The Silent Minaret

The Silent Minaret PDF Author: Ishtiyaq Shukri
Publisher: Jacana Media
ISBN: 9781770092495
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Who knew Issa Shamsuddin? Is his disappearance a matter of choice - the next step in a journey of self-imposed exile?

The Silent Minaret

The Silent Minaret PDF Author: Ishtiyaq Shukri
Publisher: Jacana Media
ISBN: 9781770092495
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Who knew Issa Shamsuddin? Is his disappearance a matter of choice - the next step in a journey of self-imposed exile?

The Silent Minaret

The Silent Minaret PDF Author: Ishtiyaq Shukri
Publisher: Jacana Media
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Daring in both form and content, this novel of belief and betrayal shuttles between two connected moments in history and two countries linked by their colonial past and globalized present. A young, missing student's friends try to reconstruct his life as they search for him, looking back to South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994 and to the expat communities of post–September 11 London. What emerges is a picture of a man insisting on a common humanity and finding ways to unify ideologies even as his world is being divided.

Stealing from the Saracens

Stealing from the Saracens PDF Author: Diana Darke
Publisher: Hurst & Company
ISBN: 1787383059
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Europeans are in denial. Against a backdrop of Islamophobia, they are increasingly distancing themselves from their cultural debt to the Muslim world. But while the legacy of Islam and the Middle East is in danger of being airbrushed out of Western history, its traces can still be detected in some of Europe's most recognisable monuments, from Notre-Dame to St Paul's Cathedral. In this comprehensively illustrated book, Diana Darke sets out to redress the balance, revealing the Arab and Islamic roots of Europe's architectural heritage. She tracks the transmission of key innovations from the great capitals of Islam's early empires, Damascus and Baghdad, via Muslim Spain and Sicily into Europe. Medieval crusaders, pilgrims and merchants from Europe later encountered Arab Muslim culture in journeys to the Holy Land. In more recent centuries, that same route through modern-day Turkey connected Ottoman culture with the West, leading Sir Christopher Wren himself to believe that Gothic architecture should more rightly be called 'the Saracen style', because of its Islamic origins. Recovering this overlooked story within the West's long history of borrowing from the Islamic world, Darke sheds new light on Europe's buildings and offers rich insights into the possibilities of cultural exchange.

South African London

South African London PDF Author: Andrea Thorpe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526148551
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
South African London studies literary responses to London by exiled and émigré South Africans between 1948 and 2005 and traces the role London played in the development of South African letters.

Minaret

Minaret PDF Author: Leila Aboulela
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802199240
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
“A beautiful, daring, challenging novel” of a young Muslim immigrant—from the author of the New York Times Notable Book, The Translator (The Guardian). Leila Aboulela’s American debut is a provocative, timely, and engaging novel about a young Muslim woman—once privileged and secular in her native land and now impoverished in London—gradually embracing her orthodox faith. With her Muslim hijab and 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 upperclass Westernized Sudanese, her dreams were to marry well and raise a family. But a coup forces the young woman and her family into political exile in London. Soon orphaned, she finds solace and companionship within the Muslim community. Then Najwa meets Tamer, the intense, lonely younger brother of her employer. They find a common bond in faith and slowly, silently, begin to fall in love. Written with directness and force, Minaret is a lyric and insightful novel about Islam and an alluring glimpse into a culture Westerners are only just beginning to understand. “Lit up by a highly unusual sensibility and world view, so rarefied and uncompromising that it is likely to throw the reader out of kilter . . . Her delicacy of touch is to be complimented.” —Chandrahas Choudhury, San Francisco Chronicle

Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories

Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories PDF Author: Alifa Rifaat
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478615494
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
“More convincingly than any other woman writing in Arabic today, Alifa Rifaat lifts the veil on what it means to be a woman living within a traditional Muslim society.” So states the translator’s foreword to this collection of the Egyptian author’s best short stories. Rifaat (1930–1996) did not go to university, spoke only Arabic, and seldom traveled abroad. This virtual immunity from Western influence lends a special authenticity to her direct yet sincere accounts of death, sexual fulfillment, the lives of women in purdah, and the frustrations of everyday life in a male-dominated Islamic environment. Translated from the Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies, the collection admits the reader into a hidden private world, regulated by the call of the mosque, but often full of profound anguish and personal isolation. Badriyya’s despairing anger at her deceitful husband, for example, or the haunting melancholy of “At the Time of the Jasmine,” are treated with a sensitivity to the discipline and order of Islam.

