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Stranger to History: A Son's Journey through Islamic Lands
As a child, all Aatish Taseer ever had of his father was his photograph in a browning silver frame. Raised by his Sikh mother in Delhi, his father, a Pakistani Muslim, remained a distant figure. It was a fractured upbringing which left Aatish with many questions about his own identity.
Stranger to History is the story of the journey Aatish made to try to understand what it means to be Muslim in the twenty-first century. Starting from Istanbul, Islam's once greatest city, he travels to Mecca, its most holy, and then home through Iran and Pakistan. Ending in Lahore, at his estranged father's home, on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed, it is also the story of Aatish's own divided family over the past fifty years.
Stranger to History is the story of the journey Aatish made to try to understand what it means to be Muslim in the twenty-first century. Starting from Istanbul, Islam's once greatest city, he travels to Mecca, its most holy, and then home through Iran and Pakistan. Ending in Lahore, at his estranged father's home, on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed, it is also the story of Aatish's own divided family over the past fifty years.
336 pages, Paperback
First published November 2, 2007
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1413 people want to read
About the author
Aatish Taseer
11 books164 followersAatish Taseer has worked as a reporter for Time Magazine and has written for the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, Prospect, TAR Magazine and Esquire. He is the author of Stranger to History: a Son's Journey through Islamic Lands (2009) and a highly acclaimed translation Manto: Selected Stories (2008). His novel, The Temple-Goers (2010) was shortlisted for the 2010 Costa First Novel Award. A second novel, Noon, is now available published by Picador (UK) and Faber & Faber (USA). His work has been translated into over ten languages. He lives between London and Delhi.
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February 6, 2017
I discovered travel writing when I was well into my 20s. Once I did, it didn’t take a lot to realise how travel accounts could tell stories much bigger than just about the particular journeys themselves. From William Dalrymple’s study of Delhi, City of Djinns, to Samanth Subramanian’s portrait of Sri Lanka after the war, This Divided Island, travel narratives have kept surprising me with the way they keep illuminating the larger through the mundane. And I’m convinced that there is no other genre of non-fiction that can tackle subjects as diverse and as difficult, and still be able to infuse them with literary beauty.
Aatish Taseer’s Stranger to History is one of those books, but it is also a whole lot more.
One of the travel quotes that keeps making its way across Facebook timelines talks about how though a traveler may be making the journey, the journey might be making him. In Taseer’s book, he acknowledges this from the very beginning: This is a journey to try to understand his making; its very undertaking is as an inward journey.
The peculiar circumstances that gave birth to Taseer is the starting point of the book, but that is not its heart. Though Taseer writes repeatedly that he wants to understand the young Muslim psyche, and indeed tries and partly succeeds in doing so, the book is not entirely about that either.
Aatish Taseer is Indian, his father is Pakistani, and his maternal family are partition refugees. His ancestry lies in the Pakistani Punjab, and Stranger to History is, at its core, an Indian’s attempt to make sense of this. And when I refer to Taseer as Indian, it is not a light remark. The writer’s ethos, his understanding of the world, his way of looking at things, is instantly, immediately recognisable. It is Indian. I know this because I am one. But also recognisable is his feeling for Pakistan, for the land that once was his ancestors’, for the undivided Indian homeland.
I understand that feeling as well. Because as an Indian, you’ve always asked yourself that question - the why of Pakistan. Why has the idea of India endured while that of this nation’s, carved from ours, born with as much idealism as ours, has fallen away in radicalism and terrorism? I understand that feeling because like Taseer, I care. You can’t erase a shared history, as he points out multiple times in the book, and that is exactly why I care: this is my world, too. But the writer has much more reason to, of course, and though his story starts as an attempt to understand Islam in this time and age, it is in Pakistan that it finds its soul.
The first part of the book deals with the writer’s observations on his travels through the Muslim world, from Turkey, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, including visits to Mecca and Medina. The second part begins in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and goes on to Pakistan, where the really personal drama of the writer’s tale takes place. The division is well thought out: the first part deals with the countries voluntarily regressing to a radical, angry, violent Islam, driven by a restless young population in search of meaning. In the second part, in Iran, the writer encounters a kind-of secular rebellion (complete with Hare Krishnas, God help us) against a state that seeks to impose its own version of Islam on the people. And then comes Pakistan. In all of these places, the writer meets troubled, damaged, fascinating young Muslims, each of them dealing with the challenges of their faith and its complexities in their own way.
The writing is incisive, the observations sharp. It startles you right at the beginning, when Taseer seems to grasp and foretell Erdogan’s Turkey of today. It gets better. In Syria, he sees a region in rift, and something that tells of ISIS's rise is already visible. In Arabia, he ventures into the history of Islam, and how it got to where it is today. In Iran, where the nation-state imposes a literal Islam, he sees a people at odds with the history being fed to them. In Pakistan, he sees the great, inclusive culture of the northern subcontinent being strangled, being made into something so hollow and regressive that his despair becomes almost tangible: you can feel it strongly.
And in all of these places, Taseer encounters the religion that gives him his Urdu name, and meets its different faces and interpretations, including most importantly, political Islam - the idea that temporal and religious power should be one, the idea that is at the root of ISIS, an idea completely at odds with the world of today. This is also what the book is about: what is Islam to its youth? What does being Muslim mean?
In Britain, where second and third generation Muslim immigrants think of Islam as an ‘extra-national identity’, we get our first glimpse of what Islam is morphing to be. In Turkey, where Islamic dress would become a point of contention, Taseer is told, “To be a Muslim is to be above history.” Taseer writes of the exchange, “(This) explained so much of the faith’s intolerance of history that didn’t serve its needs.” It is in Iran, however, that this idea comes home in an conversation with an old Iranian friend of Taseer’s, who had studied in India before going back. Speaking of Iran’s attempt to rewrite everything as an affront to the Islamic nation, and to formulate responses and governance based on this idea of a great Islamic past, the man says, “The youth of today are strangers to their history. You can’t build a country like that.”
This idea, as we come to see, is true of the entire Islamic world. In Syria, in a radical mosque where, in the wake of a Danish newspaper publishing cartoons of the Prophet, a crowd of young Muslims is riled up into an angry mob by the mufti, Taseer writes, “..it didn’t matter what kind of Muslim you were, as long as you were Muslim, because there never was any plan to offer real solutions, only to harness grievance, and because its sense of outrage had more to do with the loss of political power than divine injunction, it could even find room, as certain decayed ideologies can, for men like my father, who were ready to participate in its grievances, but who were also professed disbelievers.”
I grew up in India’s south, far away from the Punjab of India and Pakistan, and where partition is not an open wound like it is in the north. But like it is in the north, India is a land of so many cultural, communal, and religious differences that being Muslim was, to me growing up, just another mode of being, just another difference in a country-ful of them. I know the Muslim festivals, I know the cultural associations, I know the story of Ali, in the same way that my best friend from college, a Muslim, knew all of the corresponding Hindu points of interest. But, and this is an important but, the south has its own shared history and landscape. For example, in Karaikal, where I went to college, the annual Kandoori festival, a remembrance of a Sufi saint, is celebrated by Hindus and Muslims alike - this in a temple town revered for its closeness to Thirunallar, an important Shiva temple in the Hindu pantheon. The Nagore dargah is another, a short motorcycle ride away from Karaikal, where we would ride to, and pray whenever we could.
But why are these details important? Am I showing off, in the way liberals are accused of showing off their association with the other faith?
No. I point this out because it was natural to be part of these things. It was natural to attend these festivals, go to the dargah together. And the loss of exactly this is what makes Pakistan what it is today. Writing of Sind, and the factional differences, rivalries, and enmities he observes, Taseer writes, “Pakistanis offered their natural differences, differences in culture and language, as an explanation for the battle lines that had come up, but this was hardly an explanation when next door in India deeper differences had been bridged. Not only that, but in Sind too, where once great variety had been absorbed, bitter division was to be found in what was now relative homogeneity. And Sind, for centuries so diverse, its culture and worship formed from that diversity, was for the first time in its history no longer a place of confluence.”
The same can be said for all of Pakistan. This was a nation, like mine, that was founded on high ideals. Taseer again: “Pakistan’s founders were not clerics and fanatics, but poets and secularists. It was from the sophisticated (read liberal, secular) Muslims of the time that the case for the country was made. And yet among these genteel people an idea was expressed whose full ugliness, and violence, only became clear in the cruder, more basic articulations that followed.”
Taseer’s book ends with a chilling, beautiful passage where he writes of his father’s pain and confusion about facing and reacting to Pakistan’s history. It is deeply personal, an observation by a son about his father, an observation by an Indian about a Pakistani patriot: about how his nation's tragic, unsettled past holds his father down; the phrase Taseer uses is ‘the pain of history in his country’.
In itself an attempt to understand, Stranger to History can be a starting point for many who don’t understand how this peaceful, beautiful faith they know so well among their friends can foster such anger and fear. It can also be a glimpse into what Pakistan has become, but like me, it can leave you with a profound sense of sadness and despair. Because what is Pakistan except a part of us, undivided India, that was separated and distorted into something it did not really want to be? They are our people, in more ways than we can ever imagine, and if this can happen to them and this nation they forged for peace, how easy it would be for us to fall into this trap? Hate, anger, and fear, are easily stoked, easily given fuel to, and as we know, there are forces even in India’s strong, pluralistic democracy who wish for nothing less to happen.
Pakistan’s knowing, deliberate abandonment of its shared past with India was its first ‘break with history’, and as the years rolled on, that rootlessness invited in dark ideas and conceptions that festered, became poisonous, and that have now eclipsed the ideas the nation was built on.
This, then may be what Taseer is saying to us: if you lose your history, you may lose everything.
Aatish Taseer’s Stranger to History is one of those books, but it is also a whole lot more.
One of the travel quotes that keeps making its way across Facebook timelines talks about how though a traveler may be making the journey, the journey might be making him. In Taseer’s book, he acknowledges this from the very beginning: This is a journey to try to understand his making; its very undertaking is as an inward journey.
The peculiar circumstances that gave birth to Taseer is the starting point of the book, but that is not its heart. Though Taseer writes repeatedly that he wants to understand the young Muslim psyche, and indeed tries and partly succeeds in doing so, the book is not entirely about that either.
