The past as present:
Forging contemporary identities through history
Romila Thapar
Aleph Book Company [hardback], 2014
PRs 1,195
One of the world’s most eminent historians on South Asia, Dr Romila Thapar – who recently delivered the keynote address at the Lahore Literary Festival – explains why popular views about the past need to be critically examined before being accepted as historical. This collection of essays represents half a century’s scholarly work spanning ancient and modern India. The historian, writes Dr Thapar, “has to be alert to the way in which historical ideas can be used or abused in the name of history.” Drawing on her vast experience as a writer and historian, she triggers important questions about the roots of modern patriarchy and violence against women; the relationship between racial heritage, behavior, and culture; the evolution of communalism; and the overarching need for secularism in a country where nationalism is too often only a facade and historical facts blurred for the sake of electoral propaganda.
Mecca, the sacred city
Ziauddin Sardar
Bloomsbury [hardback], 2014
PRs 1,195
Sardar’s long fascination with the Kaaba, the site of religious pilgrimage that annually draws some three million Muslims from across the world, takes the shape of a project born equally of love and despair. The author juxtaposes the city of Mecca as a site steeped in world-changing history and personal spiritualism against a place of power struggles, crass commercialism, and unquestioned bigotry. Blending history, reportage, and memoir, he traces the city’s journey from pre-Islamic times to the present. Sardar also describes in riveting detail his own experience of the Haj, which, in his case, included the dramatic events of 1979 when fanatics took over Mecca’s Sacred Mosque and held it for two weeks. He charges the Saudi state with having strategically disassembled the city’s religious diversity and allowed commercial concerns to tower over its sanctuaries, shrines, and tombs. What happens in Mecca and how Muslims perceive its political and cultural history, he argues, have a profound impact on world events.
Gulf charities and Islamic philanthropy
Ed. Robert Lacey and Jonathan Benthall
Vanguard [hardback], 2015
PRs 1,995
Republished by Vanguard, this is the first book to focus on the charities of Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Gulf, covering their work both domestic and international. From a diversity of viewpoints, the book addresses the historical roots of Islamic philanthropy in religious traditions and geopolitical movements and looks at the interaction of the Gulf charities with “Western” relief and development institutions – now under pressure owing to budgetary constraints. Drawing on numerous case studies from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, the book assesses the impact of violent extremism on the sector, the ensuing legal repercussions (especially in the US), and recent attempts to alleviate the obstacles faced by bona fide Islamic charities, whose absence from major conflict zones now leaves a vacuum for extremist groups to penetrate. In this context, it studies the prospects for a less politicized Islamic charity sector when the so-called “war on terror” eventually loses its salience.
In the light of what we know
Zia Haider Rahman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux [hardback], 2014
PRs 1,195
September 2008. A middle-aged investment banker – his career and marriage in tatters – finds an unexpected visitor on his London doorstep. The disheveled figure, who appears to own little more than what he is carrying in a backpack, is recognized as a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who had disappeared years ago under mysterious circumstances. He has now returned to make a confession – with potentially formidable consequences. In the Light of What We Know traverses Kabul, London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton, and explores the universal themes of love, belonging, science, and war. Above all, it is about friendship and betrayal. The visitor is desperate to atone for his wrongs and the narrator who tries to tell his friend’s story finds himself locked in within his limited knowledge of the world and, ultimately, himself. Set against the political and economic upheavals of this century, the novel chronicles the lives of people bound inextricably by class and culture as they struggle to control their futures.
And then one day…: A memoir
Naseeruddin Shah
Hamish Hamilton [hardback], 2014
PRs 1,295
Acclaimed stage and film actor Naseeruddin Shah spans an extraordinary personal and professional journey up to the age of 32 from a feudal hamlet near Meerut to Catholic schools in Nainital and Ajmer and finally to stage and film stardom in Mumbai. Along the way, he recounts his passage through Aligarh University to the National School of Drama and the Film and Television Institute of India, where his luck finally began to change. And Then One Day is a compelling tale, written with rare honesty and consummate elegance, leavened with tongue-in-cheek humour. There are moving portraits of family members, darkly funny accounts of his schooldays, and vivid cameos of the directors and actors he has worked with, among them Ebrahim Alkazi, Shyam Bengal, Girish Karnad, Om Puri, and Shabana Azmi. The accounts of his struggle to earn a living through acting, his experiments with the craft, his love affairs, his early marriage, and his successes and failures are narrated with remarkable frankness and objective self-assessment.