Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands

by Aatish Taseer (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2010

  $12.85

  As a child, all Aatish Taseer ever had of his father was his photograph in a browning silver frame. Raised by his Sikh mother in Delhi, his father, a Pakistani Muslim, remained a distant figure. It was a fractured upbringing which left Aatish with many questions about his own identity. Stranger to History is the story of the journey Aatish made to try to understand what it means to be Muslim in the twenty-first century. Starting from Istanbul, Islam's once greatest city, he travels to Mecca, its most holy, and then home through Iran and Pakistan. Ending in Lahore, at his estranged father's home, on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed, it is also the story of Aatish's own divided family over the past fifty years.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2009

  $5.79

  What does it mean to be a young Muslim in the twenty-first century? When Aatish Taseer receives a challenging letter from his estranged father in Pakistan, he decides to set off on an expedition across the Islamic world in search of his own Islamic heritage, as well as to discover how other young people across the Middle East felt about theirs. In a post-9/11 world Aatish is forced to confront himself and his relationship with the religious and secular worlds he moves in, as one of many 'crisis children living on the faultline of Islam and modernity.' He explores issues of identity and religious self-discovery with a fascinating cross-section of people ranging from transvestites in full hijab in Istanbul, and Norwegians considering conversions in Damascus, to Hare Krishnas in Tehran. As he travels, Aatish tells the story of his own family over the past fifty years. It is an absorbing and thought-provoking journey which culminates in an emotional reunion between Aatish and his father in Lahore, on a day that brings home the stark reality of attempts to reconcile old belief systems and liberal reform in a divided region where East meets West.