A Personal Quest for an Understanding of Modern Islam
Aatish Taseer is a British writer and journalist of British-Indian origin. In this interview with Richard Marcus, he talks about Islamic identity, the ailments of the Islamic world, and his most recent book, the highly acclaimed Stranger to History: A Son's Journey through Islamic Lands
Stranger to History is about an absence: the absence of your estranged father, the Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer. Before you began your journey what, if any, expectations or hopes did you carry into it, with regards to both your Muslim heritage and how it might help to bridge the gap between you and your father?
Aatish Taseer: I was never in search of any personal religious fulfilment or identity of any kind. I wanted only to understand the distances that had arisen between my father and me. The reason I wanted to do this was because I felt instinctually that there was something deeper behind those distances, something that would help illuminate a situation wider than my own personal context. And if there was anything that aroused my curiosity at that early stage, it was only the question of what made my father – a disbeliever by his own admission – in some very important way still a Muslim.
Why did you consider it so important to make the journey – you had been estranged from your father for nearly two decades. What type of connection were you hoping to forge between the two of you?
Aatish Taseer: I had overcome that initial estrangement with my father. The silence between us was new. And I found it difficult to turn my back on the goodwill and hopefulness that that reconciliation between my father and me had produced. It was not just our personal relationship, but Pakistan too, which formed such an important cultural and historical component of my family history, both maternal and paternal, as well as the history of the land I grew up in. It would have been very hard to pretend that the new estrangement with my father was not wrapped up in a deeper feeling of loss. But I was not travelling in search of reconciliation; I would have found it strange to travel with those kinds of personal objectives in mind. I was travelling to understand.
What inspired you to tell a very personal story – your relationship with your father – and why is it integral to the book? Could you have undertaken a similar examination of the Muslim faith without raising the subject of your father?
Aatish Taseer: No. The personal, though it had wider ramifications, as the personal often does, was what lay behind my interest. I am not a professional writer of books on Islam; I wrote about the subject because I felt I had to. And it would have been very strange for me to ignore, especially in a book like this, a first book, the reasons that I was drawn to the subject. Which, by the way, are not simply my relationship with my father; that was one aspect; but much bigger than this, in fact towering over the narrative, is the Partition. And it is in relation to this event – in my opinion, the forerunner of what began to happen throughout the Muslim world during the latter part of the last century – that my parents' relationship became important, as did my maternal grandfather's grief at being separated from his country.
Although you visited more than just the countries mentioned in the book during your journey, you chose only to talk about four, aside from Pakistan. What was it about Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran that decided you to talk about them instead of some of the others?
Aatish Taseer: They all represented, in different ways, the trouble Islam had had in adapting to modern political life. In Turkey, secularism had been turned into a soft tyranny, where the state was writing sermons and choosing clerics. In Syria, it was for years not part of the program, but was slowly creeping back. In Iran, the fury of the revolution had come and gone, and we could have a window into what might come next. Finally there was Pakistan, which, in my opinion, had paid the heaviest price for the faith. It had broken with itself and its history to form a nation on the thinnest of thin grounds. And the nation had been, from start to finish, a disaster. It had left millions of people sixty years later dispossessed and full of hateful lies.
All of that remained to be dealt with; the ugly idea of a religiously cleansed society had yet to be fully discredited in the minds of people, though on practical terms, it had completely perished. And to have to do all of this in a climate of war and insecurity, with interference from foreign powers! It was a very bleak picture; hard to see how the land – not the country – would return to itself. I won't speak of Saudi Arabia, because it formed a small part of the narrative in the book.
At one point in the book you mention the Wahhabis and their influence upon modern Islam, especially in Arabic countries like Saudi Arabia. Who are they, what is their influence and how is it expressed?
Aatish Taseer: They have had forerunners, and interestingly, always at times when Islam felt itself in danger. Some consider Ibn Taymiyyah, a 13th-century scholar, living in the times when the Mongols sacked Baghdad, to be the first Wahhabi. But truly, the movement began in the 18th century with an alliance between a Najd scholar and a chieftain. The movement, mainly decrying the excesses that had come into the faith and preaching a purer, more Arab Islam, had some political and religious success before it was crushed, and crushed completely, by the Ottomans.
Its resurgence in the 20th century can be linked to the rise of Saudi Arabia and its tremendous oil wealth, which it has used to spread Wahhabism to places, which practised milder, more tolerant forms of the religion. But I think it would be too easy to say that, and it doesn't explain the first Wahhabi success. My own feeling is that Wahhabism represents a tendency within Islam – and perhaps also in other forms of organised thought – to close its doors, and retreat within itself, when it is faced with a political or intellectual threat too great to confront.
