Book Reviews

The Wall Street Journal Asia

A PEEK INTO PAKISTAN

A new novel offers a worm’s-eye view of the kinds of lives that rarely make their way to the pages of a newspaper.

By SADANAND DHUME

On the face of it, few countries are in as dire need of a public image makeover as Pakistan. Its best-known exports are the Taliban and contraband nukes. Its airspace commands more attention from Predator drones than from commercial airlines. Its immediate future rests more in the hands of NATO than in those of the WTO. In recent years, the permanently enraged Pakistani mob—protesting Danish cartoons, rumors of Koran desecration, obscure references to Byzantine history by the Pope—has become almost emblematic of the ongoing culture war between radical Islam and the West.

Somewhat paradoxically, Pakistan also happens to be home to some of Asia’s most vibrant new writing in English. Indeed, the country now churns out brilliant novelists the way its cricket team could once be counted on to produce a stream of the world’s best fast bowlers. The most recent addition to an already glittering roster is 25-year-old Ali Sethi, a precocious Harvard graduate who resides in Lahore.

In “The Wish Maker,” his first novel, Mr. Sethi explores modern Pakistan through the lives of Zaki and Samar, near-siblings who come of age together in 1990s Lahore before circumstances launch their lives on sharply divergent paths. Zaki, the book’s narrator, is a sensitive fatherless boy raised in a home bursting with strong-willed women. Samar, though technically Zaki’s aunt once removed, is for all intents and purposes an older sister. Their lives become shorthand for the decisive role family and gender play in shaping the landscape of life’s possibilities for even relatively privileged Pakistanis.

The book’s sharpest insights are reserved for matters of the heart. Mr. Sethi is especially alive to the emotional contours of young love, its modes of courtship, its methods of subterfuge. Samar, hopelessly smitten, seeks to win the affections of her love interest by gifting him imported cologne (Blue Jeans by Versace) and an audiotape filled with love songs (Meat Loaf, Mariah Carey, Bally Sagoo). Ostensible trips to the beauty salon to have her upper lip threaded, and to private classes to sharpen her math skills, serve as cover for trysts forbidden by a deeply conservative society. As detail piles upon detail, the reader cannot help but feel a mounting sense of dread, heightened by Samar’s conscription of the hapless Zaki as a co-conspirator.

Less convincing is the book’s historical reach. Though most of the action takes place in the 1990s, the story spans 60 years of Pakistani history. At times this makes the book groan under the burden of trying to include too much—the poetry of the iconic communist Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s famous promise to give the poor “food, clothing and shelter,” the importance to Pakistan of the three A’s, Army, Allah and America.

As though to make up for this less than rigorous plotting, Mr. Sethi’s prose, always lucid, often soars to illuminate the quotidian. A pre-wedding party dissolves into a “democracy of dance.” A well-groomed hotel manager has the manner of someone “who seemed to reside permanently in morning.” In its heyday in the 1950s, the cosmopolitan port city of Karachi, its cabarets filled with dancers from the Levant and Eastern Europe, appears poised to have the “vision of its successes become its totality.” The city’s subsequent decline is captured by a picture of black, swampy water stinking of fish in the afternoon, and surrounded by “territorial seagulls that were always in a panic.”

Throughout the book, Mr. Sethi is at pains to debunk the idea, not entirely uncommon in America, that Pakistan belongs to the Middle East. Lahore may boast a stadium named for Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi; the math teacher at Zaki’s elite public school may venerate the Arab contribution to his subject; the ban on alcohol in public places may drive the trendy to sheesha bars; the evening news may be read in Arabic in addition to Urdu. But culturally, Zaki and Samar’s Pakistan continues to cleave to idol-worshipping India. At the Lahore store where the duo borrows pirated Bollywood videos, the selection ranges from “Abhimaan” near the entrance to “Zanjeer” on the opposite wall. Spying the Indian actor Amrish Puri in an Indiana Jones movie evokes an instant gasp of recognition.

Mr. Sethi’s narrative may be at times forced, but all in all this remains a novel worth reading, a worm’s eye view of the kinds of lives that rarely make their way to the pages of a newspaper or magazine.

Mr. Dhume is a Washington, D.C. based writer and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2009).

The Wall Street Journal Asia 

Cultural Cartographer

Novelist Kamila Shamsie maps extremism from Kyoto to Karachi.

Burnt Shadows
By Kamila Shamsie
(Picador, 384 pages, $14)

By SADANAND DHUME

dhumejihadinsouthasia

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Ayesha Jalal, Harvard University Press, 400 pages, $29.95

The November assault on Mumbai by ten heavily-armed members of the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba came as a reminder, if one was needed, of South Asia’s trouble with radical Islam. Home to about a third of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims, the region also houses a plethora of violent groups committed to imposing an austere interpretation of their faith on believers and non-believers alike. Many of these—including the L-e-T and its occasional partner-in arms, Jaish-e-Mohammed—sprung up only in the 1990s. But as Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistan-born historian who teaches at Tufts University in Massachusetts, points out in her new book, in South Asia the intellectual pedigree for violence committed in the name of faith stretches back not decades but centuries.