Aatish Taseer is Indian, his father is Pakistani, and his maternal family are partition refugees. His ancestry lies in the Pakistani Punjab, and Stranger to History is, at its core, an Indian’s attempt to make sense of this. And when I refer to Taseer as Indian, it is not a light remark. The writer’s ethos, his understanding of the world, his way of looking at things, is instantly, immediately recognisable. It is Indian. I know this because I am one. But also recognisable is his feeling for Pakistan, for the land that once was his ancestors’, for the undivided Indian homeland.
I understand that feeling as well. Because as an Indian, you’ve always asked yourself that question - the why of Pakistan. Why has the idea of India endured while that of this nation’s, carved from ours, born with as much idealism as ours, has fallen away in radicalism and terrorism? I understand that feeling because like Taseer, I care. You can’t erase a shared history, as he points out multiple times in the book, and that is exactly why I care: this is my world, too. But the writer has much more reason to, of course, and though his story starts as an attempt to understand Islam in this time and age, it is in Pakistan that it finds its soul.
The first part of the book deals with the writer’s observations on his travels through the Muslim world, from Turkey, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, including visits to Mecca and Medina. The second part begins in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and goes on to Pakistan, where the really personal drama of the writer’s tale takes place. The division is well thought out: the first part deals with the countries voluntarily regressing to a radical, angry, violent Islam, driven by a restless young population in search of meaning. In the second part, in Iran, the writer encounters a kind-of secular rebellion (complete with Hare Krishnas, God help us) against a state that seeks to impose its own version of Islam on the people. And then comes Pakistan. In all of these places, the writer meets troubled, damaged, fascinating young Muslims, each of them dealing with the challenges of their faith and its complexities in their own way.
The writing is incisive, the observations sharp. It startles you right at the beginning, when Taseer seems to grasp and foretell Erdogan’s Turkey of today. It gets better. In Syria, he sees a region in rift, and something that tells of ISIS's rise is already visible. In Arabia, he ventures into the history of Islam, and how it got to where it is today. In Iran, where the nation-state imposes a literal Islam, he sees a people at odds with the history being fed to them. In Pakistan, he sees the great, inclusive culture of the northern subcontinent being strangled, being made into something so hollow and regressive that his despair becomes almost tangible: you can feel it strongly.
And in all of these places, Taseer encounters the religion that gives him his Urdu name, and meets its different faces and interpretations, including most importantly, political Islam - the idea that temporal and religious power should be one, the idea that is at the root of ISIS, an idea completely at odds with the world of today. This is also what the book is about: what is Islam to its youth? What does being Muslim mean?
In Britain, where second and third generation Muslim immigrants think of Islam as an ‘extra-national identity’, we get our first glimpse of what Islam is morphing to be. In Turkey, where Islamic dress would become a point of contention, Taseer is told, “To be a Muslim is to be above history.” Taseer writes of the exchange, “(This) explained so much of the faith’s intolerance of history that didn’t serve its needs.” It is in Iran, however, that this idea comes home in an conversation with an old Iranian friend of Taseer’s, who had studied in India before going back. Speaking of Iran’s attempt to rewrite everything as an affront to the Islamic nation, and to formulate responses and governance based on this idea of a great Islamic past, the man says, “The youth of today are strangers to their history. You can’t build a country like that.”
This idea, as we come to see, is true of the entire Islamic world. In Syria, in a radical mosque where, in the wake of a Danish newspaper publishing cartoons of the Prophet, a crowd of young Muslims is riled up into an angry mob by the mufti, Taseer writes, “..it didn’t matter what kind of Muslim you were, as long as you were Muslim, because there never was any plan to offer real solutions, only to harness grievance, and because its sense of outrage had more to do with the loss of political power than divine injunction, it could even find room, as certain decayed ideologies can, for men like my father, who were ready to participate in its grievances, but who were also professed disbelievers.”
I grew up in India’s south, far away from the Punjab of India and Pakistan, and where partition is not an open wound like it is in the north. But like it is in the north, India is a land of so many cultural, communal, and religious differences that being Muslim was, to me growing up, just another mode of being, just another difference in a country-ful of them. I know the Muslim festivals, I know the cultural associations, I know the story of Ali, in the same way that my best friend from college, a Muslim, knew all of the corresponding Hindu points of interest. But, and this is an important but, the south has its own shared history and landscape. For example, in Karaikal, where I went to college, the annual Kandoori festival, a remembrance of a Sufi saint, is celebrated by Hindus and Muslims alike - this in a temple town revered for its closeness to Thirunallar, an important Shiva temple in the Hindu pantheon. The Nagore dargah is another, a short motorcycle ride away from Karaikal, where we would ride to, and pray whenever we could.
But why are these details important? Am I showing off, in the way liberals are accused of showing off their association with the other faith?
No. I point this out because it was natural to be part of these things. It was natural to attend these festivals, go to the dargah together. And the loss of exactly this is what makes Pakistan what it is today. Writing of Sind, and the factional differences, rivalries, and enmities he observes, Taseer writes, “Pakistanis offered their natural differences, differences in culture and language, as an explanation for the battle lines that had come up, but this was hardly an explanation when next door in India deeper differences had been bridged. Not only that, but in Sind too, where once great variety had been absorbed, bitter division was to be found in what was now relative homogeneity. And Sind, for centuries so diverse, its culture and worship formed from that diversity, was for the first time in its history no longer a place of confluence.”
The same can be said for all of Pakistan. This was a nation, like mine, that was founded on high ideals. Taseer again: “Pakistan’s founders were not clerics and fanatics, but poets and secularists. It was from the sophisticated (read liberal, secular) Muslims of the time that the case for the country was made. And yet among these genteel people an idea was expressed whose full ugliness, and violence, only became clear in the cruder, more basic articulations that followed.”
Taseer’s book ends with a chilling, beautiful passage where he writes of his father’s pain and confusion about facing and reacting to Pakistan’s history. It is deeply personal, an observation by a son about his father, an observation by an Indian about a Pakistani patriot: about how his nation's tragic, unsettled past holds his father down; the phrase Taseer uses is ‘the pain of history in his country’.
In itself an attempt to understand, Stranger to History can be a starting point for many who don’t understand how this peaceful, beautiful faith they know so well among their friends can foster such anger and fear. It can also be a glimpse into what Pakistan has become, but like me, it can leave you with a profound sense of sadness and despair. Because what is Pakistan except a part of us, undivided India, that was separated and distorted into something it did not really want to be? They are our people, in more ways than we can ever imagine, and if this can happen to them and this nation they forged for peace, how easy it would be for us to fall into this trap? Hate, anger, and fear, are easily stoked, easily given fuel to, and as we know, there are forces even in India’s strong, pluralistic democracy who wish for nothing less to happen.
Pakistan’s knowing, deliberate abandonment of its shared past with India was its first ‘break with history’, and as the years rolled on, that rootlessness invited in dark ideas and conceptions that festered, became poisonous, and that have now eclipsed the ideas the nation was built on.
This, then may be what Taseer is saying to us: if you lose your history, you may lose everything.
January 23, 2020
Aatish Taseer is the estranged Indian son of the murdered Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer. This book is a travelogue that doubles as a memoir of their troubled relationship. Taseer was a disciple of Naipaul and this book bears his influence. It can't be as good as Naipaul's Islamic travelogues. But it's still quite good. There is admittedly a lot that one could criticize about this book, which is a scathing appraisal of life in several Muslim-majority countries based on experiences that range from limited to cursory. Given the critical mood that I've been in though, I found it satisfying.
The parts of the book which Taseer spends in Syria, Turkey and a Muslim neighborhood of England were so limited that I felt drawing any conclusions at all from them were presumptuous. His conversations in some countries seemed to amount to one single provocative person. He gets a little more traction in Iran and I think touches on some things that are true about the pain and hypocrisy of living under a theocracy, even if his experiences were still confined mainly to a circle of young urbanites. In Pakistan however I felt that his book really hit the nail on the head. He was less limited in that country by language or access. The hypocrisy and denuded spirituality of the Islam of the Pakistani elite was depicted powerfully. I found some of his descriptions quite haunting since I have recognized them myself.
Aatish's estranged father, Salman Taseer, comes across in this book as a bit of a lowlife. Not only did he abandon his son and coldly respond to his later entreaties, he continued philandering and profiteering off political connections throughout his life. His religion was apparently a despiritualized, bigoted and nationalistic Islam that he did not even believe in as a religious creed. He is rude, offensive and prejudiced more or less across this entire account. His son didn't hold back in quoting his words, to say the least, and if this man was an exemplar of Pakistan's civilian governing class it explains a lot about their track record. Having said all that, despite the terrible way he lived, Salman Taseer died nobly. There's redemption potentially at hand for everyone.
Although some of Taseer's conclusions in this book were clearly a bit sweeping, it doesn't hurt that he is quite capable of eloquently turning a phrase. Even if he might've been wrong about some things it is an enjoyable read. I found myself quite immersed in some passages and was interested in his groping attempts to reconnect with his father. I also liked his accounts and contrasts between India and Pakistan after Partition. The book would've been stronger just based on these two countries, as opposed to tossing in all the others. I'll plan to read more of his work.
The parts of the book which Taseer spends in Syria, Turkey and a Muslim neighborhood of England were so limited that I felt drawing any conclusions at all from them were presumptuous. His conversations in some countries seemed to amount to one single provocative person. He gets a little more traction in Iran and I think touches on some things that are true about the pain and hypocrisy of living under a theocracy, even if his experiences were still confined mainly to a circle of young urbanites. In Pakistan however I felt that his book really hit the nail on the head. He was less limited in that country by language or access. The hypocrisy and denuded spirituality of the Islam of the Pakistani elite was depicted powerfully. I found some of his descriptions quite haunting since I have recognized them myself.
Aatish's estranged father, Salman Taseer, comes across in this book as a bit of a lowlife. Not only did he abandon his son and coldly respond to his later entreaties, he continued philandering and profiteering off political connections throughout his life. His religion was apparently a despiritualized, bigoted and nationalistic Islam that he did not even believe in as a religious creed. He is rude, offensive and prejudiced more or less across this entire account. His son didn't hold back in quoting his words, to say the least, and if this man was an exemplar of Pakistan's civilian governing class it explains a lot about their track record. Having said all that, despite the terrible way he lived, Salman Taseer died nobly. There's redemption potentially at hand for everyone.
