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‘A treasury of Middle Eastern stories which reveals the wealth of the traffic between the East and West… Excerpts from Western travellers’ tales are contrasted with comments by the East on the West.’
The Independent
The Independent
A cornucopia of lore, stories, proverbs, etiquette, and fascinating information about the
region, The Middle East Bedside Book is an indispensable handbook for
tourists and businessmen, Arabists and armchair-travellers alike. The treasury
encompasses areas as diverse as the Arabic for words we all use every day, Bedouin greetings, camel lore and facts and fallacies about the Middle East. For instance, King Offa of Mercia struck a gold coin with the Islamic epithet ‘There is NO God but Allah’, upon it; Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dante drew inspiration from Arab sources for many of their tales.