The Shah's Iran .... and the Ayatollah's

I wonder why Jumping over Fire is not as well known as The Kite Runner. Nahid Rachin in this book set partly in Iran and partly in the USA captures Iranian society in transition. The picture painted will be found to be extremely familiar to any reader who has read The Kite Runner. The Iranian part of the book is set in the last days of the Shah’s rule and the story unfolds through the eyes of Norah Ellahi, the daughter of an Iranian father and an American mother. They are part of the elitist section of Iranian society with Norah’s father working as a doctor in the hospital operated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, considered one of the principal tools of the Shah’s stooge imperialism. The book certainly describes an extravagant lifestyle of the Ellahi family to which Nora and her brother Jahan belong.

The problem of identity is one that this book wrestles with and it does so at several levels. There is the question of finding your identity when half of you are Iranian and half American and society is rapidly turning rapidly anti American. There is the story of the identity of an adopted child which Norah’s brother Jahan is and the horror and the bewilderment of that discovery. there is the problem of being liberal in a society that is traditional at best and orthodox at worst and rapidly becoming more so. Mid way through the book , the family secretly emigrate to the USA, where they seek political asylum and another journey of identity begins for Norah and Jahan – to be identified as American when the typical American student sees Iranians as “the enemy”, especially after a group of Iranians take American embassy officials as hostages. For Jahan, the identity issue would never be resolved, and in looks more Asian and obviously Iranian than his sister, he gives up along the way and begins a reverse journey back into Iran – identifying more closely with every thing that his parents and sister had consciously abandoned and in eventually choosing to trace out and live with his birth mother

The book is also great in capturing a society in change and transition. it begins with the children living what can only be described privileged lives in the refinery town of Masjid –e –Suleiman with the barest of restrictions and deference to local culture; a contrast that the children only experience when they visit their father’s country retreat at Meigoon where the large joint family follows tradition and typical Islamic practice like the chador. But the cities largely and certainly the anglicized enclaves where the elite live are Westernized and liberated and these trips to the country side are few and far between.


All this changes of course and once the Shah and his West leaning regime falls and the and the Ayatollah Khomeini comes to power, what was till now an aberration becomes the norm. Islamic values are more strictly enforced and other traditions even if deeply Persian and anciently rooted – like Nauroz, the traditional Spring New Year and the customs and celebration associated with them are increasingly outlawed and go underground. This is some thing that Norah is happy to run away from and Jahan is only willing to embrace even though Islamic values would run counter to a long running incestuous relationship with his sister – a theme that Nahid Rachin introduces to what purpose is a mystery.

Jumping over Fire is a story with a sweeping backdrop of history that is recent and immediate, with implications for events now unfolding in the Middle East. Kite Runner portrayed for us the changes in Afghanistan; this one talks about the changes in Iran; except that the Islamic society in Iran would seem relatively humane and welcomed compared to the loathing that the Taliban seemed to generally arouse.

Book Review: India - A Million Mutinies Now : A Review from 2009

Trinidadian born Indian journalist-novelist V.S Naipaul wrote the book India – A Million Mutinies Now in the 1990s and over and over again, he recollects here , his reminiscences from his first trip of 1962 and his next one 1n 1975. He emphasises in this book that much has changed since his last two trips to India, which yielded his darkly pessimistic books, An Area of Darkness and “ India: a Wounded Civilization. In this multi layered travelogue, he describes "a country of a million little mutinies," reeling with "rage and revolt," with movements like the Shiv Sena, Dalit Panthers, the agitation of the Naxalites and the Sikh separatist movements, which were active in the 90s profiled in detail. Reading the book in 2009 is revealing ; for it shows how indeed time and tide indeed wait for no man.

The Dalit panthers have faded, the Shiv Sena exists but arguably fading and the original Naxalites of Bengal described in the book are gone as are the Sikh khalistanis. The new kids on the block are names like the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, terrorists of the SIMI or LeT variety and the Naxalites of Chattisgarh and the militants of Kashmir, none of whom were around in 1990. If Naipaul were to write a third travelogue in the next ten years, may be the landscape would have changed immeasurably.

A Million Mutinies Now," which is made up of several intersecting outline, leaves the reader with a powerful impression of people's ardour, diligence and zeal. Seemingly selected at chance, these persons may not be entirely typical of the country, but they come from a multiplicity of religious, social and economic backgrounds. What they have in common is a willingness to brave gigantic difficulties to achieve their ideals or their thoughts. Some lead lives light-years separated from those of their ancestors ; others resolutely attempt to preserve tradition and ritual in their lives.