At the heart of Partisans of Allah is an earnest attempt to understand the concept of jihad. In common parlance it means holy war against non-Muslims, but the word itself—as Ms. Jalal takes great pains to stress—simply signifies striving for a worthy or ennobling cause. Indeed, according to Ms. Jalal, jihad is the core principle of Islamic ethics. At least in theory, it encompasses more than suicide attacks on Indian troops in Kashmir or truck bombs targeting luxury hotels. A student’s endeavor to read a book, a patient’s suffering in a hospital, or a farmer’s effort to increase his crop yield may all be construed as types of jihad.

Usually, this sort of sophistry is the province of apologists for radical Islamic violence eager to explain it away as antithetical to the spirit of the faith. At times Ms. Jalal tilts in this direction—the word “infidel” is used without irony, and a tinge of hagiography enters her description of a group of 19th-century jihadists who fought the Sikhs in the Northwest Frontier. However, to her credit, Ms. Jalal is not concerned with whitewashing the less savory interpretations of jihad, but with ensuring that the term is understood with all its nuance, and in a proper historical context.

Toward this effort, a parade of theologians, scholars and legists pass across the book’s pages. In the 16th century, the liberal policies of the Mughal emperor Akbar—who abolished discriminatory taxes on non-Muslims and strove to treat all faiths equally—earned the ire of Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624). Sirhindi claimed that Islam and Hinduism were fundamentally incompatible, and that one could flourish only at the expense of the other. A prolific letter writer and a widely respected Sufi scholar, Sirhindi is credited with the revival of orthodox Islamic practice in India after Akbar’s death.

Of a similar cast of mind was Delhi’s Shah Waliullah (1703-62), the most influential Islamic scholar of his time. His blueprint to extend Islamic law outwards from the family to the local polity to (eventually) the world resonates with radical Muslims to this day. Waliullah shared teachers in what is today Saudi Arabia with Abdul Wahhab, the founder of the austere strain of Islam that bears his name. Waliullah believed in a vast Hindu and Shia conspiracy against Sunni orthodoxy, and sought to ban both the Hindu festival of color, Holi, and Muharram, the Shia commemoration of the martyrdom of the prophet Mohammed’s grandson, Imam Hussein. Waliullah popularized a saying of the prophet according to which participating in jihad was superior to fasting or praying for a month. In a similar vein, extrapolating from the history of seventh-century Arabia, Waliullah declared war booty legitimate for Muslims.

The cleric’s influence outlived him by centuries. Between 1826 and 1831, Waliullah’s most famous disciple, Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareilly in north India, led a bloody, though ultimately unsuccessful, jihad in the Northwest frontier against the Sikhs. Even today, Ahmad’s grave is a sacred site visited regularly by modern day jihadists, who have declared war on, among other things, film, music and education for girls.

It was only under British colonial rule—under attack from both Western scholars and Christian missionaries—that prominent Indian Muslims began to reinterpret jihad in less violent terms. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98), the erudite founder of Aligarh’s famous Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental college, argued that Muslims owed their loyalty to the Raj as long as their religious practices were not interfered with. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), the founder of the Ahmadiyya sect, felt that jihad as warfare against non-believers had lost its relevance in the modern world, and only contributed toward tarnishing the image of Islam. The Ahmadiyyas instead channeled their efforts toward good works, especially education.

At the outset, Ms. Jalal sets out to breach what she calls the “artificial walls” separating an academic and a general readership. In this, unfortunately, she fails. A potentially gripping read is turned into drudgery by a prose style both dry and somewhat discombobulated. The exception is Ms. Jalal’s examination of the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Abul Ala Maududi (1903-79), who—along with the Egyptians Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood—is widely regarded as the 20th century’s preeminent radical Islamic ideologue.

An admirer of Waliullah, Maududi too believed that warfare for Islam was an exalted form of piety—that fighting resolutely on the battlefield was superior to staying home and praying for 60 years. He saw Islam as a “revolutionary ideology,” which seeks to “alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.” The faith’s violent history was nothing to be apologetic about. Indeed Islam’s strength lay in the sword’s ability to tear away the veil of misunderstanding that characterizes non-Muslims. For Maududi, art, painting and music belong to jahiliyya, the state of barbarism Muslims ascribe to pre-Islamic Arabs. Apostasy from Islam was akin to treason and therefore punishable by death.

Like Islamic radicals everywhere, Maududi was obsessed with keeping women in their proper place. They were to be respected, but only in the role of nurturing mother, doting sister, devoted wife or dutiful daughter. He believed that menstruation made women physically and mentally infirm, and that they must be excluded from the public sphere altogether. Non-Muslims, inherently unreliable, had no place in the administration of the Islamic state.

In 1953, barely six years after the creation of Pakistan, Maududi joined an agitation to have Ahmadiyyas declared non-Muslim. Their alleged crimes: the veneration of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as a prophet, albeit a lesser one than Mohammed, and the rejection of armed jihad. In 1974, five years before he died, Maududi witnessed the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, eager to co-opt the radical Islamic element in Pakistani society, finally accede to his demands.

As a work of scholarship, Partisans of Allah is not meant to be prescriptive, but its subject matter places it squarely at the heart of the policy debate on how best to handle the rise of radical Islam. For one, it debunks the notion—especially popular on the left—that radical Islamic violence can be explained entirely in the secular language of historical injustice, territorial boundaries and political aspirations. In fact, religious ideas, as attested to by the continuing influence of Waliullah and Maududi, matter profoundly.