Stamping Butterflies

Stamping Butterflies PDF Author: Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Publisher: Spectra
ISBN: 0553902911
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
A mystery, a thriller, and a cutting-edge sci-fi adventure all in one, Stamping Butterflies bends time, genre, and consciousness itself to tell the spellbinding story of two worlds, three lives, one future–and the question upon which everything depends: who is dreaming whom. . . . From Marrakech to China’s Forbidden City, from a doomed starship carrying a cryogenically preserved crew to an island prison camp, the fate of the world is being played out in the minds of two dreamers. One, a would-be assassin obsessed with enigmatic equations, has set out to kill the U.S. President. The other is a young Chinese emperor ruling thousands of years in the future. Each believes he is dreaming the other. One must change the future; one must change the past. And time is running out for both. Caught in the maelstrom is a motley cast of characters, each an unwitting key to the ultimate fate of both worlds: Moz, a resourceful young Marrakech street punk, and his half-German girlfriend, Malika; Jake Razor, a self-exiled rock star; and psychiatrist Katie Petrov, who finds herself racing against a looming death sentence to pry free the secret of her condemned patient–a secret with the power to restore hope to the future...or stamp it out forever.

Hacking Timbuktu

Hacking Timbuktu PDF Author: Stephen Davies
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 054750599X
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Danny is a freelance IT specialist—that is, a hacker. He and his pal Omar are both skilled at parkour, or freerunning, a discipline designed to enable practitioners to travel between any two points regardless of obstacles. This is fortunate, because they're off on an adventure that's filled with obstacles, from locked doors to gangs of hostile pursuers. Together they follow a cryptic clue, find a missing map, figure out how to get to Timbuktu without buying a plane ticket, and join the life-and-death treasure hunt, exchanging wisecracks and solving the puzzle one step at a time.An exotic setting and gripping suspense, as well as an absorbing introduction to parkour, make this thriller a genuine page-turner.

I See You

I See You PDF Author: Ishtiyaq Shukri
Publisher: Jacana Media
ISBN: 9781431408757
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Leila Mashal, a medical doctor trained at Wits, has taken up politics. Her platform is a single issue: freedom. In declaring her candidacy, she wishes to make public her belief that while South Africans hold the vote, they don't hold the power. She is also the wife of Tariq Hassan, a renowned photojournalist whose abduction from a Johannesburg hotel made international headlines. Held in solitary confinement in an unstated locale, Tariq contemplates his isolation, his life's work, his longing for Leila, the nature of time, and the torturous effects of abject isolation on his mind. Flashbacks—narrated from both Tariq's and Leila's points of view—tell the central story of Tariq's abduction. Might Tariq's exposure of covert South African involvement in the civil war in Kasalia have prompted his abduction? The novel uses radio interviews, e-mails, journal entries, newspaper articles, personal recollections, and even an opera score to provide insight into Tariq's career as a photojournalist, documenting people displaced by conflict and war from Libya and Palestine to Afghanistan and Kasalia, a fictional African country in the grip of a brutal civil war.

Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe

Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe PDF Author: Barbara Daly Metcalf
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520204041
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Focusing on the private and public use of space, this volume explores the religious life of the new Muslim communities in North America and Europe. Unlike most studies of immigrant groups, these essays concentrate on cultural practices and expressions of everyday life rather than on the political issues that dominate today's headlines. The authors emphasize the cultural strength and creativity of communities that draw upon Islamic symbols and practices to define "Muslim space" against the background of a non-Muslim environment. The range of perspectives is broad, encompassing middle-class professionals, mosque congregations, factory workers in France and the north of England, itinerant African traders, and prison inmates in New York. The truism that "Islam is a religion of the word" takes on concrete meaning as these disparate communities find ways to elaborate word-centered ritual and to have the visual and aural presence of sacred words in the spaces they inhabit. The volume includes 46 black-and-white photographs that illustrate Muslim populations in Edmonton, Philadelphia, the Green Haven Correction Facility, Manhattan, Marseilles, Berlin, and London, among other places. The focus on space directs attention to the new kinds of boundaries and consciousness that exist not only for these Muslim populations, but for people from all backgrounds in today's ever more integrated world.