This large and diverse anthology, spanning the century between 1910 and 2010, is published under the auspices of Words Without Borders, an organization dedicated to promoting literary translation. The name expresses a pious hope: people may be divided by national and cultural boundaries, but literature is as universal as human nature itself. By reading the poems and essays and stories of strangers—and even enemies, as in the previous Words Without Borders anthology, Literature from the ‘Axis of Evil’: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations—we come to appreciate how much alike we are, how little reason there is for mistrust. Insofar as American readers think of the Middle East as a region full of real or potential enemies, Tablet and Pen may be seen as another bridge-building exercise. As Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American journalist, writes in his introduction, “the writings in these pages may help move our consciousness of the region away from the ubiquitous images of terrorists and fanatics and toward a new, more constructive set of ideas and metaphors.”

To frame a literary anthology as a response to political enmity, however, is already to cede ground to the mentality that the book means to change. You can see this in the odd way the anthology defines the Middle East. Tablet and Pen includes writing in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, as one would expect, but also a considerable amount of Urdu, the language of Muslims in Pakistan and India. Ordinarily, the Middle East is not considered to extend all the way to Lahore, but if it does, why doesn’t Tablet and Pen include any other languages of the Indian subcontinent, such as Hindi, with its vast literature? It makes perfect sense, on the other hand, to include writers from Palestine, which is of course in the heart of the Middle East. But then why does it not include any Hebrew writers, since Israel is surely just as central to the region as Palestine?

The answer could not be more obvious: Tablet and Pen is really an anthology of writings from the Muslim world. The religion of Islam is what unites such diverse languages, cultures, and civilizations as Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and Arabic. Hence no Hindi and no Hebrew. Not only would there be no harm in acknowledging this, it might even make the book more attractive in the marketplace. Yet Aslan shies away from it: “this is not meant to be an anthology of literature from ‘the Muslim world’—not only because many of the authors do not self-identify as Muslim but also because there is no such thing as a monolithic ‘Muslim world,’ save perhaps in the imaginations of some in the West.” Fair enough—but since the book opts for a geographical designation such as “the Middle East,” rather than one based on religion, the decision to omit Hebrew literature becomes all the more striking.

And all the more disturbingly polemical. Having dismissed Islam as the essence of “the Middle East,” Aslan opts instead for a post-colonialist identity: “what binds together the writers in this collection ... is neither borders nor nationalities, but rather a struggle for self-definition in the context of imperialism, colonialism, and Western cultural hegemony. (It is for this reason, and to avoid further complicating the narrative, that Hebrew literature, which has developed along a different path, is not included in this anthology.)” In fact, the contents of Aslan’s book themselves resist this kind of Saidian simplicity. “Western cultural hegemony" interests only a few of the more engage intellectuals in Tablet and Pen, while the best pieces—notably “For Freedom’s Sake,” Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s memoir of the Indian independence movement—are actually critiques of the human deformations wrought by political grievance.

It is precisely on Aslan’s stated grounds, moreover, that Hebrew literature would have been a valuable addition to his book. For it, too, can be read as a post-colonial literature. Like India and Pakistan, Israel was created in opposition to the British Empire; like Iran, it is a country with an ancient culture and history that had to be re-imagined in the modern world. And Hebrew literature, like Arabic literature, uses a Semitic language and European forms, raising questions about Eastern and Western identity. The Israeli perspective on all these questions is different from the Arab or Iranian perspective, of course, but they are shared questions.