"Fundamentalism not unique to Islam"

Our largest neighbour Indonesia is going through a period of dynamic, unpredictable and largely disheartening change--which could have a larger impact on Australia than we can yet imagine. And one of the most detailed and compassionate accounts come from an India-born, Washington-based journalist, Sadanand Dhume in his first book, My Friend the Fanatic.

Dhume discussed his book with Australian author, Linda Jaivin in the atmospheric, brick-lined Richard Wherrett Studio in the Sydney theatre last week, as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival 2008. Following the Bali bombings in October 2002, Dhume travelled across Indonesia with Herry Nurdi, managing editor of fundamentalist mouthpiece Sabili, who hero-worships Osama bin Laden.

"Herry is not a fanatic," said Dhume, however. "The title is misleading. He writes awfully bigoted things, but this is a career choice for him--he is more like a Monday to Friday fanatic. Fanatics are not curious, but Herry is very curious," he said.

To illustrate his point, Dhume talked about his visit to a purportedly moderate Islamic school in Gontor, near Ponorogo in east Java. "The students were forbidden to watch the most famous local dance," explained Dhume. "They were not taught Jihad, but they were taught to be very sceptical of any other cultural influence."

Though triggered by the Bali bombings, My Friend the Fanatic, really explores these slow transformations taking place in Indonesia, until then home to a cultural diversity of Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim faith. In his prologue, Dhume writes about Islam, a relatively recent import to the Indonesia, preceded by a millennium and a half of Hinduism & Buddhism, along with decades of Dutch influence to add.

The literal, harsh interpretation of the faith comes from a powerful minority, he believes. "Islam is a young faith, and with the rise of petro-dollars, some of the world's richest places are supporting the fundamentalist form--and Indonesia is vulnerable to this."

'…the carnage in Bali was only the most visible expression of a much larger churning.' writes Dhume in his prologue. "We are obsessed with terrorism, but more worrying are the changes in day to day life--such as asking women to cover up--that Islamic fundamentalists are bringing in Indonesia," he said at the festival.

Rooting and uprooting in Unaccustomed Earth

Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri
Bloomsbury, $29.95

After Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, you know what to expect from Jhumpa Lahiri—simple yet poetic prose, characters haunted by isolation, dislocation, regret, insecurity, unarticulated love and an overbearing sense of loss.

It would be simplistic to say her latest collection of eight stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is about the migrant experience. Though her characters are repeatedly Bengali migrants in America, the stories are really about the dislodgement of the security her characters develop in relationships or in their current situations, and then find crumbling.

In the title story, Ruma, builds a successful career, working fifty-four hour weeks, earning six figures—only to give it up and move to Seattle for marriage and children, much like her own mother. “Growing up, her mother’s example—moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household—had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Ruma’s life now.”

As her father questions her choices, she feels her mother would have understood her decision—and this seems to forge a bond that did not exist, in her mother’s lifetime. As Ruma learns about her father’s interest in another woman, I find myself, despite my usually liberal ideologies, questioning if I would be comfortable if one of my parents were to “move on” after the death of the other.

In my favourite story, Hell-Heaven, a Bengali-American daughter, constantly at war with her mother in her childhood, gets a glimpse into her mother’s sacrifices and tormenting passion for the Bengali student Pranab, when her own relationship collapses. Her mother’s scepticism of the American girl who marries Pranab touchingly reveals the notion of “the other” that all migrants develop for the natives of their new land. “She will leave him,” her mother declared after their engagement. How many times have you made a judgment about the laid back, over-spending and casually drinking Australian?

Only Goodness is about a sister, crumbling under the guilt of introducing her younger brother during their casual adolescent games, to alcohol—to which he is now completely enslaved.

The last three stories, in the second section titled "Hema and Kaushik" follow the two protagonists as they meet and part and meet again, at significant stages in their life. Kaushik and Hema’s parents forge a friendship based on the fact that they come from the same city in India. They would have had little in common if they had met in their home town, yet in the new land, they were close friends. When Kaushik’s family leaves for Bombay, only to return a few years later, Hema’s parents see this as a failure—at home and abroad.

Living together again, the differences in the two families get even more acute: Hema’s parents find that “Bombay had made them more American than Cambridge had.” —while they had remained staunchly Indian, even after years in America.