Although some of Taseer's conclusions in this book were clearly a bit sweeping, it doesn't hurt that he is quite capable of eloquently turning a phrase. Even if he might've been wrong about some things it is an enjoyable read. I found myself quite immersed in some passages and was interested in his groping attempts to reconnect with his father. I also liked his accounts and contrasts between India and Pakistan after Partition. The book would've been stronger just based on these two countries, as opposed to tossing in all the others. I'll plan to read more of his work.
August 30, 2016
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 travelled 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 travelled 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 stepsiblings, 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.
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 travelled 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 stepsiblings, 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.
August 11, 2022
4 sterren- Nederlandse paperback
Het enige wat Aatish Taseer als kind van zijn vader heeft, is een foto in een zilverenlijstje. Hij groeit op bij zijn Indiase moeder in Delhi, en heeft geen contact met zijn vader die in het vijandelijke buurland Pakistan woont.
Totdat Aatish op zijn eenentwintigste een brief van hem krijgt en ze weer voorzichtig met elkaar in contact komen.
De culturele verschillen tussen beiden, Aatish is Indiër, zijn vader is Pakistani enmoslim, leiden echter tot een gespannen relatie. Aatish besluit een reis te maken door het Midden-Oosten om inzicht te krijgen in de achtergrond van zijn vader.
Hij begint inIstanbul en reist via Mekka, de heiligste plaats voor moslims, naar Iran en Pakistan. Hij spreekt met veel vooral jonge moslimsen ontdekt dat die vaak een heel andere belevingswereld hebben dan hun ouders: ze zijn fel tegen het Westen en fanatiek in de beleving van hun godsdienst.
Taseers reis eindigt in de Pakistaanse stad Lahore, waarhij een emotionele ontmoeting heeft met zijn vader, in de nacht dat Benazir Bhutto vermoord wordt.
Integere beleving van een jongeman in een voor hem totaal onbekende wereld. Ik heb hem doorgegeven aan Naldo. Benieuwd wat hij van dit boek vindt.
Het enige wat Aatish Taseer als kind van zijn vader heeft, is een foto in een zilverenlijstje. Hij groeit op bij zijn Indiase moeder in Delhi, en heeft geen contact met zijn vader die in het vijandelijke buurland Pakistan woont.
Totdat Aatish op zijn eenentwintigste een brief van hem krijgt en ze weer voorzichtig met elkaar in contact komen.
De culturele verschillen tussen beiden, Aatish is Indiër, zijn vader is Pakistani enmoslim, leiden echter tot een gespannen relatie. Aatish besluit een reis te maken door het Midden-Oosten om inzicht te krijgen in de achtergrond van zijn vader.
Hij begint inIstanbul en reist via Mekka, de heiligste plaats voor moslims, naar Iran en Pakistan. Hij spreekt met veel vooral jonge moslimsen ontdekt dat die vaak een heel andere belevingswereld hebben dan hun ouders: ze zijn fel tegen het Westen en fanatiek in de beleving van hun godsdienst.
Taseers reis eindigt in de Pakistaanse stad Lahore, waarhij een emotionele ontmoeting heeft met zijn vader, in de nacht dat Benazir Bhutto vermoord wordt.
Integere beleving van een jongeman in een voor hem totaal onbekende wereld. Ik heb hem doorgegeven aan Naldo. Benieuwd wat hij van dit boek vindt.
February 18, 2017
I came to Stranger to History, Taseer's debut work after being thoroughly impressed by his piece on Sanskrit where he bemoaned the loss of a whole body of linguistic structure and culture thanks to colonialisation. It was personal, curious and his sentences encased within them a quiet tragedy that had me in thrall at his talent.
In this unusual part-biography, part-travelogue, he turns a journey of meeting his politician father in Pakistan who had estranged him in his childhood into an odyssey that would inform him about what being a Muslim in the current world entails. This decoding of contemporary Muslim identity and reality by virtue of travel and interviews in key Muslim nations (Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia Iran, Pakistan and other undocumented detours into Jordan and Yemen), would in his tentative plan, help him bridge the gulf of empathy for a father who is a warden and defender of an Islamic republic for decades. It would also, he hopes, help him complete his own sense of self as a Muslim: a name and a religion that has been little more than a nebulous patrilineal label from an absent father owing to the effect of having grown up in affluent, secular India and received further education and moorings in the world in more liberal societies.
This quest for personal actualisation and an ethnic understanding are both deep and compelling journeys and they ground this sometimes meandering, but never short of insightful book. Except for the novelistic flourishes in which Taseer waxes a sentence almost always too long on describing appearance of real people and the rhythms of landscape, he is in his element. Drawing upon his formal training in politics and journalism, his continuous mission to pin down the present and future aspirations of the hoi-polloi and spokespeople in Islamic lands leads to searching conversations and informed conclusions. He might just offer his reader glimpses, but his subjects are chosen with care and the wisdom yoked from interactions is articulated with pragmatism. I enjoyed how his clear-headed, direct questioning on the idea of the ideal Islamic way of life always met with an impasse as the answering man (from a Syrian cleric to his father) entered into a rhetoric constructed totally of convenient historical retellings and amorphous utopian dreams. Without being sensationalist, Taseer manages to make the reader see the fallacies of such utopias in the everyday corrosive realities within inward-looking and self-serving Islamic states with defined borders: Pakistan and Iran, both struggling with the modern "world system".
Punctuated with these socio-political musings, his personal journey tore into me, both in how earnestly he pursued his imagined redemption and how he fielded the rebuffs and snubs with absolute decorum. For his sake, I felt myself punching in the air as the bittersweet realisation in the denouement dawns on him as he sits next to his father watching Benazir Bhutto's funeral on live television. Like all journeys, he is a different man at the end of his. He sees things and people differently. The veil has dropped. He has gained in knowledge and lost in innocence, but it feels right. This is how things usually are. Life for rational thinkers is filled with many such obstacles of ossified structures and mind-sets. But the journey to reason must go on.
In this unusual part-biography, part-travelogue, he turns a journey of meeting his politician father in Pakistan who had estranged him in his childhood into an odyssey that would inform him about what being a Muslim in the current world entails. This decoding of contemporary Muslim identity and reality by virtue of travel and interviews in key Muslim nations (Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia Iran, Pakistan and other undocumented detours into Jordan and Yemen), would in his tentative plan, help him bridge the gulf of empathy for a father who is a warden and defender of an Islamic republic for decades. It would also, he hopes, help him complete his own sense of self as a Muslim: a name and a religion that has been little more than a nebulous patrilineal label from an absent father owing to the effect of having grown up in affluent, secular India and received further education and moorings in the world in more liberal societies.
This quest for personal actualisation and an ethnic understanding are both deep and compelling journeys and they ground this sometimes meandering, but never short of insightful book. Except for the novelistic flourishes in which Taseer waxes a sentence almost always too long on describing appearance of real people and the rhythms of landscape, he is in his element. Drawing upon his formal training in politics and journalism, his continuous mission to pin down the present and future aspirations of the hoi-polloi and spokespeople in Islamic lands leads to searching conversations and informed conclusions. He might just offer his reader glimpses, but his subjects are chosen with care and the wisdom yoked from interactions is articulated with pragmatism. I enjoyed how his clear-headed, direct questioning on the idea of the ideal Islamic way of life always met with an impasse as the answering man (from a Syrian cleric to his father) entered into a rhetoric constructed totally of convenient historical retellings and amorphous utopian dreams. Without being sensationalist, Taseer manages to make the reader see the fallacies of such utopias in the everyday corrosive realities within inward-looking and self-serving Islamic states with defined borders: Pakistan and Iran, both struggling with the modern "world system".
Punctuated with these socio-political musings, his personal journey tore into me, both in how earnestly he pursued his imagined redemption and how he fielded the rebuffs and snubs with absolute decorum. For his sake, I felt myself punching in the air as the bittersweet realisation in the denouement dawns on him as he sits next to his father watching Benazir Bhutto's funeral on live television. Like all journeys, he is a different man at the end of his. He sees things and people differently. The veil has dropped. He has gained in knowledge and lost in innocence, but it feels right. This is how things usually are. Life for rational thinkers is filled with many such obstacles of ossified structures and mind-sets. But the journey to reason must go on.
March 20, 2014
My reason for reading this book was that I expected to know in depth about Aatish Taseer’s relationship with his father Salmaan Taseer and paternal relatives in Pakistan. The book does talk about it but not in detail. And I don’t think it is fair to expect much anyway since their relationship was anything but normal and cordial. And over a couple of decades they met only a few times.
The main thesis of the book is the journey that the author undertook through certain Islamic countries and his quest to understand what binds or divides the Muslims all across the globe. It sounds interesting but in my view, the author hasn’t come up with anything ground-breaking or something that we (or I) didn’t know already.
Yes, we know how religion has been exploited for political gains and when the two are mixed nothing spiritually pure comes out of it. Yes, there are people, in fact the youth that dreams of Islamic renaissance and revel the past glory when the Muslims ruled over pretty much the entire world. We also know how much Friday sermons are politicized. And yes, there are “some” people who even today look for “differences” when it comes to India and Pakistan. But is that how everyone look at things? Certainly not! That’s where I didn’t enjoy the book.
The narrative also drags at lethargic pace. For example, the entire episode of Mango King – the Sindhi vadera, his abduction as a child and the mention of his court case seem redundant. The author’s hanging out (partying) with Iranian dissent didn’t prove much either. There is always bound to be a dissent in any totalitarian society. There was no surprise in knowing how guarded and corrupt Iranian system was.
I would have certainly skipped the rest of the book, if I could, as I was really not interested in knowing the meaning of “cultural Muslim”.
The main thesis of the book is the journey that the author undertook through certain Islamic countries and his quest to understand what binds or divides the Muslims all across the globe. It sounds interesting but in my view, the author hasn’t come up with anything ground-breaking or something that we (or I) didn’t know already.
Yes, we know how religion has been exploited for political gains and when the two are mixed nothing spiritually pure comes out of it. Yes, there are people, in fact the youth that dreams of Islamic renaissance and revel the past glory when the Muslims ruled over pretty much the entire world. We also know how much Friday sermons are politicized. And yes, there are “some” people who even today look for “differences” when it comes to India and Pakistan. But is that how everyone look at things? Certainly not! That’s where I didn’t enjoy the book.
