Stranger to History

Title: Stranger to History – A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands

Author: Aatish Taseer

Publisher: Picador, 2009 (First)

ISBN: 9780330511155

Pages: 323

India, a multicultural, multi-religious and multiethnic country, was partitioned in 1947 to make room for a republic of Muslims, who claimed to be a nation that can’t coexist with others. Feuds among brothers are common in families, and when a partition plan acceptable to all is implemented, peace eventually returns. But not so in the case of India and Pakistan. Communal riots of the worst kind broke out in both countries and a mass transfer of populations took place. Families were divided, relatives ended up across the border. Ties between the two countries floundered and people to people contacts also died down. Even in such frozen state of affairs, rare contacts indeed took place and love got the better of patriotism. Aatish Taseer had worked as a reporter for Time magazine. He is a bridge that connects the two countries, as his parents – Indian Sikh mother and Pakistani Muslim father – met in the fag end of 1970s and the author was born. Salmaan Taseer, his father, being somewhat a playboy, broke the relationship and returned to Pakistan. Aatish Taseer grew up in India in his mother’s household. He had only a dim recollection of his father as an infant. At the age of 21, he traveled all by himself to Lahore to meet his father, but was distracted by his indifference. His father had married many times in the meanwhile and had children through all of them. When his father read the author’s coverage of the London terrorist bombings of 2005, he advised his son to learn more about the religion to which they both belonged and to understand the Pakistani ethos. Aatish made a travel through Islamic countries which terminated in Pakistan, meeting his father. This book, the first one from the author, analyses the socio-religious ferment in the Islamic states and its precarious reconciliation to modern Western society.

Aatish travels through Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, before finally arriving in Pakistan. With his discussions among intellectuals and ordinary people in these places, he identifies the fault lines with unerring accuracy. He rightly observed in 2006 how fragile Turkey’s forceful brand of secularism, backed by the army, which could silence even the boldest Islamists. Fundamentalism is right there beneath the authority’s noses, as exemplified by the author’s visit to the neighbourhood of Fatih Carsamba in Istanbul. Islam was coming back in through the back door. These words appear prophetic, with the recent failed coup against President Erdogan. Fundamentalists want to break away from a nation’s secular history, making the citizens strangers to it, and go back to the religion’s historic roots with anachronistic desires to dress or think like the Prophet did. In short, their aim is to return to a moment of time, some 1400 years ago, in a time warp if possible. As expressed by representative men in Turkey, Islam wants to dominate the world, where they are ready to grant the right to life to other religionists and perhaps nothing more. They also consider their own governments and political classes as corrupted by western style. There is only a single way out for a clean government – Islam – which is shared by many billions of people having supra-nationalist affiliation to a common brotherhood. What this produces is an absurd insistence on trifles like detailed control of the believer’s life from his personal habits to his food choices.

The picture is not much different in Syria, where Islamic universities don’t offer any real solutions, but harness the grievance of the people against the West. When the author traveled the country in 2006, they openly sided with the regime of Assad. After the civil war broke out in Syria, these universities turned out to be the breeding ground of ISIS terrorists. Islam’s peculiarity observed by the author in the wake of the protests against cartoons appeared in a Danish journal against the Prophet is that even the moderates among them called for violence! Of the countries he toured, Turkey and Iran present contrasts of a glaring nature. The regime made secularism compulsory in all public transactions in Turkey, but the people were often deeply religious in private. In Iran, the government insisted on strict Islamic code of conduct in public, but the people were more or less secular in private. The author tells about the unbelievable tendency of a growing number of city dwellers to follow the Hare Krishna movement in Iran. It should, however, be thought only as a form of resistance to the regime of clerics and Basiji, the militia that enforces religious virtue, rather than due to any interest in Hinduism. There also, Islam encompasses all its followers under a species, jokingly called Homo Islamicos. People of other religions are thought to belong to other species. The youth has become strangers to their own history, where pre-Islamic history is blacked out. Islam in Iran is not a religion, but politics. By making even minor transgressions a crime, it has made an entire urban youth criminalized.

Pakistan presents the most tragi-comic example of all. It was founded on faith, but was never part of the tradition of high Islam. They didn’t have an Islamic past, as virtually all of them are converted Hindus, so now look forward to a great Islamic future. The country was established on the single agenda of rejection of India in every sphere. Pakistanis, at least a sizeable number of them, live in a hallucinogenic misunderstanding of the supposed ‘manliness’ of Muslims and emaciated cowardice of Hindus. It is amusing to observe this delusive image created by self-hypnotism or something! It is a plain fact that nearly 100,000 ‘manly’ soldiers of the Pakistan army meekly surrendered to valiant Indian troops at the end of the 1971 war and India cut Pakistan neatly into two fragments, like a piece of cake! This is all the more significant now, as another dismemberment of the country in the form of Balochistan is on the cards. In the absence of a credible state, local militias and crude power was everywhere. Rich people travel to the countryside only with a loaded Kalashnikov within their reach. Aatish records instances where the police themselves turn dacoits during their off-duty hours.

Subtitled ‘A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands’, the book is a re-evaluation of Islam on the basis of its strict demand of allegiance from its adherents. Taseer brings out the points where mainstream society break ranks with fundamentalism, but adopts a semi-resigned compromise with it. Fundamentalists always go by a feeling of victimization, a sense of persecution whether living in a Muslim society or not. That’s the well from which youngsters who were born and brought up in Europe turn away from the society and go east to the deadly embrace of the Islamic State. Religion has become a political and historical grievance against the modern world. Such fusing of history with faith spells danger to pluralistic and multicultural societies. Taseer answers a perennial problem often associated with Islamic societies where the voice of the moderates are not heard. Even though it is often claimed that the terrorists constitute only a tiny minority of Muslims, the voice of the ‘moderate’ majority is conspicuous by absence. The author identifies them with his father and step-siblings, who don’t pray, wear any dress they like, drink what they choose, but harboured feelings of hatred of Jews, Americans or Hindus that were founded on faith and only thinly masked in political arguments.

The book is a very good one to read, considering this is the first one from the author. A set of photographs and an index would’ve added much interest to the book.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star