Today
Murat C. Yildiz, "The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul" (U Texas Press, 2026)
The history of sports in Turkey is deeply contested. Over the decades, journalists, pundits, non-professional historians, sports scholars, and everyday people have offered competing narratives about the origins of modern sports in the late Ottoman Empire. In The Ottoman World of ... Show More
1h 5m
Today
Mikhail Pelevin, "Love, Honour and God: Pashto Writings of Early Modern Times" (Brill, 2025)
In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Mikhail Pelevin about his book Love, Honour and God: Pashto Writings of Early Modern Times (Iran and the Caucasus Monographs, vol. 5, Brill, 2025). Love, Honour and God is a survey of three centuries of Pashto literary and educat ... Show More
33m 29s
Jul 29
Lisa Blaydes and Samuel Helfont eds., "Ba‘thist Iraq Through Archives: Reflections, Explorations, and Opportunities" (Stanford UP, 2026)
The opening of Iraq's Ba'th Party archives revolutionized the study of Iraqi politics and history, offering scholars unprecedented access to the inner workings of one of the world's most impenetrable autocracies. Ba‘thist Iraq Through Archives: Reflections, Explorations, and Oppo ... Show More
41m 40s
Jul 2023
Amir Sedaghat, "Translating Rumi Into the West: A Linguistic Conundrum and Beyond" (Routledge, 2023)
Amir Artaban Sedaghat’s Translating Rumi into the West: A Linguistic Conundrum and Beyond (Routledge, 2023) engages Rumi, the 13th-century Muslim Persian mystic and a best-selling poet, and the paradoxes of English translations associated with him. Sedaghat explores generative qu ... Show More
1h 8m
Jan 2023
Afsar Mohammad, "An Evening with a Sufi" (Red River, 2022)
Afsar Mohammad's An Evening with a Sufi (Red River, 2022) is a collection of Afsar's Telugu poems translated into to English by Asfar and Shamala Gallagher. The stunning poems in the collection capture the stark realities of religious landscape of post-partition South Asia and is ... Show More
1h 3m
Mar 2022
KAREEM ABU-ZEID | Confessions & Exhausted on the Cross | Book Club
<p>Kareem James Abu-Zeid talked about his translations of ‘Exhausted on the Cross”by Najwan Darwish and “Confessions” by Rabee Jaber.</p><p>Kareem James Abu-Zeid is a translator, editor, writer, teacher, and scholar who works across multiple languages. As an acclaimed translator ... Show More
28m 6s
In this ground-breaking work, Michael Sells (the Barrows Professor Emeritus of the History and Literature of Islam and Professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Chicago) translates sixty-one poems that form the Tarjuman al-ashwaq or The Translator of Desires by Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi (Princeton University Press, 2021). The poems are pre ... Show More
<p>Sources/Recomended Reading:</p><br><p>Addas, Claude (1993). "Quest for the Red Sulphur". The Islamic Texts Society.</p><br><p>Austin, R.W.J. (translated by) (1980). "The Bezels of Wisdom". Classics of Western Spirituality Series. Paulist Press.</p><br><p>Chittick, William (198 ... Show More