In the next story, Year’s End, Lahiri touches upon the loss of a parent again, as Kaushik has lost his mother to Cancer, and must accept as his father’s new bride, whose presence is accentuated by ever such slight changes in the home decor. “She (Kaushik’s mother) had never allowed a cloth to cover the table, but now there was one...”

Finally, in Going Ashore, Hema, now a Latin professor, meets Kaushik, now a war photographer, who is constantly travelling across the world to cover terrible events. Both are in transition—Kaushik, leaving his ’on the move job’ for an editorial desk job in Hong Kong and Hema on her final holiday, before she goes to India to marry a man she barely knows. Here they share their lives, dreams and nightmares and discover their own rootlessness “I’ve never belonged to any place that way,” says Hema. Kaushik laughed, “You’re complaining to the wrong person.”

The stories then, are really about finding, losing and rediscovering your roots. On the surface they could just be geographical roots, but as Lahiri steps closer, deeper into each character’s soul, the stories are about transitions—Rumas who have lived in the same town all their life could face the dilemma of accepting a father moving on into another relationship. And Hemas everywhere, must often chose between a romance of passions and a marriage of convenience.

Lahiri traverses the emotional upheavals of her characters, leaving you questioning your own choices, raising ghosts from your own past, and unsettling every personal tragedy—big or small—you may have safely hidden away from yourself from a long time ago, in your own subconscious.

Whiter than the White

Unimagined
A Muslim Boy Meets the West
Imran Ahmad
Aurum Press, $19.95

What would you expect from a book, in which the author's note of dedicating the work to his father, as well as the acknowledgements make you laugh? Yes, Imran Ahmad's first book, Unimagined is funny—a self deprecating memoir of growing up as a Pakistani immigrant in London.

And I am afraid of getting into any form of serious analyses of his work—one unsuspecting reviewer has casually been reprimanded for her serious take on the book on Ahmad's website: "Lighten up A—, it's a funny book."

The book, described as part Bend It Like Beckham, part Adrian Mole, begins in Karachi with the 'Bonnie Baby' contest, where Ahmad dressed to look suave like James Bond, is denied the first prize, which not coincidentally goes to the organiser's daughter. "I began my lifelong struggle against corruption and injustice" writes Ahmad. And struggle he does—whether with learning to knot a tie or dealing with getting itchy under nylon trousers.

Yet, young Ahmad has one unwavering ambition—becoming the perfect English gentleman, with a perfect BBC accent, and always immaculately dressed with shirt pristinely ironed and hair neatly combed. "They may be white, but I become whiter than white, quintessentially English," he declares.

The book continues with a series of vivid memories of simple everyday, petty events, which cumulatively make for a highly enjoyable read, fulfilling our deepest voyeuristic needs. Each reader may find a part of themselves in Ahmad's journey from early success in a school quiz; and entry into a posh Grammar School; uncertainty as he seeks to fulfil his parents wishes of seeing him become a doctor, though he enjoys the arts; and a constant lack of luck with the girls.

There are of course the serious bits—their first home in London is a bed-sit, a part of a house that is rented out with shared use of bathroom and kitchen, not because of the lack of money, but because few English were willing to rent out to 'coloureds'. Ahmed recalls being racially bullied in school, and even that moment of epiphany of every migrant identity, when he is caught copying the prayer moves of other Pakistani boy at a mosque—"I am a foreigner in white, English Society, and don't seem to fit into Pakistani Society either," thinks Ahmad.

Yet, never does he speak in the rage or pathos of a victim of racial slur. In fact he acknowledges that his life's successes are far beyond what his parents could have imagined for him when they moved to London--thus the title, Unimagined.

And though post 9/11, it may seem predictable, some of his most interesting insights are from his attempts at finding logic in religious belief. He talks about the logical teachings of Islam—pork is forbidden because in the third world, it often brought disease. This may often sound like a propaganda for the British Muslims for Secular Democracy organisation, of which he is a trustee—but frankly, I am all for secular propaganda.

Along with the teething problems of every child, Unimagined is thus also the tale of Ahmad's reconciliation of his belief in the Islamic notion of Allah as the only God. He comes second in an exam which focuses on Christ's teachings, without attending a single class—the stories are common between the two religions. And he eventually even changes his mind about India despite Indo-Pak wars, after watching the even-handed treatment Hinduism, Christianity and Islam in Amar Akbar Anthony: "Maybe India isn't such a bad country after all," he concludes.