Al-Biruni’s definition of the pharmacist could have been written today. Along the road from sympathetic magic and shamanism to scientific method, much trailblazing was carried out over a few centuries by scholars, alchemists, physicians and polymaths of the Muslim Middle East, and their rules, procedures and expectations are, to a great extent, practiced almost universally today.
“In the West and the Middle East, early medicine as a whole was primarily a fusion of Greek, Indian, Persian and later Roman practices that had progressed over the better part of a millennium. Texts on medications were common, but most of these materia medica were simply lists of plants and minerals and their various effects. By the start of the seventh century ce Europe and much of the Near East had weakened culturally, and those achievements of Hellenistic arts, sciences and humanities that had not been erased were on an intellectual endangered-species list.
“By mid-century, the rise of Islam brought with it a new thirst for knowledge. This openness to discovery began the saving and, eventually, the expansion of much of what the classical world had lost. Nowhere was this truer than in the field of health, where medical practitioners took guidance from several hadiths (hah-DEETH), or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, such as this related by Bukhari: “God never inflicts a disease unless He makes a cure for it.” Similarly, Abu Darda narrated that the Prophet said, “God has sent down the disease and the cure, and He has appointed a cure for every disease, so treat yourselves medically.” Such words placed the responsibility for discovering cures squarely on the medical practitioner.
Within a century of the death of the Prophet in 632 ce, one of the earliest systematic approaches to drugs was under way in Damascus at the court of the ruling Umayyads. Snake and dog bites, as well as the ill effects of scorpions, spiders and other animals, were all causes of concern, and the poisonous properties of minerals and plants such as aconite, mandrake and black hellebore were exploited. As with most most areas of medicine at the time, Greek physicians Galen and Dioscorides were considered the ancient authorities, and building off their works, Muslim writers discussed with particular interest poisons and theriacs (antidotes).
Sudden death was not uncommon in royal courts, and it was frequently attributed, often erroneously, to poison. Not surprisingly, fear of poison convinced Umayyad leaders of the need to study them, detect them and cure them. As a result, much of early Islamic pharmacy was done by alchemists working in toxicology.
The first of these was Ibn Uthal, a Christian who served as physician to the first Umayyad caliph, Mu’awiyah. Ibn Uthal was a noted alchemist who had conducted a systematic study of poisons and antidotes. He was also reported to be Mu’awiyah’s silent executioner, and in 667 he was himself poisoned in an act of vengeance by the relatives of one of his alleged victims. Another Christian physician-pharmacist, Abu al-Hakam al-Dimashqi, served the second Umayyad caliph, Yazid.
Yazid’s son, Khalid ibn Yazid, took particular interest in alchemy, and he employed Greek philosophers who were living in Egypt. He rewarded them well, and they translated Greek and Egyptian books on chemistry, medicine and astronomy into Arabic. A contemporary of Khalid’s was Jabir ibn Hayyan, called Geber in the West, who promoted alchemy as a profession, laying early foundations for chemical and biochemical research.
These early Islamic alchemists proved to be meticulous and persistent in their experimentation, and they made careful written observations of results. They designed their experiments to gather information and answer specific questions, and through them “scientific alchemy” arose. Avoiding
unproven belief (superstition) in favor of the compilation and application of procedures, measurements and demonstrated trials that could be tested and reproduced, their work represented the true advent of the scientific method.
The role of scientific alchemy cannot be overemphasized. By the ninth century, the trend, approach and type of information that circulated in Arabic alchemical manuals represented some of the best work in this field. The careful methodology the alchemists developed served all fields, including pharmacy.
In the process of experimenting in making amalgamations and elixirs, important mineral and chemical substances were used, such as sal ammoniac, vitriols, sulphur, arsenic, common salt, quicklime, malachite, manganese, marcasite, natron, impure sodium borate and vinegar.
Among simples of botanical origin, they used fennel, saffron, pomegranate rinds, celery, leek, sesame, rocket, olives, mustard and lichen. Significant gums such as frankincense and acacia were used, as well as animal products including hair, blood, egg white, milk (both fresh and sour), honey and dung.
Laboratory equipment consisted of pots, pans, tubes, retorts, alembics, crucibles and various distilling apparatus; covering platters, ceramic jars, tumblers, mortars and pestles (often made of glass or metals); as well as tripods, scales and medicinal bottles. The range and scope of alchemical operations included processes often used today: distillation, sublimation, evaporation, pulverization, washing, straining, cooking, calcination and condensation (the thickening of liquid compounds).
While translation of Greek, Persian and Indian scientific books into Arabic had begun under the Umayyad caliphate, it blossomed in the ninth century under the Baghdad-based Abbasids. Hunayn ibn Ishaq, with his superlative knowledge of Syriac, Greek and Arabic, was probably the greatest of the translators, and his works included most of the corpus of Hippocrates and Galen. Intellectual ferment, reinforced by support from the highest levels of government, paved the way for some 400 years of achievements. Methods of extracting and preparing medicines were brought to a high art, and these techniques became the essential processes of pharmacy and chemistry.
