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Mahmoud Marai
Located off a busy Cairo square, in the bucolic and tree-lined district of Maadi, is a small basement-level office space. At first glance, the room looks no different than most of the dusty and...
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Review: ‘Mirrors of the Unseen’
Travel writing may often entertain and sometimes astonish, but seldom does it take the reader past a constellation of anecdotal experiences into the true essence of a place beyond all preconception....
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A New Mosque of Cordoba
The Mosque of Cordoba is one of the most evocative and simplest constructions in the world. It was built when Islam was a young and fresh religion, and at the leading edge of its times. Its array of...
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Muhammed al-Idrisi
Muhammed “al-Sharif” al-Idrisi (c. 1100-1165) was a major Muslim scholar, geographer and mapmaker of the medieval Islamic period. He was born in the town of Ceuta, in Morocco, and was descended from a...
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The Life and Times of Piri Re’is
A Piri Re’is map depicting the coasts of Beirut and Tripoli. Ahmed Muhiddin Piri Re’is (1475-1544) was an Ottoman mariner and mapmaker whose rise to prominence paralleled the ascending fortunes of the...
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Egypt’s Terra Incognita
We tend to associate foreign lands that are unfamiliar to us with their most enduring, and sometimes cliché, symbols. No region is more prone to this conundrum of perception than the Middle East – and...
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Hallak on ‘Beit Beirut’
One of the few remaining structures bearing the scars of Lebanon’s fifteen year civil-war (1975-1990) is Beirut’s Barakat Building. This once stately and aristocratic edifice straddles a key...
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Adelard of Bath
While he was a young man studying at the famed French cathedral school of Tours, Adelard of Bath, an 12th century Englishman of noble lineage, underwent a life changing experience. Following a lesson...
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Review: ‘Scorpion Soup’
Fast on the heels of his eerily timed epic, Timbuctoo, travel writer Tahir Shah delivers a fantastical new work of fiction drawn from the deepest wellsprings of human imagination. Scorpion Soup is a...
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Context Blindness and the Crisis in Syria
Beyond providing yet another window onto tyranny and inhumanity run amok, the crisis in Syria may also be indicative of something nearly as unsettling: the ultimate failure of the international...
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Adnan Khan on the Rickshaw Circus
Canadian journalist, and friend, Adnan Khan, has been covering South Asia and Middle East for over a decade. When not traipsing around Turkey, his home turf, the Maclean’s correspondent can usually be...
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Fanaticism’s Antidote: ‘The Sufis’
In 2012, extremist militants, battle-hardened from their fight to topple Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, took their booty, weapons and fervour and spilled into the no-man’s-land of northern Mali. There, they...
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