Second, and again contrary to conventional wisdom, criticism and firmness will do more than praise and concessions on points of principle to ensure that a modern, good neighborly interpretation of Islam triumphs over the radical Islamic alternative. It’s no coincidence that British rule fostered the relatively moderate Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, whereas 60 years of Pakistani independence have thrown up the likes of Mullah Omar of the Taliban, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed of the L-e-T and Masood Azhar of the J-e-M.

Sadanand Dhume is the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist. His next book will examine the impact of globalization on India.

The Wall Street Journal Asia

Coming of Age in Malaysia

Educated and wealthy, but of low social status.

Evening Is the Whole Day
By Preeta Samarasan
(Houghton Mifflin, 352 pages, $24)

By SADANAND DHUME

As bizarre tourism slogans go, few achieve the precise balance of concision and confusion of “Malaysia, Truly Asia.” Leaving aside the notion that other lands — say Japan or Vietnam or Indonesia — are somehow deficient in their Asianness, the central premise of Malaysia’s hard sell to the world is the notion that it hosts, in effortless harmony, three of the continent’s great cultures: Malay, Chinese and Indian.

The reality, as readers of Preeta Samarasan’s exquisitely crafted debut novel will discover, could not be more different. “Evening is the Whole Day” tells the story of a prosperous Tamil family, the Rajasekharans, who live in Ipoh, about 200 kilometers north of Kuala Lumpur. The choice of an Indian family is telling. The father is a “topshot lawyer.” The family occupies the big house on their lane, and inhabits a world of Oxford-inflected accents, gleaming Volvos and single malt Scotch. But they also belong to the community that, not to put too fine a point on it, is at the bottom of Malaysia’s racially divided totem pole.

On top, of course, are the Malay Muslims, who, though they make up only about 60% of the population, have jerry-built an elaborate system of preferences that ensures their dominance of national life. This system — which, depending on your point of view, is either a clever piece of social engineering or a kind of ethnoreligious apartheid — makes race as important a determinant of a person’s life chances as talent, ambition or hard work.

Armed with family wealth and an English education, the topshot lawyer Mr. Rajasekharan dreams of a political career in a country newly freed from British rule. But the Malay-Chinese race riots of 1969 scotch those ambitions by decisively turning Malaysia away from merit and pluralism. By 1980, when the bulk of the story unfolds, the Rajasekharan children are growing up in a land where a person’s odds of getting into university, securing a promotion in a government job, or acquiring an apartment with a reasonable down payment depend, in no small measure, on the right to check a box that says bumiputera, or “son of the soil.” The Chinese, entrepreneurial and hardworking as the stereotype goes, find a way to prosper despite the odds. The Indians, many of whom are descendants of rubber plantation workers imported by the British, tend to languish.

Much of the drama unfolds through the divergent trajectories of two teenage girls living under the same roof. Uma, the family’s brilliant eldest daughter, has snagged a scholarship to Columbia University in New York, and with it the promise of escape from her dysfunctional family. A less hopeful future awaits the servant girl Chellam, whose meager dreams are matched by the meanness of her circumstances.

Ms. Samarasan’s prose is always self-assured and frequently dazzling. She likens petty cruelty to “forcing a cat to walk through a puddle.” The pain of infidelity comes not from the mere knowledge of it, but from the indelible image of a husband buying a big white bawal fish for his mistress to steam with ginger and spring onions. The impact of an awful truth can shoot through a child “like an eel in black water.” Ms. Samarasan is also slyly humorous: It’s hard not to laugh out loud at her portrayals of an Elvis-impersonating Hindu shaman and a gossipy fantasist of a neighbor known as Kooky Rooky.

The novel, at the end, illuminates a fascinating country whose representation in literature remains scant. It expands our understanding of the sprawling Indian diaspora. Most of all, though, it leaves you with something achieved by only the best fiction — a sense that your world has somehow, almost imperceptibly, been permanently enlarged.

Mr. Dhume is a Washington-based writer and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist” (Text Publishing, 2008).

dhume-elson

Far Eastern Economic Review

by R. E. Elson, Cambridge University Press, 394 pages, $105

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

Ten years after the end of Gen. Suharto’s 32-year reign, Indonesians can look back on their achievements with some satisfaction. Democracy has taken firm root: Heading into presidential and parliamentary elections in 2009, nobody seriously questions the country’s capacity to transfer power by the ballot. Separatist movements in Aceh and Papua have been quelled. Thanks to tenacious police work, the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah is on the run. An ambitious decentralization program has settled into place without, as feared, throwing the country into administrative chaos. The press, once a government poodle, is now a pitbull. Even the economy—though sluggish compared to the go-go 1990s—has recovered from the worst of the Asian financial crisis. By way of comparison, in terms of democracy Indonesia is better off than China; in terms of development it remains ahead of India.

It’s hard to imagine, then, that until the 20th century the very word Indonesia—let alone the idea of an archipelagic state in its present form—had little meaning. As the Australian scholar R. E. Elson recalls in his meticulously researched new history, for the Dutch it was the Netherlands East Indies, the tropical Netherlands or, at times, the fanciful sounding Insulinde (the islands of the Indies). Non Dutch travelers often preferred the vague Eastern Seas or Eastern Islands, or the nakedly derivative Indian Archipelago.

