Stranger to History Read Online Free Page A

when I was in jail and all they gave me to read was the Koran – and I read it back to front several times – that I realised there was nothing in it for me,’ was offended as a Muslim by what I had written. The hold of the religion, deeper than its commandments, of religion as nationality, was something that I, with my small sense of being Muslim, had never known.
    When I came to the end of my father’s letter, I felt he was right: I couldn’t have even ‘a superficial knowledge’ of the Pakistani, but more importantly Islamic, ethos. I had misunderstood what he had meant when he described himself as a cultural Muslim. I took it to mean no more than a version of what I grew up with in Delhi – some feeling for customs, dress, food, festivals and language – but it had shown a reach deeper than I knew. And the question I kept asking myself was how my father, a professed disbeliever in Islam’s founding tenets, was even a Muslim. What made him Muslim despite his lack of faith?
    For some weeks, during a still, dry summer in London, the letter percolated. It prompted a defence on my part in which my back was up. My father responded with silence that turned colder as the weeks went by. His wife and daughter tried to intervene, but I wasn’t willing to apologise for something I’d written. And although I minded the personal attack, I didn’t mind the letter: it aroused my curiosity. Caught between feeling provoked and needing to act, I thought of making an Islamic journey.
    My aim was to tie together the two threads of experience from that summer: the new, energised Islamic identity working on young Muslims and my own late discovery of my father’s religion. My father’s letter presented me with the double challenge to gain a better understanding of Islam and Pakistan.
    But I wanted a canvas wider than Pakistan. Something deeper than national identity acted on my father, something related to Islam, and to understand this, I felt travelling in Pakistan alone would not be enough. Pakistan, carved out of India in 1947, was a country founded for the faith. But it was also a lot like India, and I felt that unless I travelled in other Muslim countries I would not be able to separate what might be common Islamic experience from what might feel like an unexplained variation of India. I also wanted to take advantage of the fact that the whole Islamic world stretched between my father and the place where I read his letter. A strange arc of countries lay on my route: fiercely secular Turkey, where Islam had been banished from the public sphere since the 1920s; Arab-nationalist Syria, which had recently become the most important destination for those seeking radical Islam; and Iran, which in 1979 had experienced Islamic revolution.
    In a classical sense, except for Turkey, the lands that lay between my father and me were also part of the original Arab expansion when the religion spread in the seventh and eighth centuries from Spain to India. I decided on a trip from one edge of the Islamic world, in Istanbul, to a classical centre, Mecca, and on through Iran to Pakistan. The first part of the trip would be an old Islamic journey, almost a pilgrimage, from its once greatest city to its holiest. The trip away, through Iran and Pakistan, was a journey home, to my father’s country, where my link to Islam began, and, finally, to his doorstep.

‘Homo Islamicos’
    I t was November. The sky was damp and heavy. I waited for Eyup outside a Starbucks on Istiklal. It was an old-fashioned European shopping street, with a tram, in central Istanbul. The road was being resurfaced and rain from the night before spread a muddy layer of water over the newly paved white stone. The youth that filled the street, sidestepping wide, wet patches of sludge and splashing brown sprinklings on the ends of jeans, were of remarkable beauty.
    Here, it seemed, was a confluence of racial attributes that produced tall men with high central-Asian cheekbones,