A pharmacist was called saydalani, a name derived from the Sanskrit for a seller of sandalwood. The saydalanis introduced new drugs including—not unexpectedly— sandalwood, but also camphor, senna, rhubarb, musk, myrrh, cassia, tamarind, nutmeg, alum, aloes, cloves, coconut, nuxvomica, cubeb, aconite, ambergris, mercury and more. They further introduced hemp and henbane as anesthetics, and they dispensed these in the forms of ointments, pills, elixirs, confections, tinctures, suppositories and inhalants.
As was the case in Europe and America up to modern times, many prominent physicians in Islamic lands prepared some medications for their patients themselves. While Al-Majusi, Al-Zahrawi and Ibn Sina are all good examples, they are actually exceptions, for the typical medical professional often welcomed the separate, specialized role of a saydalani, whose work proved as distinct from medicine as grammar is from composition.
By the beginning of the ninth century, Baghdad saw a rapid expansion of private pharmacy shops, a trend that quickly spread to other Muslim cities. Initially these were unregulated and managed by personnel of inconsistent quality, but all that changed as pharmacy students were trained in a combination of classroom exercises coupled with day-to-day practical experiences with drugs, and decrees by the caliphs al-Mamun and al-Mutasim required pharmacists to pass examinations and become licensed professionals pledged to follow the physician’s prescriptions. To avoid conflicts of interest, doctors were barred from owning or sharing ownership in a pharmacy. Pharmacists and their shops were periodically inspected by a muhtasib, a government-appointed inspector of weights and measures who checked to see that the medicines were mixed properly, not diluted and kept in clean jars. Violators were fined or beaten. Hospitals developed their own dispensaries attached to manufacturing laboratories. The hospital was run by a three-man board comprising a non-medical administrator, a physician who served as mutwalli (dean) and the shaykh saydalani, the chief pharmacist, who oversaw the dispensary. Around this time pharmacy developed its own specialized literature. It built first on Dioscorides’ materia medica of some 500 substances, and then also on Nestorian physician Yuhanna ibn Masawayh, a second-generation pharmacist, who penned an early treatise on therapeutic plants and aromatics.
It was a younger colleague, Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari, who said that the therapeutic value of each drug needed to be reconciled with the particular disease, and he urged physicians not to simply provide a routine remedy. He identified the best sources for components, stating, for example, that the finest black myrobalan comes from Kabul; aloes, from Socotra; and aromatic spices, from India.
He recommended glass or ceramic storage vessels for liquid drugs, special small jars for eye liquid salves and lead containers for fatty substances. To treat ulcerated wounds, he prescribed an ointment made of juniper gum, fat, butter and pitch. In addition, he warned that one mithqal (about four grams) of opium or henbane causes sleep and also death.
The first known medical formulary was prepared in the mid-ninth century by Sabur ibn Sahl for pharmacists in both private and hospital pharmacies. The book included medical recipes, techniques of compounding, pharmacological actions, dosages and the means of administration. The formulas were organized by tablets, powders, ointments, electuaries or syrups, and later, larger formularies followed his model.
More generally, pharmacological drugs were classified into simples and compounds—mufraddat and murakkabat. The largest and most popular of the materia medica manuals, written by Ibn al-Baytar, born in Málaga in the kingdom of Granada toward the end of the 12th century, offered an alphabetical guide to more than 1,400 simples taken from Ibn al-Baytar’s own observations as well as 150 from named written sources.
Today, every prescription filled, every pharmacy license granted, every elixir, syrup and medicament created, used or tested reflects this Islamic legacy. If what the alchemists and early medical practitioners did then seems all too obvious to us now, it is only because today’s obvious is yesterday’s discovery.
As a boy, walking along the docks near his home in Olso, Norway, Tor Eigeland watched ships and sailors from around the globe, and he dreamed of adventure. At home, “curled up in a cozy chair, I devoured everything from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to Ibsen and Hemingway,” he recalls. Soon he was “desperate to smell the tropical world and see palm trees. I knew there was a lot more out there, and I wanted to see it.”
It didn’t take long. In the summer of 1947, at age 16, Eigeland convinced his skeptical parents to allow him and a friend to take a sabbatical from school to work aboard a merchant ship. The M/V Tricolor took the pair down the coast of Europe, across northern Africa, through the Suez Canal, along the Arabian Peninsula and on to India, the Philippines and China, ending in Shanghai.
Back in Oslo, to keep his pact with his parents, he passed his school exams, but it wasn’t long until another ship job landed him in Canada where he worked in a gold mine, attended university and, in 1954, purchased his first camera, a Rolleiflex.