Among his profiles are Papu, a successful Jain trader and Anwar, a Muslim from Mohammed Ali Road in Bombay; Rajan, a displaced Brahmin in Calcutta; Kala, a Tamil woman who has thrown off the chains of tradition; Dipanjan, a West Bengali science professor; Rashid, a Shia Muslim in Lucknow; and Gurtej Singh, a Sikh in Chandigarh. He ends the journey in Srinagar, at the hotel on the lake from which he wrote An Area of Darkness.

in this highly readable, albeit now some what dated book, V.S.Naipaul celebrates the many expressions of every day life, of lives victorious in the midst of all the chaos, untidiness and poverty of the larger society. A Hindu by birth, though not observant, he finds India a place of great hope. It is, he says, the country where belief and unbelief coexist most peaceably.

Naipaul ends the book thus:

“Change is present everywhere, "India was now a country of million mutinies. A million mutinies, supported by twenty kinds of group excess, sectarian excess, religious excess, regional excess: the beginnings of self-awareness, it would seem the beginnings of an intellectual life, already negated by old anarchy and disorder. But there was in India now what didn't exist 200 years before: a central will, a central intellect, a national idea. .... What the mutinies were also helping to define was the strength of the general intellectual life, and the wholeness and humanism of the values to which all Indians now felt that they could appeal. They were a part of the beginning of a new way for many millions, part of India's growth, part of its restoration."

As a reader reading the book, close to two decades after it was written and having the benefit of hindsight, I am thankful for the rich and detailed analysis, and perhaps for the sense of hope Mr. Naipaul leaves me with in his concluding pages. This is a conclusion that at first seems at odds with much of his book's own evidence, and with what many of the interviewees see in the future.

Book Review : Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen’s book, “Identity and Violence’ examines the unfortunate connection between violence and our tendency to identify with one key trait — our ethnicity, or religion, for example — to the exclusion of all others. Sen argues that we can combat this tendency by rejecting this narrowly defined, limited sense of identity, and embracing a broader, richer and more complex understanding of ourselves.

Speaking of his own identities, he says:

" I can be, at the same time, an Asian, a British citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin...This is just a small sample of diverse categories to each of which I may simultaneously belong. "

He bemoans our predisposition to separate human kind into many different boxes – he cites Samuel Huntington and his Clash of Civilizations stereo types. Huntington of course contrasts Western civilization with "Islamic civilization," "Hindu civilization," "Buddhist civilization," and so on. The supposed conflicts of religious differences are incorporated into a sharply fractured vision of hard-boiled divisiveness. In fact, of course, the people of the world can be pigeonholed according to many other subsets, each of which has some—often far-reaching— importance in our lives: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious groupings have received much expression in recent years, they cannot be supposed to eliminate other characteristics. Amartya Sen contends that our society is driven as much by confusion as by hatred. Challenging the division of people by race, religion, and class, he presents an alternate understanding of a world that can be made to move toward peace as firmly as it has spiralled in recent years toward brutality and war.

Sen also notes the inclination to create a random -often historically inaccurate- identity of the self in order to distinguish it from the other. Here he criticizes the idea of the Western mind whereby certain ideas (e.g., democracy) are claimed to be the sole property of the Occident. Citing examples of Buddhist councils during the reign of Emperor Ashoka (3rd Century BC) and tracts on religious freedom during that of the Mughal Emperor Akbar (16th Century AD), Sen attempts to demonstrate how such an identity can be quickly disputed.

A lot of the book is preoccupied with the Muslim identity because much of the attention is directed towards the perception and understanding of this identity in the world. Moreover, much that is valuable in the Western civilisation is a legacy of Muslim as well of other, such as the ancient Hindu, civilisations. In other words, watertight compartments between civilisations are historically unsustainable. And, of course, people themselves are blends of several civilisations so that it is not correct to assume that there is such a thing as a uniform, homogenous, monolithic Muslim civilisation.

But is it really possible to fix the responsibility for all the violence that we witness today on the failure of people to recognize the various identities of others? Would that not be as naive an attitude to take towards the occurrence of violence as the perpetrators of aggression take towards identity? How are identities really shaped and very importantly how are they correlated to more concrete, real-life processes that go on in the world? Again, while it is true that everyone has multiple identities what compels one person to prioritize one of these many identities over all others? That is for us, the readers to figure.

Book Review: The Next Christendom by Philip Jenkins

What does the future hold for Christianity? Many books have been written which make a case that secular forces will instigate Christianity to grow to be more open-minded and less literal. Such statements may be confrontational and engaging, but they don't appear very convincing in light of the concrete demographic and geographic facts

These are some of the issues that are the subject of Philip Jenkins’ book on the possible future of Christianity. If Jenkins is correct, by the year 2050, six countries (Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, Nigeria, Congo and the United States) will each have at least 100 million Christians and Europe will have long been displaced by Sub-Saharan Africa as the most important hub of Christianity, while Brazil itself will have at least 150 million Catholics and 40 million Protestants. More than one billion Pentecostals, among the poorest in their diverse populations, will be spreading their own beliefs to the rest of the world. And as Christianity moves steadily south, it is also taking on a new character: Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa, and Manila are on their way to replacing Rome, Athens, Paris, London, and New York as the new focal points of the Christian Church.