The narrative also drags at lethargic pace. For example, the entire episode of Mango King – the Sindhi vadera, his abduction as a child and the mention of his court case seem redundant. The author’s hanging out (partying) with Iranian dissent didn’t prove much either. There is always bound to be a dissent in any totalitarian society. There was no surprise in knowing how guarded and corrupt Iranian system was.
I would have certainly skipped the rest of the book, if I could, as I was really not interested in knowing the meaning of “cultural Muslim”.
December 19, 2017
BOOK REVIEW OF ‘STRANGER TO HISTORY’ BY AATISH TASEER
Sometimes its good to speak in tangents.
Reading this book and the method of comparisons, elegant case studies, I’m reminded of a certain book by a certain author (I remember neither the name of the book nor the author) where he tries to answer the question ‘Why is there something instead of nothing ?’ He goes and speaks to a multiverse of people: philosophers, scientists and religious ideologues to get a broad overview and understanding of this particular question; how different people, some speaking the same language, some of the same ethnicity answer this question, depending on the perspectives shaped by their lived histories and including their formal and informal educations.
I’m also reminded of my stint with the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that fractured country, mutual paranoia enveloped by the notion of statehood. There, as in Taseer’s journey, I saw the various manifestations of religious identities. Tribalism, animism, evangelism, joblessness, greed and anarchy: a heady mix for democracy!
Aatish Taseer, offspring of the illegitimate union of Pakistani politician Salman Taseer, to be later murdered by his personal bodyguard Mumtaz Quadri and then ostracised by the nation for his outspokenness against the Blasphemy Law, and the mediocre journalist and socialite Tavleen Singh, seeks to understand the identity of his father’s faith, its deeper undertones and its relation with history and politics by making a journey through Muslim lands starting with Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and finally his father’s homeland Pakistan. He wishes to find some similarities, a common thread that supposedly joins a disparate group of people around the world: white, black, Asian, Caucasian, African through what he refers to as a ‘civilisation of faith’. What he discovers through his travel-memoire is a deeper understanding, an entrenched confusion about Islam and its relation to civilisation, culture and politics.
Turkey.
The first stop in Taseer’s journey is Turkey. This is a country I had myself travelled and admired during 2014. A Muslim country with a total secular outlook and the only non European NATO nation. The liberal outlook was there for all to see before everything went to hell in 2014. Taseer’s interactions with Abdullah ( this book was written in 2008) foretold of an explosion, the emergence of faith from the holds of Ataturk’s secular quarantine. Here Islam is differentiated from the rest of the religions as a world system, a system of rules and regulations that defy time and space. For Abdullah, its a mode of being, as temporal as being human. A Muslim cannot be separated from Islam, a moderate Muslim distances himself from Islam but that does not change the characteristics of the faith.
Syria.
The Islam Taseer encountered was more an evangelist one. It tempered all the world’s with an Islamic tinge. Syria was the perfect example of a closed world system, an ideal laboratory of isolation, a police state where the real world problems could be tuned out. But here Islam was used to justify or propagate a family’s hold on the society. A frustration and negativity, pent up and stoked and expressed in violence just a couple of years in the future.
Saudi Arabia.
Taseer saw the Arabianised version of Islam and came to realise how through Wahhabism, an Arabic culture, more Arabic than Islamic was being propagated in the name of the faith. A significant portion of the hajj or umrah consisted of rituals which predated Islam but were grounded in Arabia. Cultural Islam or the ‘corrupt’ Islam, of the Sufis, shrine and sacred threads was a result of the intermixing of Islam with local cultures. This was being subdued by a puritanical zeal with the aim of returning to the days of the early Arabs rather than the faith.
Iran.
The Islamic Republic, apparently the first political realisation of the faith, a possible model for what to expect, if the faith triumphed in other states, was a sadness in being. In the name of the faith, the regime had appropriated people’s lives, their joys and their humaneness. What was left was the magnification of trifles. The Republic had failed its people. In Taseer’s words ‘The emphasis on trifles and the hypocrisies that came with it had been institutionalised, turned into a form of control over the people who posed the greatest threat to the republic: its young.’
Pakistan.
Taseer’s terminus. This was a country that had been conceptualised as a homeland for Indian Muslims, an opposition to everything Hindu but still could not let go of the subcontinent’s idiosyncrasies. Pakistan had been cleansed of Hindus; barring a few thousands no diversity in terms of religion was permitted. Ironically the faith that was supposed to bridge cultural and ethnic differences failed to do so and in fact exacerbated the secession of its biggest chunk in 1971.
Finally, what seems most obvious is the experience of the living; faith as lived history, history as lived history and culture as lived history. Islam, by failing to allow for these ‘cultural’ aberrations and monogamising on its version of its history, the symbolic one, the Arabianised one then fails to give its followers freedom and that, my friends, is its failing.
Sometimes its good to speak in tangents.
Reading this book and the method of comparisons, elegant case studies, I’m reminded of a certain book by a certain author (I remember neither the name of the book nor the author) where he tries to answer the question ‘Why is there something instead of nothing ?’ He goes and speaks to a multiverse of people: philosophers, scientists and religious ideologues to get a broad overview and understanding of this particular question; how different people, some speaking the same language, some of the same ethnicity answer this question, depending on the perspectives shaped by their lived histories and including their formal and informal educations.
I’m also reminded of my stint with the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that fractured country, mutual paranoia enveloped by the notion of statehood. There, as in Taseer’s journey, I saw the various manifestations of religious identities. Tribalism, animism, evangelism, joblessness, greed and anarchy: a heady mix for democracy!
Aatish Taseer, offspring of the illegitimate union of Pakistani politician Salman Taseer, to be later murdered by his personal bodyguard Mumtaz Quadri and then ostracised by the nation for his outspokenness against the Blasphemy Law, and the mediocre journalist and socialite Tavleen Singh, seeks to understand the identity of his father’s faith, its deeper undertones and its relation with history and politics by making a journey through Muslim lands starting with Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and finally his father’s homeland Pakistan. He wishes to find some similarities, a common thread that supposedly joins a disparate group of people around the world: white, black, Asian, Caucasian, African through what he refers to as a ‘civilisation of faith’. What he discovers through his travel-memoire is a deeper understanding, an entrenched confusion about Islam and its relation to civilisation, culture and politics.
Turkey.
The first stop in Taseer’s journey is Turkey. This is a country I had myself travelled and admired during 2014. A Muslim country with a total secular outlook and the only non European NATO nation. The liberal outlook was there for all to see before everything went to hell in 2014. Taseer’s interactions with Abdullah ( this book was written in 2008) foretold of an explosion, the emergence of faith from the holds of Ataturk’s secular quarantine. Here Islam is differentiated from the rest of the religions as a world system, a system of rules and regulations that defy time and space. For Abdullah, its a mode of being, as temporal as being human. A Muslim cannot be separated from Islam, a moderate Muslim distances himself from Islam but that does not change the characteristics of the faith.
Syria.
The Islam Taseer encountered was more an evangelist one. It tempered all the world’s with an Islamic tinge. Syria was the perfect example of a closed world system, an ideal laboratory of isolation, a police state where the real world problems could be tuned out. But here Islam was used to justify or propagate a family’s hold on the society. A frustration and negativity, pent up and stoked and expressed in violence just a couple of years in the future.
Saudi Arabia.
Taseer saw the Arabianised version of Islam and came to realise how through Wahhabism, an Arabic culture, more Arabic than Islamic was being propagated in the name of the faith. A significant portion of the hajj or umrah consisted of rituals which predated Islam but were grounded in Arabia. Cultural Islam or the ‘corrupt’ Islam, of the Sufis, shrine and sacred threads was a result of the intermixing of Islam with local cultures. This was being subdued by a puritanical zeal with the aim of returning to the days of the early Arabs rather than the faith.
Iran.
The Islamic Republic, apparently the first political realisation of the faith, a possible model for what to expect, if the faith triumphed in other states, was a sadness in being. In the name of the faith, the regime had appropriated people’s lives, their joys and their humaneness. What was left was the magnification of trifles. The Republic had failed its people. In Taseer’s words ‘The emphasis on trifles and the hypocrisies that came with it had been institutionalised, turned into a form of control over the people who posed the greatest threat to the republic: its young.’
Pakistan.
Taseer’s terminus. This was a country that had been conceptualised as a homeland for Indian Muslims, an opposition to everything Hindu but still could not let go of the subcontinent’s idiosyncrasies. Pakistan had been cleansed of Hindus; barring a few thousands no diversity in terms of religion was permitted. Ironically the faith that was supposed to bridge cultural and ethnic differences failed to do so and in fact exacerbated the secession of its biggest chunk in 1971.
Finally, what seems most obvious is the experience of the living; faith as lived history, history as lived history and culture as lived history. Islam, by failing to allow for these ‘cultural’ aberrations and monogamising on its version of its history, the symbolic one, the Arabianised one then fails to give its followers freedom and that, my friends, is its failing.
December 30, 2020
This book does give you the sense - as most reviews suggest - that it is not a particularly accurate scholastic exercise given all the heavy inferences it chooses to draw. As the Guardian points out - imagine someone writing about contemporary Britain without understanding or speaking English on the basis of a month long trip.
Taseer travels from Turkey to Pakistan by road (curiously choosing to skip commenting on Jordan, Yemen and Oman - were they not as important in 2008-09?) and everywhere he meets lots of people (through the myriad of connections only the privileged are blessed with), chooses some conversations to focus on and makes Very Important deductions based on this. It is not that these are necessarily incorrect, but there is a sense of cherry picking certain parts and people over a 15 day to 1 month period to build a convenient narrative. It would have been fairer perhaps to make this a more personal travel journal rather than an unravelling of 'Modern socio-political Islam' as it is positioned.
