Deep in the West African nation of Mali, where the savannah grasslands meet the Sahara, lies Timbuktu. It’s an impoverished town of about 30,000, most of them nomadic traders or subsistence farmers. But Timbuktu is rich in history — long ago, it was a place of high Islamic scholarship, and it still has a million manuscripts to prove it. More →

March 12, 2004

Read some of the responses UNC freshmen wrote on their required reading assignment this summer, APPROACHING THE QUR’AN: THE EARLY REVELATIONS by Michael Sells. The book is a collection of translations and commentaries on the short chapters or suras of the Qur’an. It includes a compact disc recording of reciters chanting some of the suras. More →

August 23, 2002

Every year the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assigns a summer reading book for its incoming freshmen. This year that book was called APPROACHING THE QUR’AN: THE EARLY REVELATIONS, and it’s generated a lot of controversy both within the state and outside of it. More →

August 23, 2002