Tinderbox
The Past and Future of Pakistan
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- CHF 10.00
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- CHF 10.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
“Among many recent books on Pakistan, Mr. Akbar’s stands out….A fine and detailed history of Indian Muslim anger and insecurity.”
—The Economist
In Tinderbox, India’s leading journalist delivers a fascinating narrative history of Pakistan, chronicling the conflict between Muslim and Hindu cultures in South Asia and describing the role that their relationship has played in defining both the country and the region. Editorial director of India Today and editor of the Sunday Guardian, M. J. Akbar gives readers an unprecedented look at Pakistan past and present. Panoramic in scope but specific in detail, with rich portraits of the central figures and events that have defined the nation’s history, Ackbar’s Tinderbox tells the Pakistanian story from the Middle Ages to the present, puts the Taliban and its place within modern Islam into a meaningful context, and diagnoses where the country is headed in the 21st century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his first U.S. publication, prominent Indian journalist Akbar (Blood Brothers) brings his expertise in Hindu-Muslim relations and modern India to a historically grounded, informative, though uneven analysis of Pakistan. Attentive to the details of Islamic culture and society, the book focuses on Muslim-Hindu relations and their geopolitical expression from the 19th to mid-20th centuries. For Indian Muslims, argues Akbar, the arrival of the British began a long period of insecurity (intensifying under a British divide-and-rule strategy after the Indian Mutiny of 1857) among a once-confident minority population used to privileges and prestige under Muslim dynasties in India and the larger world. The desire for a Muslim "comfort zone," combined with a sense of past greatness, nourished the dream of a separate Muslim state, and insecurity was traded for uncertainty with the creation of Pakistan in the 1947 partition of India. Pakistan, however, has been rocked by social and cultural divisions as well as the tension between secular and religious authority. As for American foreign policy in Pakistan, Akbar only offers vague sketches. For U.S. collusion in a nuclear Pakistan, for instance, Akbar refers to other published English-language sources. The last few decades, up through the 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden deep inside Pakistan are abbreviated and derivative. Nevertheless, this is a mostly reliable introduction to a restive and fascinating country.
