Harvard confirms antique book is bound in human skin (via AFP)

Harvard University scientists have confirmed that a 19th century French treatise in its libraries is bound in human skin, Harvard University said this week, after a bevvy of scientific testing. Arsene Houssaye’s “Des destinees de l’ame” (On the destiny…

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Historian by profession and relentless nonviolent advocate by calling, Vincent Gordon Harding died on Monday, May 19, at the age of 83. The author of a series of books on the civil rights movement — which he called the Southern Freedom movement — he not only wrote history, but also played an active part in the struggle to make and remake it.

Harding worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Mennonite House in Atlanta, an interracial voluntary service. As part of the Albany, Ga., movement, he was arrested for leading a demonstration at the city hall in 1962. He became a strategist for the movement, and drafted Martin Luther King’s historic 1967 anti-war speech “Beyond Vietnam,” which King delivered at Riverside Church in New York City one year to the day before his assassination.

Harding completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago in 1965 and accepted a teaching position at Spelman College in Atlanta. In 1990 he published Hope and History, a text that stressed the importance of telling and teaching the story of the freedom struggle. Later he became professor of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, where he founded Veterans of Hope, a project focused on documenting and learning from struggles for nonviolent change, healing and reconciliation.

Even as he retired from formal teaching, Harding accelerated his efforts for social change. He co-founded the National Council of Elders, crisscrossed the country giving talks and interviews, and made an historic trip to Palestine in late 2012. He and his wife Aljosie Knight were teaching at Pendle Hill Quaker Center for Study and Contemplation in Pennsylvania when he was stricken with an aneurism near his heart, which led to his death in a Philadelphia hospital.

I didn’t get to know Harding until later in my own life. Sometime in the 1990s I read his terrific introduction to the reissue of Howard Thurman’s 1948 classic, Jesus and the Disinherited, a groundbreaking study of Jesus’ active nonviolence that had deeply influenced King’s theology and activism. But I didn’t meet him until five years ago, when he agreed to give the keynote at Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service’s 20th anniversary celebration. Rather than delivering a formal address, he made some powerful opening remarks and then threw it open to the rest of us, offering a few choice prompts to facilitate what turned out to be an exhilarating and very rich conversation ranging across the assembly. Throughout this dialogue, Harding’s presence — searching, formidable and relentlessly inviting — not only held the space, but also transformed and deepened it.

From then on we stayed in touch. I came to experience, over and over again, the graciousness, clarity, tenacity and nonviolent power Harding had come to — and that he ceaselessly shared with anyone who crossed his path. If the central hallmark of principled nonviolence is an awareness of the oneness of all being, Vincent Harding had thoroughly internalized this. He lived this by endlessly affirming a deep resilient spirit of familial connection with all. Everyone was sister, everyone was brother.

There was a stretch where we got on the phone regularly to plot the creation of a new nonviolence project. While nothing ever came of this, the two of us were given the chance to teach a weeklong class together in 2011 at Soka University in Orange County, California. Harding had been the senior advisor on public television’s Eyes on the Prize series — the magnificent, 12-part program on the civil rights movement — and he decided to use it to anchor the course, which he titled, “Whose Eyes on What Prize Today?” Day after day the small class of 10 students was treated to a powerful opportunity not only to retrace the steps of the Southern Freedom movement — from Montgomery to Mississippi, from Selma to Chicago — but also to sit in the midst of one of the agents of change that had played a critical role in that movement. In our Southern California classroom decades later, Harding communicated the reality of this historic struggle through detailed historical commentary, as well as stirring personal ruminations.

Nothing that week moved me more than his reflections on Birmingham. After setting out a clear exposition of the campaign’s goals and tactics for the students — all of whom were born some four decades after these events — Harding shifted gears and unexpectedly got more introspective than usual.

He shared how one morning during the campaign he was unable to join a line of people as they were moving forward to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience because he was taking care of his six-month-old daughter Rachel. He nevertheless stood tenaciously in the line holding her until the very last possible moment, when he reluctantly moved away from the others. As he recounted this story many years later, Harding’s eyes welled up and then he began to openly weep. There seemed to be so much in those tears. The poignancy of his necessary choice; the power of the action itself; the love for his child; the raw emotion at the injustice they were confronting and, in so many ways, were still confronting; and, perhaps, the seismic power of the drama of nonviolent change and the wellspring of feelings it can inspire, washing across the decades — and now, all those years later, touching and inspiring us anew.