While many Western analysts have stated that Christianity is in decay and that it must refashion its thinking or hazard being deserted by its followers ¾ or, even worse, becoming largely irrelevant, Professor Jenkins argues that just the contrary is true: Christianity is on the rise again and leading to a very different religion that barely resembles the Western reading of it. It is a variant of Christianity that most Westerners are not habituated to seeing

The book also parleys about how in spreading South, Christianity is in many ways returning to its native soil. Founded in the ancient near east, its earliest contact was greater toward the south and east than northwest into Europe. Of course, Jenkins’s designation of Christianity is broad, encompassing notional believers (i.e., “Christians” spanning actual believers to those whose declaration to Christian associations is merely traditional or cultural) in the Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Coptic, and Ethiopian traditions, and even Indian churches tracing their roots to the apostle Thomas, and branches like the Nestorians.

The books describes how Christianity is beginning to look as it journeys south: Southern Christianity tends to be visibly more traditional theologically than northern. They are far more likely to be Pentecostal. They wait for God to work in signs, wonders, and visions–and they see it happening. Latin America is becoming more Pentecostal than Catholic. They are sending missionaries north and west. The largest church in London today is led by a Nigerian pastor. They are competing hand to hand for numbers and members with Muslims, and often, as in Darfur and previously in Rwanda, experiencing unbelievable maltreatment. They are the face of Christianity

Most books on Christianity today have had a tendency to concentrate on the experiences of the Christians in the United States and Europe - hardly a surprise, since the predisposition is that is where most of the readership for books tends to be situated. However, this preconceived notion offers a patchy and erroneous portrait of the factual nature of global Christianity. Deciding by the books now presented, it is nearly as if Christianity doesn't exist in the South. Jenkins’ scholarly book shows that the truth is entirely unlike from what we might tend to assume.

Suite Francaise : A story of Occupied France

Suite Française is an interesting book for several reasons. The book is written by a Russian Jew and consists of two novellas bundled into one. They portray life in France from June 4, 1940, as German forces prepare to invade Paris, through July 1, 1941, when some of Hitler's occupying troops leave France to join the assault on the Soviet Union.

The second novella ends abruptly, because the author was not able to finish the manuscript. This was because she was arrested and sent to the concentration camps and eventually to the gas chamber. Irène Némirovsky was a Russian Jew who had lived in France since 1919 and had established herself in her adopted country's literary community, publishing nine novels and a biography of Chekhov. The edition of the book that I read ends with lots of correspondence between Irene’s husband and many of her associates in the publishing industry and the occupation regime of Marshal Petain. The family tries hard to establish her whereabouts after she was arrested and sent off without any information provided to her family. =The correspondence reveals that her husband’s efforts at tracing her continued for long after she had been sent to the gas chambers ; of course these facts became known only after the war ended.

Suite Francaise was originally meant to be a set of five vignettes of French life under the Nazis but of course only two were completed. “Storm in June” is the first novella. What is interesting about the book is the diversity of characters that Irene has created and their range of responses as German bombs dropped over the Paris sky and people were forced to retreat to the countryside. So there is the aristocracy, the artistes and writers, the trading and merchant class, middle class bureaucrats and commoners; all of whose familiar way of life comes to an end and they must no prepare to move to the countryside. How they do so, the priorities in their lives as they surface under the pressure and the eventual choices they make seems to underscore the basic selfishness of the human race and the instinct for self preservation that overrides every thing when the chips are down.

“Dolce” is the second novella where the occupation is now a reality and German Army is stationed in the villages of France and most things have been requisitioned by the occupation army for military use. Again the reactions and responses of the French villagers are beautifully captured. The young women are welcoming of the German Army – the French young men are all away fighting and the German officers and men are invariably polite and respectful.

The older generation (and mostly women are portrayed) are more confused. they have memories of the First World War when the French were victorious; their husbands and sons are away fighting – some are prisoners of war and some are killed and the fate of many is not clear as France has just surrendered, and here they are; under duress, having to provided hospitality to the enemy who seen and heard close by is courteous, polite and even embarrassed at what is now happening.

A great strength of the book is that although it depicts the political scenario and the military occupation of France for what it was, it doesn’t not demonize the occupying German Army, but rather portrays them warmly with families and loved ones of their own.

