Brian A. Catlos and William Dalrymple | Al-Andulas: On Islamic Spain | Jaipur Literature Festival

Al-Andulas: On Islamic Spain: Brian A. Catlos and William Dalrymple
Brian A. Catlos works on Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations in medieval Europe and the Islamic World and the history of the pre-Modern Mediterranean. In addition to travel books, he has written four scholarly books, most recently Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain, and has received many prestigious fellowships and prizes.
William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain, Age of Kali, White Mughals, The Last Mughal, Nine Lives, Return of a King and Kohinoor. He has won many awards, including the Wolfson Prize for History, the Hemingway, the Kapuscinski, the Thomas Cook, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, and has, prior to the shortlisting of Return of a King, been longlisted four times for the Samuel Johnson /Baillie Gifford Prize. He has also been awarded the prestigious President's Medal by the British Academy. His new books are The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company and Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company. Dalrymple is one of the founders and a co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.
In Kingdoms of Faith, Brian A. Catlos rewrites the history of Islamic Spain from the ground up, evoking the cultural splendor of al-Andalus while offering an authoritative new interpretation of the forces that shaped it. Prior accounts have portrayed Islamic Spain as a paradise of enlightened tolerance or the site where civilisations clashed. Catlos taps a wide array of primary sources to paint a more complex portrait, showing how Muslims, Christians and Jews together built a sophisticated civilisation that transformed the Western world even as they waged relentless war against each other and their coreligionists. Religion was often the language of conflict but seldom its cause, a lesson we would do well to learn in our own time. Catlos talks to William Dalrymple.
Presented by Aga Khan Foundation
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Described as the 'greatest literary show on Earth', the Jaipur Literature Festival is a sumptuous feast of ideas.
The past decade has seen it transform into a global literary phenomenon having hosted nearly 2000 speakers and welcoming over a million book lovers from across India and the globe. Our core values remain unchanged: to serve as a democratic, non-aligned platform offering free and fair access.
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Festival Co Directors Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple, alongside Producer Sanjoy K Roy and Teamwork Arts, create a platform for an array of speakers to debate, discuss and present their ideas in the annual five-day programme set against the backdrop of Rajasthan's stunning cultural heritage and the Diggi Palace in the state capital Jaipur.
Past speakers have ranged from Nobel Laureates His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, J.M. Coetzee, Muhammad Yunus and Orhan Pamuk, Man Booker Prize winners Ben Okri, Howard Jacobson, Margaret Atwood, Marlon James, Michael Ondaatje, Paul Beatty and Yan Martel, Pulitzer Prize winners Andrew Sean Greer, Benjamin Moser, Colson Whitehead and Jhumpa Lahiri, Sahitya Akademi winners Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, M.T. Vasudevan Nair as well as the late Girish Karnad, Mahasweta Devi and U.R. Ananthamurthy along with literary luminaries including Amish Tripathi, Chima¬manda Ngozi Adichie, Vikram Chandra and Vikram Seth. An annual event that goes beyond literature, the Festival has also hosted Amartya Sen, Amitabh Bachchan, the late A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Fry, Thomas Piketty and former president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai.
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