Stranger to History: Aatish Taseer’s Journey through Islamic Lands
By
Mohammad Ali, New Age Islam
March 25,
2022
Main
points:
1. This essay
reviews Aatish Taseer’s book, Stranger to History
2. It focuses
on three main points that the reviewer thought important and are shared by a
larger number of Muslims across the world
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Stranger to
History (2009) is an account of the journey through Western to Eastern Islamic
lands in Asia. The author, Aatish Taseer, embarked upon this journey to
understand what it means to be a Muslim in the modern world. Taseer begins his
adventure from Turkey to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan. Each country
represents a unique relationship—which is determined by their political
realities—with Islam and offered an array of experiences that Taseer has talked
about in this book.
Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk (d.1938), the founder of modern Turkey, set out on a course to
implement a strict form of secularism in the country, disallowing Islam, and
the expressions of Islam to be exhibited in the Turkish society. However, with
time, Islam managed to reappear from the peripherals that it has been
diminished to. Unlike the Turkish society, Islam was always allowed to flourish
and dominate public life and was also used to legitimize the decades-long
dictatorship and monarchy in Syria and Saudi Arabia.
Iran has
also a different story. In the previous century, the country was ruled by a
monarchy whose ambitions to modernize the state and its pro-West policies
brought the monarchy in conflict with the Iranian ulama and other disgruntled
factions of the society. Eventually, a revolution occurred in 1979, the
monarchy was overthrown, and an opportunity opened up for the Ulama. They
captured the state and renamed it the Islamic Republic of Iran declaring Iran
as an Islamic state.
Pakistan’s
emergence coincided with a dreadful carnage of millions of people which was
followed by the Partition of the Subcontinent in 1947. This modern state was
founded on a romantic idea of creating an ideal Islamic state. Since its foundation,
it insisted upon its Islamic identity.
Taseer’s
book is rich in providing detailed observations and comprehensive accounts of
interviews and casual discussions that he had with local people during his
journey. This journey is not viewed through Muslim eyes. Taseer does not claim
to be a Muslim. He was born out of an unconventional relationship between his
mother, Tavleen Singh, a famous Indian journalist, and his father, Salman
Taseer, a renowned Pakistani politician, and businessman, which he called a
love affair. Taseer was brought up by his mother in a non-religious environment
in India. Therefore, as he mentions in the book, in order to understand his
father’s religion, i.e., Islam, he undertook this journey. Along his way, he
found sometimes frustrated, sometimes scared, and sometimes both, young
Muslims, suppressed under the name of secularism and Islam. His non-religious
and liberal sensibilities acutely observed how in police-state, such as Syria,
and Iran, people are afraid to open up about the political problems of their
countries even to their friends lest they may be spies and informants to the
establishment. And how frustrated Muslims in Islamic states commit acts that
are immoral and contradictory to their religious claims. Even though the whole
book is an interesting read, I would like to focus on three important points
here.
Nostalgia
Muslims
long for their past. A past where pristine Islam helped Muslims nurture an
advanced and powerful civilization—a golden age. A past where Muslims dominated
the world. it is a romanticized idea that imagines that the Islamic world in
the past was a unified entity where Muslims of all sorts lived together. It
overlooks the differences, the conflicts, the bloody battles that Muslims
fought against each other in their past. Taseer detects the air of this
nostalgia in his conversations with some students in Turkey. They believed that
the continuity of this golden age was ruptured by the Western invaders who
established new world order in the Muslim lands with an ambition to spoil
Islam. The idea of a golden age of Muslims as a unified powerful community
remains attractive to the modern religious Muslims who feel oppressed at the
hands of the western aggressors. These students talked about the need of bringing
back to the Islamic world order to counter the western one. It is a yearning
that many Muslims in the world share with those students.
History is
either romantic or cruel for many Muslims. Other than a loving memory, history
reminds Muslims of their suffering and loss. When in Syria, Taseer observed how
some Bosnian Ulama manipulated historical events of the banishment of Muslims
from Spain in order to illustrate the sufferings of the Bosnian Muslims. Even
though, the title of Taseer’s book, Stranger to History, implies that it is he
who is unfamiliar with the history of his father’s religion. But an analysis of
Muslim behaviour to their history would reveal that it is they who have
forgotten their own past except for some selective stories for their nostalgic
pleasure.
