It's a pernicious feature of many modern books that they open with thanks to their institutional editors, gratefully acknowledging their role in "putting this text into shape" or "turning my unorganized manuscript into what you now hold in your hands." In reality such comments are the hallmark of the corporate product, homogenized for mass sales, and a long way from the genuine creation of the independent, self-sustaining imaginative artist.
Not all the books you see smiling up at you from the tables of bookstores, in other words, are the same sort of thing. These mega-buck hopefuls are in reality the publishing equivalents of GM foods, subtly doctored to make them conform to what's perceived as public "taste." Please your taste-buds they may, forgettably albeit briefly, but what they'll do to your thought processes in the long term is anybody's guess.
Most of the UK's old publishers, though they keep their original names (the further to milk the prestige they retain from former times), are nowadays merely separate doors along a corridor of some vast publishing conglomerate. Not so Eland Publishing, which remains proudly independent, reprinting classics of travel literature and occasionally issuing new publications in the travel genre.
One such new publication is Meetings With Remarkable Muslims. The title echoes a former cult classic, Meetings With Remarkable Men, by the early 20th-century Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. But if this new book also contains a secret quasi-spiritual message, it only begins to dawn on you as you finally close its elegantly-produced pages.
The title might suggest a book of interviews, but instead these are 39 essays contributed by writers who have worked in, or otherwise engaged with, the Muslim world. There are, consequently, evocations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, Niger and Senegal, pen-portraits all individually crafted and, I'm certain, far from being homogenized by any intellectual-fast-food-producing editorial machine.
Few of the contributors are "ordinary people," however. Many have worked in the Indian subcontinent or the Middle East in important positions, as museum curators, NGO directors or scholars of Persian, or else simply sought "deep isolation" among the Taureg of the pre-Sahara. Some have married into the world they love, or were born there and found their footsteps leading them to Europe. (The book's most alluring cities for me, incidentally, were Damascus and the Yemeni capital, Sana'a).
The "remarkable Muslims" described range from the famous Senegal singer Youssou N'Dour, via a senior Indian Communist who's a fan of the Grateful Dead, to an illiterate Afghani asylum-seeker, Mr. F. The essay on Mr. F. is the most harrowing in the book, about someone who, when delivered onto a Scottish dockside, couldn't write, had no possessions, and whose home had no phone and would be inaccessible to any mail service. His rejection by the UK Home Office appears almost certain.
It would be ingenuous to claim this book doesn't have a political dimension. The editors state that it "arose out of the marches in London against the invasion of Iraq." Knowing that "the lies, half-truths and manufactured fears by which this war had been sold to the public" were backed by images of bearded fanatics and veiled gunmen, they felt a collection of counter-images was needed. But there's little ranting anywhere in these pages (though there is one reference to "precise bombing for democracy").
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