Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands by Aatish Taseer; Picador; Price: Rs.495; 323 pp
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Post 9/11 amidst the rise of global Islamic terrorism, interpreting and explaining radical Islam and its fanatical followers has emerged as a major industry which has kept printing presses humming. Yet most of the rash of analyses of militant Islam have been academic publications explaining the political, historical and cultural contexts from which Muslim extremism has sprung.
Aatish Taseer’s Stranger to History is a refreshing departure from this tradition. Part memoir, part travelogue, this debut book by 28-year-old Taseer, a former reporter of Time magazine, is a first-person account of a journey he undertakes through the Middle East and Pakistan spurred by a mission to understand Islam — his father’s religion — and the “new energised Islamic identity working on young Muslims”.
The outcome of a short, intense cross-border affair between India’s celebrated woman journalist Tavleen Singh, and Salmaan Taseer, a high-profile Lahore-based businessman and politician recently appointed governor of Punjab (in Pakistan), Aatish was born in London and lived there until the age of two, when he and his mother were abandoned in 1983 by Taseer.
Forced to return to India, he was raised by supportive grandparents in Delhi even as Tavleen established a reputation as one of post-Emergency India’s most articulate woman journalists (India Today, Sunday, Indian Express, etc). As the author hurriedly tells it, while growing up in secular India and mixing with his upper class (and wealthy) Sikh cousins, he had only a vague sense of his different Muslim identity mainly because before he scarpered, his father had ensured that Taseer was circumcised as per Islamic orthodoxy.
Curiously, in an otherwise engaging narrative, the author dismisses his obviously superior private school education in India (“Christian boarding school”) and higher education in the US (“an American university”) in two paragraphs. Equally curiously, even though he insists on the circumcision of his offspring, the father never acknowledged his son, or ever spoke to him until the latter journeyed to Pakistan to meet him as a 21-year-old. Typical schizo behaviour of the feudal landed gentry in socially backward Pakistan, as recounted by several women writers of our neighbour nation, particularly Tehmina Durrani (My Feudal Lord, 1996).
Next thing you know Aatish has landed a job as a journalist in London with effortless ease. The train-bus bomb blasts in London in the summer of 2005, allegedly triggered by Muslim militants which killed 52 and injured 150 people, prompted him to write an investigative story about Islamic militancy for a British magazine. In his debut cover story he ascribes the rise of Muslim fundamentalism in Britain to the “particular estrangement, the failure of identity on so many fronts” that second-generation Pakistani youth experience in their adopted country. Far from pleasing his father, this achievement prompts him to write his first-ever letter to his abandoned son, reprimanding him for lacking “even superficial knowledge of the Pakistani ethos, blackening his name… and spreading invidious anti-Muslim propaganda”.
Confused and disturbed by the ferocity of the letter and his own shallow knowledge of Islam and Islamic society, in 2006 the author sets off on a quest into the heart of Islam, for the physical journey is also metaphorical, a way of coming to terms with his Islamic heritage from which he feels alienated. On his route lie an arc of Muslim countries — Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan.
Taseer Jr. begins his Islamic odyssey in Istanbul, the once great capital of Islam, where religion was banished from public life by its globally renowned reformer Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938). In this fiercely secular country, his investigations indicate that state-imposed rejection of Islam and its once glorious past has alienated a large and growing number of youth, pushing them to find refuge in the faith.
In Damascus, the capital of Arabist Syria, he comes face to face with the rage of the faithful against the West and its freedoms and excesses. But in Tehran, the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the excesses of a regressive theocracy are on full display. Here the complete assimilation of state and church has shaped a generation of angry youth, notes the author, adding that the Iranian Revolution has turned against its own people, “brutalising its children”. Iran’s youth have reacted to the tyranny of religious imposition with defiance and rejection.
Aatish’s Islamic voyage ends in Pakistan or ‘land of the pure’ — a country carved out of Hindu India in 1947 for the faithful. But it’s far from a warm homecoming. The thorny India-Pakistan relationship which soured his parents’ affair casts a long shadow over his relationship with his father, making their interactions tense and embarrassing. And the father-son relationship, which revived and then fell apart in the seven years since he first met his father as a 21-year-old, ends on a quiet and sombre note.
On December 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto — Taseer Sr. is a life-long supporter of the Bhuttos — was assassinated, casting a pall of gloom over the reconciliation. Yet despite years of neglect and rejection, the author describes his moment of filial tenderness for his father, a man committed to great causes. “I felt a great sympathy as I watched the man I had judged so harshly, for not facing his past when it came to me, muse on the pain of history in his country,” he writes.
An amalgam of autobiography and travelogue, Stranger to History is the promising launch of a talented writer who skillfully interweaves his own alienation with the frustration confused youth in the Muslim world experience, their dreams and freedoms crushed by autocratic gerontocracies deriving legitimacy from Islamic dogma. The paternal relationship infuses the book with poignancy, while the author’s encou-nters with students and youth as he journeys through the arc of Muslim countries, give readers a wider understanding of the Islamic world, its history, politics and people.
Muslim understanding of Islam as a civilization of faith transcending national borders, their rage against the West, their fear of modernity and paranoia about the threat to Islam, are ideas which Aatish explores, debates and interprets with facility, honesty and intelligence.
Summiya Yasmeen