Ruled by a relatively minor European power, one that was stingier with education and administrative responsibility for the natives than either the British or the French, Indonesians were slow to develop a national consciousness and an independence movement. Budi Utomo, or Glorious Endeavor, the association of medical students whose formation marks the country’s first tepid nationalist stirrings, was born in 1908. It took another 20 years for activists at a youth conference in Batavia to famously pledge their allegiance to “one homeland, one people and one language.”

At the time, the slogan represented aspiration more than reality. Portions of the homeland in question—including devoutly Muslim Aceh and Hindu Bali—had only recently been stitched together by force of Dutch arms. That the fiercely Christian Moluccans who played an outsize role in the colonial army, the refined Hinduized royals of central Java and the animist tribals of Borneo constituted a single people would have been news to most Ambonese, Solonese and Dayaks. And while the version of Malay that would be called Bahasa Indonesia already linked the trading ports of the archipelago, its usage beyond its Sumatran heartland was patchy. Suffice to say, the grandmothers, and most likely the mothers, of the Sundanese, Minangkabau and Minahasans who attended the Batavia youth conference would have been unintelligible to each other.

Indeed, when Indonesia declared independence from the Dutch in 1945—prodded by the occupying Japanese who had invaded three years earlier—its leaders agreed on little more than the desire to rule themselves. Centralists and federalists jostled over the balance of power between Jakarta and regional governments. Communists and non-Communists differed on land distribution and the nature of the economy. Javanese and non-Javanese held incompatible ideas of the cultural basis for national unity. Ethnic chauvinists and liberal cosmopolitans subscribed to opposite views on the status of the Chinese minority. Military men and civilians disputed the precise role and function of the army.

However, what Mr. Elson calls “the greatest and most enduring division” concerned the role of Islam in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. The dominant group at independence, nationalists led by Sukarno, believed in a modern, multiethnic and multireligious state in which people of all faiths would be treated equally. For Islamists such as Mohammad Natsir (1908-93), the point of banishing the Dutch was not merely to fulfill a vague longing for freedom, but to create the opportunity to be more fully Muslim—in an environment shaped by Shariah and a polity that explicitly guaranteed Muslim dominance.

Over six decades Indonesia has seen six presidents. It has swung from Sukarno’s permanent revolution to Suharto’s dour development state to the free-for-all of the post-Suharto era known as reformasi. Along the way, it has experienced one of Asia’s most infamous pogroms, the slaughter of 500,000 suspected communists in 1965-66; perhaps its sharpest economic setback, the 1998 collapse that led to Suharto’s downfall; and the most devastating natural disaster in living memory, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 225,000 people, most of them Indonesian. Through all this, the issue of Islamism, though appearing to fade between the mid-1960s and the early 1990s, has refused to disappear.

Mr. Elson does not dwell on this detail. Indonesia, as he points out, has outgrown both the rhetorical excesses of the Sukarno era and the development-at-any-cost ambition of Suharto’s New Order regime. In their place he sees “modesty of purpose, pragmatism in attitude and gradualism in achievement.” For the first time, a country whose independent history has only known competing forms of collectivism—both Sukarno and Suharto forbade dissent and emphasized unity—has opened the door to a culture of individual rights. Should Indonesia’s democracy continue to mature, as Mr. Elson appears to believe is likely, it will gradually overcome all discrimination based on race or religion, celebrate pluralism in thought and culture, and reflexively respect freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

Needless to say, a sunny view of Indonesia’s future is not entirely unwarranted. Compared to the rest of the Muslim world—with the possible exception of secular Turkey and Tunisia—it remains a beacon of hope and moderation. The country’s cosmopolitan elites share an unselfconscious broadmindedness; the masses have historically favored nonsectarian parties over Islamists. Compared to their counterparts in South Asia, let alone those in the Middle East, Indonesian women enjoy a higher status in society and greater access to education and careers. In outspoken defenders of religious and artistic freedom such as former President Abdurrahman Wahid, the country boasts Muslim leaders who are moderate by any yardstick and not merely by the special one usually applied to Islam.

And yet it’s equally easy to take a less sanguine view. The most reassuring aspects of contemporary Indonesia are essentially holdovers from the past; the most disturbing belong firmly to the present. If seen through the prism of pluralism—a thaw in attitudes toward the Chinese minority notwithstanding—the growth of orthodox practice and Islamist politics have already shrunk the big tent the country once represented. A generation ago, an ambitious, public spirited Christian could aim for virtually any job in the country. Today the sectarianism fostered by organizations such as the Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI), and an accompanying sense of majority entitlement, have led to de facto barriers to advancement for non-Muslims in the civil service, state-owned companies and, albeit to a lesser extent, the higher reaches of the military.

State-sponsored migration has fatally altered the demographics of traditionally Christian or animist regions such as the Moluccas and Papua. In many of the most devoutly Islamic parts of the country, local authorities have begun to experiment with Shariah, complete with vice squads, mandatory dress codes and compulsory Koran reading. Vigilante groups attack “unauthorized” churches, heterodox Ahmadiyya Muslim mosques and secular liberal gatherings with impunity. In parliament and in politics at large, the fundamentalist Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), modeled on the Muslim Brotherhood, beavers away at diminishing women’s rights, cultural diversity and the ability to respond firmly to Islamist intimidation and violence.

