Amanda Gorman | – ( Buy her forthcoming poetry collection via Penguin Random House.) The Hill We Climb When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade We’ve braved the belly of the beast We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always […]
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Books
An Admiring Review of Cole, ‘Muhammad: Prophet of Peace,’ in Algeria’s Echorouq
The Algerian newspaper Echorouq [al-Shuruq] has published a positive review of the Arabic translation of my book, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires Available at Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor And Hachette And Barnes and Noble And Amazon Juan says: In turbulent era, I am most gratified that Muslim readers on the […]
New Year Bliss in Persian Poetry: the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – After the dark year of 2020, I thought it might be nice to talk about poetry and rebirth today. The quatrains or Rubaiyat attributed to the medieval astronomer Omar Khayyam (d. 1131), four-line Persian poems, are often about renewal, and some make special mention of New Year’s Day (Now-Ruz in […]
Black Lives Mattering: HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ demonstrates that Racism is the True Horror
By Guy Stephen Webster | – Lovecraft Country, a new series from HBO adapted from the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, takes a critical look at the legacy of the controversial but classic horror writer, HP Lovecraft. By doing so it also sheds a light on the mode of literature he famously pioneered: weird fiction. […]
A Drunken Nightingale: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Honolulu’s Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art
Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design | Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art |- Here is a short video made while I was Scholar-in Residence at Shangri La in Honolulu in December of 2016. The grounds are the former mansion and guest house of the billionaire art collector Doris Duke, who filled […]
Fundamentalist Pandemics: What Evangelicals and Khomeinists Could Learn From The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam
This essay by Juan Cole was originally published in Tomdispatch.com. See the original for a perceptive introductory essay by Tom Engelhardt. This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticism — this time in two countries that think of themselves as […]
Washington Irving, “Legend of the Arabian Astrologer”
Washington Irving, Tales from the Alhambra (New York: Lea and Carey, 1832). Legend of the Arabian Astrologer. IN OLD times, many hundred years ago, there was a Moorish king named Aben Habuz, who reigned over the kingdom of Granada. He was a retired conqueror, that is to say, one who having in his more youthful […]
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Why some Sufis drink Wine
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Quatrain of the Day A search for good times isn’t why we drink: Wine’s not for going rogue or faithlessness. We sip to bring ourselves to selflessness; that is the secret of my drunkenness. trans. Juan Cole, (Whinfield 66) می خوردن من نه از برای طربست نز بهر فساد و ترک […]
Poetry of Uplift for our Plague Year: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Juan Cole’s New Translation)
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Today my new translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is out from I.B. Tauris/ Bloomsbury. I hope you all enjoy it! I make an argument in the historical epilogue to my translation that this volume is an anthology by many poets and that a custom had grown up of […]
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