Vincent Harding was both an historian and a maker of history. His calling was to write history, but also to confront history and, in the end, to join with others in breaking the seemingly immutable constrictions of history. For example, the last time I saw him was last August at the Wild Goose Festival near Asheville, N.C., where — in addition to making an appearance on the main stage to be interviewed by On Being’s Krista Tippett before several thousand people — he joined a more humble gathering in one of the other tents on the premises. There was Harding, adrift in the crowd, engaging in small group discussions and taking part in role-plays for the next nonviolent struggle tackling war, poverty and the climate crisis.

My colleague L.R. Berger was a very good friend of Harding’s. She tells me that when she spoke to him on the phone, he said he had profound peace and was embraced in love. “And,” she said, “he was hopeful.” Harding was a veteran of hope to the end, which may be his greatest gift and example to us all in this time when hope is needed more than ever.

In many forums, he advised us not to canonize King. It is too easy to set him apart from the rest of us and thus to ignore the gritty, unfinished business there is to do. King was, as Harding titled his book about the civil rights leader, The Inconvenient Hero. In this same spirit, Harding would no doubt assiduously resist his own canonization. Nevertheless, it is right and good to lift our voices in gratitude so that this teacher, mentor and practitioner of active and powerful nonviolence be given his due.

Thank you, Vincent.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Mirrored from Waging Nonviolence
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There are many sides to whistleblowing. The one that most people don’t know about is the very personal cost, prison aside, including the high cost of lawyers and the strain on family relations, that follows the decision to risk it all in an act of conscience. Here’s a part of my own story I’ve not talked about much before.

At age 53, everything changed. Following my whistleblowing first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, I was run out of the good job I had held for more than 20 years with the U.S. Department of State. As one of its threats, State also took aim at the pension and benefits I’d earned, even as it forced me into retirement. Would my family and I lose everything I’d worked for as part of the retaliation campaign State was waging? I was worried. That pension was the thing I’d counted on to provide for us and it remained in jeopardy for many months. I was scared.

My skill set was pretty specific to my old job. The market was tough in the Washington, D.C. area for someone with a suspended security clearance. Nobody with a salaried job to offer seemed interested in an old guy, and I needed some money. All the signs pointed one way — toward the retail economy and a minimum-wage job.

And soon enough, I did indeed find myself working in exactly that economy and, worse yet, trying to live on the money I made. But it wasn’t just the money. There’s this American thing in which jobs define us, and those definitions tell us what our individual futures and the future of our society is likely to be. And believe me, rock bottom is a miserable base for any future.

Old World/New World

The last time I worked for minimum wage was in a small store in my hometown in northern Ohio. It was almost a rite of passage during high school, when I pulled in about four bucks an hour stocking shelves alongside my friends. Our girlfriends ran the cash registers and our moms and dads shopped in the store. A good story about a possible date could get you a night off from the sympathetic manager, who was probably the only adult in those days we called by his first name. When you graduated from high school, he would hire one of your friends and the cycle would continue.

At age 53, I expected to be quizzed about why I was looking for minimum-wage work in a big box retail store we’ll call “Bullseye.” I had prepared a story about wanting some fun part-time work and a new experience, but no one asked or cared. It felt like joining the French Foreign Legion, where you leave your past behind, assume a new name, and disappear anonymously into the organization in some distant land. The manager who hired me seemed focused only on whether I’d show up on time and not steal. My biggest marketable skill seemed to be speaking English better than some of his Hispanic employees. I was, that is, “well qualified.”

Before I could start, however, I had to pass a background and credit check, along with a drug test. Any of the anonymous agencies processing the checks could have vetoed my employment and I would never have known why. You don’t have any idea what might be in the reports the store receives, or what to feel about the fact that some stranger at a local store now knows your financial and criminal history, all for the chance to earn seven bucks an hour.

You also don’t know whether the drug tests were conducted properly or, as an older guy, if your high blood pressure medicine could trigger a positive response. As I learned from my co-workers later, everybody always worries about “pissing hot.” Most places that don’t pay much seem especially concerned that their workers are drug-free. I’m not sure why this is, since you can trade bonds and get through the day higher than a bird on a cloud. Nonetheless, I did what I had to in front of another person, handing him the cup. He gave me one of those universal signs of the underemployed I now recognize, a we’re-all-in-it, what’re-ya-gonna-do look, just a little upward flick of his eyes.