In the book you talk about how history is being distorted by certain religious leaders in order to justify the notion that Muslims are persecuted. What purpose is served by creating this attitude among the faithful?
Aatish Taseer: It is comforting to them. It makes them feel that they are not responsible for their wretchedness, that it is all the work of a grand conspiracy which seeks to keep them down. They then can carry on feeling envious and resentful about the big, modern world, without ever having to do the hard work of engaging it. But it is a very pernicious cycle. Because the less you engage it, the faster you fall behind, the harder it becomes to pick yourself up. And in the end when you're nothing it becomes very easy for some greasy-faced fanatic to feed you comforting lies.
You've ended up presenting a rather negative view of the current state of Islam, from your depiction of Iran and Syria, the sentiments expressed by young religious Muslims in Turkey and Britain, to your description of your father's "moderate Muslim" as practising "too little moderation and in the wrong areas". Was there anything you came across in your travels that countered that impression – that perhaps gave you something you could identify with or the hope there was more to Islam than anger and resentment?
Aatish Taseer: This is the kind of question that makes assumptions I do not share. I don't consider it 'positive' to travel in a country and shut your eyes to its realities. Neither do I think it is at all helpful for schoolboy English travellers to go to these places and come back with reports of their teeming bazaars and lavish hospitality. Fortunately, I come from the sub-continent, which has its fair share of crowded bazaars and generous people, so I feel no need, when I am travelling in the Islamic world, to overlook the gloom of Syria or the tyranny of Iran, in the interest of feeling upbeat when I come home. I think it is cynical and patronising to go to these places and tell tales of how the people are capable of a good joke and a cheerful chat as if people and societies should not amount to more. And for people who are coming from societies that have achieved more, this kind of attitude expresses the worst kind of foreigner's disregard.
Do you have any concerns about what non-Muslims will think after reading this book? What do you hope they will take away from it?
Aatish Taseer: No. The book is published in eleven countries, some of which I have never even visited. It would be impossible for me to conceive what 'non-Muslims,' as a whole, might think.
The hardcover edition of Stranger to History was released a year ago, and I was wondering what the reaction to it has been from Muslims in general and your family in particular?
Aatish Taseer: Again, this is not the kind of judgement I'm in a position to make. What I will say is that despite the fact that the book is only distributed and not published in Pakistan, I have received the maximum number of letters from that country. I was particularly moved by one Pakistani student who wrote: "A lot of us agree with you but wouldn't write this sort of thing for reasons that need not be explained to you." However, I know that Muslim reviewers, whether they be in Australia, India, England or Pakistan, have all given the book a rough time. Which is an interesting thing in itself.
At one point you refer to both yourself and your father as the "Stranger to History" of the book's title.
Aatish Taseer: The title, I feel, works on different levels. In the case of my father, I was thinking of Pakistan and how it turned its back on its shared history with the sub-continent in the interest of realising the aims of the faith. That was one historical break. But I was also thinking of a more general rejection of pre-Islamic India among the sub-continent's Muslims, a rejection, which has translated into deeper illusions about their place of origin, many believing they came from "Islamically purer" countries, such as Afghanistan and Persia. There was also, of course, the personal estrangement, when it came to my father's relationship with me. That was my estrangement, too, along with an estrangement from the land that is Pakistan, and to which both my parents are linked.
You mention near the end of the book, the one benefit you derived from your journey was, it reconnected you to Pakistan. What makes that connection so important to you in light of the divide between your father and yourself?
Aatish Taseer: It is the connection to the land and people of Pakistan that is important. That land, and its culture, is still, for all the distances that have been created, a part of the shared culture of the sub-continent. The things shared are language, dress, ideas of caste, poetry and song. And it is of these things that nations are made, not religion; that has shown itself to be too thin a glue. When one considers that enduring shared culture, despite everything that has been done to break it, one is forced to reject the intellectual argument for the Partition as false. There is no two-nation theory; there are no separate Indian nations; there is just the giant plural society of India, held together by an idea no less subtle, and yet no less powerful, than that of Greece or Europe. It is this society that must on some level regain its wholeness, not along angst-ridden national or religious lines, but as part of a peace worthy of a continent.
You set out to find common ground with your father by seeking to gain an understanding of how someone who doesn't practice the religion can still call themselves a Muslim. After what you observed in your travels, do you still refer to yourself as a Muslim in spite of the fact that you appear to have nothing in common with people like your father?
Aatish Taseer: No. During the journey itself, I realised that neither on a religious level nor on a 'cultural' one could I ever be part of the 'civilisation of faith', which is, in the end, a vision of purity. I have too much hybridity in my life, welcome hybridity, to accept a world-view such as that.
Interview: Richard Marcus
© Qantara.de 2010
Editor: Lewis Gropp/Qantara.de
Qantara.de
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