Meetings with Remarkable Muslims

by Barnaby Rogerson

Book Overview

A collection of travel writing celebrating friendship and the chance encounters that unexpectedly enrich our lives, which shows the diversity of the modern Islamic world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0955010500
• ISBN13: 9780955010507
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: Eland Publishing
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

A Collection of Travel Writing

(Lisa Kaaki) Since 9/11 there has been an international interest in the Islamic world which has continued to the present. One of the latest efforts to shed some new light on Muslims comes in the form of a delightful book: "Meetings With Remarkable Muslims, a Collection of Travel Writing." The idea for the book came after the editors, Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring, witnessed the marches in London protesting against the invasion of Iraq: "Realizing that the lies, half-truths and manufactured fears by which this war had been sold to the public were backed by the images of the Islamic world latched onto by our media - of bearded fanatics, suicide bombers and veiled gunmen - it seemed important to offer a broader, truer picture. As anyone who has traveled regularly within the Muslim world will know, this perception is willfully, even perhaps maliciously, false. " The collection is divided into three parts, "Here and Now," "Memories," and "Ghosts," in which the authors show the lives of Muslims, highlighting the varieties of their practices and traditions. The book is more than anything about ordinary Muslims leading ordinary lives: "There are no world-famous presidents, revolutionary colonels, or publicity-hungry preachers in this world-view. Instead it is the porters, drivers, smugglers, musicians, teachers, mothers, neighbors and restaurateurs who are cherished for the example of their ordinary lives," say the authors. Although most of the writers in this collection would not describe themselves as writers at all, the pieces are beautifully written. Alberto Cairo, a lawyer by profession, has been making prosthetic arms and legs in Kabul for the past fifteen years. In 1996, he was described on the front page of the International Herald Tribune as "the most beloved foreigner in Afghanistan." His personal account of life in Kabul is of a country still searching for peace: "In Kabul new restaurants and pizzerias are opening all the time with exotic foreign names such as Golden Lotus, The Great Wall, New York Restaurant; the cinemas show romantic Indian films with songs and violence; you see mobile phones everywhere, the traffic is chaotic, much of the city is a building site, refugees have returned in their thousands. Life seems to be surging ahead triumphantly. But peace has not yet spread through the land. " In another piece, Robin Hanbury-Tenison writes about his life with his Tuareg companions when they wandered through the northern Air Mountains, a part of the Sahara few outsiders have ever visited - or even know about. In a moving account of his travels, he praises his companions who "would die rather than let anything happen to me... In my whole life I have never felt safer, more wrapped in friendship. " Brigid Keenan, a diplomat's wife who has lived in Muslim countries for more than ten years, was impressed by Thala Khair, "the daughter-in-law of a Syrian Defense Minister and the wife of a colonel in the Syrian Republican Guard; she