Veteran historian Iftikhar Malik takes the reader on a journey across the globe in his latest text, which reads like an enormously erudite travelogue. Malik has written extensively on South Asia and the East, but in this book he moves beyond those realms and speaks of his adventures in places as diverse as Finland and Michigan. The bulk of the text does indeed focus on the famous historic Silk Road route and comprises the central section of the text, which is bracketed between a set of personal memoirs and a recounting of Malik’s sojourn in certain predominantly Western countries such as Switzerland and Britain. His Silk Road adventures are the most engrossing of the lot. They begin with his experiences in the famous cities of Samarkand and Bukhara. Malik describes the notable mosques of these venues with as much passion as he allocates to the local colour and cuisine—in aggregate, he appears to be a person with a wanderlust of both the body as well as the mind. One of the more intriguing aspects of his book involves the way in which he brings to life famous figures related to, or affiliated with, these areas. These include Tamerlane, Marco Polo, Lord Byron, the poet Rumi, and Rumi’s guru Shams, among others. Malik describes the family history of Rumi in as much detail as (in other parts of the text) he devotes to describing his own family, including a cousin of his who was a skillful Hakim!
The scope and density of the book makes it impossible to do justice to his travels in a brief book review, but the narrative is peppered with nuggets of interesting information such as how the prophet Daniel’s buried body lengthens slightly each year, and how there is a superstition that disturbing the tomb of Tamerlane leads to war. When this happened once, Hitler attacked Russia! Malik recounts how he could only enter Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque after proving (by reciting Quranic verses) that he was a Muslim. Going beyond Jerusalem he speaks of Isfahan, Fes (Fez), Cordova (Cordoba), and finally Italy (regarding which he makes note of unfortunate memories of being harassed repeatedly by the police). His descriptions of mosques, be they the famous Cordovan one dating from the days of Moorish Spain or a major Moroccan one (a minaret of which was left unfinished due to the demise of its architect Yaqub), continue to hold the reader’s interest throughout his rambling, yet insightful, narrative. Buildings other than mosques also hold a particular fascination for Malik—for instance he painstakingly describes the structure and history of the leaning tower of Pisa towards the tail-end of his travelogue. And he also takes care to mention, with sincere respect, the major universities and especially madrasas that he visited.
The entire narrative is recounted in first-person, which makes sense, given that Malik bestows a personal touch on everything which he considers worth writing about. He comments with great admiration on the legendary Air Marshal Nur Khan, and writes in detail about the promotion of the cause of women’s education in Nur Khan’s hometown of Tamman, where one of the early girls’ schools was a little more than three mud-baked rooms. He also writes with affection about his alma mater Michigan State University, and with sincere appreciation of the genius of the artist Gulgee, whom he met personally. Although Malik did not have any personal interaction with Sadequain, he describes his calligraphy with the same wonder and excitement with which he comments on a wooden musical instrument on display that was partly structured to resemble an animal! On perusing the text in its entirety it becomes evident that Malik has a finely-honed sense of visual imagery (as well as a scholar’s grasp of history), and nowhere is this more evident than in the unique manner in which he transfers imagery into words. Perhaps the greatest, though somewhat oblique, compliment that I can pay to his text is that one does not really suffer from the lack of photographs while reading it. With a writer as well-informed and clever as Iftikhar Malik, pictures are simply not needed.
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