Nonetheless, it is still very enlightening and educational. This is an 'outsider' travelling to these 5 countries - Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan - and trying to get into the skin of these places. Now these aren't countries that most of us would even be willing or able to travel towards for a vacation - and therefore my knowledge is very limited and heavy on stereotype. So it is a discovery however limited. The contrast between Turkey (forced to be secular in the streets but discovering religion in the sheets) versus Iran (religious in the streets, dismissively irreligious if not secular in the sheets), the pre-Civil War and Arab Spring Syria, an actual evening at Mecca, the schisms within Pakistan's Sindhi/Punjabis and the mujahhirs - all of this is quite enthralling and written most evocatively. Clearly the author is most at home when he writes about Pakistan - which he perhaps understands best - but I was personally particularly fascinated by the chapter on Iran.
This is interspersed with Taseer's own personal life tale as a second narrative through the book - which is delightfully voyeuristic. He is a brave man to lay bare his own family as he has even if they have largely been public figure and it almost acts as an intellectual soap-opera written in heavy prose.
It is interesting to observe that almost a decade after this work has been published - someone who has been so caustic about Islam and Pakistan is now persona-non-grata in India for pointing out similar tendencies and flaws. As they say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
Taseer travels from Turkey to Pakistan by road (curiously choosing to skip commenting on Jordan, Yemen and Oman - were they not as important in 2008-09?) and everywhere he meets lots of people (through the myriad of connections only the privileged are blessed with), chooses some conversations to focus on and makes Very Important deductions based on this. It is not that these are necessarily incorrect, but there is a sense of cherry picking certain parts and people over a 15 day to 1 month period to build a convenient narrative. It would have been fairer perhaps to make this a more personal travel journal rather than an unravelling of 'Modern socio-political Islam' as it is positioned.
Nonetheless, it is still very enlightening and educational. This is an 'outsider' travelling to these 5 countries - Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan - and trying to get into the skin of these places. Now these aren't countries that most of us would even be willing or able to travel towards for a vacation - and therefore my knowledge is very limited and heavy on stereotype. So it is a discovery however limited. The contrast between Turkey (forced to be secular in the streets but discovering religion in the sheets) versus Iran (religious in the streets, dismissively irreligious if not secular in the sheets), the pre-Civil War and Arab Spring Syria, an actual evening at Mecca, the schisms within Pakistan's Sindhi/Punjabis and the mujahhirs - all of this is quite enthralling and written most evocatively. Clearly the author is most at home when he writes about Pakistan - which he perhaps understands best - but I was personally particularly fascinated by the chapter on Iran.
This is interspersed with Taseer's own personal life tale as a second narrative through the book - which is delightfully voyeuristic. He is a brave man to lay bare his own family as he has even if they have largely been public figure and it almost acts as an intellectual soap-opera written in heavy prose.
It is interesting to observe that almost a decade after this work has been published - someone who has been so caustic about Islam and Pakistan is now persona-non-grata in India for pointing out similar tendencies and flaws. As they say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
December 24, 2022
Citaat : En de vraag die ik mezelf maar bleef stellen, was: hoe kon het dat mijn vader, iemand die altijd beweerd had niet te geloven in de grondbeginselen van de islam, ondanks dat toch een moslim was?’
Review : Aatish Taseer is een kind van een Indiase moeder en een Pakistaanse vader en groept op in Delhi. Hij leeft alleen met zijn moeder en heeft geen contact met zijn vader. Op zijn eenentwintigste krijgt Aatish een brief van hem en hebben ze weer voorzichtig contact met elkaar. De culturele verschillen tussen beiden– Aatish is Indiër groeide op bij de sikh familie van zijn moeder , zijn vader is Pakistani en moslim – leiden echter tot een gespannenrelatie. Aatish besluit een reis te maken door het Midden-Oosten ominzicht te krijgen in de achtergrond van zijn vader. Hij begint inIstanbul en reist via Mekka, de heiligsteplaats voor moslims, naar Iran en Pakistan. Hij spreekt met veel vooral jonge moslimsen ontdekt dat die vaak een heel andere belevingswereldhebben dan hun ouders: ze zijn fel tegen het Westen en fanatiek in de beleving van hun godsdienst. Taseers reiseindigt in de Pakistaanse stad Lahore, waarhij een emotionele ontmoeting heeft metzijn vader, in de nacht dat Benazir Bhuttovermoord wordt.
De auteur (1980) studeerde Frans en politicologie en werkte een tijd lang voor Time Magazine. Hij woont afwisselend in Londen en Delhi. Hij noemt zichzelf, zoals zijn vader, 'cultuur-moslim'. Als iemand die niet religieus is opgevoed, wordt hij toch geraakt door de broederlijke aandacht waarmee hij door andere moslims wordt benaderd. Een interessant, boeiend en authentiek verslag.
Review : Aatish Taseer is een kind van een Indiase moeder en een Pakistaanse vader en groept op in Delhi. Hij leeft alleen met zijn moeder en heeft geen contact met zijn vader. Op zijn eenentwintigste krijgt Aatish een brief van hem en hebben ze weer voorzichtig contact met elkaar. De culturele verschillen tussen beiden– Aatish is Indiër groeide op bij de sikh familie van zijn moeder , zijn vader is Pakistani en moslim – leiden echter tot een gespannenrelatie. Aatish besluit een reis te maken door het Midden-Oosten ominzicht te krijgen in de achtergrond van zijn vader. Hij begint inIstanbul en reist via Mekka, de heiligsteplaats voor moslims, naar Iran en Pakistan. Hij spreekt met veel vooral jonge moslimsen ontdekt dat die vaak een heel andere belevingswereldhebben dan hun ouders: ze zijn fel tegen het Westen en fanatiek in de beleving van hun godsdienst. Taseers reiseindigt in de Pakistaanse stad Lahore, waarhij een emotionele ontmoeting heeft metzijn vader, in de nacht dat Benazir Bhuttovermoord wordt.
De auteur (1980) studeerde Frans en politicologie en werkte een tijd lang voor Time Magazine. Hij woont afwisselend in Londen en Delhi. Hij noemt zichzelf, zoals zijn vader, 'cultuur-moslim'. Als iemand die niet religieus is opgevoed, wordt hij toch geraakt door de broederlijke aandacht waarmee hij door andere moslims wordt benaderd. Een interessant, boeiend en authentiek verslag.
February 26, 2021
In a recent review for Poetry Magazine, the poet and journalist Austin Allen asserts that T. S. Eliot’s body of work “entices all of us, even the most Prufrockian schlub, to view history as personal—and to personify it as the source of our daily temptations and frustrations” (September 2015). Aatish Taseer, no schlub, Prufrockian or otherwise, in his 2011 memoir, Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, nevertheless has written a contemporary substantiation to Allen's claim.
Taseer personifies the psychological world he grew up in, Punjabi, India, haunted by its pre-Partition past. A deeply serious person, tall, handsome, engaging, considerate, with an encyclopedic knowledge of Indian languages, culture and history, Taseer’s eyes, even at instances of high – or low – hilarity, are shadowed not only with his own past and its disillusionments, but with disenchantment, sorrow, in what he sees as the cultural fall of a century. He is taken with the idea of the 1947 split of Pakistan from India as a symbol of himself, or perhaps it works the other way around: perhaps he is a symbol of it. His eight-month journey through strongholds of the Islamic world – with only his British passport to defend him - and he dispassionately interviews locals as he goes – begins in Turkey, where politics and faith are purposely, sometimes heedlessly, insensibly divorced, proceeds through Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, where politics and religion are one, and ends at ailing Pakistan – when he crosses on foot – demonstrating an admirable lack of prudence.
Henry James, in his essay "The Art of Fiction,” offers this advice to writers: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” Taseer is not looking for corroboration of a position he already holds, but for understanding of the phenomena he observes, beginning with an alienated Muslim teenager in Britain, and ending with his deceptively unfettered father, the Pakistani businessman and politician who was assassinated by his own bodyguard in 2012: pretzel logic, irrationality, fanaticism, rebellion, and fear, all in relation to a history embattled with the present, a history that is ever eroding from consciousness. Taseer asks, What is the nature and source of this faith that has become, in the modern world, so deeply politicized? What has happened, if they still exist, to cultural Muslims, whom he defines in an article for the Huffington Post, but ends Stranger to History with a sense of separation from, as: “intellectuals, poets, writers [who] took great pride in the challenge that they, as men of learning, were obliged to present to men of faith. Long before dissent and irreverence came to be seen as a Western contamination, they had been an organic part of the Islam of the Indian subcontinent … [and are] now most endangered of endangered creatures: the atheist Muslim. A man, who though not religious, was nonetheless steeped in the culture of Indian Islam; an unbeliever, yes; but, by no means, deracinated … [who] represented a certain intellectual and cultural self-confidence … this kind of man had, in our time, all but disappeared … In a world of ever sharper polarities, the cultural Muslim, around till just the other day, had been edged out; he was, in some respects, the supreme casualty of the age” (November 2012).
In the end, however, Taseer feels estranged, and herein is the source for the book’s title, even from this notion of the cultural Muslim. He is caught by conjunctions between Islam and “politics somehow,” a phrase lobbed at him during an interrogation in Iran, a phrase that strikes him as so calculatedly disingenuous that he turns it over and over in his head throughout the center of the book. Islam’s “small and irrelevant rules,” he concludes, “were turned on the people to serve the faith’s political vision. For the faith to remain in power in a complex [modern] society, it had to beat down the bright and rebellious members of that society with its simplicities.”
Stranger to History is studded with winning observations. The game of cricket, so popular in the subcontinent, is “a dress rehearsal for war;” Iran’s police state is a “tyranny of trifles;” Punjab, bisected in Partition, retains unity in “language, song, poetry, clan affiliation, and a funereal obsession with certain tragic romances.” Ha.
At times, however, Taseer loses track of his readers, his sense of audience, and although he is mostly careful to explain, he occasionally becomes mired in what is obvious to him, and will fall into sentences that are inexplicable: “In the end, the story could only be seen in its context, a vignette in Pakistan’s Hobbesian political life. The extreme shows of defiance – not signing the admission or not paying the ransom – could also come to seem like bravado rather than courage when the people who endured them saw them as training rather than injustice.” It’s these last four words I cannot unpack: training rather than injustice? However, this failure may be my own. Possibly, I just don't get it.
But if I am right, abrupt summations like this one are the book’s only flaw. And although its publication was four years ago and concerns a world where there have been marked escalations in the troubles Taseer explores, it is important reading for those of us, West and East, who hope to better understand, and with knowledge become better able to act in ways that will help us circumvent more tragedy.
