A bestselling author explains how on September 11th an ancient fight-to-the-death conflict exploded on the shores of the United States.

    The trail of two key figures, an accused Pakistani mastermind and his American operative, traces the rise of a complex, international threat.

    The author has simplified the subject to serve the needs of the non-specialists. This work will be a significant addition to the text books available on Islamic jurisprudence in English.

    Yet the literary landscape of this dynamic part of the world has been bound together not by borders and nationalities, but by a common experience of Western imperialism. Keenly aware of the collected scars left by a legacy of colonial rule, the acclaimed writer Reza Aslan, with a team of four regional editors and seventy-seven translators, cogently demonstrates with Tablet and Pen how literature can, in fact, be used to form identity and serve as an extraordinary chronicle of the disrupted histories of the region.Acting with Words Without Borders, which fosters international exchange through translation and publication of the world’s finest literature, Aslan has purposefully situated this volume in the twentieth century, beyond the familiar confines of the Ottoman past, believing that the writers who have emerged in the last hundred years have not received their full due. This monumental collection, therefore, of nearly two hundred pieces, including short stories, novels, memoirs, essays and works of drama—many of them presented in English for the first time—features translated works from Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish. Organized chronologically, the volume spans a century of literature—from the famed Arab poet Khalil Gibran to the Nobel laureates Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk, from the great Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis to the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Ismat Chughtai—connected by the extraordinarily rich tradition of resplendent cultures that have been all too often ignored by the Western canon.By shifting America’s perception of the Middle Eastern world away from religion and politics, Tablet and Pen evokes the splendors of a region through the voices of its writers and poets, whose literature tells an urgent and liberating story. With a wealth of contextual information that places the writing within the historical, political, and cultural breadth of the region, Tablet Pen is transcendent, a book to be devoured as a single sustained narrative, from the first page to the last. Creating a vital bridge between two estranged cultures, "this is that rare anthology: cohesive, affecting, and informing" (Publishers Weekly).

    Follow the career of an actress with Middle-Eastern heritage whose dreams of playing a ghostbuster spiral into repeat castings as a jihadi bride. Among stories of honour killings and ill-fated love in besieged locations, we also find heart-warming connections and powerful challenges to the status quo.From Algiers to Brighton, these stories transcend time and place revealing just how varied the search for belonging can be.Between them the writers in this anthology have been short- or long-listed for four Orange Prizes, two Man Booker Prizes and won countless other awards. Alongside renowned authors are emerging voices published here for the first time.

    ISIS), a group so brutal and hardline that even al-Qaida deemed them too extreme. Baghdadi, an introverted religious scholar, with a passion for soccer, now controls large swaths of land in Iraq and Syria. McCants shows how Baghdadi became radicalized in the Saddam Hussein era and found his path to power after connecting with other radicals in an American prison during the Iraq War, culminating in his declaration of a reborn Islamic empire bent on world conquest.

    Recognising genuis, the judge decides to spare him and gives him instead a small, blank book, encouraging him to confine his thoughts to it alone. Thus begins the seamless blend of fact and fiction that is Samarkand. Vividly re-creating the history of the manuscript of the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam, Amin Maalouf spans continents and centuries with breathtaking vision: the dusky exoticism of 11th-century Persia, with its poetesses and assassins; the same country's struggles nine hundred years later, seen through the eyes of an American academic obsessed with finding the original manuscript; and the fated maiden voyage of the Titanic, whose tragedy led to the Rubaiyaat's final resting place - all are brought to life with keen assurance by this gifted and award-winning writer.

    In “Bhagavad Gita for Beginners: The Song of God in Simplified Prose,” author Edward Viljoen uses contemporary, simplified language to bring this inspiring work to life. That which seems to be forcing people to act in selfish--even evil--ways is really the accumulation of desires coming together in a strong, irresistible appetite for self-satisfaction. These desires are rooted in the senses, and sense information can be misleading. More powerful than the senses, though, is the mind. And more powerful than the mind is the will (or intellect), and that which is above it all,--the Real Self, that part of us not deluded by the information of the sense world. The Bhagavad Gita For Beginners: The Song Of God In Simplified Prose will inspire uninitiated readers of the Bhagavad-Gita to delve into the original text, as well as bring a newly-found clarity and perspective to those already familiar with it.

    Don't lose more time searching for the perfect poems or readings - I've already done all the hard work to save you the trouble. This book combines several well known anthologies and brings you well over 1000 poems since 1250. The original anthologies used as a source are: 1919 Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and 1917 The New Poetry - An Anthology - Edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson.

    The truth? In Saudi Arabia, the existence of Christian churches is prohibited, along with the Bible itself; no Christian or Jew can enter Mecca or Medina lest their mere footsteps desecrate Islam’s holiest sites. In Pakistan and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world, conversion from Islam to Christianity is punishable by death. In Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and even the President’s beloved Indonesia, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other “infidels” often face acts of religious genocide by fundamentalists who invoke core Islamic texts and teachings to justify their actions.In short, as Robert Spencer shows in this work, the creed of Muhammad, far from being a religion of peace, has revealed itself in the post-9/11 world to be a religion of bigotry.

    The anthology - the 22nd of its kind - is introduced by Jeannette Winterson. If you buy only one poetry book this year, this deserves to be it.

    Two years earlier, her lover, Pakistan's greatest poet, was beaten to death by government thugs. In present-day Karachi, her daughter Aasmaani has just discovered a letter in the couple's private code—a letter that could only have been written recently. Aasmaani is thirty, single, drifting from job to job. Always left behind whenever Samina followed the Poet into exile, she had assumed that her mother's disappearance was simply another abandonment. Then, while working at Pakistan's first independent TV station, Aasmaani runs into an old friend of Samina's who gives her the first letter, then many more. Where could the letters have come from? And will they lead her to her mother? Merging the personal with the political, Broken Verses is at once a sharp, thrilling journey through modern-day Pakistan, a carefully coded mystery, and an intimate mother-daughter story that asks how we forgive a mother who leaves.

    More than thirty years after Khomeini’s return to Tehran and the subsequent rebirth of Iran as an Islamic Republic, Khomeini’s Ghost offers an intimate, richly detailed portrait of the fundamentalist leader and architect of Iran’s adversarial relationship with the West—a man whose legacy has influenced history and policy, and will continue to do so for generations to come.

    This title contains essays that include expositions on nature and its impossibility without the existence of God and suggested ways for the elderly and sick to treat their ailments while staying true to their religion.

    This prodigious narrative, composed by the poet Ferdowsi between the years 980 and 1010, tells the story of pre- Islamic Iran, beginning in the mythic time of Creation and continuing forward to the Arab invasion in the seventh century. As a window on the world, "Shahnameh" belongs in the company of such literary masterpieces as Dante's "Divine Comedy," the plays of Shakespeare, the epics of Homer- classics whose reach and range bring whole cultures into view. In its pages are unforgettable moments of national triumph and failure, human courage and cruelty, blissful love and bitter grief.In tracing the roots of Iran, "Shahnameh" initially draws on the depths of legend and then carries its story into historical times, when ancient Persia was swept into an expanding Islamic empire. Now Dick Davis, the greatest modern translator of Persian poetry, has revisited that poem, turning the finest stories of Ferdowsi's original into an elegant combination of prose and verse. For the first time in English, in the most complete form possible, readers can experience "Shahnameh" in the same way that Iranian storytellers have lovingly conveyed it in Persian for the past thousand years.