Now a valued member of the Bullseye team, I was told to follow another employee who had been on the job for a few weeks, do what he did, and then start doing it by myself by the end of my first shift. The work was dull but not pointless: put stuff on shelves; tell customers where stuff was; sweep up spilled stuff; repeat.

Basic Training

It turned out that doing the work was easy compared to dealing with the job. I still had to be trained for that.

You had to pay attention, but not too much. Believe it or not, that turns out to be an acquired skill, even for a former pasty government bureaucrat like me. Spend enough time in the retail minimum-wage economy and it’ll be trained into you for life, but for a newcomer, it proved a remarkably slow process. Take the initiative, get slapped down. Break a rule, be told you’re paid to follow the rules. Don’t forget who’s the boss. (It’s never you.) It all becomes who you are.

Diving straight from a salaried career back into the kiddie pool was tough. I still wanted to do a good job today, and maybe be a little better tomorrow. At first, I tried to think about how to do the simple tasks more efficiently, maybe just in a different order to save some walking back and forth. I knew I wasn’t going to be paid more, but that work ethic was still inside of me. The problem was that none of us were supposed to be trying to be good, just good enough. If you didn’t know that, you learned it fast. In the process, you felt yourself getting more and more tired each day.

Patient Zero in the New Economy

One co-worker got fired for stealing employee lunches out of the break room fridge. He apologized to us as security marched him out, saying he was just hungry and couldn’t always afford three meals. I heard that when he missed his rent payments he’d been sleeping in his car in the store parking lot. He didn’t shower much and now I knew why. Another guy, whose only task was to rodeo up stray carts in the parking lot, would entertain us after work by putting his cigarette out on his naked heel. The guys who came in to clean up the toilets got up each morning knowing that was what they would do with another of the days in their lives.

Other workers were amazingly educated. One painted in oils. One was a recent college grad who couldn’t find work and liked to argue with me about the deeper meanings in the modern fiction we’d both read.

At age 53, I was the third-oldest minimum-wage worker in the store. A number of the others were single moms. (Sixty-four percent of minimum-wage employees are women. About half of all single-parent families live in poverty.) There was at least one veteran. (“The Army taught me to drive a Humvee, which turns out not to be a marketable skill.”) There were a couple of students who were alternating semesters at work with semesters at community college, and a small handful of recent immigrants. One guy said that because another big box store had driven his small shop out of business, he had to take a minimum-wage job. He was Patient Zero in our New Economy.

State law only required a company to give you a break if you worked six hours or more under certain conditions. Even then, it was only 30 minutes — and unpaid. You won’t be surprised to discover that, at Bullseye, most non-holiday shifts were five-and-a-half hours or less. Somebody said it might be illegal not to give us more breaks, but what can you do? Call 911 like it was a real crime?

Some good news, though. It turned out that I had another marketable skill in addition to speaking decent English: being old. One day as a customer was bawling out a younger worker over some imagined slight, I happened to wander by. The customer assumed I was the manager, given my age, and began directing her complaints at me. I played along, even steepling my fingers to show my sincere concern just as I had seen actual managers do. The younger worker didn’t get in trouble, and for a while I was quite popular among the kids whenever I pulled the manager routine to cover them.

Hours were our currency. You could trade them with other employees if they needed a day off to visit their kid’s school. You could grab a few extra on holidays. If you could afford it, you could swap five bad-shift hours for three good-shift hours. The store really didn’t care who showed up as long as someone showed up. Most minimum-wage places cap workers at under 40 hours a week to avoid letting them become “full time” and so possibly qualify for any kind of benefits. In my case, as work expanded and contracted, I was scheduled for as few as seven hours a week and I never got notice until the last moment if my hours were going to be cut.

Living on a small paycheck was hard enough. Trying to budget around wildly varying hours, and so paychecks, from week to week was next to impossible. Seven hours a week at minimum wage was less than fifty bucks. A good week around the Christmas rush was 39 hours, or more than $270. At the end of 2013, after I had stopped working at Bullseye, the minimum wage did go up from a little more than $7 to $8 an hour, which was next to no improvement at all. Doesn’t every little bit help? Maybe, but what are a few more crumbs of bread worth when you need a whole loaf not to be hungry?

Working to Be Poor

So how do you live on $50 a week, or for that matter, $270 a week? Cut back? Recycle cans?

