Browse Resources

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.

As background to the locations described in Hisham Matar's novel In the Country of Men readers can view and download a map of Libya by the United Nations Cartographic Section in pdf format.

As background to the locations described in House of Stone: a Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid, readers can view and download a map of Lebanon from the United Nations Cartographic Section website in pdf format. Note…

Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novel Persepolis, was interviewed for an article by Simon Hattenstone in the London Guardian newspaper in March 2008, just before release of the film version of Persepolis.

Kamila Shamsie, author of Broken Verses, is interviewed by Helen Brown for The Telegraph in April 2005. She speaks about her novels and about the some of the characters and other aspects of Broken Verses.

Hisham Matar, author of In the Country of Men, was interviewed in 2007 by Nouri Gana of the University of California, Los Angeles about his childhood, contemporary literature, and his first novel. The interview is posted on Words Without Borders, a…

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…

There are today more than fifty Muslim states, extending from the Atlas Mountains in the West to the Malay Archipelago in the East, and from Sub-Saharan Africa to the steppes of Central Asia. They include some of the most populous countries in the…

1517 Egypt incorporated into the Turkish Ottoman Empire. 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte's forces invade Egypt. British and Turkish forces defeat the French in 1801 and restore Ottoman rule of…

1911-1912 Italy seizes Libya from the Ottoman Empire. Sanussi leader Omar al-Mukhtar begins insurgency against Italian rule. 1931 Italians mount military response, imprison rebels in concentration camps, and execute…

1904 – 1906 France and Spain carve out zones of influence. France and Spain control Moroccan ports and collect customs duty. 1912 With the Sultan as a figurehead, Morocco becomes a French protectorate administered by…

As background to the locations described in Dreams of Trespass, the memoir of Fatima Mernissi's childhood in Morocco, readers can view and download a map of Morocco from the United Nations Cartographic Section website in pdf format.

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.…

As background to Leila Aboulela's novel Minaret, readers can link to and download the United Nations Cartographic Section maps of the Sudan and South Sudan as pdfs. Note that the Sudan and South Sudan were not yet divided during the period in which…

1871-1874 Turkish and Egyptian forces conquer the territory of today’s Sudan. 1881-1885 Muhammed Ahmad declares himself al-Mahdi, or awaited guide, and begins reconquest of Sudan. Mahdi’s forces capture…

Western discussions of Muslim women’s public attire seldom take into account what women themselves think about this issue. In the past decade, the Gallup Organization has been polling intensively in Turkey and other Muslim countries. A Gallup…

The Age-Old Modesty of the Veil: Banning the Veil in Iran (1930s) By Sattareh Farman Farmaian When my mother had learned that she was to lose the age-old modesty of her veil, she was beside herself. She and all traditional people regarded Reza's…

Because Muslim women in Egypt have controlled their property, or rather because some of the wealthy women controlled their property, we find women as well as men setting up charitable endowments which are known as awqaf [plural]. A waqf [singular] is…

Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's inventive, wry, and tragic memoir of growing up in Tehran in the 1980s—the tumultuous years when the Islamic Revolution took hold in Iran and the country fought off an invasion from neighboring Iraq. Using a…

Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood takes place in Fez, Morocco, in the 1940s and early 1950s. The harem of this memoir’s title is a large house with its own courtyard, shared by several generations of an extended family. Fatima…