Moorishgirl, Rihani

Lately I’ve been enamored of the weblog by Moorishgirl who, in addition to covering American affairs from a distinctly Arab-American point of view, uncovers a lot of little known writers from the Arab world. I’ve learned so much! Such as Ameen Rihani, (profiled by profiled Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post), Yasmina Khadra (profiled by Giles Tremlett in the Guardian),

Rihani, Kennicott writes,

His route to that dual identity is fascinating, and accounts, perhaps, for some of his appeal to contemporary scholars. As a teenager in Manhattan, Rihani slowly lost much of his Arabic but gained a firm command of English literature. Rihani lore says that he discovered the prophet Mohammed by reading about him in the works of the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle; his interest in his Arab identity was further fueled by Washington Irving’s “The Alhambra.” He was an Arab who became more of an Arab by reading the romanticized and often racist works about Arabs written in the West.