One answer is: you don’t live on those wages alone. You can’t. Luckily I had some savings, no kids left in the house to feed, and my wife was still at her “good” job.  Many of my co-workers, however, dealt with the situation by holding down two or three minimum-wage jobs. Six hours on your feet is tough, but what about 12 or 14? And remember, there are no weekends or holidays in most minimum-wage jobs. Bullseye had even begun opening on Thanksgiving and Christmas afternoons.

The smart workers found their other jobs in the same strip mall as our Bullseye, so they could run from one to the next, cram in as many hours as they could, and save the bus fare. It mattered: at seven bucks an hour, that round trip fare meant you worked your first 45 minutes not for Bullseye but for the bus company. (The next 45 minutes you worked to pay taxes.)

Poverty as a Profit Center

Many low-wage workers have to take some form of public assistance. Food stamps — now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — were a regular topic of conversation among my colleagues. Despite holding two or three jobs, there were still never enough hours to earn enough to eat enough. SNAP was on a lot of other American’s minds as well — the number of people using food stamps increased by 13% a year from 2008 to 2012. About 1 in 7 Americans get some of their food through SNAP. About 45% of food stamp benefits go to children.

Enjoying that Big Mac? Here’s one reason it’s pretty cheap and that the junk sold at “Bullseye” and the other big box stores is, too: those businesses get away with paying below a living wage and instead you, the taxpayer, help subsidize those lousy wages with SNAP. (And of course since minimum-wage workers have taxes deducted, too, they are — imagine the irony — essentially forced to subsidize themselves.)

That subsidy does not come cheap, either. The cost of public assistance to families of workers in the fast-food industry alone is nearly $7 billion per year. McDonald’s workers alone account for $1.2 billion in federal assistance annually.

All that SNAP money is needed to bridge the gap between what the majority of employed people earn through the minimum wage, and what they need to live a minimum life. Nearly three-quarters of enrollments in America’s major public benefits programs involve working families stuck in jobs like I had. There are a lot of those jobs, too. The positions that account for the most workers in the U.S. right now are retail salespeople, cashiers, restaurant workers, and janitors. All of those positions pay minimum wage or nearly so. Employers are actually allowed to pay below minimum wage to food workers who might receive tips.

And by the way, if somehow at this point you’re feeling bad for Walmart, don’t. In addition to having it’s workforce partially paid for by the government, Walmart also makes a significant portion of its profits by selling to people receiving federal food assistance. Though the Walton family is a little too shy to release absolute numbers, a researcher found that in one year, nine Walmart Supercenters in Massachusetts together received more than $33 million in SNAP dollars. One Walmart Supercenter in Tulsa, Oklahoma, received $15.2 million, while another (also in Tulsa) took in close to $9 million in SNAP spending.

You could say that taxpayers are basically moneylenders to a government that is far more interested in subsidizing business than in caring for their workers, but would anyone believe you?

Back in the Crosshairs

Some employees at Bullseye had been yelled at too many times or were too afraid of losing their jobs. They were not only broke, but broken. People — like dogs — don’t get that way quickly, only by a process of erosion eating away at whatever self-esteem they may still possess. Then one day, if a supervisor tells them by mistake to hang a sign upside down, they’ll be too afraid of contradicting the boss not to do it.

I’d see employees rushing in early, terrified, to stand by the time clock so as not to be late. One of my fellow workers broke down in tears when she accidentally dropped something, afraid she’d be fired on the spot. And what a lousy way to live that is, your only incentive for doing good work being the desperate need to hang onto a job guaranteed to make you hate yourself for another day. Nobody cared about the work, only keeping the job. That was how management set things up.

About 30 million Americans work this way, live this way, at McJobs. These situations are not unique to any one place or region. After all, Walmart has more than two million employees. If that company were an army, it would be the second largest military on the planet, just behind China. It is, in fact, the largest overall employer in the country and the biggest employer in 25 states. When Walmart won’t pay more than minimum, it hurts. When it rains like that, we all get wet. This is who we are now.

I Was Minimum

It’s time to forget the up-by-the-bootstraps fantasies of conservative economists bleating on Fox. If any of it was ever true, it’s certainly not true anymore. There is no ladder up, no promotion path in the minimum-wage world. You can’t work “harder” because your hours are capped, and all the jobs are broken into little pieces anyone could do anyway. Minimum wage is what you get; there are no real raises. I don’t know where all the assistant managers came from, but not from among us.

I worked in retail for minimum wage at age 16 and again at 53. In that span, the minimum wage itself rose only by a few bucks. What changed, however, is the cast of characters. Once upon a time, minimum-wage jobs were filled with high school kids earning pocket money. In 2014, it’s mainly adults struggling to get by. Something is obviously wrong.