From there, he says, “I decided on going to university in Mexico. Kind of a wild idea, but that’s what I wanted to do.”
In Mexico, he began writing and taking pictures for local magazines and public relations firms. Then, he recalls, he wanted a location where he could earn a living as a photojournalist.
“I checked how many foreign correspondents and photographers of an international standard were based in Beirut, and I found there was a total lack. So I thought there’ll be lots of work if I go there. So I took another chance.
“Beirut was really an international meeting point. It was the most practical place to operate in the Middle East for journalists, photographers, spies and businessmen.”
In 1965, one encounter at the foreign press club introduced him to Paul Hoye, hired by Aramco the year before to edit Aramco World and establish its office in Beirut after 15 years in New York. Hoye gave Eigeland his first Aramco World assignment: a cover story on the centennial of the American University of Beirut.
So began a 50-years-and-counting relationship with the magazine, which has sent him to more than two dozen countries over more than 50 assignments, 27 of which were cover stories and two of which were full issues that he shot and wrote.
The magazine “helped me live the kind of life I like,” he says. “It’s enabled me to meet great people around the world.”
What follows are a few selected highlights of Tor Eigeland’s half century as witness to daily life for AramcoWorld.
—The Editors
November 1967
This assignment was certainly one of the most memorable in my life, even though the photos weren’t published until 2013, and then they became a book, too.
The Marsh Arabs lived in the central marshes of southern Iraq, between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. A vast area of marshes. This particular photo—I remember taking it one morning, probably about four a.m. I was staying on a little island with some of these people. I saw this canoe just gliding by. I thought I was totally in another world 2,000 years ago. It was unreal. My whole experience there, I didn’t feel alien, but it was like living in a world totally, totally different from what I’d known before. A watery world, indeed.
At the time, there were somewhere between 350,000 and half a million people living in the marshes. Their civilization was thousands of years old. They turned out to be extremely hospitable and fun-loving.
Looking back on it, I think what has made it even more memorable is that this way of life is nearly extinct. Saddam Hussein drained the marshes.
January/February 1970
The assignment was on Istanbul—an immense, lively city. You do a little research, and then you talk to some of the people there who really know the city. You find a driver who also really knows the city and sort of understands what you’re trying to do, so you make a plan and off you go in many different directions. This picture was not at all part of the plan. There was one carpet in the image of President John F. Kennedy. I was quite touched by that, that people in Istanbul would bother to do something like that.
May/June 1969
What I remember most was the incredible skill of the drivers in getting through or around the dunes. They were all Bedouin, born and bred and at home in this sandy world. I would have got stuck in five minutes.
The other thing I remember from that trip was sleeping in the sand one night when there was a minor sandstorm. I must have been very tired as I slept right through the night. I woke up and, to my horror, I couldn’t move anything. Except for my head, my nose, I was buried in the sand. Panic is what I felt until one of the truck drivers spotted me and helped dig me out. Much relieved, I got dusted off and had a breakfast of sweet tea and bread with the drivers before we set off again.
September/October 1976
This was quite a large assignment involving a lot of travel. I have a very special relationship with Spain. The Spanish culture, way of life, is what attracted me to Spain. I love even the sound of the Spanish language. I find the Spanish a warm and lively people. Very approachable. And the food! Generally speaking, I’m sort of infamous for enjoying good food. I love Spanish food.
When I was at university in Mexico, I specialized in Spanish and Latin American literature and philosophy, most of which I’ve forgotten. I developed a real desire to go live in Spain, and I did in 1970, for nearly 20 years. Another reason for moving to Spain was to get away from the tensions in Beirut and, also, life was much cheaper in Spain. I still feel very much at home in Spain.
As part of the assignment on Islam in Al-Andalus, I found this particular dome, the one over the famous mihrab in the Great Mosque of Córdoba, incredibly beautiful. There was only one good way to photograph it, and that was to lie down on the floor. To the great surprise of the mob of tourists, I asked them to step aside, and I spent the next 15 minutes plonked down on my back trying to get this photo just right.
January/February 1975
This was the cover of the first whole issue I did for Aramco World. [Editor] Paul Hoye and I were talking about Saudi Arabia, and I said, “Well, I can do a whole issue for you on Saudi Arabia, Paul.” And that’s what happened. Then, of course, once I got into it, I thought this was completely mad.
The big idea was to present a different picture of Saudi Arabia from what was in the news. There were so many positive things, culturally, historically, and that’s what I wanted to try and show people. I was amazed at how helpful everyone was. I must say everyone at Aramco in Saudi Arabia was extremely helpful. I couldn’t have done it without them.
It was quite overwhelming, the challenge. When I sat down to start writing it, I felt completely swamped, overwhelmed. Endless tape recordings with a lot of my impressions. I spent endless hours transcribing it. You do it bit by bit, and the magazine came off in the end.
