Travel

Dancing With Darkness

Magsie Hamilton Little

Life, Death and Hope in Afghanistan

London, July 7th 2005. The author, a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, witnesses the carnage caused by a suicide bomber on a London bus. At a loss to reconcile the blind hatred behind the attacks with the Islamic world she has been studying, and despite the risks, she feels compelled to travel to the heart of where many see as the conflict between East and West, in a search for understanding. She buys a ticket and gets on a plane to Kabul. A single non-Muslim woman in Afghanistan faces many dangers; but Magsie also encounters the warmth and humanity of the Afghan people, in their desperate struggle to survive. It is they who give her a knowledge of Islamic faith and culture she could never have learnt at college and enable her to see a side of Afghan life seldom reported in the Western press.

Months later, back in London, life resumes as normal, before suddenly everything is turned upside down again. A desperate phone call from Kabul sends her rushing back to the country she has come to love – and plunges her into a terrifying nightmare. Alone and totally out of her depth, it is only now that the real journey can begin…

An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Celebi

Evliya Celebi is the greatest travel writer of the Ottoman Empire, sometimes described as the Ottoman Herodotus. Born in 1611, he started traveling in 1640 (during the reign of Sultan Murad IV) and continued for over 40 years, eventually stopping in Cairo where he died in 1685.

This translation offers selections from Celebi’s 10-volume work for the first time in English and gives a taste of the Celebi’s interests, which range from architecture to natural history, through Sufism, politics, music, science and the supernatural. Celebi is a consummate storyteller and recounts the miraculous to the mundane with an intensely curious eye and inquisitive mind. Delightful.

Contents
Istanbul
Anatolia
Retinue of Malek Ahmed Pasha
Safavid Borderlands
East Anatolia and the Balkans
Hungary and the German Campaign
Habsburg Borderlands, Crimea and Beyond
Greece and the Conquest of Crete
Haj
Egypt and Sudan
Mevlud of Seyyid Ahmad al-Badawi

Meetings With Remarkable Muslims

This work is a collection of travel writing celebrating friendship and the chance encounters that unexpectedly enrich our lives, which shows the diversity of the modern Islamic world and the way in which it continues to inspire, bemuse and enrich the Western imagination.