Alaa al-Aswany, a prominent Egyptian writer with a broad array of interests and accomplishments, is a lively man with a penchant for playful conversation. I sat down with him one spring afternoon in his Brooklyn apartment, and was easily drawn into the world he conjured, one small detail at a time.

The focus here is on two Persianate texts. The first is the Shahnama or ‘Book of Kings’, the monumental poem of a poet retrospectively named Ferdowsi, or ‘man of paradise’, who lived in the late 10th and early 11th century CE. The second text is in prose: it is a comparably monumental preface to a lavish new edition of the Shahnama that was commissioned in 1426 CE and published in 1430 under the aegis of a Timurid prince named Bāysonghor.

We are so used to thinking in regional terms that instinctively we are more at ease with comparisons between adjacent countries.