Selected articles
Busra and Bostra, Syria
Bahira took Abu Talib aside and told him to keep a special watch over Muhammad, “for if others see and get to know about him what I know, they will do him evil for a great future lies before this nephew of yours.”
The Lure of the Silk Road
I knelt by the emperor’s grave-slab and touched it. Beneath, wrapped in linen embalmed in camphor and musk, his shrunken body had been laid in an ebony coffin. I could not imagine it. The living man was too vivid in my mind.
Colin Thubron’s The Lost Heart of Asia
Medieval Damascus
In the cosmopolitan court of Ommayad Damascus, scholar officials drawn from the old ruling classes of Byzantium and Sassanid Persia, from Yemen and Egypt mingled with singing girls, desert bards and nomad huntsmen drawn from out of the old tribal courts of Arabia.
Ruins of the shrine to Saint Simeon
… the intensity of his discipline alarmed the community – which was constantly on its guard lest madness, exhibitionism or self-serving masochism undermined a hermit in his spiritual search.