In short, the jury is still out on the idea of Indonesia. It may well evolve, as Mr. Elson and others of an optimistic bent suggest, as a benign liberal democracy with a strong commitment to human rights. But by the same token, the alternative, a state dominated by Islamist collectivism, in which nonconformist women, non-Muslims and heterodox Muslims are effectively second-class citizens, can hardly be ruled out.

Forbes.com

IN HIS OWN FOOTSTEPS

Sadanand Dhume

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar

By Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin, $28)

In 1973 Paul Theroux embarked upon a series of train journeys across Eastern Europe and Asia that culminated in a widely acknowledged classic of travel writing: The Great Railway Bazaar.

Thirty-three years later–older, wiser, sexually less adventurous but still reliably crotchety–he returned to cover more or less the same terrain. The result is a fascinating, and to a contemporary reader delightfully old-fashioned, travelogue larded with all the hallmarks of the genre–anecdote, history and, especially, the kind of tart generalization that has become all too rare in a culture that confuses discernment with blandness.

A generation ago Theroux traveled in, as he evocatively puts it, an age of aerograms and postcards and big black unreliable telephones. In his reprise, despite being tethered to his wife in Hawaii via BlackBerry, he finds things less changed than technology alone (or the wide-eyed Thomas Friedman) would suggest.

The food on the train to Bucharest remains stomach-churning. Still tidy and politically soporific, Singapore is “more a corporation or a cult than a country.” Life in India, which in Theroux evokes equal parts affection and horror, is “an unending experience of nonconsensual rubbing.” Capitalist Russia is hardly different from its communist incarnation: “A pretentious empire with a cruel government that was helpless without secret police.”

Nor is the seasoned traveler particularly impressed with a story that consumes acres of newsprint each week, the economic transformations underway in China and India. China strikes him as ugly and soulless. The new prosperity represents “the horror of answered prayers, a peasant’s greedy dream of development.”

Similarly, upwardly mobile India’s pride and joy, the high-technology capital of Bangalore, has become a much less pleasant place to visit. Its transformation brings to mind “less city planning than the urban equivalent of botched cosmetic surgery.”

Smaller countries come in for similar treatment. Romania’s primary exports are apparently wheat and orphans. Like Albania, its principal function is to supply Western Europe with “factory workers, hookers and car thieves.” John McCain’s beloved Georgia is “a supine and beleaguered country of people narcissistic about their differences.” Turkmenistan, at the time of Theroux’s visit is ruled by the megalomaniac Saparmurat Niyazov–who banned beards, ballet and gold teeth and renamed a month after his mother–is succinctly summed up as “a tyranny run by a madman.”

Needless to say, Theroux–like the tropical fruit durian or the music of M.I.A.–is not to everyone’s taste. Indeed, in some ways Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is best appreciated with an Eastern sensibility, one more likely to equate age with wisdom than with ill-temper, and willing to accord the deference due a capacious mind whose grasp encompasses everything from 19th-century Japanese prints to the novels of the Russian gulag to the grammar of road accidents in Africa.

In a broader sense, Theroux’s impolitic frankness is also a welcome relief from the pronouncements of the caste of professional Pollyannas who populate academia, NGOs, the business press and multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. You can’t imagine him announcing that the triumph of liberal democracy is inevitable, or that Islam is a religion of peace, or that poverty will be eradicated in our lifetime.

One may argue, of course, that Theroux, less alert to the grand historical narrative than his mentor-turned-bête noire V.S. Naipaul or the Pole Ryszard Kapuscinski, fails to notice how tens of millions of Asians indeed live lives less socially and economically constrained than those of their parents. There were no women blogging about their sex lives in Mao’s China, and most Indians would gladly take traffic jams over drought.

But at the same time his travels bring to life a sobering truth: Outside North America, Western Europe and Japan, virtually no one lives in a country where political liberty, economic prosperity and social freedom can be taken for granted. As the cliché goes, the more things change the more that they, like the slop served on Romanian railways, remain the same.

 

 

 

 

 

http://globalasia.org/pdf/issue7/v3n3_Dhume.pdf

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST

By Mohsin Hamid

Harcourt, 192 pages, $22.00

THE ISLAMIST

By Ed Husain

Penguin Global, 304 pages, $18.00

The Wall Street Journal Asia

The Trouble with Anita

By SADANAND DHUME

Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India
By Anita Jain
(Bloomsbury, 307 pages, $24.99)

Say you’re a 30-something woman in New York with a life that belongs in “Sex and the City” but a notion of romantic love that wouldn’t be out of place in a Victorian novel. Things haven’t quite worked out with the dashing Argentine who promised to write your name in his heart. The appeal of variety — a tête-à-tête with a French investment banker in a Soho lounge, or boozing it up with a laddish British journalist — has begun to wear thin. Observing the quotidian intimacy of a neck rub between your married friends drives you to tears.

If you happen to be Anita Jain, an Indian-American armed with a degree from Harvard and a resume that includes stints as a journalist in Singapore and Mexico City, you can always try your luck in the land of your forefathers. Or to put it bluntly, as she does: “People commonly go to India to find themselves or to find god, but I went to India to find a husband.”

