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News & ArtsTuesday, June 14, 2011
City / Life Bobcats, Birds, Benign Heartbreak, and Shabby Self-Interest and Solitude: Jonathan Raban's "The Last Father-Daughter Road Trip" and the Fact That There Are No 72 Virgins
Posted by Jen Graves on Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 12:13 PM
The Seattle Englishman in whose hands we once placed the Stranger Genius Award for Literature has a new, aching essay out.
For a while I've been dipping in and out of Raban's definitive collection Driving Home: An American Scrapbook, which weighs nearly a kilogram and is out in the UK but still forthcoming here, my copy borrowed from another great English Seattle writer and professionally intelligent tourist, Lesley Hazleton.
She is at work on a biography of Muhammad (!). Here is her TED talk on "how flexible the Quran is...at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible."
1
Jen,
I read "After the Prophet" by Hazelton a few years ago. I don't agree with her politics but she had a pretty good grasp of what happened after Mohammed died. It's a comprehensive account on the origin of the Shiite/Sunni division in Islam. Evidently, she resides in the PNW.
I read "After the Prophet" by Hazelton a few years ago. I don't agree with her politics but she had a pretty good grasp of what happened after Mohammed died. It's a comprehensive account on the origin of the Shiite/Sunni division in Islam. Evidently, she resides in the PNW.
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