Robyn Creswell

A Permanent Elegy

“As it happens, sorrowful sensualism is congenial to Arabic poetry.”

Reimagining al-Andalus

To modern Arab thinkers, the Andalusian experiment has represented everything from the perils of factionalism to the benefits of cultural openness to the pain of exile.

‘Endless Organic Growth’

The recent drawings of the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi, now ninety-two, derive their energy from the tension between suffering and pleasure.

Then What Happened?

Yasmine Seale's new translation of The Thousand and One Nights has a texture—tight, smooth, skillfully patterned—that make previous versions seem either garish or slightly dull by comparison.

On the Road

The Book of Travels, Hanna Diyab’s memoir of his Mediterranean adventures, is a mixture of clear-eyed observation and wide-eyed innocence.

C.V.

The Body and the Border

Making and Unmaking

Lebanon’s Infernal Circle

The Slave Trade

a poem

A Free Man in Nablus

‘An Enthusiastick Sect’

Waking the Dead

Persia’s Hybrid Art

The longer one studies the artworks in the exhibition “Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran,” the more absorbing they become.

The Seal of the Poets

Syrian Fables

Again and again in Osama Alomar’s tales, a promised rescue or moment of respite turns out to be the trapdoor to a deeper circle of hell.

Tripoli Nights with a Master of Arabic

A Different Syria

The anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara shows the everyday as rendered strange by war, yet war itself takes place among the stubborn routines of daily life.

The First Great Arabic Novel

Syria’s Lost Spring

For an introduction to the ideas and culture of the original Syrian protesters one can scarcely do better than Syria Speaks, an anthology of visual and literary work, most of it from the early days of the uprising.