Scan barcode
tamarbookaholic's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
informative
medium-paced
4.0
adithyavs's review against another edition
5.0
In a very personal and deep story, Aatish Taseer takes us on a journey through the lands of Syria, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan to find the history that he did not inherit from his father. Aatish takes us on a multi dimensional journey. A journey through his extraordinary life. And another one through the pages of history. It's not a book of history. Neither is it an autobiography. And I don't think you can call it a travelogue. It's a collection of experiences that people have had of an idea. An idea that has changed lives and history throughout the world.
ameya88's review against another edition
4.0
This book does give you the sense - as most reviews suggest - that it is not a particularly accurate scholastic exercise given all the heavy inferences it chooses to draw. As the Guardian points out - imagine someone writing about contemporary Britain without understanding or speaking English on the basis of a month long trip.
Taseer travels from Turkey to Pakistan by road (curiously choosing to skip commenting on Jordan, Yemen and Oman - were they not as important in 2008-09?) and everywhere he meets lots of people (through the myriad of connections only the privileged are blessed with), chooses some conversations to focus on and makes Very Important deductions based on this. It is not that these are necessarily incorrect, but there is a sense of cherry picking certain parts and people over a 15 day to 1 month period to build a convenient narrative. It would have been fairer perhaps to make this a more personal travel journal rather than an unravelling of 'Modern socio-political Islam' as it is positioned.
Nonetheless, it is still very enlightening and educational. This is an 'outsider' travelling to these 5 countries - Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan - and trying to get into the skin of these places. Now these aren't countries that most of us would even be willing or able to travel towards for a vacation - and therefore my knowledge is very limited and heavy on stereotype. So it is a discovery however limited. The contrast between Turkey (forced to be secular in the streets but discovering religion in the sheets) versus Iran (religious in the streets, dismissively irreligious if not secular in the sheets), the pre-Civil War and Arab Spring Syria, an actual evening at Mecca, the schisms within Pakistan's Sindhi/Punjabis and the mujahhirs - all of this is quite enthralling and written most evocatively. Clearly the author is most at home when he writes about Pakistan - which he perhaps understands best - but I was personally particularly fascinated by the chapter on Iran.
This is interspersed with Taseer's own personal life tale as a second narrative through the book - which is delightfully voyeuristic. He is a brave man to lay bare his own family as he has even if they have largely been public figure and it almost acts as an intellectual soap-opera written in heavy prose.
It is interesting to observe that almost a decade after this work has been published - someone who has been so caustic about Islam and Pakistan is now persona-non-grata in India for pointing out similar tendencies and flaws. As they say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
Taseer travels from Turkey to Pakistan by road (curiously choosing to skip commenting on Jordan, Yemen and Oman - were they not as important in 2008-09?) and everywhere he meets lots of people (through the myriad of connections only the privileged are blessed with), chooses some conversations to focus on and makes Very Important deductions based on this. It is not that these are necessarily incorrect, but there is a sense of cherry picking certain parts and people over a 15 day to 1 month period to build a convenient narrative. It would have been fairer perhaps to make this a more personal travel journal rather than an unravelling of 'Modern socio-political Islam' as it is positioned.
Nonetheless, it is still very enlightening and educational. This is an 'outsider' travelling to these 5 countries - Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan - and trying to get into the skin of these places. Now these aren't countries that most of us would even be willing or able to travel towards for a vacation - and therefore my knowledge is very limited and heavy on stereotype. So it is a discovery however limited. The contrast between Turkey (forced to be secular in the streets but discovering religion in the sheets) versus Iran (religious in the streets, dismissively irreligious if not secular in the sheets), the pre-Civil War and Arab Spring Syria, an actual evening at Mecca, the schisms within Pakistan's Sindhi/Punjabis and the mujahhirs - all of this is quite enthralling and written most evocatively. Clearly the author is most at home when he writes about Pakistan - which he perhaps understands best - but I was personally particularly fascinated by the chapter on Iran.
This is interspersed with Taseer's own personal life tale as a second narrative through the book - which is delightfully voyeuristic. He is a brave man to lay bare his own family as he has even if they have largely been public figure and it almost acts as an intellectual soap-opera written in heavy prose.
It is interesting to observe that almost a decade after this work has been published - someone who has been so caustic about Islam and Pakistan is now persona-non-grata in India for pointing out similar tendencies and flaws. As they say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
coronaurora's review against another edition
4.0
I came to Stranger to History, Taseer's debut work after being thoroughly impressed by his piece on Sanskrit where he bemoaned the loss of a whole body of linguistic structure and culture thanks to colonialisation. It was personal, curious and his sentences encased within them a quiet tragedy that had me in thrall at his talent.
In this unusual part-biography, part-travelogue, he turns a journey of meeting his politician father in Pakistan who had estranged him in his childhood into an odyssey that would inform him about what being a Muslim in the current world entails. This decoding of contemporary Muslim identity and reality by virtue of travel and interviews in key Muslim nations (Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia Iran, Pakistan and other undocumented detours into Jordan and Yemen), would in his tentative plan, help him bridge the gulf of empathy for a father who is a warden and defender of an Islamic republic for decades. It would also, he hopes, help him complete his own sense of self as a Muslim: a name and a religion that has been little more than a nebulous patrilineal label from an absent father owing to the effect of having grown up in affluent, secular India and received further education and moorings in the world in more liberal societies.
