Murjana Book Launch: Love and Passion in Medieval Baghdad

Dr Ghada Karmi celebrates the launch of her latest book, Murjana, with renowned historian Prof Ilan Pappé. This is a recording from the book launch at Owl Bookshop in London in October 2025.

It is spring of the year 830. Baghdad, the capital of a vast Islamic empire, is one of the world’s most glorious cities. Its ruler is an intellectual, a forward-thinking caliph who champions reason and the pursuit of knowledge against the forces of ignorance and superstition. The Caliph’s court has become a dazzling academy of poets, musicians, philosophers, and theologians—a picture of a vibrant, self confident, pleasure-loving society.

Order Murjana.

Yet, it bears the fateful seeds of future strife. The Sunni-Shia divide, religious fanaticism, and the stirrings of Islamist extremism all started then. These themes emerge as the story of a passionate love that ends in murder unfolds.

Dr Ghada Karmi is a celebrated Palestinian author, physician and academic. She was born in Jerusalem before being ethnically cleansed as a child during the Nakba in 1948. Dr Karmi later trained as a doctor of medicine at Bristol University. She established the first British-Palestinian medical charity in 1972 and was an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. Her previous books include One State The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel and the best-selling In Search of Fatima.

Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel.