Mystics and Warriors

Flor Benavides, whose Sephardic Jewish family had to flee Baghdad in the late 1940's, grew up in Chicago. When she was 10 years old, her older brother Idris returned to Chicago from an extended buying trip with four Persian friends throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. As a girl, Flor had loved Idris's stories of that trip, especially his description of the group's encounter in Malta with a mysterious, almost wizardly, man known as Shamsuddin. Fifty years later, Flor learned that Shamsuddin...