Miko Peled
Avraham “Miko” Peled (Hebrew: אברהם “מיקו” פלד, born 10 December 1961) is an Israeli-American activist, author, and karate instructor. He is author of the books The General’s Son: The Journey of an Israeli in Palestine,[1] published in 2012, and Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five,[2] published in 2017. He is also an international speaker. Know more
The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make
In late 18th-Century Europe, a new fashion led to an international scandal. In fact, an entire social class was accused of appearing in public naked.
The culprit was Dhaka muslin, a precious fabric imported from the city of the same name in what is now Bangladesh, then in Bengal. It was not like the muslin of today
What Bengal Made and Let Others Claim
For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dhaka was the capital of the world’s muslin trade. The fabric it produced was so fine that the claim passed down through generations, that a six yard sari could be pulled through a finger ring, has been demonstrated to be true. Historians reached for weightier language: “woven wind,” “vapours of dawn.” At its peak the yarn reached a thread count of 1,200, spun from a cotton called phuti karpas that grew along the Meghna, through sixteen elaborate stages of work, the fibre cleaned with the toothed jawbone of a boal fish, the thread spun in boats in the early morning because only humid air would let it stretch without snapping. Read more
