Saqi: 133 books

Hasan, the local imam's son, has the strange ability to smell a menstruating woman among a thousand others. This helps him classify members of the opposite sex with whom he has little contact until the day he has a brief affair with a married woman. This sexual initiation irrevocably transforms him...

Bahiah Shaheen, an eighteen-year-old medical student and daughter of a prominent Egyptian public official, finds the male students in her class coarse and alien. Her father, too, seems to belong to a race apart. Frustrated by her hard-working, well-behaved, middle-class public persona, her meeting...

A devastating critique of the Arab world's political stagnation by one of its most revered thinkers. The 1967 War - which led to the defeat of Syria, Jordan and Egypt by Israel - felt like an unprecedented and unimaginable disaster for the Arab world at the time. For many, the easiest solution was...

Nawal El Saadawi's most recent play, God Resigns at the Summit Meeting, created an uproar in her native Egypt. On the basis of the title alone, officials declared the work heretical and charged El Saadawi with insulting the "Almighty God", not just Islam. Her prosecutors requested that all...

More than two decades after their parents rose up against the Shah's excesses, increasing numbers of young Iranians are risking jail at the hands of religious paramilitaries roughly their own age, for things their counterparts in the West take for granted: wearing makeup, slow dancing at parties,...

This reader consists of the full Arabic text of 11 carefully chosen and very readable short stories by established Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian and Jordanian writers. The earliest story, written in 1929, is by the Egyptian Mahmud Tahir Lashin; the most recent by the Iraqi writer, Fuad al-Takarli, written...

Modern Arabic literature remains little known and poorly understood despite growing curiosity among European readers. This brief introduction offers a unique overview, focusing on developments over the last fifty years. It provides a guide to the literary landscape, indicating the major landmarks...

Mohammed Arkoun was one of the most prominent and influential Arab intellectuals of his day. During a career spanning more than thirty years, he was revered as an outstanding research scholar, a bold critic of the theoretical tensions embedded within Islamic Studies and an outspoken public figure,...

The Caucasus has an extremely rich folk literature, almost unknown among English speakers, which includes myths, legends, magical tales, anecdotes and proverbs. The one hundred and one legends included in this book reflect the cultures of fourteen different ethnic groups - their dynamism and the matters...

At first glance Sufism and Surrealism appear to be as far removed from one another as is possible. Adonis, however, draws convincing parallels between the two, contesting that God, in the traditional sense does not exist in Surrealism or in Sufism, and that both are engaged in parallel quests for...

Classic Palestinian Cuisine is a collection of over one hundred mouh-watering dishes, such as ful m'dammas (broad bean salad), kidreh (rice with mutton) and djaj mahshi (stuffed chicken), characteristic of the culinary culture of the Mediterranean. Christiane Dabdoub Nasser's delightful tips and anecdotes,...

How has Saudi Arabia managed to maintain its Arab and Islamic values while at the same time adopting Western technology and a market economy? How have its hereditary leaders, who govern with a mixture of political pragmatism and religious zeal, managed to maintain their power? This comprehensive history...

After Zionism brings together some of the world's leading thinkers on the Middle East question to dissect the century-long conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians, and to explore possible forms of a one-state solution. Time has run out for the two-state solution because of the unending and permanent...

Demystifying Syria offers an extraordinary insight into the shifting relations between the Ba'th party and the armed forces, civil law, social structure, burgeoning private enterprise, internal political opposition, the European Union and its relation to Syria. This book goes beyond the headlines...