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Author: Tahir Shah
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0553816802
Category : Casablanca (Morocco)
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
By turns hilarious and harrowing, this work by an acclaimed English travel writer is the story of his family's move from the gray skies of London to the sun-drenched city of Casablanca, where Islamic tradition and African folklore converge--and nothing is as easy as it seems.
Author: Tahir Shah
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0553816802
Category : Casablanca (Morocco)
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
By turns hilarious and harrowing, this work by an acclaimed English travel writer is the story of his family's move from the gray skies of London to the sun-drenched city of Casablanca, where Islamic tradition and African folklore converge--and nothing is as easy as it seems.
Author: Benson Bobrick
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416568069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
The Caliph’s Splendor is a revelation: a history of a civilization we barely know that had a profound effect on our own culture. While the West declined following the collapse of the Roman Empire, a new Arab civilization arose to the east, reaching an early peak in Baghdad under the caliph Harun al-Rashid. Harun is the legendary caliph of The Thousand and One Nights, but his actual court was nearly as magnificent as the fictional one. In The Caliph’s Splendor, Benson Bobrick eloquently tells the little-known and remarkable story of Harun’s rise to power and his rivalries with the neighboring Byzantines and the new Frankish kingdom under the leadership of Charlemagne. When Harun came to power, Islam stretched from the Atlantic to India. The Islamic empire was the mightiest on earth and the largest ever seen. Although Islam spread largely through war, its cultural achievements were immense. Harun’s court at Baghdad outshone the independent Islamic emirate in Spain and all the courts of Europe, for that matter. In Baghdad, great works from Greece and Rome were preserved and studied, and new learning enhanced civilization. Over the following centuries Arab and Persian civilizations made a lasting impact on the West in astronomy, geometry, algebra (an Arabic word), medicine, and chemistry, among other fields of science. The alchemy (another Arabic word) of the Middle Ages originated with the Arabs. From engineering to jewelry to fashion to weaponry, Arab influences would shape life in the West, as they did in the fields of law, music, and literature. But for centuries Arabs and Byzantines contended fiercely on land and sea. Bobrick tells how Harun defeated attempts by the Byzantines to advance into Asia at his expense. He contemplated an alliance with the much weaker Charlemagne in order to contain the Byzantines, and in time Arabs and Byzantines reached an accommodation that permitted both to prosper. Harun’s caliphate would weaken from within as his two sons quarreled and formed factions; eventually Arabs would give way to Turks in the Islamic empire. Empires rise, weaken, and fall, but during its golden age, the caliphate of Baghdad made a permanent contribution to civilization, as Benson Bobrick so splendidly reminds us.
Author: Jim Al-Khalili
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101476230
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
A myth-shattering view of the Islamic world's myriad scientific innovations and the role they played in sparking the European Renaissance. Many of the innovations that we think of as hallmarks of Western science had their roots in the Arab world of the middle ages, a period when much of Western Christendom lay in intellectual darkness. Jim al- Khalili, a leading British-Iraqi physicist, resurrects this lost chapter of history, and given current East-West tensions, his book could not be timelier. With transporting detail, al-Khalili places readers in the hothouses of the Arabic Enlightenment, shows how they led to Europe's cultural awakening, and poses the question: Why did the Islamic world enter its own dark age after such a dazzling flowering?
Author: Jonathan Lyons
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608191907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
For centuries following the fall of Rome, western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to catch even a glimpse of the scientific advances coming from Baghdad, Antioch, or the cities of Persia, Central Asia, and Muslim Spain. T here, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge and revitalizing the works of Plato and Aristotle. I n the royal library of Baghdad, known as the House of Wisdom, an army of scholars worked at the behest of the Abbasid caliphs. At a time when the best book collections in Europe held several dozen volumes, the House of Wisdom boasted as many as four hundred thousand. Even while their countrymen waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, thirsty for knowledge, traveled to Arab lands and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance. I n this brilliant, evocative book, Lyons shows just how much "Western" culture owes to the glories of medieval Arab civilization, and reveals the untold story of how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning.
Author: Florence Parry Heide
Publisher: DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley)
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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Book Description
Ishaq, the son of the chief translator to the Caliph of ancient Baghdad, travels the world in search of precious books and manuscripts and brings them back to the great library known as the House of Wisdom.
