Review: The Way of Sufi Chivalry

  Translated by Shaykh Tosun Bayrak Not about martial codes, but more of a guidebook on proper etiquette (adab) in Islam. The biggest focus was on the virtue of generosity. True generosity is giving before your brother is forced to ask, because in asking, the needy one is humiliated by his need. A poem is […]

Review: Midnight’s Children

 by Salman Rushdie Could the Booker Prize have gone to a novel that treats three generations of an extended family but remains emotionally dead-flat aside from twin swellings of self-pity and self-love?  Was a career launched by a book that contains 50 years of intricately plotted interconnections, parallels and synchronicities across the breadth of the […]

Review: Ottoman Age of Exploration

By Giancarlo Casale. The Ottomans were very active throughout the Indian Ocean world during the 1500s despite having no access to or knowledge of the area at the beginning of the century.  The author shows their exploration of the Indian Ocean is closely analogous to the activities of the Portuguese in same period. The most […]

American Nations: Review

Colin Woodward traces the origins of settlement in the United States to demonstrate that American attitudes, values and politics are highly regional and perpetuate over time. This basis for this is the “Founder’s Effect”, a recognized phenomenon whereby the original settlers of an area have an outsize effect on culture across time. Looking at patterns […]

Knowledge of Self

Theodore W. Allen (1919-2005) told me where white people come from. We like to think we know who we are, and indeed many things about ourselves we can easily define: male, muslim, American. But I am white and I could not explain to myself what that meant. Any meaning I set was either too narrow, […]