Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands by Aatish Taseer; Picador; Price: Rs.495; 323 pp Post 9/11 amidst the rise of global Islamic terrorism, interpreting and explaining radical Islam and its fanatical followers has emerged as a major industry which has kept printing presses humming. Yet most of the rash of analyses of militant Islam have been academic publications explaining the political, historical and cultural contexts from which Muslim extremism has sprung. Aatish Taseer’s Stranger to History is a refreshing departure from this tradition. Part memoir, part travelogue, this debut book by 28-year-old Taseer, a former reporter of Time magazine, is a first-person account of a journey he undertakes through the Middle East and Pakistan spurred by a mission to understand Islam — his father’s religion — and the “new energised Islamic identity working on young Muslims”. The outcome of a short, intense cross-border affair between India’s celebrated woman journalist Tavleen Singh, and Salmaan Taseer, a high-profile Lahore-based businessman and politician recently appointed governor of Punjab (in Pakistan), Aatish was born in London and lived there until the age of two, when he and his mother were abandoned in 1983 by Taseer. Forced to return to India, he was raised by supportive grandparents in Delhi even as Tavleen established a reputation as one of post-Emergency India’s most articulate woman journalists (India Today, Sunday, Indian Express,etc). As the author hurriedly tells it, while growing up in secular India and mixing with his upper class (and wealthy) Sikh cousins, he had only a vague sense of his different Muslim identity mainly because before he scarpered, his father had ensured that Taseer was circumcised as per Islamic orthodoxy. Curiously, in an otherwise engaging narrative, the author dismisses his obviously superior private school education in India (“Christian boarding school”) and higher education in the US (“an American university”) in two paragraphs. Equally curiously, even though he insists on the circumcision of his offspring, the father never acknowledged his son, or ever spoke to him until the latter journeyed to Pakistan to meet him as a 21-year-old. Typical schizo behaviour of the feudal landed gentry in socially backward Pakistan, as recounted by several women writers of our neighbour nation, particularly Tehmina Durrani (My Feudal Lord, 1996). Next thing you know Aatish has landed a job as a journalist in London with effortless ease. The train-bus bomb blasts in London in the summer of 2005, allegedly triggered by Muslim militants which killed 52 and injured 150 people, prompted him to write an investigative story about Islamic militancy for a British magazine. In his debut cover story he ascribes the rise of Muslim fundamentalism in Britain to the “particular estrangement, the failure of identity on so many fronts” that second-generation Pakistani youth experience in their adopted country. Far from pleasing his father, this achievement prompts him to write his first-ever letter to his abandoned son, reprimanding him for lacking “even superficial knowledge of the Pakistani ethos, blackening his name… and spreading invidious anti-Muslim propaganda”. Confused and disturbed by…