Imbued with this clarity of purpose — and having landed a job at the Financial Times — Ms. Jain arrives in Delhi in the summer of 2005. Her quest quickly turns into an anthropological excursion. She discovers the pleasures of Grade A Manali hash and Old Monk rum with water. In her spare time, she hangs out with rock aficionados whose primary allegiance is not to God or country but to the Rolling Stones. Ms. Jain’s father, a vivid and endearing presence throughout the book, emigrated from a country where a family on the lower rungs of the middle class would divide a single banana among eight siblings. His daughter returns to a land where Mediterranean bistros serve Chilean white wine or a couple of double vodka-sodas at a fashionable night club can set you back about $20. (Not everything has changed; as Ms. Jain observes, the same amount can pay for the monthly services of a cook.)

Her peculiar status — both insider and outsider — gives Ms. Jain an unusual view of the changes rippling through middle-class India. She detects a welling of cultural self-confidence at a dance club that dedicates Saturday nights exclusively to Hindi songs. She notices — with delicious tartness — that these days it takes a lot less than chronic wife-beating to trigger a divorce; mere temperamental differences will do. On “gay night” at a popular club, she watches rich and poor mingle in a way that would be unthinkable for most of her friends. In the phenomenon of expatriate white women paid by companies to attend polo matches and cocktail parties, she uncovers the vulgarity and longing beneath the veneer of the city’s new wealth.

To her credit, Ms. Jain also turns her dry-eyed gaze inwards. She knows that she is “never the best-looking woman in a room.” She tells a would-be lover that she longs to stop being “this courtesan-type figure — skilled in the art of intelligent conversation and also game for a little bedroom play.” She acknowledges, but does not fetishize, the classic Indian-American lament of not fully belonging to either India or America.

Ms. Jain’s attempts to get hitched are oddly desultory — a casual fling here, a stolen kiss there, a brief tilt at the arranged route when her parents visit from California. At times one can’t help but wonder whether she set out to snag a spouse or merely to chronicle a rollicking search for one.

Either way, it soon becomes apparent that the odds of Ms. Jain finding romantic bliss are awfully slim. The qualities of a fine memoirist — self-deprecating wit, searing honesty — are almost fatally at odds with the measure of self-deception and capacity for subterfuge more common among the few who manage to have it all, the torrid affair with the young rocker and the respectable arranged marriage with the Manhattan investment banker. Ms. Jain is hopelessly sentimental about the idea of love, but unusually alert to its shortcomings in practice. If it were the other way round, she might have had better luck in Delhi’s marriage market. But “Marrying Anita” wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable and entertaining a read.

Mr. Dhume, a former India bureau chief of the Far Eastern Economic Review, is the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist” (Text Publishing, 2008).

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Far Eastern Economic Review

by Steve Coll

Penguin, 688 pages, $35

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

On the face of it, few alliances are as unlikely as that between the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. One is the world’s oldest democracy, the other a secretive monarchy. One celebrates individualism and champions human rights; the other mandates an austere understanding of Islam’s collective responsibilities, and enforces perhaps the harshest policies toward women and religious minorities on the planet. The U.S. spearheads the War on Terrorism, now entering its eighth year. Meanwhile its ostensible ally, with its staggering oil wealth and control of Islam’s holiest sites, promotes the fundamentalist outlook shared by Islamist terrorists from Morocco to Mindanao.

The best known terrorist group with a Saudi pedigree is, of course, al Qaeda. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers who participated in the 9/11 attacks were Saudi nationals. Osama bin Laden himself is a product of an elite Jeddah high school and a scion of one of the kingdom’s great fortunes. In many ways bin Laden has come to symbolize Islam’s troubled encounter with the West, but his story in fact represents only one bloody strand of a complex fabric. To put things in perspective, there’s no better place to start than Steve Coll’s magisterial history of the Arab world’s most famous business dynasty.

Modern Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by Abdulaziz ibn Saud. His conquest of the Arabian peninsula over the preceding two decades depended upon a nearly 200-year-old alliance between his clan and the descendants and followers of Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, an 18th century Islamic scholar. The rudiments of their pact, which endures to this day, gave the Al-Sauds untrammeled political power in return for enforcing Wahhabi orthodoxy on the country’s spiritual and cultural life. Wahhabis, also called Salafis, practice what they regard as the purest form of Islam. In emulation of the prophet Muhammad and his earliest companions they reject art, music and adornment, and are deeply suspicious of most modern technology.

Mohamed bin Laden arrived in Jeddah around 1925 as a penniless teenage migrant from Yemen’s arid Hadhramawt valley. Illiterate but resourceful and hard working, he had a knack for organizing men and an ability to ingratiate himself with the kingdom’s rulers. Over time he established himself as a reliable contractor. His fi rst big break came in 1950 when Abdulaziz named him Director-General of Construction Works. As Saudi Arabia’s economy expanded, the bin Laden fortune fattened on no-bid contracts for palaces, highways and mosques. With wealth came a growing family. At the time of his death in a plane crash in 1967, Mohamed bin Laden had fathered 25 sons and 29 daughters from 22 wives. Two of the boys—the eldest, Salem and No. 17, Osama—would come to embody the contrasting pulls and pressures faced by wealthy Saudi Arabians in the latter half of the 20th century.

