a college in Kilburn to start my English course. To belong in a country you have to know its language first. That’s what immigrants are...
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The Methodology of Musicality: On Translating the Literary Lyricism of The...
Last year, The Last One was the unexpected hit of France’s annual rentrée littéraire. In this slim auto-fictional work, author Fatima Daas (a pseudonym) tackles gender identity, anti-Arab racism in...
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From Serialization to Novelization: On the First Iteration of Frank Herbert’s...
If anyone has ever told you Dune is a “tough read,” it would be interesting to see if that same person was able to read an eight‑hundred‑page Stephen King or Harry Potter novel. Although there are...
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“A Letter to Kofi Annan”
Abdelghaffar, owner of the tallest building in the quarter—built by the sweat of his brow, as he reportedly doesn’t tire of saying—is pacing up and down his rooftop, stressed about the stray dogs that...
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How Arabic Translations of Ancient Greek Texts Started a New Scientific...
In the eighth-century CE the Abbasids undertook to collect the wisdom of the world in their new capital at Baghdad. This project started with the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur (“the Conqueror,” r....
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