Relentlessly, the author questions what the idea of the Islamic world — to which his interlocutors constantly allude — really means, and concludes that the concept is used as a counterpoint to modernity. He hears talk of Muslims feeling robbed culturally, of the influence of foreign ideas, of modern genocide, ‘of racism, of the clutter of modernity — being bombarded by emails and adhering to drab routines — of children from mixed marriages, and of loss of identity, resulting from the large-scale migrations of the last 50 years’, and he comments that these scenarios define the modern experience. ‘There was nothing about them that was particular to Islam.’
In Turkey and in Syria, as in England, Aatish finds zealots insisting that Islam offers an alternative world on earth. In Iran he sees at first hand what a Shia attempt at theocratic rule has actually become. The faith that a Turkish interlocutor had described as ‘having something to say to the believer in every second of his life’ has been turned against the people of Iran. ‘Though Iranians had not known the great machines of socialist and Fascist repression, they knew a subtle, daily harangue’.
Moving East, Aatish arrives in his father’s land. Despite his upbringing abroad, he is deeply rooted there. When India was partitioned in 1947 his Punjabi Sikh grand- father opted for Pakistan: not only were his lands there but his regiment, the illustrious Probyn’s Horse, was going to Pakistan. The massacres of August 1947, however, forced him to move to Hindustan. In 1965 he found himself fighting against his own regiment and with some pride sent an artillery unit to accept the surrender of a Pakistani prisoner-of-war from Probyn’s Horse who refused to surrender to the infantry.
Although Aatish professes affection for Pakistan, this is clearly uncomfortable territory for him. The distractions of history, Pakistan’s and his own, crowd his time in his fatherland.
But, in the end, he comes to understand, and even to forgive, the Governor. Stranger to History closes with Aatish and Salman Taseer together in Lahore on the night of 27 December 2007. As the author watches his father, who had served both Bhuttos, stricken with grief and horror at Benazir’s assassination, he is overcome with tenderness. ‘I felt a great sympathy as I watched the man I had judged so harshly, for not facing his past when it came to me, muse on the pain of history in his country.’
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