Yahya Birt

Yahya Birt
It is obvious enough that the debate about the place of Islam in Europe has probably never been so important or sharply contested. The numbers of those who think there can be no genuine or settled place for Europe’s second largest religion seem to be growing; and this sentiment now mobilises politics in many [...]

The first full biography of Abdullah Quilliam, appointed Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles by Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1893, has just come out. It’s a fascinating read and exhaustively researched and written in an accessible way by Ron Geaves, Professor of Comparative Religion at Liverpool Hope University. It can be ordered online from Kube [...]

The emergence of “Islamophobia” as an English-language neologism could be dated to around 1991, although earlier occurrences can be found in Edward Said’s essay “Orientalism Reconsidered” in 1985 and from the early twentieth century in French.[1]  This emergence coincided with the moment when Muslim minorities become politically active in Western Europe, in the midst of [...]

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (London: Penguin, 2007) is a little gem of a novel. It is the story of Changez, a Pakistani from an old Lahori family fallen on genteel poverty, who goes to America to get a good education and make money. It is a tale of enchantment followed by disenchantment. Changez wins [...]

It was sad to hear of the passing away of Robert Jordan on 16th September, whose Wheel of Time series was a modern, if flawed, fantasy masterpiece. The series had captured the imagination of a generation, selling some thirty million copies and was translated into twenty languages.
Of course literary critics are usually sniffy about popular [...]

Orhan Pamuk is not only the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (2006), but his difficult novels are widely read in his home country of Turkey for perhaps two reasons: they take the pulse of the country’s concerns and they attempt to do this by rescuing literary narrative from the grip of [...]

Would it be feasible to imagine a convincing universal library, one that contained not only every book in existence, but every possible book? Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the Argentinian writer famous for exploring philosophical conundrums through short stories and fictive essays, once did so in his parable “The Library of Babel” (1941). Well before the [...]

The effects of globalisation show very clearly how nationalism and the free flow of capital work against each other. Nations seek to maintain their border controls; the deregulated global economy (deregulation starting with currency exchange in the early 1970s) is breaking down borders, as the flows of capital, people and ideas increase. With respect to [...]

In a wonderful, lyrical work, In an Antique Land, the novelist-anthropologist Amitav Ghosh charts the story of his fieldwork in the Nile Delta. Calcutta-born and Oxford-educated, Ghosh embarks on two parallel journeys. One records his attempt to ‘understand’ contemporary Egyptian village culture, which he always sees as fumbling, somehow an ‘impossible’ stab at cross-cultural ‘translation’ [...]