“Decay is real,” Taseer told me in an informal interview, ruing society’s current disengagement with the past. As much as he may see intersection in his own plural history, including disconnection, as an analogy for what is happening in the larger social order, it is no stretch to see ourselves similarly. Our personal memories are shaded by our search for patterns. And the days of our ancestors live inside us, whether we recognize the fact or not.
Taseer personifies the psychological world he grew up in, Punjabi, India, haunted by its pre-Partition past. A deeply serious person, tall, handsome, engaging, considerate, with an encyclopedic knowledge of Indian languages, culture and history, Taseer’s eyes, even at instances of high – or low – hilarity, are shadowed not only with his own past and its disillusionments, but with disenchantment, sorrow, in what he sees as the cultural fall of a century. He is taken with the idea of the 1947 split of Pakistan from India as a symbol of himself, or perhaps it works the other way around: perhaps he is a symbol of it. His eight-month journey through strongholds of the Islamic world – with only his British passport to defend him - and he dispassionately interviews locals as he goes – begins in Turkey, where politics and faith are purposely, sometimes heedlessly, insensibly divorced, proceeds through Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, where politics and religion are one, and ends at ailing Pakistan – when he crosses on foot – demonstrating an admirable lack of prudence.
Henry James, in his essay "The Art of Fiction,” offers this advice to writers: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” Taseer is not looking for corroboration of a position he already holds, but for understanding of the phenomena he observes, beginning with an alienated Muslim teenager in Britain, and ending with his deceptively unfettered father, the Pakistani businessman and politician who was assassinated by his own bodyguard in 2012: pretzel logic, irrationality, fanaticism, rebellion, and fear, all in relation to a history embattled with the present, a history that is ever eroding from consciousness. Taseer asks, What is the nature and source of this faith that has become, in the modern world, so deeply politicized? What has happened, if they still exist, to cultural Muslims, whom he defines in an article for the Huffington Post, but ends Stranger to History with a sense of separation from, as: “intellectuals, poets, writers [who] took great pride in the challenge that they, as men of learning, were obliged to present to men of faith. Long before dissent and irreverence came to be seen as a Western contamination, they had been an organic part of the Islam of the Indian subcontinent … [and are] now most endangered of endangered creatures: the atheist Muslim. A man, who though not religious, was nonetheless steeped in the culture of Indian Islam; an unbeliever, yes; but, by no means, deracinated … [who] represented a certain intellectual and cultural self-confidence … this kind of man had, in our time, all but disappeared … In a world of ever sharper polarities, the cultural Muslim, around till just the other day, had been edged out; he was, in some respects, the supreme casualty of the age” (November 2012).
In the end, however, Taseer feels estranged, and herein is the source for the book’s title, even from this notion of the cultural Muslim. He is caught by conjunctions between Islam and “politics somehow,” a phrase lobbed at him during an interrogation in Iran, a phrase that strikes him as so calculatedly disingenuous that he turns it over and over in his head throughout the center of the book. Islam’s “small and irrelevant rules,” he concludes, “were turned on the people to serve the faith’s political vision. For the faith to remain in power in a complex [modern] society, it had to beat down the bright and rebellious members of that society with its simplicities.”
Stranger to History is studded with winning observations. The game of cricket, so popular in the subcontinent, is “a dress rehearsal for war;” Iran’s police state is a “tyranny of trifles;” Punjab, bisected in Partition, retains unity in “language, song, poetry, clan affiliation, and a funereal obsession with certain tragic romances.” Ha.
At times, however, Taseer loses track of his readers, his sense of audience, and although he is mostly careful to explain, he occasionally becomes mired in what is obvious to him, and will fall into sentences that are inexplicable: “In the end, the story could only be seen in its context, a vignette in Pakistan’s Hobbesian political life. The extreme shows of defiance – not signing the admission or not paying the ransom – could also come to seem like bravado rather than courage when the people who endured them saw them as training rather than injustice.” It’s these last four words I cannot unpack: training rather than injustice? However, this failure may be my own. Possibly, I just don't get it.
But if I am right, abrupt summations like this one are the book’s only flaw. And although its publication was four years ago and concerns a world where there have been marked escalations in the troubles Taseer explores, it is important reading for those of us, West and East, who hope to better understand, and with knowledge become better able to act in ways that will help us circumvent more tragedy.
“Decay is real,” Taseer told me in an informal interview, ruing society’s current disengagement with the past. As much as he may see intersection in his own plural history, including disconnection, as an analogy for what is happening in the larger social order, it is no stretch to see ourselves similarly. Our personal memories are shaded by our search for patterns. And the days of our ancestors live inside us, whether we recognize the fact or not.
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December 31, 2020A son's journey to History of family and Islam
What is it to be a Muslim in the middle east and other theocracies. To answer this question, Atish travels from Turkey to Syria and eastward to Saudi, Iran and finally to Pakistan, to meet his estranged dad, the flamboyant Salman Taseer who was later shot by his bodyguard, for sheltering Asiya Bibi against the hudood laws.
The not so good part is that the travelogue is just like any other diary writing, the descriptions not so vivid and little alien to me, as he goes thru meeting different folks in each of the countries.
The good part is his story of finding his father and growing up as a kid with a Muslim name in a sardarji, the drama of a love story across the border n all.. Fathers, they protect when young, direct when you grow and children grow cold as their age advances, what happens when this dad is not there as a person, but as a ghost in newspapers, headlines etc.. These troubling questions are faced when Atish travels to understand what it means to be a Muslim across the lands and thereby connect with Salman at a much better level..
The best part is the enterprise of understanding faith in different countries, what it means to be a Muslim culturally, how it has shaped, built or defaced societies.. What regimes have done in the name of Islam to its population, his experiences in Iran leading to an expulsion etc etc.. One would just dream to take such an adventure.
Finally 4 stars for blending personal history with history, geography of faith, the honesty of his life story and audacity of such an attempt. Now on to Sir Naipaul's book on the same topic..
What is it to be a Muslim in the middle east and other theocracies. To answer this question, Atish travels from Turkey to Syria and eastward to Saudi, Iran and finally to Pakistan, to meet his estranged dad, the flamboyant Salman Taseer who was later shot by his bodyguard, for sheltering Asiya Bibi against the hudood laws.
The not so good part is that the travelogue is just like any other diary writing, the descriptions not so vivid and little alien to me, as he goes thru meeting different folks in each of the countries.
The good part is his story of finding his father and growing up as a kid with a Muslim name in a sardarji, the drama of a love story across the border n all.. Fathers, they protect when young, direct when you grow and children grow cold as their age advances, what happens when this dad is not there as a person, but as a ghost in newspapers, headlines etc.. These troubling questions are faced when Atish travels to understand what it means to be a Muslim across the lands and thereby connect with Salman at a much better level..
The best part is the enterprise of understanding faith in different countries, what it means to be a Muslim culturally, how it has shaped, built or defaced societies.. What regimes have done in the name of Islam to its population, his experiences in Iran leading to an expulsion etc etc.. One would just dream to take such an adventure.
Finally 4 stars for blending personal history with history, geography of faith, the honesty of his life story and audacity of such an attempt. Now on to Sir Naipaul's book on the same topic..
January 25, 2016
I had high expectations from this book, but it left me underwhelmed. Although this is an important piece of work and does enlighten and also entertain at many points, but it does not really captivate the reader. The book talks of the authors journey through the Islamic lands of Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan and along the way we get to meet several interesting characters like a Mujahid from London who aspires to be a suicide bomber, a hardline Madrasa teacher in the secular Istanbul, a Krishna follower in Tehran who applies his own twists to the chants to keep himself safe from the fundamentalist regime and a feudal lord in 21st century Sindh. The book seems more like a work of reportage, the author does not seem to question or seek answers to the presence of an aspiring suicide bomber in the middle of UK or the rise of a hyper religious regime in Turkey after decades of state backed policy of secularism.
July 8, 2015
The Author has a Pakistani father (who had left) and an Indian Sikh Mother and he travels not only to Pakistan but also to Turkey, Syria and Iran. Why? To understand what is it actually to be a Muslim in the present world.
While he roams around the cities and countryside of these Islamic homelands, he experiences how these all are similar because of religion but different due to culture. From the fiercely secular Turkey, the new global centre of Islam which is Syria, the forced Islamic Republic that Is Iran to finally a failed state, which is becoming 'Stranger to its own history', called Pakistan.
It's not JUST a travelogue. It's a son's journey to try to connect and know the father which he never had and the faith and religion which he had never followed diligently.
One of the best NON FICTION that I have read this year.
While he roams around the cities and countryside of these Islamic homelands, he experiences how these all are similar because of religion but different due to culture. From the fiercely secular Turkey, the new global centre of Islam which is Syria, the forced Islamic Republic that Is Iran to finally a failed state, which is becoming 'Stranger to its own history', called Pakistan.
It's not JUST a travelogue. It's a son's journey to try to connect and know the father which he never had and the faith and religion which he had never followed diligently.
One of the best NON FICTION that I have read this year.
December 25, 2011
The idea of the book is interesting. It is interesting to discover the religion of your father, which you really did not know. Aatish's journey went through Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria, Iran and Pakistan: an interesting mix of cultures and ways of living religion. However, I did not like in the book the analysis of the writer on many issues that he faced. It took us a life time to understand the interlinks between religion and culture, what Islam is and how it is used by different groups to take advantage of it. The issue is very complicated, and I think the projections made by the author did not provide all the time the reasonable analysis..
March 31, 2011
Interesting concept but the two strands don't come together. There is no sense that he is sincerely interested in exploring Islam or able to unwind his relationship with his father. Towards the end he some interesting observations and comments about the partition of India and Pakistan - but it wasn't worth slogging though the whole book to get to them.
January 4, 2013
Interesting story of a man attempting to establish a relationship with an absent father & fa's religion - Islam. Well worth reading for anyone interested in an insight into Islam as it is lived today & India-Pakistan relations.
November 1, 2013
The story missed sync a lot, Got tempted from its title 'stranger to the history'. It Ends abruptly. Nothing to take away from it.
February 28, 2017
Fascinerende reiseskildring fra muslimske land, innenfor en ramme av en sønn som forsøker å forstå sin fraværende og avvisende fars muslimske bakgrunn og kultur
May 11, 2021
“Nationality and race were my markers, but for the people coming to Abu Nour, these differences were trumped by a greater sense of allegiance.”
