skopia
Egypt expelled its Jews after Suez, and Roden, exiled in London, collected recipes from displaced Sephardi and Arab families and the histories behind them. English-speaking kitchens learned hummus, tabbouleh, and mezze from her.
Two centuries of crusade told from the receiving end, out of the Arab chroniclers: the Franj, as they called the invaders, eat the dead at Maarat and sack Jerusalem the following year.
Four amateurs shaped the modern Middle East, Anderson argues, and the strangest was Lawrence, an Oxford archaeologist who led an Arab revolt knowing his government had already promised the land away.
Three Palestinian men pay a driver to smuggle them from Iraq into Kuwait inside a water tanker. Kanafani turned those hours in the metal into the defining image of Palestinian exile.
Ibn Battuta left Morocco at twenty-one for the hajj and stayed away twenty-nine years, judging cases in Delhi and crossing the Sahara to Mali. He dictated all 75,000 miles from memory.
Western scholarship on the East was never neutral, Said argues: scholars and novelists built an exotic, backward Orient that empire could claim to govern. He upended how the West studies everyone it ruled.
Scheherazade marries a king who executes each new wife at dawn and stays alive by telling stories that break off before the end. Sinbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba reached the world through her.
God makes the world, loses the people in it, and spends the rest of the book getting them back. The English of this translation is the English later writers have had to answer.