Stranger to History
A Son's Journey through Islamic Lands
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
What does it mean to be a young Muslim in the twenty-first century? When Aatish Taseer receives a challenging letter from his estranged father in Pakistan, he decides to set off on an expedition across the Islamic world in search of his own Islamic heritage, as well as to discover how other young people across the Middle East felt about theirs. In a post-9/11 world Aatish is forced to confront himself and his relationship with the religious and secular worlds he moves in, as one of many ‘crisis children living on the faultline of Islam and modernity.’ He explores issues of identity and religious self-discovery with a fascinating cross-section of people ranging from transvestites in full hijab in Istanbul, and Norwegians considering conversions in Damascus, to Hare Krishnas in Tehran. As he travels, Aatish tells the story of his own family over the past fifty years. It is an absorbing and thought-provoking journey which culminates in an emotional reunion between Aatish and his father in Lahore, on a day that brings home the stark reality of attempts to reconcile old belief systems and liberal reform in a divided region where East meets West.
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Compelled to "face and record a suppressed personal history," Taseer, a former Time magazine reporter and author of two novels (The Temple-Goers and Noon) seeks to put the pieces of his ethnic and spiritual identity together by understanding the bond of his Sikh mother and Pakistani Muslim father and the overarching call of his Islamic faith. Selected portions of his memoir were used to defend the killer of his estranged father, the acting governor of Punjab, for protecting Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman accused of blasphemy for drinking, which transformed the murder trial into a litmus test of his father's tolerant faith. Taseer launches into a fact-finding quest to uncover his ancestral roots, the holy core of his religion, and what it means to be a Muslim in this century, including dialogues with young radicalized extremists, intellectuals, gays, and traditionalists, stopping in London, Istanbul, Damascus, and Pakistan. The author's awe of sacred Mecca and prickly spiritual questions about his faith form the spine of this book, along with the political and religious contradictions of Pakistan and the tragic untimely death of Benazir Bhutto.
