Middle Eastern Children’s Literature

Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind by Suzanne Fisher StaplesStaples' first book is a beautiful portrayal of the life of a girl growing up among camel-dealing nomads in modern Pakistan. Shabanu knows the way her people have always lived: a daughter abides by her father's decisions, a wife obeys her husband's wishes. Yet Shabanu is strong-willed and independent. With her own wedding planned for the following year, Shabanu confronts her fear and apprehension. Disaster strikes -- Shabanu and Phulan, out alone and threatened with rape by a powerful local landowner, escape but humiliate him.

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The Garden of Abdul Gasazi by Chris Van Allsburg

This children's book is about a dog named Fritz who runs off from the boy who is watching over him. The dog enters the garden of a retired magician who hates dogs. Yet, the boy has to get the dog back. Alan is shocked to discover that the dog may have been turned into a duck. The book was a 1980 Caldecott Honor book (i.e., a runner-up to the Medal winner) for best illustrations in a book for children. A book greatly enjoyed by children of all ages.

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Shadow Spinner by Susan Fletcher

Every night, Shahrazad begins a story. And every morning, the Sultan lets her live another day -- providing the story is interesting enough to capture his attention. After almost one thousand nights, Shahrazad is running out of tales. And that is how Marjan's story begins.... It falls to Marjan to help Shahrazad find new stories -- ones the Sultan has never heard before. To do that, the girl is forced to undertake a dangerous and forbidden mission: sneak from the harem and travel the city, pulling tales from strangers and bringing them back to Shahrazad.

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The Three Princes: A Tale from the Middle East by Eric A. Kimmel

A wise and beautiful princess is wooed by three princes. Two are men of wealth and renown, while the third, Mohsen, possesses "little more than his handsome face, his cloak, and his camel." It is he, of course, whom she wishes to marry. To give him a chance to compete with them, she sends them all on a quest, vowing to marry the one who returns with the greatest wonder.

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Mosque by David MacaulayMacaulay's books on architecture are by now an institution in themselves, and this latest addition to the series maintains the high quality of its predecessors. Using, as always, a fictional framework to hold his nonfictional material, the author introduces readers to Admiral Suha Mehmet Pasa, a wealthy aristocrat living in Istanbul, who decides in his declining years to fund the building of a mosque and its associated buildings-religious school, soup kitchen, public baths, public fountain, and tomb.

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Iqbal: A Novel

Thirteen-year-old Iqbal Masih was murdered in his Pakistani village in April, 1995, a few months after he had received an international prize and traveled to Sweden and the United States, speaking about his six years as a bonded child in Lahore carpet factories. The murderers-perhaps part of the "Carpet Mafia"-have never been caught. In smoothly translated prose, D'Adamo retells the boy's story through the eyes of a fictional coworker. Also sold into servitude to pay her father's debt, Fatima worked in Hussain Khan's carpet factory for three years and had forgotten almost everything about her previous life.

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Under the Persimmon Tree by Suzanne Fisher Staple

In the mountains of northern Afghanistan after 9/11, Najmah watches in horror as the brutal Taliban kidnap her father and older brother. Will they ever return home? When her mother and baby brother die in an American air raid, she stops speaking, and, disguised as a boy, makes a perilous journey to a refugee camp in Pakistan. In a parallel narrative, Nusrat (her American name was Elaine), who converted to Islam when she met Faiz in New York, has set up a rough school for the refugees. She has had no news of Faiz, her husband, since he left to establish a clinic in the north.

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Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood by Ibtisam Barakat

This moving memoir of a Palestinian woman's childhood experiences during the Six-Day War and its aftermath is presented in beautifully crafted vignettes. Barakat, now living and working in the United States, frames the story of her life between 1967 and 1970 with a pair of letters from herself as a high school student in 1981. Detained by soldiers during an ordinary bus trip, she was prompted to try to recall her shattered childhood and share her experiences with others around the world.

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Come Back to Afghanistan: A California Teenager’s Story by Said Hyder Akbar

Akbar's refreshingly unsentimental reminiscences of visiting his father's homeland as a teen make for an intriguing portrait of Afghanistan at a time of significant transition. On 9/11, Akbar, who was born in Peshawar in 1984 but grew up in the U.S., was living near Oakland, Calif., where his father ran a clothing store. After the attack, the elder Akbar, a descendant of an Afghan political family, returned to his country to take a job as President Hamid Karzai's chief spokesman and, later, as governor of Kunar, a rural province.

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Salaam: A Muslim American Boy’s Story by Tricia BrownA sensitive and loving portrait of a Muslim-American family. Meet Inram, a young Muslim American boy who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He likes to do the same things as most kids his age—play in the park, take karate lessons, and tell jokes with his friends. Inram knows that some people don’t understand what it means to be a Muslim. He wants to help everyone see that Muslims strive to be good people, just like people of other faiths do. Tricia Brown and Ken Cardwell have created a warm, sensitive portrait of a boy and his family who are both Muslim and American at the same time.

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Sami and the Time of the Troublesby Florence Parry Heide & Judith Heide Gilliland

Ten-year-old Sami lives in Beirut, Lebanon. Because of gunfire and bombing in the streets, he and his family spend much of their time in the basement of an uncle's house. There they listen to the radio or stare at the carpets Sami's mother insisted on bringing along as reminders of a normal life.

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References• www.hse.k12.in.us/staff/jbergren/Chapter%2015.ppt • www.northstarinst.org/TSS/TSS%20Talk%20II%20Post.ppt • Norton Chapter 7

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