Fast on the heels of his eerily timed epic, Timbuctoo, travel writer Tahir Shah delivers a fantastical new work of fiction drawn from the deepest wellsprings of human imagination. Scorpion Soup is a collection of stories-within-stories inspired by the Arabic masterpiece One Thousand and One Nights. The book employs a literary device known as [...]
While he was a young man studying at the famed French cathedral school of Tours, Adelard of Bath, an 12th century Englishman of noble lineage, underwent a life changing experience. Following a lesson about star constellations given by a wise man at the academy, Adelard, smitten by what had become a huge love of learning, [...]
A few months ago, an announcement was made in British Columbia involving one of the world’s last stretches of untouched wilderness. Shell Canada declared that it was abandoning its plans for gas drilling in ‘The Sacred Headwaters’ region of northern B.C. The area, known to very few Canadians due to its remoteness and lack of [...]
While visiting England, I had the pleasure of meeting psychologists Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell - the originators of the Human Givens approach to psychotherapy. At the core of their approach is the idea that human beings, like all organic beings, come into this world with a set of needs. If those needs are met appropriately, it is not [...]
How anyone could know where to drive off a flat desert highway without the benefit of landmarks, or a GPS, to find a little known fort that is poorly depicted on maps and hidden in a wilderness of rock, was the question I kept turning in my head, as Ahmed al-Shalaan steered our vehicle tentatively [...]
One of the few remaining structures bearing the scars of Lebanon’s fifteen year civil-war (1975-1990) is Beirut’s Barakat Building. This once stately and aristocratic edifice straddles a key intersection near the centre of the city. The four-story avant-garde building was designed by two architects in the 1920s and 30s and fused Art Deco elements with [...]
On a recent trip to Yukon, I visited Kwaday Dan Kenji (“Long Ago People’s Place”), a First Nations cultural interpretive centre on the old Alaska Highway near the village of Champagne. Harold Johnson and his wife Meta Williams of the northwest Champagne-Aishihik First Nation live on the wooded lot, an ancestral site, where they’re sharing the [...]
We tend to associate foreign lands that are unfamiliar to us with their most enduring, and sometimes cliché, symbols. No region is more prone to this conundrum of perception than the Middle East – and few countries in that region more susceptible than Egypt. Recurring media images like political protests in Cairo, or archaeologists chasing [...]
TAHIR SHAH’S TIMBUCTOO has arrived with eerie, serendipitous, timing. In the months leading up to its publication, a coup d’etat and ensuing power vacuum in the West African nation of Mali has resulted in extremists taking over the country’s north (where Timbuktu is located). Islamic militants, said to be affiliated with al-Qaeda, and who have piggy-backed on [...]
BRENT LIDDLE, a wilderness guide from Haines Junction, Yukon has spent over three decades exploring one of the most remote corners of North America. Between 1975 and 2002 he served as an interpretive guide at Kluane National Park: a 22,000 square kilometer wilderness area in the Yukon straddling the southernmost limit of the Arctic. Kluane [...]
“The ‘great secret’ at the heart of all genuine esoteric organizations is this: that all humanity and all creation are one and every single thing is part of the whole. This immense potential knowledge resides in all humanity waiting to be awakened and used.” – Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, in Godhead: The Brain’s Big [...]
The subject of climate change tends to come up most often by way of the media. Because of news filtering – especially in television – it is hard to find any meaningful coverage on this topic beyond what appears fleetingly in the headlines. And we rarely, if ever, get a chance to meet the scientists [...]
I recently caught up with my old friend, Richard Nahas, an M.D. practicing alternative and integrative medicine in Ottawa. Since embarking on his career in 1994 Richard has accrued a panoply of fascinating work-related experiences and travels: from challenging tenures treating the downtrodden in Cairo and Johannesburg, to being a frontline physician during the SARS [...]
This is a fascinating lecture delivered in Australia by Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University and author of the acclaimed book The Population Bomb. It’s a big picture, long view look at how population growth is likely to impact our world. It’s as important a talk as you’ll ever hear, since there’s virtually no [...]
Not long ago I had the opportunity to travel across much of the length of Manitoba during an assignment that took me to the far north of the Canadian province. The two-day, 1700 kilometre journey was made aboard “The Hudson Bay” – the train linking Manitoba’s capital of Winnipeg with the idiosyncratic and distant northern [...]
Three questions sum up the fundamental quandary for scientists working in biology and cosmology today. Where did the information that made matter possible come from? How did life arise out of inanimate matter? And what is consciousness? These profound puzzles about the nature of our universe are the major stumbling blocks holding up progress in [...]
For decades a small indie bookstore has been operating, virtually in secret, beneath the corporate hustle of Toronto’s downtown core. “Open Air Books and Maps” is a quirky and clandestine establishment located in a basement-level nook at the corner of Adelaide and Toronto streets. Since 1976, this cramped and largely unannounced subterranean haunt has been [...]
“You can analyze the past but you need to design the future. That is the difference between suffering the future and enjoying it.” – Edward De Bono Psychologist and physician, Dr. Edward De Bono, has devoted much of his life to teaching and promoting the skills of creative thinking. He believes the greatest threat facing [...]
Ahmed Muhiddin Piri Re’is (1475-1544) was an Ottoman mariner and mapmaker whose rise to prominence paralleled the ascending fortunes of the empire he served. In addition to becoming an admiral in the Ottoman navy, Re’is also founded Suleiman the Magnificent’s school of mapmaking. He had a huge talent for drawing charts and he created both [...]
Muhammed “al-Sharif” al-Idrisi (c. 1100-1165) was a major Muslim scholar, geographer and mapmaker of the medieval Islamic period. He was born in the town of Ceuta, in Morocco, and was descended from a line of nobleman who traced their lineage to the Prophet Mohammed. Al-Idrisi took an interest in foreign lands and travel early in [...]
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