Tales from the life of Bruce Wannell: Adventurer, Linguist, Orientalist Salawat This switching of addressee is

This switching of addressee is a linguistic device known as iltifāt and is common in Arabic poetry…

and so on back one by one to al-Hasan ibn ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib

engaging but never patronising

This was the time when he had gone through ten to eleven years of ridicule and rejection in Makkah

Tales from the life of Bruce Wannell: Adventurer, Linguist, Orientalist Salawat This switching of addressee isBruce Wannell was the greatest Orientalist traveller of his generation: a Paddy Leigh Fermor of the East, a Kim for our own time. He lived in Iran through the 1979 revolution, worked for a decade in the North West Frontier during the wars in Afghanistan and could transcribe the most complex Arabic calligraphy by sight. Although he lived in the lands of Islam he also knew all the artistic treasures of Christendom. His curious combination of talents