Modern look at the world of Islam (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Modern look at the world of Islam

1:46pm Monday 14th August 2006 in

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TEMPTATIONS OF THE WEST: HOW TO BE MODERN IN INDIA, PAKISTAN AND BEYOND. Publisher: Picador; Author: Pankaj Mistry; Price: £16.99.

This book deals with the modern world. When the divisions of the cold war were in place, communist regimes were seen as belonging to the eastern bloc apart from western civilisation.

Given that they were attempts to implement a western dream, this was a curious view.

Far from being anti-western, communism was hyper-western. Stalinism and Maoism were not versions of oriental despotism - as generations of western scholars have maintained.

The current view of Islam as being somehow anti-western is just as unreal.

In terms of its basic picture of the world Islam belongs in the western tradition of monotheism, and radical Islam is in many ways a hybrid offshoot of Leninism and anarchism - also western ideologies. Like Soviet Russia and Maoist China, Islamist movements owe more to the modern west than we - or they - care to admit.

The West is a ramshackle construction that changes shape along with the shifts of geopolitics, and in cultural terms it is just as unsettled. In his previous book, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, Pankaj Mishra showed that the milieu in which the Buddha emerged resembled our own in many ways.

Intellectual disorientation and a pervasive mood of nihilism provided fertile ground for the Buddha's teaching, which offered a remedy for spiritual distress and acted as a catalyst of cultural renewal.

In what is now Afghanistan, it created a Greco-Buddhist civilisation whose traces survived a succession of kingdoms and empires until the Taliban set about destroying them.

The wheel continues to turn today, with Buddhist philosophy having a stronger resonance in the modern west than that of the ancient Greeks.

The fluidity of cultural frontiers is a theme of Mishra's work, and it is central to Temptations of the West. Like his study of the Buddha this is a genre-bending book.

It begins autobiographically with an account of Mishra's time as a student in India and continues with his adventurous travels throughout India, Kashmir, Pakistan and Tibet.

Today he spends part of the year in India and part in Britain, and his view of both societies is in some ways that of an outsider.

His portraits of politicians and officials, business and media people struggling to make sense of their mutating and sometimes collapsing societies are sharply observed.

Deeply immersed in the history of the region, he tells the reader more about the true condition of much of Asia today than can be gleaned from any number of weighty academic tomes.