Noureddin and the Persian Woman
A pile of gold coins Here's another of the stories Sheherazade told the king: Once the sultan had two viziers, a good one (Khacan) and a bad one (Saouy). Naturally Saouy hated [...]
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07, 2017
25
07, 2017
Mullah Nasruddin – Islamic Stories
Grapes on a Seljuk period plate Nasruddin lived in the time of the Seljuk Sultans. One day Nasruddin was coming from the vineyard with baskets of grapes on his donkey. The children crowded around [...]
25
07, 2017
Arabic language and literature
Arabic language: Sabataean writing Where did Arabic come from? Arabic is in the Semitic language group. Semitic languages seem to have gotten started before the beginning of writing. That would be before [...]
25
07, 2017
Medieval Islamic historians
A page from Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, from Herat, Afghanistan, about 1444 AD. Now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Islamic historians began by translating Greek historians like Herodotus and Thucydides into Arabic. But soon historians wrote in [...]
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07, 2017
The Islamic story of wheat on the chessboard
Muslims playing chess in Spain What is exponential growth? About 1260 AD, Ibn Khallikan, a Kurdish historian living in the Abbasid Empire (modern Iraq), wrote an encyclopedia with biographies of many famous men [...]
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07, 2017
Arabian Nights – Medieval Islamic Literature
Princess (ca. 1540 AD) How old are the Arabian Nights stories? People in India and Iran have been telling these stories for a long time - nobody knows how long. Around 850 AD, an Iranian [...]
25
07, 2017
Aladdin and the Lamp – Arabian Nights
An Islamic oil lamp like Aladdin's lamp, from the University of Michigan Scheherazade tells Aladdin's story This is one of the stories Scheherazade told the king. Scheherazade's Arabian Nights Sinbad [...]
21
07, 2017
Who was the god Ganesh? – Hinduism – India
The god Ganesh (Musee Guimet, Paris, from Tamil Nadu, ca. 1500 AD) Who was Ganesh? Ganesh was one of the Hindu gods. He has an elephant head, so he's easy to spot in [...]
21
07, 2017
The Blind Men and the Elephant
Mughal painting of the blind men and the elephant, from the 1600s AD (now in Walters Art Museum) A story that's a metaphor Once there was an elephant, a tame [...]
20
07, 2017
The Ramayana – A Hindu story – India
A scene from the Ramayana: Rama in the forest (a Gupta carving of the 400s AD, now in New Delhi) What is the Ramayana? The Ramayana is a story from [...]
