Fiction

Ibrahim, a freelance journalist from Arabia, has always been deeply aware of his rich Arabian heritage and history but has become disillusioned and disheartened by the seemingly incessant onslaught of Western suspicion, abuse and adverse media attention thrust upon his people. To Ibrahim and his family, it seems as if Western paranoia and prejudice against the Arab has become set in stone. It is to escape this climate of hostility that Ibrahim decides to take his wife, two sons and three daughters on a holiday away from the heat of the Middle Eastern summer and visit an old journalist friend, Mark, a staunch Englishman who has retired to New Zealand. There, they could assimilate a new...

One of the great works of world literature. In it Farid ud-Din Attar explores the nature of the spiritual path through an allegory of the brave birds that go in search of their king through the peaks of exultation and the valleys of despair that represent the stages of the seeker as he travels towards enlightenment. Attar was the predecessor of the great Persian Sufi poet Jalalludin Rumi, who borrowed Attar's technique of weaving wisdom within entertaining and amusing tales.

Mantiqu’t-Tair is one of the masterpieces of Persian literature of which a complete and annotated translation into English is here presented for the first time as The Speech of the Birds. The text revolves around the decision of the birds of the world to seek out a king. Their debilitating doubts and fears, the knowing counsel of their leader Hoopoe, and their choice of the Simurgh as a king, is in reality an allegory of the spiritual path of Sufism with its demands, its hazards and its infinite rewards. The poem contains many admonitory anecdotes and exemplary stories, including numerous references to some of the early Muslim mystics such as Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya, Abu Sa’id ibn Abi’l-Khair,...