The Siege of Mecca by Yaroslav Trofimov

1979 was a big year in the history of relations between the US and parts of the Islamic world. In early November Iranian radicals supporting the Iranian revolution took over the US embassy in Tehran and held 53 Americans hostage. On November 20th Salafist radicals in Saudi Arabia seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and [...]

Belated Book Report

I saw Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations sitting on the bookshelf and decided I’d take another shot at posting about it. Here’s my previous and not very informative post.
First off, this one line threw me for a loop, and I couldn’t help but hold it against the book. It is mind-bogglingly [...]

Qur’an Authors

Found this over on The Arabist’s site.
Amazon.com lists the authors of the Holy Qur’an as Muhammad and Gabriel.

The History of Islam by Robert Payne

Usually I don’t buy a book and then let it sit around, unread, but somehow I don’t remember where I acquired this book, and I just got around to reading it. It was originally published in 1959 under the name, “The Holy Sword,” which says a lot. Although they gussied up the titled for the [...]

Killing and Mayhem in Holy Books

I was reading the comments to a blog post on Pharyngula and a couple of commenters included some really interesting links.
Here’s one that lists a whole lot of exhortations to violence from the Bible, and here’s a Boston Globe newspaper article comparing and contrasting violent passages in the Bible and Qur’an.
From the latter:
The Bible also [...]

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf

Another nonfiction book translated from the French that is actually a good read. Really helped solidify my understanding of the Crusades. It covers a two-hundred-year period, so it’s hard to keep all the characters straight. I’m going to have to go back in and write down all the names, what religion and nationality they were, [...]

Allah’s Fire by Chuck Holton and Gayle Roper

This is not a review, just a series of observations.
I expected this book to be full of misinformation about Arabs and Islam. Well, it had a good deal of that, but I did not anticipate how much Christian glurge there would be. As for the romance novel aspect, by the end of the book [...]

Wild Fire by Nelson DeMille

The downside is that there are no Middle Eastern terrorists in this one, and Asad “The Lion” Khalil is just a memory whose name gets brought up a couple of times by our old friend, protagonist John Corey.
John Corey is one of those characters who I get a kick out of in print or on [...]

Some People Have No Shame

I was just over on Mantiq al-Tayr’s blog reading his post about Norma Khouri (not her real name), who wrote a book a few years back purporting to be a real-life account of an honor killing in Jordan. Except it was complete fiction and Norma is a con woman who’s currently on the lam.
Here’s a [...]

Islamophobia and Romance, Together at Last

The things one stumbles upon while perusing the internet. I was looking for new books to read, and through some strange twist of fate that can probably never be recreated, I found this specimen:
Allah’s Fire, book one of the Task Force Valor series, written by the dynamic duo of a prodigious romance novelist and a [...]