100 books like Conversations with Ogotemmêli

This is exploration literature at its very best. Heinrich Barth was inclined to pedantry, but he was thorough and meticulous (his maps were models of their kind); he was also a skilled linguist (fluent in Arabic, he later published vocabularies of eight African languages including Tamashek and Hausa, and learned enough Hausa on a single journey from Ghat to Agadez to be able to converse freely).

He stayed in the Sahara for six years in the 1840s, and returned with massive journals packed with priceless ethnographic and geographic information, only to find fame passing him by. His contemporary, David Livingstone, was much more suited than the stolid German to a life of the celebrity traveler, and spoke much more eloquently at revival meetings and at conventions of Geographical Societies. (Livingstone met Barth once, and gave him an inscribed copy of his Missionary Travels, which must have grated). Barth’s massive… show more.

African exploration has a rich history of intrepid women travelers (I think particularly of Mary Kingsley, who had once ascended Mount Cameroon in a day, Victorian petticoats notwithstanding. Kingsley finally died of typhoid in South Africa while she was administering to Boer prisoners of war, but before that, she made many an expedition among the Fang of Gabon and, as she put it, “danced many a wild dance with the wild river.”) Mary Anne Fitzgerald is the best modern example. Jailed by the dictatorship of Kenya’s Daniel Arap Moi and subsequently expelled, she then reported from hotspots all over Africa, including Liberia, the Central African Republic, and Cote d'Ivoire, coming under fire and under threat more than once, facing down guerrillas and governments in turn. 

She also has an eye for the piquant detail. She was once an eyewitness to a mass circumcision of an age cohort of young Samburu… show more.

All right, so a Nobel laureate doesn’t need any encomiums from me, but what the hell. Soyinka’s first book in nearly half a century is revealing, enlightening, satirical, gleeful and just plain damn funny, while telling you more about the chaotic politics and sociology of his native Nigeria than you ever thought possible, a wonderful window into Africa’s most populous country.

This is far more than a colonial era whodunit, a recounting of yet another colonial atrocity – though it is that in spades.  Yes, in 1897 the British occupation army reacted to the killing of a a few colonial officials by razing an empire to the ground, careless of its causes and its effects. So much, so commonplace. But what an empire! The Benin artworks the army looted, subsequently dispersed to museums around the globe, were and still are a revelation to those whose notions of African art were to that point limited to masks and fetishes. A mere catalogue of the pieces would be enough to explain why Picasso, among other artists, was captivated by the art of Africa, but Philips has done more than that – he puts the looted artifacts into their context and into their culture. There is nothing didactic or preachy about this book, but… show more.

I have to admit, part of me squarely into midlife, is still scared of my own shadow. This was the first book I read after my father passed away, and not only was it the perfect guide through the grief, loss, and rite of passage, but also a homecoming of sorts. Roshi Joan Halifax has clearly wandered the vastness of her own inner landscape and offers up treasures from the dark, mysterious depths. She makes it clear, that yes, darkness exists. And also, yes, evil and other unspeakable things may hide within it. But upon her travels and fearless exploration, she has found other luminous gifts that only the soul houses, and only a valiant seeker could discover. The Fruitful Darkness as she calls it is akin to the night sky filled with stars, the fertile soil with seeds, or the womb brimming with new life. It is alive, inviting… show more.

Aslan writes engagingly and urgently about Islamic history from a contemporary Muslim-American perspective. He grounds his account in academic scholarship but does not let it overshadow the excitement of the rise of a new world civilization. Aslan attends to the potential within Islam for democracy and for greater rights for women and rejects the bigotted “clash of civilizations” model that sees Muslims as always outsiders in Western society.

Talal Asad’s genealogical analysis of the concept of religion in Western thought is a classic.

Asad, a Saudi-born anthropologist, proposed that it was the unique product of Western modernity and secularism to perceive religious discourse in the public arena as a disguise for power, which created a bias towards it in public life. This bias was then internationalized through the transposition of an inherently ethnocentric concept of religion.

Among other insights, Asad stressed the need to approach religious traditions in reference to the experience of the believers and the texts or traditions they invoke in their everyday life. A seminal piece of work that can provide a point of reference for anyone working to decolonize religious studies.

The religious history of America has long overlooked the unique spiritual life of Black Americans. Dr. Stephen Finley has been at the forefront of a new generation of researchers and historians chronicling the incredibly rich history of Black New Religious Movements in the United States and how they’ve influenced both popular Black culture and all-American culture. In and Out of This World peels back closely guarded beliefs and practices and gives readers the context to understand them not as fringe lunacy but a logical endpoint to a diverse and robust cosmology. Dr. Finley does what the best historians do—makes us care about people while giving us the information to understand their ideas and beliefs.

How can you have a list of cult books without William Burroughs? I nearly put some Burroughs on this list, but as this is for hard-to-impress fans of cult books, you’ve probably already read him. I was also tempted to include Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone, but again, you’ve probably already read him (or object to him on reputation alone). Michael Muhammad Knight takes on both these figures while attempting to write the Great American Queer Islamo-Futurist Novel. Contains hip-hop history, gay fiction, and sacrilege – what’s not to like? A blasphemous blend of autobiography and literary experimentation.

Written for contemporary audiences by a living Sufi philosopher and world-renowned authority of comparative philosophy and mysticism, The Garden of Truth is a must-read for anyone who wants to have an understanding of, awaken to, and joyously live in the present moment. Unlike any book I’ve seen in English, this work explains how the Sufi path of liberation is all about realizing that one can only return to the present moment by proceeding from where we are in the here-and-now. Once we get There, we realize that Here is Now, since Now was always Here.