Category Archives: Arabs

The author of The Map of Knowledge freely admits that her education was in Classics, so it was remiss in “non-Western” history. These gaps show up in the text of her book. For example: It helped that Sassanian culture was one of the most sophisticated and impressive on earth, and that Arab culture was young […]

Read more

This summer I had the pleasure of spending a week in July visiting a Gulf nation which was not Saudi Arabia. It was so hot and humid that my glasses would fog over in the 110-degree weather (Fahrenheit). The reason I went was for a possible business opportunity. As someone who is an atheist from […]

Read more

The magazine Foreign Policy recently had a “sex” issue out. This issue is particularly famous for Mona Eltahaway’s jeremiad against Arab male culture, and their attitudes toward women. Over at bloggingheads.tv Charli Carpenter express…

Read more

I’m pretty critical of the tendency to fixate on the “West vs. the Rest” which is common today across the ideological and cultural spectrum. Frankly, I think Zach does it a little too much for my taste, but that’s a separate issue. Rather, I want to highlight this bizarre tendency to fixate on the West […]

Read more

I picked up The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization on the run, as I was about go traveling somewhere. I didn’t look at the contents or even the jacket summary very closely. My interest specifically was to get to know a little more about the Abbassid House of Wisdom, which like […]

Read more

5/5
Razib Khan