Meetings with Remarkable Muslims, ed. Barnaby Rogerson & Rose Baring, London: Eland, 2005. pp312 Compelling and very readable, Meetings with Remarkable Muslims is a book that highlights different aspects of the lives of Muslims from a broad range of countries, classes and cultural backgrounds. Much of the book is breathless, exciting narrative, and I have rarely come across such compelling travel writing. The collection sheds light on the dynamics that animate contemporary Muslim societies, but each piece is a gripping read in its own right. These thought-provoking pieces are also a good way to get a sense of the time and the places in which they are set. Most are very precise about setting, because the location is usually essential to the way the story evolves. However, the book moves easily from the mundane to the sublime, and from mysticism to Islamist militancy. Providing insightful comments on differences in custom and language, it is above all about ordinary Muslims leading ordinary lives. The collection is divided into three parts, "Here and Now," "Memories," and "Ghosts," and the authors paint on a broad canvas, depicting the lives of Muslims and either deliberately or unwittingly highlighting the varieties of Muslim beliefs and practices, as well as the commonalities and occasional tensions between tradition and modernity. They excel at sharp, amusing descriptions of lifestyles, dress and food. Personal touches of this sort make up the best parts of the book. A few of the authors are Muslim -- two are Arab women who have lived most of their lives in the West -- but the majority are Westerners who regularly travel in Muslim countries, becoming entangled with the locals in exotic settings as they do so. There is a touch of the Orientalist in some of the pieces. In his intriguing piece "The Very Rich Hours of the Sultan of Geneina," for example, retired British diplomat Glencairn Balfour-Paul recounts adventures with the Sultan of Dar Masalit in western Sudan. "One steaming summer day I watched him, stood beside one of the shrinking pools of valuable water ... He looked like an inverted African Canute, challenging the waters to recede. Out of what was left of the pool waded a bevy of jet-black Aphrodites with water lilies in their plaited hair, and the foremost of them kneeled at the Sultan's feet to proffer him a single cream- white water lily." "Perhaps the Very Rich Hour in the Sultan's programme was a ceremonial gathering of the tribes in their drum-beating squadrons, eight thousand horsemen and camel-men having assembled to ride past him and such foreign notables as came to witness the ceremony," Balfour-Paul goes on. "Accompanying some of the squadrons were even prouder individuals sporting medieval regalia, coats of chain mail, plumed helmets, and brass shin-pads. English pageantry has had nothing to match since Crécy." A common thread throughout the book, however, is its focus less on grandees than on the minutiae of daily life. The back streets of Casablanca are portrayed as squalid dog-eat-dog hellholes, for example, and so are the majestic mountainous wastes of Afghanistan. Yet, these meetings are far from all taking place in such depressing surroundings: indeed, written mostly at the time of the Europe-wide protests against the US- led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the book "has no political subtext, follows no academic discipline and sharpens no doctrinal axe," as the introduction puts it. Rather, it "delights in cultural difference, yet celebrates our common humanity," and it vouchsafes intriguing insights into Muslim life in countries as far afield as Morocco and Senegal, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and the Indian Sub- Continent. No reader can fail to be moved by the stories in this book emanating from war-torn Afghanistan. This was a society tyrannised first by the Taliban, and now suffering under the American occupation, and there are heart- rending stories here of war and suffering, as well as an unusual portrait of the Afghan capital Kabul today: "new restaurants and pizzerias are opening up all the time with exotic foreign names such as 'Golden Lotus,' 'The Great Wall' and 'New York Restaurant,' the cinemas show romantic Indian films containing songs and violence, you see mobile phones everywhere, the traffic is chaotic, much of the city is a building site, refugees have returned in their thousands. Life seems to be surging ahead triumphantly." There is also an account by Justin Marozzi of Ahmed Shah Masoud, dubbed "The Lion of the Panshir" for his exploits against the Russians in Afganistan, and who was assassinated in 2001. Marozzi dwells at length on Masoud's matinee-idol looks, making "so many female reporters swoon over the years [and the] handsome face lined with two decades of warfare ... he was simply the most charismatic man I have ever met." No less revealing are biographical parentheses, such as the account of the Anglo-Palestinian physician Ghada Karmi of her father: "I got to know my father when he was eighty-eight. He was by then living alone in Amman, my mother having died two years earlier. It saddens me that at the end of his life -- he is now ninety-nine years old and should be one hundred when this book is published-- my father's fine mind, still lucid and marvelously coherent, has been taken over by this obsession, to the exclusion of nearly all his other ideas. His bitterness at what he views as the monstrous injustice of a world system dominated by the 'Judaeo-Christian West' comes across in repetitive tirades meant more for himself than his listeners." For another contributor, Horatio Clare, it is less the position of Islam in the world that is the stuff of his writing than the kind of small details that can serve as guides to character and disposition. Arguably the best