Insistence
on Trifles
Muslims
believe that Islam is a complete way of life, meaning that Islam has fairly
something to say for everything that you do in your life. So long as this idea
of living life by following a religion strictly to its minute injunctions
remains personal, it does not do any harm to other people. But as soon as a
state shoulders the responsibility to force people to follow the trifles that
are considered parts of the religion, it becomes a device to control and censor
the lives of its citizens. In Saudi Arabia and Iran, Taseer observed how
religion was used to control the lives of normal people and curtail their
freedom. Taseer recorded an incident that occurred while he was performing his
Umrah, an off-season pilgrimage to Mecca. He said that he was wearing some
religious strings from some temples and Sufi shrines around his neck and
wrists. Suddenly, a fellow pilgrim approached Taseer and his Saudi friends who
were helping him to perform Umrah. The pilgrim said to them that they should
make him remove those things. Similarly, another incident that he recorded was
narrated to him by an Iranian girl. It was about some religious police who
tried to seize her dog only to kill him afterward and were stopped once her
uncle bribed them to go away. These anecdotes demonstrate how states, such as
Iran, in the name of religion, control the lives of their people. As a result,
people become rebellious and start hating the state religion as is the case in
Iran. Taseer quotes one Iranian saying, “(In Iran) People were very connected
to religion even though the government (the monarchy) was not religious. But
now that the government is religious, most of the people want to get away from
religion. They see it as killing people, putting journalists in jail. That is
the true religion. It is very hard for me to say I am a Muslim. Most of the
terrorists today are religious. I prefer to say I have no religion.” (p.185)
When
religion becomes a tool for oppression at the hands of a government, it loses
its sanctity for the people.
Islamic
Renaissance
In a
conversation with his half-brother in Pakistan, Taseer observes that
Pakistanis, or at least his half-brother, were hoping that their religious
leaders would bring an Islamic renaissance, just like the one that brought
about by monks in Europe, which would bring again the civilizational glory of
Islam. And then he makes an interesting remark, “In his (Taseer’s half-brother)
excitement, he forgot what constituted the kind of renaissance he was thinking
of. He forgot the industry of those European monks all those centuries ago,
translating books from Arabic into the European languages. I’d been to enough
madrassas in my life, in enough places, to know that the majority not only
ignored books outside the Islamic past, they ignored the Islamic thinkers too;
they taught only on Book.” (p.222)
Taseer is
right in his analysis. Based on my experience of the Indian madrasas, since I
have spent many years studying there, I can argue that their exposure to
education, not just modern but religious as well, is very limited. Madrasas
have failed to achieve their objectives. Due to their flawed educational
system, they are unable to impart proper religious education to their students.
Madrasa students are illiterate in their own field. This ignorance is exhibited
through their disengagement with the serious religious issues that Muslims are
facing today.
Islam is a
complex religion. Its source, the Quran and Traditions, cannot be read
atomistically in closed walls, as is the case in India. Nor can it be entwined
with politics. Islam needs a serious and intellectual approach for its
interpretations. In Muslim lands, people attach themselves to Islam either
emotionally or politically, which is bad for both, the religion, and its
followers. Even though, Taseer rarely engaged with political Islam in his book,
he commented once on the disastrous consequence that political Islam had caused
in some Muslim countries. He writes, “What I had discovered in Iran, and had
sensed in Syria, was how violent and self-wounding the faith could become when
it was converted from being a negative idea, a political and historical grievance
against the modern world, into a positive one.” (p.206)
Taseer’s
book looks deep into the moral and psychological problems that Muslims are
facing today, their conflict with the modern world, and sometimes, with their
own.
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Mohammad Ali has been a madrasa student. He has also participated in a
three years program of the "Madrasa Discourses,” a program for madrasa
graduates initiated by the University of Notre Dame, USA. Currently, he is a
PhD Scholar at the Department of Islamic Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New
Delhi. His areas of interest include Muslim intellectual history, Muslim
philosophy, Ilm-al-Kalam, Muslim sectarian conflicts, madrasa discourses.
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/books-documents/history-aatish-taseer-islamic-lands/d/126664
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