Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Note that the Associated Press is aligned with the dominant narrative of Western corporate media and politicians calling the Israeli war on Palestinians ‘an Israeli-Hamas war’.

  Ramadan Nights

Abortion: how women break the taboo in Yemen

The Gulistān (Rose-Garden) of Saʿdī of Shiraz. The book was written in 1258. The most recent translator of the Gulistān says: 'Saʿdi’s Gulistan must be one of the most widely read books ever produced. Almost from the time it was written it was the first book studied by school children throughout the entire Persian-speaking and -reading world—from Constantinople to Bengal and from Central Asia to East Africa.' "The story of the Qāḍī of Hamadān appears in the chapter of the Gulistān on “Love and Youth.” For those readers unfamiliar with the story, I will present it here in summary, mainly in my own words, but also sometimes in Saʿdī’s— very much, one might say, in the manner that the story might have been narrated to largely illiterate audiences down the centuries in various social settings. The story goes thus (any phrase in full quotation marks, or for which I provide a Persian transliteration is a direct quotation from Saʿdī; also, any direct speech in si...