Islam holds the mirror of spirituality to capitalism

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, May 14, 2006, Page 18

Meetings with Remarkable Muslims Edited Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring 312 pages Eland

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 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 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").

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 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 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.