Books like The Belt

I planned to read this book for research but ended up so immersed in the story that I kept forgetting to take notes. The narrative, a “clever inversion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” follows the travels and travails of a young protagonist tangled in the contradictions of his African childhood, his formal education in England, and his return home with what he sees as the boon of modern thought. Part mystery, part romance, part history, part monomyth, part psychological thriller, the novel is set in an “unsettled and violent no-man’s-land between…tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement...” This book fascinated and haunted me even as it informed me about the complexities, dichotomies, and dissonance of colonization. Shot through with “allusions to Arabic and European fiction, Islamic history, Shakespeare, Freud, and classical Arabic poetry,” Salih’s novel should first be read for what it is: a brilliant work of art.

Translated into English by Peter Theroux, this gorgeously written and emotionally stunning novel is told from the perspective of the Bedouin inhabitants during a time when Americans were arriving by the shipload to develop the oilfields they had discovered. The story is both epic and intimate (and, at points, wittily ironic) and opened my eyes to the vast destruction not only of the land and its people but the very core of their culture. Banned in several Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, this is the first volume of a trilogy (and I recommend them all). 

A simple yet elegantly written memoir about growing up in mid-century as a Palestinian Arab Bedouin. Diqs’ focus is not on politics but on family, tribe, and tradition as he details his boyhood and his people’s dislocation and transition from nomads tending their sheep to an agrarian, village-based culture. Diqs’ written memories provided me with a profound and intimate awareness of the details of Bedouin life before the partitioning of Palestine and the petroleum industry’s impact on the Middle East.

Because 20th Century Aramco was a closed company inside a closed culture inside a closed country, and because the laws of Sharia and strict corporate guidelines silenced the stories of women, I found it frustrating if not impossible to uncover narratives written by female Arab authors. Then I discovered Basrawi’s fascinating memoir about growing up in Dhahran. It provided riveting insight into the life of a teenage girl whose father was one of the first Saudi Muslim employees allowed to live inside the gated community. Basrawi vividly details coming of age in the middle of a white community and her eventual move to Beirut, where she endures the strife of the country’s civil war. Her account is rare, invaluable, and poignantly told—a reminder that it is literature that offers the greatest understanding of the immediate and lasting effects of colonial imperialism.

This book has rightly become a classic in the field and is a book I keep returning to for Mernissi’s fantastic insights into the particularities of queenship in the Islamic world and her fascinating examples of the agency of royal women. Mernissi’s passion for the subject, and for the wider history of women’s political agency in the Islamic world springs from the page, making this an absorbing read. A more recent work that builds on Mernissi’s book and is also highly recommended is Shahla Haeri’s The Unforgettable Queens of Islam - both Mernissi and Haeri make clear connections between royal women of the premodern era and modern female politicians today.

This is a “big picture” book, providing a grand sweep of international history to readers.

Owen argues world politics involves recurring ideological divides that lead states to forcefully intervene in others’ politics. He looks at Catholic-Protestant tensions in Europe, republican-monarchical conflicts in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the 20th century fight between democracy and totalitarianism.

He then argues the contemporary secular-Islamist division is another case of such a transnational divide, both highlighting the significance of this struggle and rejecting those who would argue there is something exceptionally disruptive about political Islam.

While my scope is much narrower—specific cases of states trying to use religion as a foreign policy tool—I drew on Owen to argue that this is most likely in the case of broad transnational ideological struggles. 

This is an extremely fine book that traces and discusses the origins or intellectual roots of Islamic renewal and reformism in Indonesia (and the Malay world in general). What makes this book special is that, among others, the author used rare academic sources (e.g., Arabic biographic dictionaries that have never before been analyzed or utilized as research materials) to reconstruct the history of Indonesia’s Islamic reformism. The book shows that an orthodox form of Islam in Southeast Asia was the product of intellectual and religious networks between Muslim societies in the archipelago and the Malay-Indonesian Islamic scholars in the Haramain (Mecca and Medina) who transmitted Islamic scholarships, knowledge, and discourses to them since the seventeenth century. 

This book was recommended to me by the first sound practitioner who facilitated a memorable sound healing session with me. Trusting my intuition, I decided to give it a chance. I found myself deeply engrossed in Inayat Khan’s soothing and logical approach to sound, so much so that it inspired me to embark on a similar journey of my own. Shortly after reading this book, I left my corporate life behind to write my first book and open my sound healing practice. 

This book is a true gem. Khan’s masterful presentation of abstract concepts like imagination, desire, mysticism, mortality, and immortality, and their connection to sound, has a profound, Rumi-like effect on the soul. I find myself returning to its wisdom every few months, continually reaping the rich bounty it offers. 

Saba Mahmood’s book is an intellectually stimulating and insightfully written study of a grassroots women’s mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt.

Speaking to a North American audience, Mahmood challenged secular-liberal theorizations of human agency and views that depicted Muslim women in patriarchal societies as without agency. Her nuanced and multi-dimensional study evidenced a considerably more complex picture of moral choice, agency, and Islamist politics that centered on the women’s own understandings and interpretation of a complex religious and political landscape.

It is Mahmood’s balanced and reflexive approach that makes this book a deeply educational study for students and scholars alike.

Warrior Women of Islam opens a window into the world of medieval Muslim authors as they drew upon a mixture of fiction and reality in order to captivate the imagination of their readers/auditors.

Yet although fictitious, not to mention fantastic, Kruk demonstrates how the female protagonists of medieval Islamic epics served to promote ideals of female piety, devotion, and courage in moments of religious conflict.