Salem bin Laden (1946-88) was groomed from the start for leadership, packed off to an English boarding school at the age of 12. When he was barely 21 years old his father’s death left Salem responsible for the sprawling clan. A larger than life figure, he had the ability to flit effortlessly between Swiss ski resorts, Texan mansions and the salons of his family’s royal patrons. Under his leadership the bin Laden fortune would continue to swell. But what stands out in Mr. Coll’s richly detailed portrait is not the world of Panamanian holding companies, Liberia-registered corporations, real estate investments in Florida and construction contracts in Mecca and Medina. Rather, it is Salem the bon vivant and madcap dreamer.

As a student in England, Salem developed a taste for Flying Dutchman pipe tobacco and a lifelong devotion to schmaltzy pop tunes. You Are My Sunshine was a particular favorite. He pursued women as ardently as his father. At one point he proposed simultaneously to four girlfriends—English, German, American and French. He intended to house them all in a compound in Jeddah, each with her own house flying her country’s flag, and with a car—a Rolls-Royce, a Mercedes and so on—reflecting her provenance. He could be crude; handing out cash to young Western women gave him a particular thrill. He was also a sentimentalist. Unsure of his birthday, he used Valentine’s Day as a proxy. When it came to America, Salem could not get enough. His visits were frequent, and his purchases included Learjets, Lincolns, Tabasco sauce in bulk and large quantities of decorative cacti from the southwest.

A dozen or so years younger than Salem and born to a different mother—a Syrian married at 14 and divorced by Mohamed before she turned 18—Osama never quite developed the same comfort with the West. Instead of studying overseas, Osama enrolled in Jeddah’s prestigious Al-Thaghr Model School, where his contemporaries included several Al-Sauds. In the 1960s, Saudi Arabia had begun welcoming an influx of teachers and intellectuals fleeing the socialist Gamal Abdel Nasser’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The Brotherhood and the Wahhabis, though they differ on important details, share the core belief that every aspect of society and the state must conform to Shariah law.

Osama joined a Brotherhood cell as a 15-year-old in high school. In matters of orthodoxy his standards were exacting from the start. At soccer practice he would chide friends for wearing shorts rather than long pants. He refused to shake hands with women, and averted his eyes if an unveiled woman happened to open the door of one of his brothers’ homes. He absented himself from his graduating class photo; photography was akin to idolatry. He rejected music for competing with Koran recital. Rather than be tempted by premarital sex, at the age of 17 he acquired his first wife, a 14-year-old cousin. His political outlook took on a similarly rigid cast: Every Muslim, he came to believe, must hate Jews, Christians and Americans.

By now the well-known contours of Osama’s adult life have acquired an aura of inevitability—the participation in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, the rift with the Al-Sauds over their decision to allow U.S. troops to defend them against Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War, the brief sojourn in Sudan, the alliance with the Taliban, and the post-9/11 turn as a fugitive, most likely in Pakistan. Mr. Coll speculates that things might have turned out differently but for Salem bin Laden’s untimely death while piloting a plane in Texas in 1988. By force of personality, and control over the purse strings, Salem had held together the bin Laden clan’s secular and religious factions. Perhaps he would have persuaded Osama to give up jihad once the Soviets had been driven out of Afghanistan. Perhaps he would have convinced his brother of the folly of targeting the U.S. mainland.

Either way, the contradictions in the U.S.-Saudi relationship ran too deep to have been papered over forever. With the end of the Cold War, the antipathy toward communism that bound the two countries faded. In the meantime, thanks to the ease of international travel and the diffusion of technology—just about anyone can learn how to rig a crude bomb set off remotely by cell phone—the disposition of a country’s people has acquired nearly as much importance as that of its government. At a popular level, the Internet allows ordinary Saudis and Americans to peer into each other’s lives as never before. Many don’t like what they see.

Salem bin Laden inhabited a world where a wealthy Saudi could boogie the night away in a Swedish disco and then hop on a plane to ferry cash to his jihadist brother in Peshawar. For today’s Saudis, the choice between a medieval belief system and a modern lifestyle, between Wahhabism and the West, is much starker. The kingdom’s charities and front groups have come under scrutiny, as has the influence of Saudi-funded mosques from Bradford to Bangladesh to Brunei. In the 20th century, the U.S. had good reason to be endlessly gentle with, and often supportive of, its recalcitrant ally. The 21st century promises a rather different approach.

dhumesuicideofreason

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Lee Harris, Basic Books, 312 pages, $26

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

Early in the book, Lee Harris quotes a Chechen terrorist involved in the 2002 attack on a Moscow theater that left 169 people dead. “We will win in the end,” the Chechen declares, “because we are willing to die and you are not.” The sentiment is familiar to anyone who follows the global Islamist movement, which seeks to impose Shariah law on society and the state. Expressed in remarkably similar ways, it surfaces in al Qaeda press releases in Pakistan, jihadist propaganda videos in Iraq and Islamist T-shirts in Indonesia. Fittingly then, it sets the tone for an expansive, thoughtful and unusually frank meditation on the troubled encounter between Islam and the West.

Mr. Harris, who lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia and contributes to a slew of mostly conservative publications, holds a stark view of the world. The modern, liberal West, he believes, faces two closely related threats: an exaggerated confidence in reason and a deep underestimation of the power of religious fanaticism.

