New in Paperback

Middle Eastern Borders

---

On Sept. 11, 2001, Said Hyder Akbar's father owned a hip-hop clothing store in Oakland, Calif. One year later, he was serving as chief spokesman for Afghanistan's interim president Hamid Karzai and on his way to becoming governor of a province. Akbar himself, in many ways an ordinary American teenager, had never set foot in his father's homeland. In Come Back to Afghanistan: Trying to Rebuild a Country with My Father, My Brother, My One-Eyed Uncle, Bearded Tribesmen, and President Karzai (Bloomsbury, $14.95), he recounts (with the help of co-author Susan Burton) the summers he spent working with his father while watching a fledgling democracy struggle to take shape. "When I arrived in Kabul," he writes, "I took off my Ralph Lauren polo shirt and khakis and slipped on my kameez partoog. . . . The only weird thing about it was that I didn't feel weird, and when I think of changing back into my khakis . . . and spending the fall in Concord, California, sitting around a big TV with a bunch of friends, I don't feel weird, either."

With an American passport, Akbar moves with relative ease from country to country (although he does get grilled by customs agents when he returns to the United States from Afghanistan). Behzad Yaghmaian's Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West (Delta, $14) tells of those who must find the cracks between borders: "Shadi and Nima from Iran, Shahrokh Khan from Afghanistan, Roberto from Angola, Nur from the Sudan -- all were fleeing for their lives. Bombs had landed on their villages, armed strangers had burst into their homes, soldiers had executed their loved ones. . . . They wanted only a safe place where they could live in peace and work quietly, put their lives back together. But in their flight they hit borders, lines they couldn't cross." Yaghmaian, a professor of economics at Ramapo College in New Jersey and an Iranian-born American citizen, travels to bazaars and safe houses and border crossings along the treacherous paths that Muslim migrants take as they make their way west.

The borders that Harvard anthropologist Steven C. Caton attempted to cross in 1979 were often invisible to his American eyes. In Yemen to study tribal poetry, he writes in Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation (Hill and Wang, $16), "My hope was to live in a proper 'tribal' village with 'tribal' poets but that required the permission of a local sheikh, and I could not persuade a single one to give it and grant me his protection besides." Instead, he settled in a hijra, a village "whose inhabitants claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad" and which served as a sanctuary where members of the surrounding tribes "could pray in the mosque and trade in the souk without fear of being attacked by enemies." But any sanctuary provided by the hijra tragically vanished when a young resident kidnapped two of the daughters of a neighboring sheik. In the tribal war that followed and its aftermath, poetry played a powerful role, and Caton found himself more participant than scholarly observer.

More than 100 years earlier, in 1840, in Damascus, a delicate social truce between Muslims, Christians and Jews collapsed. A well-respected monk -- who had inoculated thousands of the city's children against smallpox -- had vanished, last seen heading into the Jewish quarter. Within a day of his disappearance, crowds of angry Christians had gathered outside the monastery, chanting, "The Jews sacrificed the father!" Ronald Florence's Blood Libel: The Damascus Affair of 1840 (Other, $15.95) narrates how the city quickly spiraled out of control, with its Jewish leaders accused of ritual murder and the French foreign consul leading the prosecution.

The birth of the Arabic novel is as recent as 1929, according to noted translator Denys Johnson-Davies. For a long time, Johnson-Davies writes in his introduction to The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction (Anchor, $15.95), "the idea of an author creating characters and making them inhabit worlds of his creation not only was foreign to the Muslim Arab mind but was regarded as almost unacceptable." And yet since then, Arabic literature has flourished. Johnson-Davies includes "the work of seventy-nine writers from fourteen countries, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east." The late Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz is featured, of course, but so are noted Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, Moroccan writer Leila Abouzeid and the Sudanese author Tayeb Salih, whose Season of Migration to the North is the first Arabic novel to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series. In this rich collection, "it is a testament to the talents of these Arab writers that they are able to make the unfamiliar universally appealing."

--Rachel Hartigan Shea