This quest for personal actualisation and an ethnic understanding are both deep and compelling journeys and they ground this sometimes meandering, but never short of insightful book. Except for the novelistic flourishes in which Taseer waxes a sentence almost always too long on describing appearance of real people and the rhythms of landscape, he is in his element. Drawing upon his formal training in politics and journalism, his continuous mission to pin down the present and future aspirations of the hoi-polloi and spokespeople in Islamic lands leads to searching conversations and informed conclusions. He might just offer his reader glimpses, but his subjects are chosen with care and the wisdom yoked from interactions is articulated with pragmatism. I enjoyed how his clear-headed, direct questioning on the idea of the ideal Islamic way of life always met with an impasse as the answering man (from a Syrian cleric to his father) entered into a rhetoric constructed totally of convenient historical retellings and amorphous utopian dreams. Without being sensationalist, Taseer manages to make the reader see the fallacies of such utopias in the everyday corrosive realities within inward-looking and self-serving Islamic states with defined borders: Pakistan and Iran, both struggling with the modern "world system".
Punctuated with these socio-political musings, his personal journey tore into me, both in how earnestly he pursued his imagined redemption and how he fielded the rebuffs and snubs with absolute decorum. For his sake, I felt myself punching in the air as the bittersweet realisation in the denouement dawns on him as he sits next to his father watching Benazir Bhutto's funeral on live television. Like all journeys, he is a different man at the end of his. He sees things and people differently. The veil has dropped. He has gained in knowledge and lost in innocence, but it feels right. This is how things usually are. Life for rational thinkers is filled with many such obstacles of ossified structures and mind-sets. But the journey to reason must go on.
In this unusual part-biography, part-travelogue, he turns a journey of meeting his politician father in Pakistan who had estranged him in his childhood into an odyssey that would inform him about what being a Muslim in the current world entails. This decoding of contemporary Muslim identity and reality by virtue of travel and interviews in key Muslim nations (Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia Iran, Pakistan and other undocumented detours into Jordan and Yemen), would in his tentative plan, help him bridge the gulf of empathy for a father who is a warden and defender of an Islamic republic for decades. It would also, he hopes, help him complete his own sense of self as a Muslim: a name and a religion that has been little more than a nebulous patrilineal label from an absent father owing to the effect of having grown up in affluent, secular India and received further education and moorings in the world in more liberal societies.
This quest for personal actualisation and an ethnic understanding are both deep and compelling journeys and they ground this sometimes meandering, but never short of insightful book. Except for the novelistic flourishes in which Taseer waxes a sentence almost always too long on describing appearance of real people and the rhythms of landscape, he is in his element. Drawing upon his formal training in politics and journalism, his continuous mission to pin down the present and future aspirations of the hoi-polloi and spokespeople in Islamic lands leads to searching conversations and informed conclusions. He might just offer his reader glimpses, but his subjects are chosen with care and the wisdom yoked from interactions is articulated with pragmatism. I enjoyed how his clear-headed, direct questioning on the idea of the ideal Islamic way of life always met with an impasse as the answering man (from a Syrian cleric to his father) entered into a rhetoric constructed totally of convenient historical retellings and amorphous utopian dreams. Without being sensationalist, Taseer manages to make the reader see the fallacies of such utopias in the everyday corrosive realities within inward-looking and self-serving Islamic states with defined borders: Pakistan and Iran, both struggling with the modern "world system".
Punctuated with these socio-political musings, his personal journey tore into me, both in how earnestly he pursued his imagined redemption and how he fielded the rebuffs and snubs with absolute decorum. For his sake, I felt myself punching in the air as the bittersweet realisation in the denouement dawns on him as he sits next to his father watching Benazir Bhutto's funeral on live television. Like all journeys, he is a different man at the end of his. He sees things and people differently. The veil has dropped. He has gained in knowledge and lost in innocence, but it feels right. This is how things usually are. Life for rational thinkers is filled with many such obstacles of ossified structures and mind-sets. But the journey to reason must go on.
sreeraag_mohan's review against another edition
5.0
‘We thought,’ my great-grandmother once said, ‘that first it had been the rule of the Muslims, then it was the rule of the English, and now again if it was to be the rule of the Muslims, what difference would it make?’
Aatish Taseer's Stranger to History is a genre-bending novel, part travelogue and part quest for identity. The novel begins with the author's determination to bridge the gap and reconcile differences between him and his distant, absentee father through the only thing that he left him - his religion and his identity as a Muslim.
Taseer's quest to understand the Islamic faith and the Muslim brotherhood takes him across diverse interpretations of the faith: from the forced secularism of Turkey to the heavy-handed and often brutal application of the Sharia and Islamic law in Iran and Pakistan. Taseer examines the ways in which religion interacts with the state, and how it affects the populace's view of the world and the freedoms extended to them.
Highly recommended to anybody who wants to understand what it means to be Muslim in the 21st century.
More...