Sarah, I read a (to be honest not very good) graphic novel about conversos in New Mexico called El Iluminado by Ilan Stavans, which suggests that a lot of communities in the American Southwest were heavily populated by conversos who wanted to get away from the Inquisition by coming to the Americas, and who continued to practice Jewish traditions (not eating pork, lighting candles on Fridays, covering mirrors after a death, sweeping dirt out of windows instead of doors) while outwardly presenting as Catholics. It looks like they even invented a saint so that they could celebrate Purim. I'm really curious about whether this is a history shared by Moriscos, and I found this very long book review of a number of scholarly texts on that subject. Hopefully enlightening!

I love this topic! In the past I've mostly brought it up with texts where my students speak the original language (we look at side-by-side versions of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold in the original Spanish, the Google translation, and the Gregory Rabassa translation) and texts where I can find a number of different translations (Oedipus Rex pulls up like 10 different translations easily). I also like to play this short Radiolab segment about translating a medieval French poem in hundreds of different ways and the various choices the translators have to make. None of these quite get to the questions explored in the article about the Rubiyyat—now I'm curious to do more research into these translators' particular social and political contexts like Fakhreddine does.

@Joey Braccino I find this tension between trying to "cover" a number of languages, regions, and time periods in the IB Literature curriculum (or any English curriculum) while resisting the desire to essentialize particular authors and texts as somehow encompassing all one needs to know about those places to be a real struggle, as well as a real mobilizing opportunity for conversation. The point at the end of Dr. Toorawa's interview where he says, "It seems to me that if I’m going to teach you a text in Arabic at a university, [I should do so] because it’s just normal" seems really important to me: we should read texts from a number of different languages, places and times not because we need to rehabilitate them, but because they're "normal"—that doing so should be a normal part of a global education. (The implied opposite being that reading exclusively American or English-language texts is abnormal and to be avoided, even if it is par for the course—and in another sense "normal"—in many h.s. curricula?)

Michael, I was struck by this anecdote as well, and I like the connection you make to cultural Jewishness (which I claim for myself too, despite not following most(?) Jewish laws.) I love that Shahab Ahmed writes about the scholar identifying as a Muslim because "My family have been Muslims for a thousand years [...] during which time we have always been drinking wine." It makes me wonder how much our definition of Islam comes down to "following x set of rules" rather than shared history, values and worldviews, artistic traditions, etc. I wonder if we define other religions using the same criteria too.