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The Butterfly Mosque
The Butterfly Mosque is the memoir of an American woman raised in a secular family who discovers the value of religion during her travels. Interested in history, art, and literature, G. Willow Wilson takes a teaching job in Cairo. She meets the…
The Harem and the Revolutionary Gentlewomen of Egypt
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…
Tags: Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, anthropology, charity, colonialism, culture, Egypt, family, gender, harem, hejab, imperialism, Islam, marriage, nationalism, Orientalism, revolution, seclusion, slavery, veil, waqf, women
Persepolis
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…
Tags: Britain, childhood, colonialism, culture, family, France, Iran, memoirs, Persia, politics, religion, revolution, United States, war, youth
Broken Verses: a Novel
Pakistan was created as an independent nation in 1947, carved from predominantly Muslim regions in the east and west of India after British colonial rule ended on the Indian subcontinent. Ever since, Pakistan has struggled to be Islamic yet secular,…
House of Stone: a Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
From the late New York Times journalist Anthony Shadid comes a chronicle of his quixotic efforts to restore his family’s ancestral home in Lebanon. While House of Stone is a memorable tale of the ups and downs of house renovation, it is also a…
Tags: architecture, culture, family, immigration, journalism, Lebanon, memoir, migration, Syria, war