Reza Aslan - Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East

This book would not have been possible without the contributions of the following regional editors:

Arabic: MICHAEL BEARD

Michael Beard teaches at the University of North Dakota and publishes frequently on Persian and Arabic literature. His first book, Hedayats Blind Owl as a Western Novel , is a study of modernism in Iran. Among his many translations is (with Adnan Haydar) Adoniss Mihyar of Damascus, His Poems (Aghn Mihyr al-Dimashq, 2009). He coedits the journal Middle Eastern Literatures Incorporating Edebiyt , as well as the series Middle East Literature in Translation for Syracuse University Press.

Persian: SHOLEH WOLP

Sholeh Wolp is the author of Rooftops of Tehran (Red Hen Press), The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press), and the translator of Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (University of Arkansas Press), for which she was awarded the Lois Roth Translation Prize in 2010. She is the guest editor of the 2010 Iran issue of Atlanta Review and the poetry editor of the Levantine Review , an online journal about the Middle East. Her poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in scores of literary journals, periodicals, and anthologies worldwide, and have been translated into several languages. Born in Iran, she now lives in Los Angeles.

Urdu: ZEENUT ZIAD

Zeenut Ziad was assistant professor of economics at the University of Karachi and the first woman executive in Pakistani banking. She also served as the director of the Staff College of a major commercial bank and as an economic consultant for the World Bank. Her publications include The Magnificent Mughals (Oxford University Press, 2002). She is also working on the translation of the nineteenth-century Urdu text on Sufi ethics, The Radiant Dawn .

Words without Borders gratefully acknowledges Amazon.com for its grant in support of the publication of Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East.

I N MY HIGH SCHOOLS world-history book, which opened with Ancient Greece and the founding of Western Civilization and closed with Ronald Reagans Morning in America, there was a picture I will never forget: Napoleon Bonaparte astride a black horse at the edge of the Giza Plateauhands on his reins, epaulets fluttering in the desert windstaring at the cracked and crumbling faade of the Sphinx. The Egyptian colossus is shrouded in centuries of sand, so that only its head is visible; the angle of the portrait is such that the newly minted Master of Egypt is eye to eye with the Sphinx. In fact, the mounted Napoleon, whose army had vanquished the Egyptian forces loyal to the Ottoman sultan a few days earlier, is presented as a kind of Sphinxian figure himselfaugust, inscrutable, constant as the boundless desert that surrounds him.