Journey to the centre of the faith

Faith was the reward of the sacred house, and faith would have answered the objection the pilgrim had raised. But I had come faithless to Mecca. And justly, I was found out.” Aatish Taseer begins his Stranger To History with this description of a pilgrimage, setting the tone for a book that is part excavation of his own past, part interrogation of the relationship people who call themselves Muslims have with the world.

Born of a brief affair between an Indian Sikh mother, journalist Tavleen Singh and Pakistani politician Salman Taseer, now governor of Punjab, Aatish Taseer set out on his quest in an attempt to discover his absent father as well as his connection to his religion.

What makes his pork-eating, Scotch-drinking father claim to be a Muslim, even while rejecting the Quran after having read it “back to front several times” in jail? This conflict is at the heart of Taseer’s journey, and runs through his encounters in Syria, Iran, Turkey, Mecca and eventually Pakistan.

There are interesting characters in the book, like the young students in Turkey earnestly debating the Islamic credentials of “western inventions” like cameras and Marlboro cigarettes, or the Norwegian scholar in Damascus who sways a crowd bent on violence in the aftermath of the Danish cartoons controversy with his chaste Arabic. Taseer himself gets picked up for interrogation in Iran, and performs the umrah — the lesser pilgrimage at Mecca — while keeping the tattoo of Lord Shiva on his shoulder discreetly covered.

But despite the promise of his mixed background (and, presumably, the insights this offers into the countries he visits), Stranger To History offers a curiously flattened picture of this world — much of what he finds to report is dismal and uni-dimensional to a degree that seems unlikely as well as unwarranted. There is no hint that the rabid, unbending form of Islam he encounters in Iran or Syria, for instance, are parts of a larger picture, with counter-currents in the strong Sufi traditions that exist in both countries. Taseer’s questions reflect neatly the anxieties of a western audience, and there is the familiar reliance on easy parallels, such as the robe-wearing bearded zealots in an orthodox neighbourhood v/s an evening in a gay nightclub in Istanbul.

One gets the feeling that in his own way, Taseer is as unwilling to see the limitations of his worldview as the students who debate the Islamic-ness of the camera.

The parts of the book that deal with Taseer’s family legacy and his coming to terms with it are emotionally absorbing, but eventually there isn’t very much there. (His brief, fraught relationship with his father began with a meeting in 2002, and reportedly ended with the publication of this book). The connections that he draws between the two levels of his journey are laboured, and at times, it feels as if too much effort is being put into justifying the cover blurb of ‘A son’s journey through Islamic lands’.

Taseer is at his best in Pakistan, where he travels across Sindh with a feudal landlord described only as ‘the Mango King’. This is also where he connects with the more pleasant parts of his patrimony — family, music, poetry.  Taseer is a gifted writer, and his prose is layered without being tediously descriptive.

Unfortunately, this is not matched by his powers of analysis or insights, at least outside the familiar contours of the subcontinent and his own family’s relationship with its fractured past. This makes Stranger To History an uneven travelogue that covers interesting ground, but fails to capture the complexity of the “Islamic lands” it sets out to map in their present state of flux.