Re: What book are you reading?
Reply #476 - December 19, 2011, 03:23 PM
IMRAN KHAN
PAKISTAN
A Personal History.
Bantam Press
I haven't finished reading it yet, but I keep returning to the prologue where Maududi's minions (Imran Khan calls them Jamaat-e-Tuleba) had orders to beat him up and break a few bones.
Maududi developed and perfected these righteous riots against those nice Amadiya people way back then and he obviously passed his tequniques on very effectively to these young thugs, if Imran's account of the beating he just managed to avoid (before being arrested) in 2007 is true.
I haven't read the whole book yet but I keep returning to that prologue. He writes very convincingly, I believe it as though I was there and wish for threateners, intimidators and thugs of every description, everywhere, to recieve some of the justice they all pretend to be street-brawling for every time I re-read that prologue..
And even though I've stuck up for Musharaff in the past, calling him "the one Pakistani leader that USA did not put in power", I believe Iran Khan has good reason(s) to believe that Musharaff was complicit in the failed plan to have Imran badly beaten up before the police arrested him in 2007.
Pakistani Politics is not just as bad as Tariq Ali says in his "Clash of Fundamentalisms" book it's even worse - from what I've read so far. Maududi's minions live on.
There are other parts of the book that I'm in two minds about and that I wasn't able to dismiss as a bona fida member of the C.E.M.B. All I can explain about that is I still have a soft spot for the Sufi view of things. Perhaps I still love the Idries Shah view of Sufi teachings while I thought I'd put aside all ideas of a big beardy man in the sky.
But naive or not I can't find any reason to disbelieve anything I've read so far even though I realise that many will say this book is a self-serving political move
"And you, you are a fantasy, a view from where you'd like to think the world should see, just be true, and you will likely find a few building a vision, doing justice to our times."
Roy Harper, addressing the doorstep evangelists, dawa-doers and other self-appointed representitives.
Topic: What book are you reading?