Aatish Taseer uncovers what it means to be Muslim today, undertaking a journey that goes through Turkey, the Islamic heartlands of Syria and Iran, ending in Pakistan. Stranger to History is not just about his discovering Islam, but also about his coming to terms with his estranged Pakistani father, Salmaan Taseer.
Taseer has interwoven two deeply personal elements in his memoir, which at times made an interesting read, and at other times, felt like a drag.
Aatish Taseer uncovers what it means to be Muslim today, undertaking a journey that goes through Turkey, the Islamic heartlands of Syria and Iran, ending in Pakistan. Stranger to History is not just about his discovering Islam, but also about his coming to terms with his estranged Pakistani father, Salmaan Taseer.
Taseer has interwoven two deeply personal elements in his memoir, which at times made an interesting read, and at other times, felt like a drag.
July 10, 2018
My first Taseer book recommended by a collegue. Insightful, especially to a person who has very little knowledge of Islam. He writes well , excellent vocabulary. As a reader one could sense his need to reach out to have father. This journey was on account of that desire.
December 10, 2022
3.5 actually!
This is the first travel writing book I have picked. It's more like a memoir of the author, his relationship with his father and how he is British Indian Pakistani.
I enjoyed the book, The travelogue to Turkey, Syria, Iran and Pakistan was interesting. How author meets people who have different understanding of being a Muslim but I really loved when author meets Abdullah in Turkey, his understanding and belief in Islam impressed me and I think it impressed author as well because he mentions him in almost every chapter.
Iran made me upset, I feel sad for the people who are fed up with cultural Islam. I would say Cultural Islam because the Islam that should be preached is nowhere to be found.
Extremely upset because people stopped to believe in the religion. The more you drift away from religion, the more this world would become ugly. That's what has happened with Iran & the more you force religion on someone, the more they rebuke.
What I didn't like about the writing is that author really thinks highly of India and how it is better than Pakistan but the truth is both countries are same. Same hatred for each other, same competition. And not everything about religion needs to be over analysed. Everything need not to be connected with the world system and politics. And if author doesn't consider himself a Muslim, he doesn't need to pretend he is. and I don't want to know about Cultural Muslim. Either you are a believer or you are not. Don't make sections in the religion.
This is the first travel writing book I have picked. It's more like a memoir of the author, his relationship with his father and how he is British Indian Pakistani.
I enjoyed the book, The travelogue to Turkey, Syria, Iran and Pakistan was interesting. How author meets people who have different understanding of being a Muslim but I really loved when author meets Abdullah in Turkey, his understanding and belief in Islam impressed me and I think it impressed author as well because he mentions him in almost every chapter.
Iran made me upset, I feel sad for the people who are fed up with cultural Islam. I would say Cultural Islam because the Islam that should be preached is nowhere to be found.
Extremely upset because people stopped to believe in the religion. The more you drift away from religion, the more this world would become ugly. That's what has happened with Iran & the more you force religion on someone, the more they rebuke.
What I didn't like about the writing is that author really thinks highly of India and how it is better than Pakistan but the truth is both countries are same. Same hatred for each other, same competition. And not everything about religion needs to be over analysed. Everything need not to be connected with the world system and politics. And if author doesn't consider himself a Muslim, he doesn't need to pretend he is. and I don't want to know about Cultural Muslim. Either you are a believer or you are not. Don't make sections in the religion.
October 6, 2016
Between a three and four.
Aatish Taseer is wonderfully gifted writer. There is no doubt in that. To write a travel memoir on his journey towards his father via religion is no easy task. However there is some naivety that crops up in the book overall, which can mostly be attributed to the time when Aatish wrote the book (probably in his mid 20s). I strongly believe mid 20s is when a person grows up as a person and learns a lot about the world around him. It is interesting that Aatish exhibits that growth in the introduction to the revised edition (which came out a year after Salmaan Taseer was assasinated).
I've read travel memoirs mostly by William Dalrymple and one can definitely see the ease with which Dalrymple weaves stories into his journeys seemlessly. Though it is gross injustice to compare the two of them (considering both writers are good in their own right), Aatish could take a leaf from Dalrymple's style guide.
Looking forward to reading 'The Way Things Were' next!
Aatish Taseer is wonderfully gifted writer. There is no doubt in that. To write a travel memoir on his journey towards his father via religion is no easy task. However there is some naivety that crops up in the book overall, which can mostly be attributed to the time when Aatish wrote the book (probably in his mid 20s). I strongly believe mid 20s is when a person grows up as a person and learns a lot about the world around him. It is interesting that Aatish exhibits that growth in the introduction to the revised edition (which came out a year after Salmaan Taseer was assasinated).
I've read travel memoirs mostly by William Dalrymple and one can definitely see the ease with which Dalrymple weaves stories into his journeys seemlessly. Though it is gross injustice to compare the two of them (considering both writers are good in their own right), Aatish could take a leaf from Dalrymple's style guide.
Looking forward to reading 'The Way Things Were' next!
July 7, 2018
Taseer’s autobiographical account on discovering religion through the Islamic world presents an interesting contrast between the cultural, political vs the spiritual aspect of Islam. Taseer, half Pakistani and half Indian, deals with the aspects of the subcontinent history and it’s link with the religion through the larger purview of history. Being raised in a atheist household almost two decades later in the same country as Taseer, the struggle to come in terms with an identity hit home. The book captures beautifully a story of self discovery and highlights what Islam actually entails in it’s world.
August 28, 2020
The first time I picked up a book by Aatish Taseer was for no reason other than the inexplicable allure that the name ‘Aatish’ holds for me (weird reason to pick a book, I know). When I later read more about him, I knew I would definitely read all his books someday. I finally started with his first perhaps most personal narrative. I loved it, I was changed by it.
.
Stranger to History is ostensibly a travelogue-meets-memoir. The journey, though stretching from the Western to the Eastern limits of the Islamic World, is more inward than outward. It is simply the quest that most of us continue to undertake throughout our lives- a search for the self. Taseer, born to an Indian mother and a Pakistani father, stands at the cusp of a splintered history. No wonder then that he sets out to understand what being his estranged father’s son means for his place in the world. And for that, he must understand what makes his father, a non-practicing, identify so closely with Islam. Starting in Turkey and moving through Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, he meets men and women of both his father’s and his own generation to understand ‘political Islam’ and that much-vaunted ‘Civilisation of Faith’. The experiences and conversations he collects on this journey bring him closer to understanding his own place in the world. He then travels through Pakistan, acquainting himself with a country he can lay validly claim to as his own but has little knowledge of. The journey comes a full circle and ends at the doorstep of his father, on the night that Benazir Bhutto is assassinated, bringing to a close an era in the life of Pakistan and his father.
.
This book reiterates my belief that unless we know where we come from, we will never understand where we are going. The personal and political histories that have brought us to this moment in our lives, must be explored and appreciated, before they start to fade into oblivion. It was a learning experience for me in many ways too, introducing me to the undercurrents of the Islamic World through a novel lens. Though Taseer’s experiences in other countries were riveting to say the least, it was his account of his time in Pakistan on both his visits that touched me most. It felt like a homecoming after many years away, with all its attendant discomfort and unfamiliarity. The relationship with his father perhaps mirrors the tenuous bond between our two countries- an intermingling of the personal with the political.
.
Stranger to History is ostensibly a travelogue-meets-memoir. The journey, though stretching from the Western to the Eastern limits of the Islamic World, is more inward than outward. It is simply the quest that most of us continue to undertake throughout our lives- a search for the self. Taseer, born to an Indian mother and a Pakistani father, stands at the cusp of a splintered history. No wonder then that he sets out to understand what being his estranged father’s son means for his place in the world. And for that, he must understand what makes his father, a non-practicing, identify so closely with Islam. Starting in Turkey and moving through Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, he meets men and women of both his father’s and his own generation to understand ‘political Islam’ and that much-vaunted ‘Civilisation of Faith’. The experiences and conversations he collects on this journey bring him closer to understanding his own place in the world. He then travels through Pakistan, acquainting himself with a country he can lay validly claim to as his own but has little knowledge of. The journey comes a full circle and ends at the doorstep of his father, on the night that Benazir Bhutto is assassinated, bringing to a close an era in the life of Pakistan and his father.
.
This book reiterates my belief that unless we know where we come from, we will never understand where we are going. The personal and political histories that have brought us to this moment in our lives, must be explored and appreciated, before they start to fade into oblivion. It was a learning experience for me in many ways too, introducing me to the undercurrents of the Islamic World through a novel lens. Though Taseer’s experiences in other countries were riveting to say the least, it was his account of his time in Pakistan on both his visits that touched me most. It felt like a homecoming after many years away, with all its attendant discomfort and unfamiliarity. The relationship with his father perhaps mirrors the tenuous bond between our two countries- an intermingling of the personal with the political.
October 15, 2021
Aatish Taseer was conceived of a whirlwind affair between a Pakistani Muslim politician and an Indian Sikh Journalist. And life can never be simple born on such fault lines of incompatible religious and political outlooks. This memoir is interesting because it shows in glaring light how an individual’s life gets affected by these societal constructs of statehood and religious identity. Aatish did a commendable job at documenting these fault lines in lucid prose and insightful observations while visiting Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan capturing how faith has affected the broader society. Another great writer, V.S. Naipaul did a similar journey across some of these countries and made more or less similar observations, but with Aatish it was more of a personal discovery whereas Naipaul’s observations were more of a neutral and unbiased spectator.
Aatish’s father left him and his mother when he was just 18 months old and he was raised alone by his Sikh mother in Delhi. All his childhood he lived with a ghost of an absent father and tried to make sense of his absence from his life. As a grown up he wanted to understand and decode these rifts created by ideological and political differences that are powerful enough to make a father abandon his own child and wife. For Aatish it was an attempt towards personal discovery, a pilgrimage of sorts. He wanted to understand how Islamic faith can seep in a society and trump familial bindings as well as moral and ethical values. He starts his journey in Turkey where he discovers how political regime is trying to keep faith at bay causing dichotomy in society. People attracted to faith end up creating their own ghettos, in spite of heavy censure from the state. They have built little glasshouses where faith can be planted keeping out the vices of modernity and state persecution. The young's of the society are forced to learn secular values at schools by state but at homes they live within the shackles of faith introduced to them by their families and that is confusing to them. He observes that society has got divided among the faithfuls and not so faithfuls and is almost on cusp of open conflict between these two worldviews.
