The Conversation

Friday essay: how a Bengali book in Broken Hill sheds new light on Australian history

Author: Samia Khatun, Senior Lecturer, SOAS, University of London

The large book bearing a handwritten English label, 'The Holy Koran', was not a Quran, but a 500-page volume of Bengali Sufi poetry. Samia Khatun

Some 1,000 kilometres inland from Sydney, over the Blue Mountains, past the trees that drink the tributaries of the Darling River, there stands a little, red mosque. It marks where the desert begins.

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