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama urged that the federal minimum wage be raised to $9 an hour. He also said that a person holding down a full-time job should not have to live in poverty in a country like America.

To the president I say, yes, please, do raise the minimum wage. But how far is nine bucks an hour going to go? Are so many of us destined to do five hours of labor for the cell phone bill, another 12 for the groceries each week, and 20 or 30 for a car payment? How many hours are we going to work? How many can we work?

Nobody can make a real living doing these jobs. You can’t raise a family on minimum wage, not in the way Americans once defined raising a family when our country emerged from World War II so fat and happy. And you can’t build a nation on vast armies of working poor with nowhere to go. The president is right that it’s time for a change, but what’s needed is far more than a minimalist nudge to the minimum wage. Maybe what we need is to spend more on education and less on war, even out the tax laws and rules just a bit, require a standard living wage instead of a minimum one. Some sort of rebalancing. Those aren’t answers to everything, but they might be a start.

People who work deserve to be paid, but McDonald’s CEO Donald Thompson last year took home $13.7 million in salary, with perks to go. If one of his fry cooks put in 30 hours a week, she’d take in a bit more than $10,000 a year — before taxes of course. There is indeed a redistribution of wealth taking place in America, and it’s all moving upstream.

I got lucky. I won my pension fight with my “career” employer, the State Department, and was able to crawl out of the minimum-wage economy after less than a year and properly retire. I quit Bullseye because I could, one gray day when a customer about half my age cursed me out for something unimportant she didn’t like, ending with “I guess there’s a reason why people like you work at places like this.” I agreed with her: there is a reason. We just wouldn’t agree on what it was.

I’m different now for the experience. I think more about where I shop, and try to avoid big places that pay low wages if I can. I treat minimum-wage workers a little better, too. If I have to complain about something in a store, I keep the worker out of it and focus on solving the problem. I take a bit more care in the restroom not to leave a mess. I don’t get angry anymore when a worker says to me, “I really can’t do anything about it.” Now I know from personal experience that, in most cases, they really can’t.

Above all, I carry with me the knowledge that economics isn’t about numbers, it’s about people. I know now that it’s up to us to decide whether the way we pay people, the work we offer them, and how we treat them on the job is just about money or if it’s about society, about how we live, who we are, the nature of America. The real target now should be to look deeply into the apartheid of dollars our country has created and decide it needs to change. We — the 99% anyway — can’t afford not to.

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book,  We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A TomDispatch regular, he writes about current events at his blog, We Meant Well. His new book, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, has just been published.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook and Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars — The Untold Story.

Copyright 2014 Peter Van Buren

Mirrored from Tomdispatch.com

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Many times I have asked myself how can I concentrate on the British Romantic Poets when people in Syria, the country of my birth, have been killing each other for the last four years, supposedly in the name of liberty and freedom? Thousands of men, women and children have been killed, maimed, or made homeless. Historical monuments that stood there for centuries were erased from the ground. Was I trying desperately to forget my misery and immerse myself in a mythical world? If so, I did not entirely succeed.

Ironically, even in the poetry of the Romantics, I cannot escape the haunting images of past such paroxysms of violence in my homeland. Coleridge much admired Hulagu,the brother of Kublai Khan (the Mongol Emperor of China), but Syrians remember him as a tyrant who sacked northern Syria in 1260, and attempted to destroy the latest traces of civilization. Byron greatly admired Timur Lang (Tamerlane), who destroyed Aleppo and Damascus in the fourteenth century, leaving behind him mountains of skulls out of which hundreds of towers and pyramids were built. But neither of these icons of the romantics can be blamed for the current destruction. It is the Syrians themselves who are engaged in self-destruction, not, as in former times, intruders.

Reciting poems such as “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner”, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, “Daffodils”, “All Religions are one”, “Ozymandias” or “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” seemed to relieve somehow my physical and spiritual pain. But it did not take me long to realize why I was haunted now by poets like Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley and Byron. They too lived during a turbulent historical period not very different from mine. Their country was always engaged in wars. The injustice of the social system was appalling. Religious minorities were oppressed. The slave trade was rife. Indigenous Africans were mostly brought from west central Africa by British ships and exported to British plantations, especially the sugar colonies, and to North and South America.

