IIR Teaching Resources: South Asia and the Middle East

Web Resources

Book Recommendations
by Marilyn Booth, Director, Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

SARAI: South Asia Resource Access on the Net
A comprehensive listing of reference sources, scholars and institutions, and sources by theme

Access Islam: A Window into Islamic Holidays, Traditions and Cultures for Students in Grades 4-8
A project of Thirteen/WNET, supported by Title VI funds, this Web site offers video streaming and ever-expanding resources for K-12 teachers to use in the classroom.

Outreach World: A Resource for Teaching Kids about the World
This often-cited Web site includes much curricular information, news, and further resources about the Middle East, and has been partly developed by faculty at Middle East National Resource Centers around the country.

Books
One of the best ways to introduce a region and a culture is through fiction, while recognizing that to teach fiction always entails raising interesting questions about how lived experience and representation intersect. Below is a list of Arabic fiction in translation that might serve well in a high school classroom. This list was compiled by Marilyn Booth (Director, PSAMES, and Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature). She welcomes comments or questions at mbooth@uiuc.edu.

Works by Nawal El Saadawi, which are numerous and available, are not listed below.

Leila Abouzeid, Year of the Elephant (Morocco)

Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose (Lebanon—French; on the Lebanesecivil war)

Radwa Ashour, Grenada(Egypt; historical novel on Muslim Spain at the time of the Inquisition)

Liana Badr, The Eye of the Mirror (Palestine)

My Grandmother’s Cactus: Stories by Egyptian Women (Marilyn Booth,ed. and trans.)

Ulfat Idilbi, Sabriya: Damascus Bittersweet
(Syria)

Ulfat Idilbi, Grandfather’s Tale

Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns (Palestine)

Out al-Kouloub, Ramza (Egypt—early
20th century woman’s life)

Alia Mamdouh, Mothballs (Iraq)

Emily Nasrallah, A House Not Her Own
(Lebanon)

Emily Nasrallah, September Birds

Ibtihal Salem, Children of the Waters
(Egypt, short stories)

Miral al-Tahawy, The Tent (Egypt)

Latifa al-Zayyat, The Open Door (Egypt—1960s feminist classic abouta middle-class girl growing up andher country growing toward independence)

Ibrahim Abdel Maguid, The Other Place (Egypt—about migrantworkers in Libya)

Hamdi Abu-Golayyel, Thieves in Retirement (Egypt)

Idris Ali, Dongola: A Novel of Nubia (Egypt/Nubian population)

Abbas al-Aswani, The Yacoubian Building (Egypt—daily lives of inhabitants of a building)

Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley (Egypt)

Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire,
Sugar Street): celebrated fictional panorama of urban Egyptian society from before World War I to mid-century; also very rich in considering family relations and gender relations of that time and place.

Naguib Mahfouz, The Thief and the Dogs

Naguib Mahfouz, Autumn Quail

Hanna Mina, Fragments of Memory: A Story of a Syrian Family (Syria)

Hassan Nasr, Return to Dar al-Basha (Tunisia)

Yusuf al-Qaid, War in the Land of Egypt (Egypt—fictionalization of the era of the 1973 October war, focusing on issues of class exploitation)

Muhsin al-Ramli, Scattered Crumbs (Iraq)

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (Sudan)

Tayeb Salih, The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories

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