The argument goes that children reared in the West are encouraged to develop into rational human beings, capable of taking a disinterested view of events and prone to apportion blame and moral censure evenly between their opponents and themselves. In the Islamic world, by contrast, fanaticism has evolved as both a cultural defense mechanism and an agent of conquest.

It is fanaticism that allowed Islam in its early years to obliterate the Sassanian civilization of the Persians and the Christian culture of the Byzantines, permanently altering not merely their political institutions but their entire way of life. This force allows no questioning of its core tenets. It privileges duties over rights, the community over the individual and the future over the present. It has now resumed its ancient struggle with the West with renewed vigor.

This is a challenge that Mr. Harris believes the West is ill-equipped to meet. Most people in advanced democracies have come to believe that reason—and by extension reasonable behavior—is innate to the human condition. In fact it stems from a particular tradition, the Enlightenment, and the peculiar historical circumstances of three countries: France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Thanks in large part to them, in the West both cultural norms and education hardwire most citizens to think and behave rationally. This is achieved early in childhood and established at “a physiological and precognitive level.”

In short, Westerners are conditioned to feel ashamed of temper tantrums, unreasonable outbursts or impulsive acts of aggression. So, for example, when fervent Christians are ordered to remove a copy of the Ten Commandments from an Alabama courthouse they protest by peacefully waving placards rather than by trashing the premises or assaulting the judge. The thought of bombing an embassy because of a cartoon, shooting a nun over an obscure reference to medieval history by the Pope, or jailing someone for the high crime of naming a teddy bear Mohammed is simply unfathomable.

By contrast, according to Mr. Harris, Muslims are brainwashed from an early age by a “shaming code” that demands that they reject anything that threatens to subvert the supremacy of their faith. While Americans drug their most aggressive boys—alpha male children in Mr. Harris’s parlance—with Ritalin, Muslims do everything they can to ensure that theirs are tough, aggressive and ruthless. Americans are proud of their boys entering Harvard; Muslims apparently prefer theirs to enter paradise as martyrs.

Despite the somewhat overheated tone, this book offers much that is commendable. The rational mind does indeed have trouble grasping the reality of religious fanaticism. Thus the constant—and at times comic—reach for “deeper” explanations for Islamist violence: poverty, lack of democracy, historical grievances over territory. (For some mysterious reason, Cambodian peasants, Vietnamese living under one-party rule and Hindu refugees from their ancestral homeland of Sindh appear not to have discovered that the proper response to their circumstances is to blow themselves up on buses or pilot aircraft into skyscrapers.) Mr. Harris also recognizes a simple fact that is too often overlooked by the pundit class: reduced to its core, the entire debate about terrorism, Islam and Islamism is simply about what people believe and how they are willing to act on those beliefs.

And yet on the whole Mr. Harris is more wrong than right. For one, he fails to distinguish between Islamists and ordinary Muslims, the majority of whom, like people of any faith, are nonviolent. Most Muslims, and indeed many nonviolent Islamists, would indeed prefer a ticket to Harvard than to a martyr’s paradise. Mr. Harris also fails to acknowledge that religious fanaticism, though particularly potent in Muslim lands, is hardly a Muslim monopoly.

Finally, he underestimates the resilience of Western societies. Cultures based on individual rights, the capacity for self-criticism and rational thought are in fact infinitely stronger than any tribal society can ever hope to be. It’s no accident that the British, the French and the Americans have dominated the planet for more than 300 years. While Islamism does indeed threaten cherished gains of the Enlightenment, such as the freedom to ridicule religion, its eventual triumph in the West is far from certain. All told, the odds of Danish Muslims one day learning to draw blasphemous cartoons probably match those of amputations and public floggings making their way to central Copenhagen.

In reality, it is in Muslim-majority countries that Islamism poses the greatest danger. The movement thrives in places like Pakistan and Indonesia that lack strong institutions such as impartial courts or an honest civil service. Deeply embedded cultural norms and the threat of violence force secular liberals in Muslim countries to tiptoe around religious sensibilities. This cedes the rhetorical high ground to Islamists, who are invariably pious and whose ideas are rooted in an interpretation of their faith. A Portuguese or Chilean Catholic who favors contraception and gay rights is free to declare that he couldn’t care less what the Bible says or the Pope thinks. His Malaysian or Bangladeshi counterpart who shows similar disregard for Islam is either very brave or very foolish.

Indeed, in the Muslim world the slightest whiff of disrespect toward the Koran or the prophet Mohammed is an invitation to violence. Those Muslims who believe in gender equity, the separation of the mosque and the state, and freedom of conscience are reduced to quibbling over the interpretation of Koranic verses and the traditions of the prophet. Hence the never-ending quest by liberal Muslim intellectuals, such as those associated with Malaysia’s Sisters in Islam or Indonesia’s Liberal Islam Network, to define what constitutes “authentic” Islam.

Unfortunately, these worthy efforts alone are not enough to counter the well-organized and tenacious adherents of Islamism, who are usually backed by the weight of tradition, the bulk of clerical opinion and the resources of the oil-rich Middle East. Ultimately, by failing to enlarge the terms of the debate, by failing to make Islam as open to criticism as any other belief system, it is Muslim liberals—not Western rationalists—who are complicit in their own extinction.