Laila Lalami

A manuscript of an early novel byTruman Capote was found recently and is now being auctioned.

The first draft of “Summer Crossing”

Not content with renaming the months of the year after himself Turkmenistan’s potentate Saparmurat Niyazov, also known as Turkmenbashi, has now published a book of poetry. The oeuvre is called My People. My Country. My Dignity and Honor. Previous bestsellers in the genre include Zabiba and The King, by one Saddam Hussein.

The idea that Africa had no written literary tradition is so ingrained in everyone’s minds, it is rarely challenged. In an IHT piece, Philip Smucker describes a new project that seeks to restore thousands of manuscripts from Africa’s so-called oral tradition, which were shared with readers using the bookmobiles of the time.

From West Africa’s Atlantic coast across the sandy expanses to the White Nile in the east, camels laden with chests full of books and manuscripts trekked from one oasis to the next. In caravan cities like Timbuktu, tanners, leather workers and scribes worked to replenish the rich stock of political treatises, scientific manuals, law books and sacred texts.

Many of the manuscripts were lost during the colonial era, but those that remain are particularly relevant. In them, one can find testament of an African tradition in Islam that is distinct from the Arab tradition.

Scholars today argue that study of the ancient texts will help the region’s people reconnect with a lost identity. “Our work is both urgent and necessary as a means of recovering our collective memory,” said [library director] Abdelkader Haidara.

Readers outside Timbuktu may get a chance to see the manuscripts as well, as some of them are being digitized.

The Daily Star wraps up the weeklong activities at the Globe Theatre in London for its Shakespeare and Islam festival. The organizer said that the inspiration for the festival came from a discussion of Othello.

“I had a conversation with the Ambassador of Morocco, who is convinced that [the character of] Othello was based on the Moroccan Ambassador who came to England in 1600. He told me a lot [about] England’s relationship with Morocco and it made me realize that what we need to do is explore the context of Othello, politically, socially and culturally [in] the early 17th Century. We wanted to explore England’s perceptions of Islam and Islamic lands.”

Previous posts on the Shakespeare and Islam festival: here and here.

Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize winner Jos

Adam Shatz’s article about Maxime Rodinson and Jacques Derrida draws interesting parallels and contrasts between the famed scholar of Islam and the famed philosopher and thinker, both of whom passed on recently.

Where Rodinson was a fervent rationalist in the Enlightenment mold, Derrida relentlessly questioned the universality of Western reason, and at times displayed a streak of Jewish mysticism. While Rodinson wrote in a prose of impeccable lucidity, Derrida cultivated a style that was highly metaphoric, elusive, gnomic, teeming with paradox and wordplay, at times opaque to the point of self-parody (”Therefore we will be incoherent, but without systematically resigning ourselves to incoherence”). In their approach to ideas they could hardly have been more different.

Yet it’s the affinities between the two scholars that make this exceedingly well-researched article such an interesting read.