Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands by Aatish Taseer
| Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands by Aatish Taseer | |
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| Category: Travel | |
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Reviewer: Lesley Mason
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| Summary: An interesting excursion into Islamic territories from Turkey through Syria, Saudi, Iran and Pakistan as one man searches for what it means to be Muslim. Thought-provoking. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 336 | Date: July 2010 |
| Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd | |
| ISBN: 978-1847671318 | |
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Aatish Taseer was born of out of a short week of passion between a Sikh Indian mother and a Pakistani Muslim father. The mother was a journalist; the father a politician.
That week of passion was to be all it was, despite subsequent attempts at hushing up the pregnancy, then pretending a marriage until finally a clean break was made when the boy was about 18 months old. Ah, but such breaks never are clean are they? There's always a certain amount of meddling from the side-lines, and then there's a child's longing to know who he is, where he is really from.
The latter is going to be all the more so if your father was a much respected political activist, who is now a successful businessman, and your paternal grandfather was a revered poet… how can you let that lie? How can you not want such people to be proud of you?
That is Taseer's real failing – at the end of the day he wanted his dad to be proud of him. And it was never going to happen. Not only do they belong in totally different worlds, they are so very much alike in other ways. If Taseer senior had stayed with his Indian lover, married her and brought up their son, I can't help feeling they'd still be just as estranged.
Under the rules of Islam, Taseer is Muslim by dint of his father being so. Irrespective of his own beliefs – or as it transpires those of his father. It just is. He is marked as such by his early circumcision, which for all he knew could just as easily mark him as a Jew, but certainly it set him apart from his Sikh and Hindu cousins. This was his first sense of being a Muslim. It was, as he says, a very small sense.
It was no big deal. Family life in Delhi was full of friends of all faiths, Muslims included. He knew their holidays and rituals as well as anyone else's (i.e. not very). If he feels himself to be Muslim at all, it is to be a 'cultural Muslim' rather than a 'religious one'. It was a secular and inclusive upbringing that turned out an intelligent and inquisitive young man.
He was almost bred for journalism. And so he finds himself on the train to Leeds in 2005 after a group of British lads, of Pakistani extraction, and professing a Muslim faith, had bombed London. We weren't as shell-shocked as this as the Americans had been by 9/11, terrorism is nothing new in these shores. Horrified, yes. Saddened, obviously. But… it's just the next round of brutality.
If anything came close to shocking the British people it was the discovery that this terrorism might be cloaked in the robes of what we still think of as an Eastern religion, and of a foreign political ideology, but the perpetrators were all of our own making. They were British. This we didn't quite understand. British but fighting for a cause we felt was so very un-British.
So Taseer heads to Leeds and Bradford to talk to local Pakistanis, local Muslims, to find out what it was all about. He meets the average folk, who like living there, do the work they came to do, held on to their dress, their language, their religion, but were open and full of humour and understood or at least accepted the country they'd wound up in. He also meets the clerics, full of vehemence for a war that is not theirs until they choose to make it so (and they do). He meets the younger generation of British Pakistanis (or Pakistani Brits) full of radical faith and patriotism for an imagined country, full of aggression. Maybe the elder was right who said simply that they were bored. They didn't have to struggle, so they sought out a struggle, created one.
This was Taseer's introduction to radical Islam and out of it grew a magazine article that made front page news.
Full of achievement he sent a copy to his father. Who responded with wounding criticism.
Taking this criticism to heart, the notion that he did know the Pakistani ethos, did not understand Islam, and therefore has no right to say the things he has written, he decides to put that right. He decides to visit his father, but to take the long way round. The very long way.
The plan is seven to eight months travelling through Muslim countries from Istanbul to Mecca, then on through Iran and Pakistan before finally winding up at his father's house.
That trip is the focus of the book "Stranger to History". The stranger of the title is Taseer himself. He acknowledges his disconnection to the historical thread of what it means to be Muslim, and is only dimly aware of the effect that those more closely tied to the faith have had on the history of the lands they have ruled. It is largely about whether you can actually be 'a cultural Muslim' anymore, if so, where he would choose to so designate himself.
He travels slowly, shamelessly exploiting whatever contacts he already has or makes along the way, avoiding hotel rooms in favour of borrowed apartments and staying with scattered extended family. He talks to anyone who will talk back: drivers, hotel workers, people he meets on the street or on trains, students, politicians, fixers and bureaucrats and businessmen. He talks economics and politics, but mostly he talks religion.
What is it really like, he wants to know, to be not just Muslim, but Muslim in a Muslim country? How much of what goes on in the streets and in people's heads is genuine faith, how much of it is political ideology, how much just accepted tenets from traditional ways without thought or favour, how much of it – really – matters? And why?
The Spectator's reviewer said that the book should be read by policymakers that they might gain "insights into the thinking of angry young Muslim men". I'm not sure that there were any new insights here. These men want to dominate. It really is that simple. It is all about power play, about a harking back to the glorious past. There is no space in their thinking for how can we accommodate the modern world without forsaking our core beliefs, or (sacrilege indeed) could we accommodate those beliefs to a world that is not what it was. It is a very narrow world view.
The surprising thing is that it is not just angry young men. It is older generations too, less angry, more resigned, but still of the same mindset. Islam must triumph, not for any purposefully argued logical or humanitarian reason, simply because. That is perhaps the essence of faith. But it allows little room for human lives to be played out within it.
It is the human lives Taseer tries to show us, in passing. Forbidden parties, spontaneous revolts. Idiotic rules of course she can wear nail polish, so long as she removes it for washing before prayers, at each prayer, five times a day. Recent tortures. Current corruption. Above all the absence of humour, and often of humanity.
It is a one-sided tale. He is seeking specific answers and so his questions are focussed. He is a man travelling alone, so most of his interlocutors are also men. There is very little of the female perspective here, and what there is, is at the extreme end of the rebellious spectrum. It is an interesting read, however, and the picture it creates is one of an overwhelming cross-border populace struggling to defend their faith. Whether this is because of the type of contacts Taseer made or is a genuine reflection of the countries he wandered through, I cannot say – but 'defensiveness' is what comes across, in the worst sense of the word.
At one point his father and step-mother debate "the holocaust" and downplay the numbers, the reality of it, and whilst this is an extreme example it underlines a feeling that comes across elsewhere that many of the people he meets resent the Jews for being able to claim 'victim status'. I have my own views on that, but it is interesting that few of the representatives in this book talk of the beauty of Islam, the peace of it, what it could be and could mean, if it didn't feel the need to spend all of its time fighting to be heard. If it didn't need to dominate everything else. There is a kind of you don't understand! petulance about many of the answers he receives.
Of course the book is also shot through with Taseer's relationship with his father. There are flashbacks to earlier meetings and school-day telephone calls. My view is that he should have taken the hint. His father has nothing to give him, and frankly he's better off that way. He is a more tolerant, more curious, more open person as a result.
He's also a pretty good wielder of words. Descriptive and engaging throughout. Not one to make you want to follow in his footsteps, but certainly one to make you think about where he has been and where those places are heading.
I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to The Bookbag.
Further reading suggestion: Taseer’s follow-up to this book is the novel The Temple-Goers, which explores many of the same themes but is a somewhat more difficult read.
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