Product Description: With a focus on the areas of theory, literature, culture, society and film, this collection of essays examines, questions and broadens the applicability of Postcolonialism and Islam from a multifaceted and cross-disciplinary perspective...read more

Product Description: The relationship between Islam andthe West is one of the most urgent and hotly debated issues of our time. Thisbook is the first to offer a comprehensive overview of the way in which Muslimsare represented within modern English writing, ranging from the novel, throughmemoir and travel writing to journalism...read more

‘Travellers to the Middle East from Burkhardt to Thesiger’ is a compendious anthology of travellers' writings produced during the high tide of Britain’s involvement in the Middle East. The anthology contains extracts from many of the canonical travel texts of the period, including passages by T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and Robert Byron, as well as many more extracts from both female and male writers. The anthology is also enlivened by the broad geographical span covered, including descriptions of territories in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Arabia and Persia.

Though known to specialists, Comte de Gobineau’s vital if idiosyncratic contribution to Orientalism has only been accessible to the English reader through secondary sources. Especially important for its portrayal of an esoteric Sufi sect like the Ahl-i Haqq, and its vivid narrative of the Babi episode in Persia, Gobineau’s work impacted significantly on European intelligentsia, including Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold, Lord Curzon, and the Orientalist Edward Granville Browne. Daniel O’Donoghue’s brilliant translation now makes available sizeable extracts from Gobineau’s two most important writings on the East: Three Years in Asia and Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia. Geoffrey Nash’s comprehensive introduction and notes contextualise Gobineau’s work in the light of contemporary scholarship, as well as assessing its impact on nineteenth century Orientalists and modern Iranians, and its relevance to debates around Islam and modernity that are still alive today.

Product Description: According to the late Edward Said, ‘Why English and not Arabic is the question an Egyptian, Palestinian, Iraqi or Jordanian writer has to ask him or herself right now.’ This concise study argues there is a qualitative difference between Arabic literature, Arabic literature translated into English, and a literature conceived and executed in English by writers of Arab background...read more

Product Description: Migration and diaspora are arguably the most written about cultural phenomena of the early twenty-first century. Where are cultural purity and authenticity to be found? What happens to the migrant forced to leave his/her first nation behind? In an age of unusual cross-cultural connections, can a non-native acquire the characteristics and affiliations of a foreign culture? Imagining Persia probes these questions of identity through two people's stories - an eastern woman and a western man...read more