In Eastern Dreams, author Paul Nurse discusses not only the history of the Arabian Nights, but also the many fascinating people, who become characters themselves, responsible for bringing the Nights to the West and the wider world, and how the Nights has influenced, and continues to influence, global culture.
Scheherazade's Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors.
In a 2004 meeting marking the Arabian Nights' tercentennial at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, nineteen international scholars presented their work on the transnational aspects of the Arabian Nights. This volume collects their papers, whose topics range from the history of the Arabian Nights manuscripts, to positioning the Nights in modern and postmodern discourse, to the international reception of the Nights in written and oral tradition.
This book explores the evolution of Islamic institutions and culture, the influence of the West, the modernization efforts of Middle Eastern governments, the struggle of various peoples for political independence, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the reassertion of Islamic values and power, the issues surrounding the Palestinian Question, and the post-9/11 Middle East.
In this accessibly written history, Amira K. Bennison contradicts the common assumption that Islam somehow interrupted the smooth flow of Western civilization from its Graeco-Roman origins to its more recent European and American manifestations. Instead, she places Islamic civilization in the longer trajectory of Mediterranean civilizations and sees the Abbasid Empire as the inheritor and interpreter of Graeco-Roman traditions.
Destiny Disrupted tells the history of the world from the Islamic point of view, and restores the centrality of the Muslim perspective, ignored for a thousand years. In Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary tells the rich story of world history as it looks from a new perspective: with the evolution of the Muslim community at the center.