Bridging Cultures Bookshelf: Muslim Journeys: Literary Reflections

The stories of The Arabian Nights—stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories—are told in the voice of a beautiful young woman, Shahrazad, who will lose her life if the king loses interest in her nightly narratives. Collected over several centuries from a variety of sources in India, Persia, and Arabia, and ranging from adventure fantasies, amorous encounters, and animal fables to pointed Sufi tales, these stories provided daily entertainment in the medieval Islamic world, and still exert their presence today in literature and art, as well as everyday life. Over centuries of telling and retelling, the stories were modified to reflect the general life and customs of the Arab society that adapted them—a distinctive synthesis that marks the cultural and artistic history of Islam.

Composed in the twelfth century in northeastern Iran, Farid ud-Din Attar’s acclaimed Sufi poem is among the most significant works of Persian literature. A mystical, allegorical rendering of Sufi belief, The Conference of the Birds takes the reader on an epic journey as the birds of the world go in search of their perfect king. Thirty birds reach their goal, but only after traveling through seven arduous valleys and mastering their own personal faults. Attar guides his reader on a similar journey, marked by wit and wisdom, frustration and joy—a journey that, as the birds themselves find, turns out to be grander than its destination.

From Nobel Prize–winning author Orhan Pamuk, the novel Snow paints a fantastic picture of daily life in Kars, a dreamlike town in the mountains of far eastern Turkey. Following an exiled poet who becomes stranded in Kars during a weeklong blizzard, the deeply layered story is an attempt to untangle the town’s history, the importance of poetry, the vicissitudes of belief, and the limits of reason. Humorous and deeply sympathetic, Snow takes readers on a mesmerizing tour of the complex terrain of Turkish belief, politics, and personal expression.

Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret follows the spiritual journey of a young woman exiled from her home in Sudan and forced to invent a new life in London, far from the comforts of her privileged childhood and secular education. She supports herself as a maid caring for the children of wealthy Arabs. Struggling to establish a new sense of identity, she finds herself drawn to a community of observant Muslim women at a neighborhood mosque, who provide spiritual and emotional support as she navigates a range of challenges. The young woman comes to express a newfound piety, embracing the traditions of veiling, prayer, and fasting.

Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood takes place in Fez, Morocco, in the 1940s and early 1950s. The harem of this memoir’s title is a large house with its own courtyard, shared by several generations of an extended family. Fatima Mernissi recounts her experiences and observations as a precocious young girl living in the harem, acutely aware of the many sacred frontiers she is forbidden to cross—the barriers between men and women and between Muslims and Christians, the threshold separating one room from another or the interior of the house from the street outside. She learns that all the women around her chafe at the limitations of harem life in one way or another, but she also comes to realize that she can transcend these limitations covertly—through imagination, creativity, learning, and even mischief.