The Travels of Ibn Battuta: A Guided Reader is a unique Arabic literature and history textbook for students at the High Intermediate to Advanced level. Ibn Battuta was the greatest traveler of the medieval period, and his narrative provides an unmatched view of medieval civilization from Spain to China, and from Russia to Mali. Students will read the authentic descriptions of Ibn Battuta's encounters with cannibals, desert bandits, Mongol chieftains, and his impressions of wonders from Timbuktu to Constantinople to Quanzhou. This book provides a guided and scaffolded survey of Ibn Battuta's...

Can a writer help to bring about a more just society? This question was at the heart of the movement of al-adab al-multazim, or committed literature, which claimed to dominate Arab writing in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1960s, however, leading Egyptian writers had retreated into disillusionment, producing agonized works that challenged the key assumptions of socially engaged writing. Rather than a rejection of the idea, however, these works offered reinterpretation of committed writing that helped set the stage for activist writers of the present.
David DiMeo focuses on the...