USSR

Lefties of a certain age will remember the Foreign Languages Publishing House of Moscow, an operation which pumped out large numbers of books in English (and presumably other languages). Books which were perhaps a little utilitarian, as befitted the workers' republic, but which were also very good value.

I was reminded of them by this book, picked up for a tenner at the second hand book shop at the top of Ryde, an operation we try to fit in in the course of our annual trip to the Isle of Wight (and to be found at reference 1). A book which does not seem to have a date of publication but which, I would guess, dates from the 1960's and was produced under the auspices of the Muslim Religious Board of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, a board which may well have succumbed under the new senior management team.

A book which I presume to have been printed in Arabic and which comes with a pull out booklet containing the text and the list of the 135 full page illustrations in Russian, English and French. Illustrations which are a mixture of black and white and colour, not glossy but rather arty. Lots of mausoleums and lots of madrasahs. Different from us in that while we have lots of tombs in and around our churches, we do not generally go in for mausoleums. And while we have church schools attached to cathedrals and otherwise, we generally allow them to go in for a general education, rather than, for example, rote learning of the New Testament.

In the margins I learned that while we might use Arabic numerals, they are so named for being decimal numbers, not because we actually use the same numerals as the Arabs, although to be fair two or three of them are same or at least very similar. I had then thought that I was close to being able to decipher the dates in the Arabic text, but actually I am confused, with 1371-1372 coming out as 1372-1371. Not got a grip on the direction of writing at all, although the book as a whole does seem to be back to front. Plus I had thought that they counted from the birth of their Prophet rather than from that of our Lord. But assuming that 1300 means 1300, there are lots of big and expensive buildings here from the 14th century, roughly the same time that we were building many of our cathedrals.

I think the book shop man must have been pleased that the book had found a good owner, as he treated to me to the substantial (if second hand) carrier bag from Tesco, visible to the left of the book itself, and fully up for holding this quite heavy book.

Reference 1: http://ryde-bookshop.co.uk/.

Reference 2: http://www.softschools.com/languages/arabic/numbers_1_10_in_arabic/.