Author: Haroon Moghul
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807024651
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Explains the attraction of Muslims to their faith, and discusses the challenges contemporary Islam confronts, and how we might imagine an Islamic theology and identity ready to face tomorrow Islam is often associated with and limited to the worst of the world—extremism, obscurantism, misogyny, bigotry. So why would so many people associate with such a fundamentalist faith? Two Billion Caliphs advocates for a way of being Muslim in the world, ready for today and prepared for tomorrow. Unlike stale summaries, which restrict themselves to facts and figures, Haroon Moghul presents a deeply Muslim perspective on the world, providing Islamic answers to universal questions: Who are we? What are we doing here? What happens to us when we die? And from description, Moghul moves to prescription, aspiring to something outrageous and audacious. Two Billion Caliphs describes what Islam has been and what it is, who its heroes are, what its big ideas are, but not only to tell you about the past or the present, but to speak to the future. Two Billion Caliphs finds that Islam was a religion of intimacy, a faith rooted in and reaching for love, and that it could be and should be again. Fulfilling that destiny depends on the efforts of Muslims to reclaim their faith, rebuild their strength, and reimagine their future, on their own terms. Two Billion Caliphs offers Muslim thoughts for the age ahead, to create an interpretation Islam of and for days to come, the kind of religion the world’s Muslims deserve, with echoes of the confident faith Muslims once had. The destiny of Islam, then, is not, as so many prefer to argue, a reformation. It is a counter-reformation. A restoration of what once was.
Author: Ed Husain
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1632866412
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
“Ed Husain has become one of the most vital Muslim voices in the world. The House of Islam could very well be his magnum opus.” -Reza Aslan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Zealot “This should be compulsory reading.” -Peter Frankopan, author of the international bestseller The Silk Roads Today, Islam is to many in the West an alien force, with Muslims held in suspicion. Failure to grasp the inner workings of religion and geopolitics has haunted American foreign policy for decades and has been decisive in the new administration's controversial orders. The intricacies and shadings must be understood by the West not only to build a stronger, more harmonious relationship between the two cultures, but also for greater accuracy in predictions as to how current crises, such as the growth of ISIS, will develop and from where the next might emerge. The House of Islam addresses key questions and points of disconnection. What are the roots of the conflict between Sunni and Shi'a Muslims that is engulfing Pakistan and the Middle East? Does the Koran encourage the killing of infidels? The book thoughtfully explores the events and issues that have come from and contributed to the broadening gulf between Islam and the West, from the United States' overthrow of Iran's first democratically elected leader to the emergence of ISIS, from the declaration of a fatwa on Salman Rushdie to the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Authoritative and engaging, Ed Husain leads us clearly and carefully through the nuances of Islam and its people, taking us back to basics to contend that the Muslim world need not be a stranger to the West, nor our enemy, but our peaceable allies.
Author: Nicholas H. A. Evans
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501715704
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 149
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Book Description
How do you prove that you're Muslim? This is not a question that most believers ever have to ask themselves, and yet for members of India's Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, it poses an existential challenge. The Ahmadis are the minority of a minority—people for whom simply being Muslim is a challenge. They must constantly ask the question: What evidence could ever be sufficient to prove that I belong to the faith? In Far from the Caliph's Gaze Nicholas H. A. Evans explores how a need to respond to this question shapes the lives of Ahmadis in Qadian in northern India. Qadian was the birthplace of the Ahmadiyya community's founder, and it remains a location of huge spiritual importance for members of the community around the world. Nonetheless, it has been physically separated from the Ahmadis' spiritual leader—the caliph—since partition, and the believers who live there now and act as its guardians must confront daily the reality of this separation even while attempting to make their Muslimness verifiable. By exploring the centrality of this separation to the ethics of everyday life in Qadian, Far from the Caliph's Gaze presents a new model for the academic study of religious doubt, one that is not premised on a concept of belief but instead captures the richness with which people might experience problematic relationships to truth.
Author: Jurji Zaidan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780984843527
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
It is 809 AD in Baghdad, the capital of the 'Abbasid Empire. The famed Caliph Harun al-Rashid has died. His successor, al-Amin, son of his Hashemite Arab wife, had promised the Caliph that he would appoint his half-brother al-Ma'mun, born to a slave mother, as his heir apparent. But al-Amin appoints his own son instead. This betrayal provides an opening for the Persians to help the statesmanlike and brilliant al-Ma'mun, whom they consider one of their own, to challenge his fickle brother. Against the backdrop of this war of succession, the novel weaves parallel love stories, political intrigue and machinations, nobility and treachery, spies and counterspies. Behzad, a famous doctor with an agenda all his own, is deeply in love with the beautiful Maymuna: both are members of Persian families persecuted by the 'Abbasid house. But the son of al-Amin's vizier is also enamored with Maymuna and wants to marry her. At the center of these tangled webs is al-Amin's mysterious Chief Astrologer, whose true identity and loyalties remain unknown even to the Caliph and his court. He not only divines the future but also shapes it by changing the course of the war between the brothers-a war from which the 'Abbasid Empire never recovered. What will become of the lovers? Who will survive and who will perish? The fast-paced action and suspense leave us guessing to the very end.
Author: Tahir Shah
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing Inc.
ISBN: 1611450578
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 533
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Book Description
Tahir Shah has a genius for surreal travelling, finding or creating situations and people. Doris...