The French Revolution that destroyed the most centralized absolutist state in Europe excited the British poets’ imagination. They hoped for radical political reform both in France and their own country. But gradually they witnessed the failure of successive constitutions in Paris, the Reign of Terror of 1793-94, the execution of the French King and Queen, the endless fighting between political factions, and finally the triumph of a military dictatorship.

To relieve their anxieties and fears they all turned to the East hoping to find a remedy and inspiration. Many Arabic and Persian books were available to them in English translation, from One Thousand and One Nights to the Seven Ancient Arabic odes called Mu’allaqat, from the philosophical novel, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a 12th century Arabic book, to the works of the Persian poet Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz, from the romance of Majnun Layla by the 16th century Persian Hatefi to the poetry of the 11th century Syrian philosopher and poet Abu al- ‘Ala’ al-Ma’arri, from the Quran to Muhammad’s Journey to Hell and Heaven. English and other European writers also produced many books on the history and religion of the people constituting the Ottoman Empire whether Turks, Kurds or Arabs. In short, 18th and 19th century Britain was teeming with Arabic and Islamic books that were read and absorbed by young British poets who were desperate to forget their misery in an era of bloodshed and violence.

But once I started reading the poems of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Shelley and Byron I heard familiar voices, saw familiar images, discovered familiar themes and characters that I had known all along during my life when I was growing up in Syria. It was not new poetry to me, but it was certainly new to Britain. (I did not discover this fact recently. I knew that already when I was working on my doctorate in up state New York at the end of the sixties, and I had passed my observations to my students at the time, most of them were New Yorkers. But then I did not pursue my work on the romantic poets for almost 36 years!)

Only today I have come to reflect on this artificial binary opposition created by some scholars between East and West, and how philosophers and literary and cultural critics have ignored for so long the role played by Arabs and Moslems in helping the British romantic poets develop their themes, characters, imagery and narrative modes. On the other hand, I had to wrestle with the ambiguous feeling of the poets themselves towards the East. For Coleridge for instance, the prophet Muhammad was considered a rebel, a Prometheus type, but also as someone “who scattered abroad both evil and blessings.” For Byron, the poetical passages in the Quran far surpassed European poetry, and Muhammad was another admirable Napoleon. Yet Byron was very proud of his own ancestors as Crusaders in Palestine. In spite of all these contradictions and anxieties, the East hardly differed from the West. The British poets reached Hayy Ibn Yaqzan’s conclusion that all people are alike, though infinitely various.

Samar Attar

author of Borrowed Imagination: The British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources (Lanham, 2014).

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He spoke in Grand Rapids on the meaning of his background for his writing and imagination:

He made the interesting point that much high fantasy is already ethnic, it is just from the unmarked ethnicity of northern Europeans.

h/t SF Signal

Niranjana Iyer interviewed Ahmed for Bookslut . She wrote:

“Saladin Ahmed was born in Detroit and raised in a working-class Arab American enclave in Dearborn, Michigan. He has racked up a number of achievements as a poet and a short story writer (including nominations for the Nebula and Campbell awards), and has taught writing at universities and colleges for over ten years. Ahmed’s debut fantasy novel Throne of the Crescent Moon was published in 2012, and earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, a rave from NPR, and acclaim from readers.

Throne of the Crescent Moon is the first installment of the Crescent Moon Kingdoms trilogy, and features swords and sorcerers and shapeshifters aplenty… but wait! The sorcerer is sixty years old, the champion swordsman is five feet tall, the fierce shapeshifter is a tribal girl, the setting is the Middle East — and the locals are the heroes rather than the villains. Ahmed’s epic fantasy encompasses the clash between religious fundamentalists and moderates, power struggles in a land ruled by a dictatorial Khalif, ghuls and demons, a forked sword that cleaves the right from wrong in men, a master thief who steals from the rich to give (some of his loot) to the poor, and the tug-of-war between skepticism and faith. Throne is intelligent, original, and hugely enjoyable, and thrilling for both diehard fantasy readers and newcomers to the genre.

You began your writing career as a poet; what drew you to fantasy? And how did your background in poetry play itself out when writing this book — did your search for the perfect word or image ever get in the way of the action?

My poetry — even my explicit social protest poetry — always drew on mythology, magic, and monsters, and was often inflected with weirdly heroic tones, so it some ways it was a switch of form rather than content. And I tried to bring a poet’s ear for language to Throne, but a hundred-thousand-word novel makes different demands than even a long poem.”

Read the whole interview

Saladin Ahmed’s home page is here