An anti-colonial short-course for Malaysians in one volume. The Myth of the Lazy Native was an influential book in post-colonial studies, published a year before Edward Said’s Orientalism[1]. Syed Hussein Alatas trawls through centuries of original sources to find the sources of the persistent idea that Malays, and other native peoples, are lazy. Some of […]
Category Archives: Briefly
The Souls of Black Folk – Review
By W.E.B. Dubois An old book, over a hundred years old already. Some of the essays have passed from contemporary relevance into historical record, but it is history rarely discussed, from an intimate perspective and the prose hasn’t lost any of its power. Nobody writes like that anymore! The Greeks, the Bible, Shakespeare. The Veil, […]
Commander of the Faithful: Review
By John W Kiser An enjoyable and easy introduction to an amazing life. The book is strongest in the first third, showing his upbringing and describing Algerian society in that period, and in the last third, when his exile and travels involved him in many important and unexpected events. Meeting Imam Shamil the Chechen Mujahid […]
Review: The Moor’s Account
By Laila Lalami. A conquistador leads a party of 600 into present-day Florida. A decade later, four men from the expedition emerge in Mexico: three Spainards and a black Muslim. This is The Moor’s Account. If it is fiction, it is fiction truer than any American history I got in high school. It’s a story […]
Review: Getting Filthy Rich
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia promises not to waste your time like the pompous gasbags of “foreign” literature such as Salman Rushdie. OK, Hamid doesn’t mention Rushdie by name, but I know that’s who he meant.
Memory
Review: The Way of Sufi Chivalry
Translated by Shaykh Tosun Bayrak Not about martial codes, but more of a guidebook on proper etiquette (adab) in Islam. The biggest focus was on the virtue of generosity. True generosity is giving before your brother is forced to ask, because in asking, the needy one is humiliated by his need. A poem is […]
Review: Midnight’s Children
by Salman Rushdie Could the Booker Prize have gone to a novel that treats three generations of an extended family but remains emotionally dead-flat aside from twin swellings of self-pity and self-love? Was a career launched by a book that contains 50 years of intricately plotted interconnections, parallels and synchronicities across the breadth of the […]