{"product_id":"oriental-encounters","title":"Oriental encounters","description":"Marmaduke Pickthall (1875-1936) failed the Foreign Office examination and went east instead, spending two years in Palestine and Syria with an Arabic-speaking companion and almost no money. He learned the language properly, travelled with people rather than past them, and came home altered. He later became a Muslim and produced The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, the first English translation of the Quran by an English Muslim, still in print a century on.This is the account of those two years, written twenty years afterwards. It is unusual among books of its period for what it declines to do: there is no surveying, no improving commentary, no imperial condescension — only conversations, misunderstandings, hospitality and jokes, with the Englishman generally the one who has got things wrong. E. M. Forster admired it, and it remains among the few Edwardian travel books that a reader today can finish without wincing.This is a faithful print-on-demand facsimile of the 1918 London edition, reproduced in full from a library copy. The historical text is reproduced without modification; only the format, margins and legibility have been reset for modern printing.","brand":"EDITIONS RECREASOFT","offers":[{"title":"Perfect Bound","offer_id":67486383440176,"sku":"9782387812094","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/www.thegreatbritishbookshop.co.uk\/products\/oriental-encounters","provider":"The Great British Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}