There are many poor people here, from sand-blown Sufis to a formerly rich man who gave up all to be a porter at a mosque -- as well as proponents of women's liberation, lovers of dates and silks, plus olivewood flutes, travel by camel, pink houses on the Bosphorus, diving off the Pakistani Sindh desert coast attached to a turtle ("my unwilling, unwitting guide to my own atavistic reptilian past"), the pleasures of hashish and even of wine -- Islam prohibits drunkenness, not alcohol, one man insists.
The sheer variety of the Muslim world, extending from Morocco to Indonesia (this last sadly absent from this collection) is everywhere here. And these Muslims, you suddenly realize, are all people who take the little things of life seriously, so that deigning to notice the mundane and the everyday comes to seem a form of neurosis, common among cerebral Anglo-Saxons, but significantly, and delightfully, rare among the world's Muslims, and those Westerners who have chosen to spend their lives among them.
What I believe this book secretly asks is this: What if our corporate capitalist culture, Western or Eastern, is in reality shabby, because it is without spirit? What if, bar its suicide bombers (servants not of Allah but of Satan, one Muslim opines), the Islamic world is saner, more humane and more beautiful than our own? And cumulatively these disparate chapters are strangely all of a piece. They taught me, in a sense, how to live -- as far from corporate moguls as you can get, and appreciating the pleasures of life as they pass -- all too quickly for many, somewhat slower, you feel, for the people delineated here.
It goes without saying, of course, that this book is well-timed, but its value extends further. It is a deeply lovable work, and has in fact become a treasured possession.
One last point. In a travel article on Hanoi in Taipei Times last year, I noted that Norman Lewis' 1951 classic on travel in Vietnam, A Dragon Apparent, was "hard to find." Now I've found it. It's been reissued by Eland, and has just been reprinted -- sewn as well as glued, almost unheard of in a paperback book these days, as it proudly claims. For Eland's catalogue, visit www.travelbooks.co.uk/catalogue.html.
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