What is the Point of Being a Christian : Timothy Radcliffe

The author is a Dominican Friar and that alone might be enough for many of us to say that this is not for us. Besides the Dominican order as any order – religious or otherwise that has been around for centuries has had its share of controversies in the past that might cloud the present. But if we allow history or our prejudices to cloud our reading, we are making a mistake. Consider the overall message of this book: "God coming to meet us in all the drama of our lives: birth and death, eating and drinking, sex and healing.” the book doesn't drop to the level of answering the shallow questions that people ask, but looks at the person behind those questions, and how they relate to the world.

The title of the book is what is the Point of Being a Christian? In one sense, this is a personal quest but there is much in Radcliffe's search to which I felt able to respond affirmatively. He begins with what was, by his own admission, the glib response of "because it is true" but in the chapters of the book the deeply complex concept of Christian truth is unpacked. Central to the notion of Christian truth is the role of the individual within the community and the difficulties which arise within human relationships.

One thing stands out in the book. Tim Radcliffe, places the Christian faith as one that can only be lived out in a sense of belonging to a community of God’s place. To prove the point, he of course cites many examples from his monastic experience as a member of the Dominican order, but the manner in which he cites them is such that they never come through as some thing that only works for monks and priests. He really sums this up by saying that all the claims that can be made for the Christian faith – even the most basic one that it is not a religion at all but a relationship with a saviour and a God can be best understood and unpacked in the context of God’s people.

He holds up a challenge to the church to become the sort of community that can speak convincingly about the God it clams to believe in and claims that most of the doctrines of Christianity make no sense unless we have a clear understanding of the goodness of our corporeal existence. This is particularly relevant as a lot of us are presented with an atomized Christian faith where only two parties appear to exist – God and the individual believer with the church, the body of Christ reduced to the margins as a shadowy presence.

Apart form his experience as one time Master of the Dominican Order, Radcliffe is able to draw on two thousand years of church history to buttress his argument, some thing which adds weight to his claims. Most protestant writers would not be able to draw on examples more than a century or two old, with the line being drawn at the Reformation. The book, while entirely written on scriptural foundations draws on centuries of history which are distilled in to a 21st century context. Tim Radcliffe’s work incidentally was awarded the Michael Ramsay award for theological writing by the Anglican Church and the book, despite the credentials of the author and the vast frame of reference that the book addresses is a relatively easy read.

Making Choices : Peter Kreeft

A professor of philosophy at Boston College, a believer, and a deep thinker about the issues facing our times, Peter Kreeft cuts to the heart of our responsibility to make choices, examining how these choices should be made and our duty to choose well. Kreeft tackles questions like, Are there any moral absolutes? Can you live a good life without living a Godly life? And if you can be moral without believing in God, why believe?

Kreeft does an excellent job of explaining, simply and clearly, that right and wrong are objective - regardless of whether or not it is easy or makes someone happy. Kreeft also clears up some moral misconceptions like 'if it doesn't hurt anyone else, then it's ok' and 'the end justifies the means'. While Kreeft argues that morality comes from God, he also argues that one need not know that or believe in God to understand and use objective morals

The last few chapters are really the heart of the book, and where Kreeft most directly engages modern culture. His discussion of sex in terms of sacredness is wonderfully clear - understanding sex as sacred simultaneously avoids both errors of hedonism on the one hand, and repression on the other. Kreeft's bit on society's confusion between sex and money is utterly incisive - that sex is often used as a mere means of exchange (of pleasure), but all manner of legal protections are erected around money, treating it as virtually sacred, even expecting it to reproduce and grow.

While grounding the choices that we are supposed to make in life in God’s plan and purpose for our lives, Peter Kreeft suggests a triangulation between three primary elements based on which God’s will may be known and appropriate choices made. The three elements he suggests are – (1) God’s Word, (2) the circumstances of our life as arranged by God and our private discernment and(3) peace of mind guided by the spark of the Holy Spirit.

Krefft stresses a lot on the pitfalls of depending on only one of these tools. He argues that depending only on scripture without interpreting it in the context of today’s circumstances and context could lead to strait jacketed legalism. Similarly depending entirely on circumstances with out reference to scripture and inner discernment could lead to decisions being made based on the criteria of situational ethics. And again, depending on “peace of mind” alone without referring to God’s Word might mean decisions based largely on emotional comfort and subjectivity.

An interesting foot note is that Kreeft expects the above tools to be used, God’s will to be discerned and choices made in the context of a community of God’s people. We live in a world that values independence and individualism, but to choose to walk the path-of-discerning independently is not the path to God's Will according to Kreeft. The concept of "communal discernment" is not that we surround you with people who will make a decision for us, but rather that these people will be ears more than mouths and question-askers more than advisors. A readable book, though slightly heavy reading in the earlier chapters but as J.I.Packer puts it. “The book clears a straight road through the thorny jungles of skewed modern thinking…..