Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

I have just finished reading Global Middle East Into The Twenty-First Century . Apart from a couple of essays which I have found dry, the collection of 24 short essays is really worth reading.   It is accessible to both students and those who are eager to read about different topics related to the region in its global context, from music, food and Levantines in Latin America to oil, Egyptian cotton, Mo Salah and ports of the Persian Gulf...

Nightingales and Pleasure Gardens

"Muslims were always ready to learn from other cultures, and in the late fifteenth century they did so from the heirs of Genghis Khan. The Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor, the Middle East, and North Africa, the Safavid Empire in Iran, and the Moghul Empire in India would be created on the basis of the Mongol army state and become the most advanced states in the world at the time. But the Mongols also unwittingly inspired a spiritual revival. Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–73) had fled the Mongol armies with his family, migrating from Iran to Anatolia, where he founded a new mystical Sufi order. One of the most widely read Muslims in the West today, his philosophy is redolent of the refugee’s homelessness and sense of separation, but Rumi was also enthralled by the vast extent of the Mongol Empire and encouraged Sufis to explore boundless horizons on the spiritual plane and to open their hearts and minds to other faiths. But no two people will respond to the same trauma identically, howev...

The erasure of Islam from the poetry of Rumi