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Review Stranger to History by Aatish Taseer

December 22, 2012

Reviewed by Randy Rosenthal

Author of the novels Noon and The Temple-Goers, Aatish Taseer was born in London to a wellknown Pakistani politician and an Indian mother who separated shortly after their affair. Disowned by his father, Taseer grew up in India with his mother, and was educated in America. As a reporter for Time magazine, he wrote an article on the 7/7 London bombings, condemning the British Pakistani extremists responsible for the violence. After the article was published, Taseers father sent his son a searing letter, saying that Taseer knew nothing about Pakistan or Islam. The letter compels Taseer to take an eight-month trip from Istanbul to India in order to learn about his Muslim heritage, and somehow gain his fathers approval. The result of the trip is Taseers first book, Stranger to History: A Sons Journey Through Islamic Lands, which was originally published in the UK in 2009 and is only now available for American readers. The book feels like a delightfully long New Yorker article that you never want to end. The Financial Times of London praised Stranger to History as indispensable reading for anyone who wants a wider understanding of the Islamic world, of its history, and its politics, and little else needs to be said. Turkey is the home of modern, secular Islam, so its no surprise when Taseer smokes spliff-sized joints with Turkish soldiers, and parties at Istanbul nightclubs where naked gay men paint each others bodies on the dance floor. Like Taseer, most Turkish people identify themselves as cultural Muslimsthey have an Islamic heritage but are without faith. In a conservative neighborhood where Muslims live in a Muslim country with a sense of persecution, Taseer is told that to be Muslim is to be above history. This is the first glimpse Taseer gets into the Islamic mindset; Islam has less to do with faith than it has to do with its battle against modernity. Its also where he gets the books title; since they have been disconnected from their religion, young cultural Muslims are strangers to history.

Syria is a police state and the destination of Islamic fundamentalists training to fight Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it is also a center for Islamic study. Taseer happens to be in Syria during the uproar over the Danish cartoon that mocks the prophet Mohammed. Amidst the violent demonstrations, Taseer observes with prescience the inherent contradiction of a religion of peace that so easily incites fury. It is in Syria where Taseer learns that Muslim faith was such a negative force, because it didnt matter what kind of Muslim you were, just that you were Muslim, because there was never any plan to offer real solutions, only to harness grievance, and that its sense of outrage had much more to do with the loss of political power than divine injunction. For Taseer, Islam is a decayed religion defined not by what its members believe but by what they hate. In Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam, Taseer travels to Mecca and acts out the role of a pilgrim, feeling a fraud the whole time he is in the land of Mohammed. He notes the American chain restaurants that line the way to the Great Mosque and the Kaba. He clarifies that the hajj has little to do with Islam, explaining that traveling to Mecca was a pre-Islamic custom refashioned by the Prophet to unite the Arab tribes and celebrate the fathers of their race, Abraham and Ishmael. In the midst of the holiest site in Islam, Taseer loses interest in the Muslim religion and focuses his attention on Muslim society. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, Taseer learns nearly everything he wanted to know about modern Muslim culture. Unlike Syria, Iran initially seems more open and free than any other conservative Muslim country, but Taseer quickly sees that Iran is a police-state of the mind, with citizens denouncing each other, and even denouncing themselves. He talks to Iranians who declare that the revolution had nothing to do with Islam, but that it was an inevitable result of so much oil money being pumped into the country during the seventies. Iran developed too quickly, with too much wealth and freedom. In contemporary Iran, Islam is seen as a tyranny of trifles, with the morality police being the representatives of the decayed religion more concerned with headscarves and alcohol than peace and faith. Since the Iranian people have been twisted by the corruption of Islam, Taseer ironically sees the country as being on a healthier path than other Islamic nations. Iranians are no longer looking toward religion to solve their problems. In Iran, Islam is not religion, it is politicsand one of the most fascist, repulsive forms of politics at that. After being interrogated by the Iranian police and forced to leave the country, Taseer finally arrives in Pakistan. But even in the Pure Land, Taseer does not find people with a clear understanding of their religion. On one hand, Pakistanis define themselves by their opposition to India more than their allegiance to Islam. In other words, Pakistan is simply an India for Muslims only. Taseer also sees how violence is embedded in Pakistani feudal life, and how the original Sind inhabitants look down on the Indian Muslim refugees who emigrated across the Indus after the 1947 partition, disproving the notion of a united Pakistan. Corruption and crime is out of control in Pakistan. Elaborate schemes to rob cars are a nightly activity to avoid. The robbers previously paid off the police, but then the police figured to cut out the middle men and became the robbers themselves while off duty. In the absence of a credible state, Taseer writes, crude power, loose and available, was all there was to seize on to.

The idea of a failed society is echoed throughout the book, and it is in Pakistan where Taseer repeatedly hears the idea of a failed state. But its not only Islamic society that has failed. If a writer pursued a similar mission of traveling through Christian countries and observing Christian society, one need look no further than the American Christian Right to verify that Christianity, like Islam, is a failed religionthough of course Christianitys failure was cemented hundreds of years ago, with the Crusades and the Inquisition. Even though the books focus is on Islam and Muslim countries, its hard to read Stranger to History and not feel that America is also a failed state, as is the rest of the West. It seems as if civilization as a whole is disintegrating. Finally, Taseer ends up in his fathers living room on the night Pakistans politician Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. His fathera man who drinks Scotch nightly, spends a lot of time sending textmessages on his smart phone, and was Muslim because he doubted the Holocaust, hated America, thought Hindus were weak and cowardly, and because the glories of the Islamic past excited him allows his son to be in the same room, but emotionally separates himself, forming a clique with his other Pakistani children. Taseer gets the point; he is not Pakistani, he is not Muslim, he is not his fathers son. But by then, Taseer isnt interested in getting his fathers approval, and finally seems to be in the tranquil mental space he long wanted to achieve. It took eight months of traveling through several countries and writing a very important book for him to get there.