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As background to the locations described in Kamila Shamsie's novel Broken Verses, readers can view and download a map of Pakistan by the United Nations Cartographic Section in pdf format.

Gordon Stewart’s When Asia Was the World includes accounts of various travelers on land and sea. Among the travelers mentioned in the book, Xuanzang, Ibn Fadlan, Abraham bin Yiju, Ibn Battuta, Ma Huan, and Tomé Pires all traversed Indian…

I am writing to you, my lord and master—may God prolong your life and grant you permanent well-being and happiness—to inform you that I arrived on Friday, after an eight days’ journey, and unloaded my cargo on Sunday, the day I am…

As background to the discussion of scientific knowledge in Jim al-Khalili's House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance, the diagram traces the movement of knowlege from East to West over several centuries.…

10th century,Baghdad, Iraq Ibn al Nadim (ca. 932-990) in the Fihrist, or Catalogue of Books, mentions a book of Persian stories entitled Hazār Afsān, a tale of 200 stories in which Sheherezade tells a thousand nights of stories to…

1947 British colonial rule ends with partition of the subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan and East Pakistan. Pakistan and India dispute boundaries of mountainous region of Kashmir.…

We travelled to the town of Qāliqūṭ [Calicut], which is one of the chief ports in Mulaibār. It is visited by men from China, Jāwa, Ceylon, the Maldives, al-Yaman [Yemen] and Fārs [Persia], and in it gather merchants from all quarters. Its…

Stewart Gordon uses the narratives of nine travelers to tell the story of Asia’s diverse economy and cultures between 500 and 1500 CE. During those thousand years, the world’s largest continent was the hub of global cultural and economic…

Moving between past and present, anthropologist Amitav Ghosh presents a lyrical portrait of life in Egypt, as well as broad histories of that country, Tunisia, and India’s Malabar Coast. Ghosh weaves strands of his own life in rural Egypt into…

This ninety-minute film takes audiences on an epic journey across nine countries and over 1,400 years of history. It explores the richness of Islamic art in objects big and small, from great ornamented palaces and the play of light in monumental…