Twinkle, twinkle, like a star. Does love flourish from afar? was the rhyme that appeared on the labels attached to a series of mysterious carved stone h.
ICS: legend or legacy tribune.com.pk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tribune.com.pk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
April 5, 2021, 3:14 p.m. ET
Credit.Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin/The New York Times
In this age of anxiety, anger and contestations between the West and the Islamic world, many epoch-shaping stories of intellectual exchanges between our cultures are often forgotten.
A powerful example comes from literature. Millions of Christian, Jewish and Muslim readers across the world have read that famed tale of the man stranded alone on an island: “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe, the 18th-century British pamphleteer, political activist and novelist.
Few know that in 1708, 11 years before Defoe wrote his celebrated novel, Simon Ockley, an Orientalist scholar at Cambridge University, translated and published a 12th-century Arabic novel, “Hayy ibn Yaqzan,”