100 Books Like The Road to Mecca

I do not know about the origins of my passion but hardships did influence me, the values of Islam shaped my personality and infused passion required to speak up against injustices. When I write, I speak my mind and try to put my heart and soul into it and that’s how the passionate story of ‘The Broken Silence’ came into existence. It is composed over a period of 23 years; that speaks up and documents the genocidal sanctions imposed on Iraq that caused the pathetic deaths of about a million innocent children - “This book is a historic documentation of one man’s passionate efforts to do his part to speak truth to power.”

I do not know about the origins of my passion but hardships did influence me, the values of Islam shaped my personality and infused passion required to speak up against injustices. When I write, I speak my mind and try to put my heart and soul into it and that’s how the passionate story of ‘The Broken Silence’ came into existence. It is composed over a period of 23 years; that speaks up and documents the genocidal sanctions imposed on Iraq that caused the pathetic deaths of about a million innocent children - “This book is a historic documentation of one man’s passionate efforts to do his part to speak truth to power.”

I do not know about the origins of my passion but hardships did influence me, the values of Islam shaped my personality and infused passion required to speak up against injustices. When I write, I speak my mind and try to put my heart and soul into it and that’s how the passionate story of ‘The Broken Silence’ came into existence. It is composed over a period of 23 years; that speaks up and documents the genocidal sanctions imposed on Iraq that caused the pathetic deaths of about a million innocent children - “This book is a historic documentation of one man’s passionate efforts to do his part to speak truth to power.”

I do not know about the origins of my passion but hardships did influence me, the values of Islam shaped my personality and infused passion required to speak up against injustices. When I write, I speak my mind and try to put my heart and soul into it and that’s how the passionate story of ‘The Broken Silence’ came into existence. It is composed over a period of 23 years; that speaks up and documents the genocidal sanctions imposed on Iraq that caused the pathetic deaths of about a million innocent children - “This book is a historic documentation of one man’s passionate efforts to do his part to speak truth to power.”

Steven A. Cook is the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for the Middle East and Africa studies and director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine and an expert on Arab and Turkish politics as well as U.S. Middle East policy. 

I am an American-trained Indonesian anthropologist, teacher, writer, researcher, and academic nomad who has lived and taught at a Saudi university. I have travelled since childhood. When I was a kid or teenager, I journeyed to various places and cities for schooling away from my home village (and parents) in the isolated highlands of Central Java. I also travelled for shepherding my goats which I did after school. So, I love to travel, learn many things from my travel, and as a teacher of Anthropology of Travel, I have always been fascinated by literature on travel whatever its forms ranging from pilgrimage and nomadism to migration and tourism.   

My exploration of Sufism began in the unlikely environment of the Soviet Union where Sufism was considered a relic of the past to be replaced by the atheist, world-asserting ideology. The fact that my Muslim academic advisor assigned this topic to me, an active customs officer, was nothing short of a miracle. It was the beginning of a chain of miracles that punctuated my teaching and research career in the USSR, UK, US, EU, and the post-Soviet republics of Eurasia, especially Tatarstan and Kazakhstan. Having observed Sufism in various shapes and forms for over thirty years, my knowledge of its precepts and rituals is of great help to me in everyday life.  

Brandon Wilson is an author, photographer, explorer, and pilgrim. He is a voracious explorer of nearly one hundred countries, he has trekked many pilgrimage trails, including: the Camino de Santiago, Camino Catalan, Camino Aragonés and Via de la Plata across Spain, and twice the St. Olav’s Way across Norway and Sweden. Brandon and his wife Cheryl were the first Western couple to complete the 1100-kilometer pilgrim trail from Lhasa, Tibet to Kathmandu, and he was the first American to traverse the 1850-kilometer Via Francigena from England to Rome. In 2006, he and his French friend re-blazed the 4500-kilometer route of the First Crusades from France to Jerusalem, naming it the Templar Trail, to establish it as a path of peace.

I grew up hearing stories about my grandfather, who was the blacksmith in Saratoga, California, from the 1920s to the 1940s, and I wanted to write a novel about him. As I began to research his life, a world opened up to me. I learned how the suburbs I’d grown up in were built on one of the world’s greatest fruit-growing regions, and the story about my grandfather grew into a story about the profound changes we’ve wrought upon the land. That novel, The Blossom Festival, was the beginning of my lifelong engagement with the peoples and places of my home state that I’ve carried through in all the books I’ve written. 

I’m a preacher’s kid, and I’ve always had an evangelistic impulse to get other people to love the books I admire, through my teaching at Harvard, through my writing, and simply by pressing books into my friends’ hands. I grew up hearing about my parents’ early years in the Philippines, where my father was an Anglican missionary, and I was always drawn to tales of distant or imagined lands. My literary interests led me to study a dozen ancient and modern languages, and then to learn more about the places where my favorite authors came from, and to study their cultures and history.