أخبارنا — literature

A fennec fox, the sand and stars, a baobab tree and a lad whose scarf unwinds to the length of a tagelmust, the face-covering turban worn by the nomads in the Sahara, are just some of the images that readers hold dear after finishing The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The reach of the beloved children’s classic—about a pilot who crash-lands in the world’s largest sand desert and meets a small boy from a far-off asteroid—is as vast as the Sahara itself. This year the story was translated for the 300th time since it was first published in French as Le Petit...

Accounts of travel from the Maghreb to the rest of the world have given birth to a particular literary genre known as rihla. Over the centuries Maghribi scholars traveled to the Mashriq for religious purposes, namely to accompish pilgrimage (rihla hijaziya). Others recorded their travel experience to European countries when they were part of official embassies (rihla sifariya). In both cases the writers of these travel accounts wanted to share their experience with their countrymen and underline how much their culture was different. Today scholars from different disciplines resort to these travel accounts which are a mine of information that...