travel piece in the book, Clare's piece is a very funny evocation of extended family life, Moroccan-style. The world it describes of a Moroccan single mother of two children and her best friend and extended family is theatrical in its sense of drama and timing. Everyone here knows everyone else's secrets, and these form the stuff of gossip and conversation. Indeed, in its focus on women, Clare's piece reveals a world that is by no means patriarchal or male-dominated. Instead, his piece, "Sisters and Brothers," reveals the important position of women in contemporary, urban settings, many of them having emerged as the bread-winners, since the men are unemployed. "My friends," he writes, "seemed to divide their country into two. Morocco at work, which they bemoaned as a near disaster -- no jobs, no money, bad police, poverty corruption -- and Morocco at play: the food, the music, company, kif and sports, the life of the streets, the balmy, limpid evenings, the stunning beauty of its lights and colours." Clare's piece is shrewd, observant, and appealing, and it is all too aware of the socio-economic divisions of contemporary Morocco. It also highlights the sometimes corrosive effect of contemporary life on Islamic practice in certain communities: "it was a strange pleasure to lie there, as if in a company of eternal students. Denied earning power by their unemployment, and spending power by their women who shopped, haggled and hustled for them, these men played endless cassettes, lost themselves in television, and devoted hours to the preparation, sharing and smoking of kif." Clare is sympathetic to both the men and the women caught up in this situation, noting that "they were gentle, funny and respectful of each other, in that red-eyed brotherhood of the routinely stoned, but they became defensive, raucous and obstreperous when the women returned, fomenting spurious conflict as if to divert attention from their self indulgence and redundancy." His own indulgent social comedy soon also gives way to a harder judgment, however: "kif is the perfect opiate for the long-term unemployed." Another approachable piece that goes a long way towards filling in certain gaps in the Western understanding of Islam is Sabiha al-Khemir's "The Absent Mirror." A Tunisian novelist, artist and academic who divides her time between east and west, al-Khemir writes about an encounter in New York: "I looked at Mary Belle. 'What does she know?' I thought, 'Black American Christian, probably an evangelist ... she calls me 'Sabina'! What does she understand of an Arab Muslim woman -- I am invisible to her!' "The Autumn colours of Central Park were fire to my thoughts; the bench where she and I sat was at a decisive crossroads in my life's journey. She finished eating, folded the paper bag neatly, held it between her palms and declared: 'al-hamdu-lilah!' Mary Belle was a Muslim? Having heard her thank God in those Arabic words startled me, bringing the insight that it was she who was invisible to me, and that a Muslim could also be a large, black, American woman, eating a hamburger in Central Park." Brigid Keenan's account of a young Syrian woman is equally revealing."I have lived with my diplomat husband in Muslim countries for more than ten years," Keenan writes, "and have met many extraordinary people of that faith, but my nominee for this book is Thala Khair. As the daughter-in-law of a Syrian Defence Minister and the wife of a colonel in the Syrian Republican Guard, she doesn't sound like an obvious choice, but that's one reason I decided on her: she goes against all the stereotypes." "Thala herself prays five times a day and fasts during Ramadan, but she rarely attends the mosque, and she questions the interpretations of some of the teachings -- on drinking alcohol for instance," Keenan continues, noting that her subject is not a conventional Muslim, but rather someone who has modified customary practice. "My Islam is the Islam of tolerance and peace, it is in the constant presence of the word 'mercy' in the Qur'an," Khair explains. Many of the writers here hark back to the past, and indeed the book's final section is devoted to memories of the dead. Though these pieces have intriguing titles, such as "Encountering Ali," "Meeting Muhammad," and "Ziryab on My Mind," they do not engage with the contemporary world in the way that many of the book's best pieces do. Finally, one of these concerns the Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour in a piece written by Mark Hudson. N'Dour explains here that as young boy growing up in West Africa, "I used to think about what I could do, and I remembered that I used to hear a lot of Egyptian radio when I was young, and that my father was a great fan of Umm Kalthoum. To me her voice is magic -- the quality of space in the arrangements. I wanted to see if I could achieve that with my own voice, and bring together north and west African traditions in my music." Hudson reflects that Umm Kalthoum, "a muezzin's daughter from the Egyptian provinces, is supposedly the most-played artist of the twentieth century. Her austere, majestically yearning voice, steeped in the cadences of the Muslim liturgy, was both the defining sound of the hero in the age of Arab nationalism and an excellent example of how the sacred pervades every aspect of artistic expression in Islamic society." She has also served as an inspiration to N'Dour and a cause for the "reassertion of faith in N'Dour's own life." While N'Dour's music is not pan-Islamic in its reach, being sung in Senegal's lingua franca, Wolof, nevertheless, "the Muslim religion is one." However, the way it is expressed in different parts of the world is different, Hudson writes. In Senegal, he quotes Youssou N'Dour as saying, "people really live Islam. You can hear that even in our pop music." By Gamal Nkrumah