Next Aatish moves to Syria in search of a purer form of Islam but there he finds that regime is using faith to further their own agenda. All problems of governance are blamed not on an inefficient and corrupt government but on ‘world system’ that somehow is limiting the purity of faith. He finds that faithful from all over the world have congregated in Syria in search of the pure faith which they cannot experience in their native lands. This search for purity has made the society so finicky that they’re ready to kill and destroy for some cartoons published in a far away Norway, in the name of faith. Aatish observed that blaming outsiders for their internal problems is an attitude of a defeated civilisation which is stuck in the past long gone glory.
Aatish's next stop is the headquarters of faith i.e. Saudi Arabia, there he performs Umrah at Grand Mosque but gets chided for wearing the articles of another faith on his body by the believers. Aatish laments the fact Islam is so exclusive that it can’t tolerate even a petty signature from a different faith on a believers body. But his own internal struggle with faith is more threatening to him than a verbal slight from a faithful. Aatish also observes that faith is in every aspect of life in Saudi Arabia and that stifles any progress or change. He questions this aspect of faith where it has to be everywhere in an individual’s life, in food, in clothing, even in bedroom. He observes that this was not always like this but is a recent phenomena when Sunni Wahhabism took hold in Saudi Arabia with the discovery of oil.
Aatish interested in seeing the other flavour of Shia Islam lands next at Tehran but there he observes that regime has used faith to criminalise the whole society. People have been booked and even beaten mercilessly for any petty misdemeanours like wearing a T-Shirt or putting lipstick, he calls it a tyranny of trifles. Interestingly he manages to meet a group of Iskon followers in Tehran who have left faith to go and start worshipping Krishna, Hindu god. He observes that regime’s brutality has disenchanted the whole society with mosques left empty and people openly questioning the basic tenets of faith. The highlight of this section is the heart rending story of a woman who has lost count of the times she has been booked and beaten, in particular one instance where she was beaten mercilessly for no reason et al by a group of plainclothesman. The regime finally got sniff of Aatish and he was questioned by security agencies and was not able to get an extension of his tourist visa forcing him to leave abruptly for Pakistan, his final destination.
For Aatish, Pakistan was not much different from India, he observed that though the country was created on the principle of faith but it is now anchored more on the negation of India than anything else. He visits a feudal lord in Sindh province and observes that feudalism is so prevalent in Sindh because of the lack of a middle class, society is made up of only haves and have nots. Hindus who earlier formed bulk of middle class in Sindh moved out during partition and Muhajirs who migrated to Sindh from India could not fill that gap causing a stunted society. He moves to Hyderabad next where he encounters a community stuck in the past, left destitute by the state. Faith has not been able create a cohesive society and he observes open enmity between Sindhi’s and Muhajirs communities causing widespread disaffection with faith and people waiting for the next big idea that can keep the society intact. Even the mighty Indus has been reduced to a thin stream of water not because of faith but degradation of faith in Pakistan is a good analogy for a river getting dry due to climate change.
Finally Aatish reaches Lahore where he meets his father after a long gap but could not get that closeness from him that he expected. He remains baffled why his father is still not ready to accept him as his own son, and how social constructs like faith and politics are still able to suppress the basic human emotions.
It’s a good book to understand the impact of faith on Islamic societies and how faith is being used by corrupt regimes to stifle freedom and enquiry in these societies.
Aatish’s father left him and his mother when he was just 18 months old and he was raised alone by his Sikh mother in Delhi. All his childhood he lived with a ghost of an absent father and tried to make sense of his absence from his life. As a grown up he wanted to understand and decode these rifts created by ideological and political differences that are powerful enough to make a father abandon his own child and wife. For Aatish it was an attempt towards personal discovery, a pilgrimage of sorts. He wanted to understand how Islamic faith can seep in a society and trump familial bindings as well as moral and ethical values. He starts his journey in Turkey where he discovers how political regime is trying to keep faith at bay causing dichotomy in society. People attracted to faith end up creating their own ghettos, in spite of heavy censure from the state. They have built little glasshouses where faith can be planted keeping out the vices of modernity and state persecution. The young's of the society are forced to learn secular values at schools by state but at homes they live within the shackles of faith introduced to them by their families and that is confusing to them. He observes that society has got divided among the faithfuls and not so faithfuls and is almost on cusp of open conflict between these two worldviews.
Next Aatish moves to Syria in search of a purer form of Islam but there he finds that regime is using faith to further their own agenda. All problems of governance are blamed not on an inefficient and corrupt government but on ‘world system’ that somehow is limiting the purity of faith. He finds that faithful from all over the world have congregated in Syria in search of the pure faith which they cannot experience in their native lands. This search for purity has made the society so finicky that they’re ready to kill and destroy for some cartoons published in a far away Norway, in the name of faith. Aatish observed that blaming outsiders for their internal problems is an attitude of a defeated civilisation which is stuck in the past long gone glory.
Aatish's next stop is the headquarters of faith i.e. Saudi Arabia, there he performs Umrah at Grand Mosque but gets chided for wearing the articles of another faith on his body by the believers. Aatish laments the fact Islam is so exclusive that it can’t tolerate even a petty signature from a different faith on a believers body. But his own internal struggle with faith is more threatening to him than a verbal slight from a faithful. Aatish also observes that faith is in every aspect of life in Saudi Arabia and that stifles any progress or change. He questions this aspect of faith where it has to be everywhere in an individual’s life, in food, in clothing, even in bedroom. He observes that this was not always like this but is a recent phenomena when Sunni Wahhabism took hold in Saudi Arabia with the discovery of oil.
Aatish interested in seeing the other flavour of Shia Islam lands next at Tehran but there he observes that regime has used faith to criminalise the whole society. People have been booked and even beaten mercilessly for any petty misdemeanours like wearing a T-Shirt or putting lipstick, he calls it a tyranny of trifles. Interestingly he manages to meet a group of Iskon followers in Tehran who have left faith to go and start worshipping Krishna, Hindu god. He observes that regime’s brutality has disenchanted the whole society with mosques left empty and people openly questioning the basic tenets of faith. The highlight of this section is the heart rending story of a woman who has lost count of the times she has been booked and beaten, in particular one instance where she was beaten mercilessly for no reason et al by a group of plainclothesman. The regime finally got sniff of Aatish and he was questioned by security agencies and was not able to get an extension of his tourist visa forcing him to leave abruptly for Pakistan, his final destination.
For Aatish, Pakistan was not much different from India, he observed that though the country was created on the principle of faith but it is now anchored more on the negation of India than anything else. He visits a feudal lord in Sindh province and observes that feudalism is so prevalent in Sindh because of the lack of a middle class, society is made up of only haves and have nots. Hindus who earlier formed bulk of middle class in Sindh moved out during partition and Muhajirs who migrated to Sindh from India could not fill that gap causing a stunted society. He moves to Hyderabad next where he encounters a community stuck in the past, left destitute by the state. Faith has not been able create a cohesive society and he observes open enmity between Sindhi’s and Muhajirs communities causing widespread disaffection with faith and people waiting for the next big idea that can keep the society intact. Even the mighty Indus has been reduced to a thin stream of water not because of faith but degradation of faith in Pakistan is a good analogy for a river getting dry due to climate change.
Finally Aatish reaches Lahore where he meets his father after a long gap but could not get that closeness from him that he expected. He remains baffled why his father is still not ready to accept him as his own son, and how social constructs like faith and politics are still able to suppress the basic human emotions.
It’s a good book to understand the impact of faith on Islamic societies and how faith is being used by corrupt regimes to stifle freedom and enquiry in these societies.
September 14, 2013
This book was quite an undertaking for a young journalist struggling to reconcile his identity and heritage. Taseer, grandson of a famous Pakistani poet, son of a "cultural Muslim" Pakistani politician and an Indian Sikh journalist mother sets out on a journey to finally reconnect with his father and learn what it means to be a Muslim.Challenged by his father to learn more, he travels from Istanbul through Turkey, Syria,Saudi Arabia, Iran and finally, Pakistan, discovering along the way the how religion and politics mix in each of these lands and how the Islamic world is tied together in an overarching ache to regain its former glory. Many times reading the book I felt the author's youth and was surprised by his naivete in some situations.
The main thing I got out of the book was a new understanding of history. The Muslims Taseer meets in each country are tied together by a common history, the history of Islam, that connects them across geographical and political boundaries. This is most clear when Taseer writes about the partition of Pakistan and India, and Pakistan's jettisoning of its Indian past in favor of the Islamic past, creating a greater divide between the two nations than any border. In many ways, this is a frightening book, but also one that helped me get a better grasp on the world as it changes around me.
The main thing I got out of the book was a new understanding of history. The Muslims Taseer meets in each country are tied together by a common history, the history of Islam, that connects them across geographical and political boundaries. This is most clear when Taseer writes about the partition of Pakistan and India, and Pakistan's jettisoning of its Indian past in favor of the Islamic past, creating a greater divide between the two nations than any border. In many ways, this is a frightening book, but also one that helped me get a better grasp on the world as it changes around me.
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January 21, 2019There's something to be said for reading a much-talked about book years after it comes out. You are able to read it with fewer filters, and with less judgement. I approached it, unwilling to either admire or dislike, and found it to be useful and relevant. The information in it is mostly anecdotal and experiential (which is as the author intended the book to be) and the writing good. The great sadness of reading it in 2019, of course, is that the chapters about Pakistan, and especially about how India was different, now seem to be in need of an update.
September 9, 2012
An interesting narration of a son's journey starting from Istanbul to Lahore to find out about what is to be a muslim. This book talks about the life, culture of people in the different Islamic countries and how it affects him as an individual and his relationship with his father, Salmaan Taseer.
March 11, 2015
A fascinating trip through Islam- political, geographic and most importantly, cultural. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to gain a nuanced perspective on Islam through any of the above lenses.
November 22, 2016
It was a little boring to read for me as i am used to reading fast paced books. So it took a little bit of time to complete it. But it was a good book and I got to know few things that i didn't know before.
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