Meetings With Mountains

Some books are meant to be read quickly. This one asks for something slower — the kind of attention you might give an elder who has traveled widely and seen much.

*Meetings with Mountains: Encounters with the Saints and Sages of the Islamic World* is a photographic collection by the British photographer Peter Sanders, who spent nearly fifty years traveling to capture images of people regarded as role models and exemplars of purity, knowledge, and illumination in the traditional Islamic world. It is a work built from patience — a lifetime's worth of it — gathered into a single volume for the reader to return to.

This is less a book to move through once than one to keep close, opening it when you want a reminder of what a life spent in remembrance and knowledge can look like. It rewards unhurried attention, the kind you might give to a family album rather than something skimmed and set aside.

This edition, from Inspiral Books, is a hardback, made to hold up to years of return visits — fitting, given how long Sanders himself spent making the work that fills it. For anyone drawn to the traditional world and its exemplars, it holds a quiet place of its own.