The Arrival of a Pakistani Narrator
Arranged around one family’s genealogy a new political narrative about Pakistan emerges
The Faithful Scribe: A Story of Islam, Pakistan, Family, and War
by Shahan Mufti
Other Press, pp. 355. $18.96
Shahan Mufti, a well-regarded journalist, starts his narrative non-fiction book by asking the reader to view him as a “dragoman.” The word is a good one to know in this day and age. It comes to English from the Arabic and Persian word tarjuman, and is rooted in a very long history of translation, interpretation, and guidance offered to Westerners by selected Easterners.
In fact,a book that seeks to explain one of Asia’s most enigmatic nations and the equally enigmatic religion that it clings to (or which clings to it?), the word choice couldn’t be better. And Mufti plays the dragoman well. He shows you all the important landmarks, all the walls where the gems have been looted, and as many of the secret passageways as you have time for.
British colonialism is there, and so is the Partition. The history of the myriad imperial attacks on the Indian subcontinent is there, and so is his own family’s search for ancestral roots in the rubble. India and Bangladesh and America are there, and so are the politicians and dictators that have tried to shape Pakistan since 1947. And, of course, Islam is there too, hanging about, always giving the dragoman some additional avoirdupois, some mystique.
At the end of The Faithful Scribe, you feel the kind of languorous serenity that comes after having experienced big history, the kind of reflection you might lapse into after bopping around the Parthenon, or Jerusalem, or certain parts of Europe under the guidance of a well-read tour-guide. Except you’re in bed and its four a.m.
But Mufti is not just a dragoman. He is not merely an explainer of events, like some kind of intellectual Vanna White (certified letter-turner on the Wheel of Fortune). Not only is he aware that he exists inside the historical forces that connect Pakistan, India, Islam, and America, he also hopes to find a narrative that will allow him to make sense of it all. To this end he jumps into a pair of investigations, one personal and one political.
Mufti’s personal investigation is about figuring out his family’s genealogy and ancestral connection to both the Punjab and Islam. To this end he traces family trees (some convincing and some not). He meets long-lost relatives and goes to ancient grave-sites. He relives some of his parents’ and grandparents’ lives. In this journey, one that I have seen many other Punjabis from Pakistani try to make, he reaches for the Caliph Omar, Tamerlane, Sufi masters, Islamic jurists, and relatives that worked for the British. To his great credit, at the end of the journey, rather than beaming with some genealogical triumphalism, Mufti finds himself at a cross-roads about what actually constitutes history. Is history the narrative you can prove? Or is history the narrative that you want to believe? The journalist in him leans to the former. The man-in-search-of-an-existential-home leans to the latter. I will let the reader find out which one Mufti chooses (it is in Chapter 8). But it is most definitely a choice. And the history you choose has tremendous political ramifications in the Indian subcontinent, one of the oldest places in the world.
And that leads me to what is perhaps the more fascinating investigation in this book. It is the one about what constitutes the idea of Pakistan, how it came to be, what it did, and how it represents its own history to itself. It is here that Mufti really shines. Unlike the founders of Pakistan, who were aiming to build an Islamic Republican Utopia, Mufti is writing from the vantage point of having seen the Pakistan experiment — of a vibrant religious nationalism, of a secularism that emanates from Quranic (as opposed to Enlightenment) definitions of justice — unfold and collapse upon itself. But Mufti isn’t jaded by it. He is curious. And that curiosity leads him to come up with a very interesting narrative, one that will go a long way towards helping Pakistanis (and people outside Pakistan) make sense of the nation.
Mufti’s narrative about the malaise inside Pakistan (which he correctly identifies as a Civil War), starts with his discovery of a series of letters between Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and the Deobandi scholar Muhammad Qasim Nanotvi. This was the first I had heard about the existence of this rather remarkable correspondence, between the liberal and the fundamentalist strains of pre-Partition Islam. And the arc that Mufti makes from that moment, through a pork-eating Muhammad Ali Jinnah defending a Muslim that killed a Hindu that wrote a Satanic Versus like book about the Prophet Muhammad (wow, right?), through various faces of Islamization in Pakistan, is really fascinating. At last things start making sense.
Mufti’s book, if read carefully (and you do have to read carefully because it is really two books in one—insert Partition joke), shatters some of the other binaries by which Pakistan is evaluated. Gone is Mosque versus Military. Gone is Secularism versus Islam. Gone is Muslim versus Hindu. I will leave it to the reader to determine if they agree with Mufti’s new narrative for Pakistan, but I think that with this book Shahan Mufti has taken the leap from investigative journalist to public intellectual, and because of the attendant responsibility I hope he will make the effort to pare down his argument in order to force more direct engagement with it, both among policymakers that influence Pakistan out of DC, and among the various strands of Pakistani elite.
Finally, since Americans so love (and need) foreign things compared to local things in order to understand and sell them better, I will say that if he wants, Shahan Mufti is capable of being a Pakistani William Buckley and Susan Sontag in one, as only someone of that much complexity can take on the challenges facing that wonderful but troubled nation. As should be apparent by now, I recommend this book.
Ali Eteraz is the author of Children of Dust (HarperCollins, 2009),about the spiritual privations of a skeptic. It was a New Statesman Book of the Year and long-listed for the Asian-American Writer’s Award. @eteraz
