‘Ajam is beautiful because it does not claim to be one thing or another’

I learned a few things over the weekend about illustrated Turkic-readership journal Molla Nasraddin and Russian-trained Ottoman German illustrator Oskar Schmerling in the era of major European counterparts Le Rire and Simplicissimus (e.g.), and about the long career of Iranian-Russian Soviet poet-bureaucrat Abolqasem Lahouti, among other things previously unknown to me, through the New Books conversation with Yale lit scholar Sam Hodgkin appended below.

Pulled in, I wound up listening as well to Hodgkin in another (quite different) discussion of his book on Ajam Media Collective’s podcast and, then, to a film-oriented lecture given at NYU the previous year, both linked below. A rich vein, promising to add a good deal to the picture I’ve begun to get mainly through the work of Priya Satia and Pankaj Mishra.

No plans to pick up Hodgkin’s book, priced for university library acquisition, anytime soon. I will be (that is, am) listening to more from Ajam Media, though — for the religion content and the political-world content both.