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Leila Aboulela, Sudanese-born author of Minaret, was interviewed by Anita Sethl for the Guardian newspaper in London, June 2005. She discusses the relative importance of national and religious identity.

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…

Goha Gives Thanks to Allah Goha once lost his donkey. He couldn’t find it anywhere. As he went around the town searching for it, he kept on saying, “Thanks be to Allah! Thanks be to Allah!” People were surprised to find him giving…

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…

Timeline: Number of Captives Embarked and Disembarked per Year, 1525-1867

For information related to narratives of Muslim slaves transported to the Americas between 1514 and 1866,The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database comprises nearly 35,000 individual slaving expeditions. Records of the voyages have been found in…

The map of the volume and direction of the transatlantic slave trade pinpoints the place in the Gulf of Mexico where Abdurrahman ibn Sori, the subject of Prince Among Slaves, disembarked as one individual in the flow of slaves from all regions of…