May/June 1977
I did a story on the tulip bulb industry, for which Holland is famous, because of course all those tulips originally came from Turkey. Being in Holland was logical at that time as Aramco World had moved there because of the civil war in Lebanon.
I rented an airplane and photographed tulip fields from where they looked like beautiful carpets. What I most remember from that assignment was flying and seeing these magical colorful patterns. Another thing I remember were the gardens called Keukenhof, where they display the most fantastic variety of tulips. In season it gets totally overrun by tourists, but one day I asked to come in before the gardens opened, and I spent some magical early hours with just the tulips and me.
May/June 1983
When you have to take fairly intimate people photos, you have to somehow put people at ease, which may take time, talking, laughing, showing an interest in the person, often telling him or her why you’re taking it.
This lovely old guy does not in any sense typify Oman. Oman is like many countries: It varies from one region to another. What typifies Oman now would be a much more modern sort of building, cars, luxury hotels, beautiful beaches, great agriculture. There are all kinds of quaint corners as well, and people of the old generation who look just as they did decades ago. I doubt that you would find someone there now looking like this. He’s in full regalia with a sword and the Omani dagger on him. The photo makes a nice point of something very traditional and then a shop full of Coke and Pepsi bottles, soft drinks. Old and new, indeed.
This very much describes the difference between the first Oman image and a modern Oman. Here, tourists are having a great time in the Wahiba Desert, a beautiful area of virgin sands. These people are quite typical of what would be young Omani tourists. From the mountains to the sea and the city to the desert, it’s a beautiful country. Very well developed, wisely developed. Very friendly, hospitable.
January/February 1981
Nobody thinks of Egypt in terms of lakes, except for the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser, and the effects it has on the country and its agriculture. A lot of ill effects as well as good effects. That’s a book’s worth of information.
The story was to tell the public about how many lakes really are in Egypt. What I remember best was the sheer beauty of many of them, as in this photo, which is actually one of my favorites.
Coincidentally, the photo was taken almost exactly where in 1964 I photographed the workers closing the Nile, exactly the same place. By now there is a huge lake that reaches way into Sudan.
September/October 1989
This picture is very close to my heart. It was a story I had proposed about the Arab influence on Spanish food, which is great, especially in Andalucía. This photo captures quite a lot. It shows snow-clad mountains in the background, the Alhambra and the Sierra Nevada. I spent several days with a food expert in Granada, whose specialty was precisely the traditional Andalucían sweets. Yes, a good part of this job was to taste this food all over Andalucía. That was a treat!
July/August 1988
The Silk Road story was pretty important.
A landmark for the magazine, you might say. We were probably the first Western travelers to do the Silk Road all the way and mostly by land in a long, long time, because the borders were actually completely closed or semi-closed until a few years before. We traveled through what was then the Soviet Union and into what was a much more Communist China than it is now.
It went much better than expected because proper permissions had been obtained. From Russia into China, there’s a sort of no-man’s land where nobody crossed, really, until then. We walked from a train station near the border with our luggage into China. Since this was the first time this kind of tourism had been allowed, there was a great reception with dragon dancing and banging of drums. We were welcomed there with open arms. That was all very smooth.
We moved quite fast, so you don’t really have time to establish yourself in any one place, unless you have a year or two to do a trip like that. It’s more a matter of grabbing what you can than really establishing some kind of a relationship with a place or people.
This is in Xinjiang, western China, populated by tribesmen around Kashgar. A lot of these people can seem almost like they live on horseback. This photo, of an older man with probably his grandson with a Chinese uniform hat—I very well remember. There were horse races and also something like a polo match with a goat’s head or something like that, which they pick up and sling around. In fact, very exciting. I also remember the crowd. It had got so heated up that there were Chinese policemen there, not very well liked by the locals. The police in the end asked us to leave because it was getting so heated they thought there might be a fight.
This photo was taken in Samarkand. What is most remarkable about this photo, to me, is that it was taken in the rain in a place where it almost never rains. In fact, I was told generally, in that area, my photos were remarkable mostly because it was raining. Umbrellas where you never see umbrellas. It was a special moment on a very, very long trip full of excitement, pleasures and lots of difficulty as well.
This is a market in Kashgar, in western China. That was really like being in another world. No time to really establish any relationships with anybody. You had a day to do it. You go to the market, and you get pushed around by the immense crowd. Everybody’s friendly, no hostility whatsoever, but still it’s a matter of grabbing what photos you can, when you can. Language there is a real challenge. If you speak Chinese, that’s no use because the local people speak Uighur.
November/December 1997
My greatest memory was being out in the Badia—that’s what they call the great eastern desert there—with a Jordanian guide looking for I don’t remember what. In the distance, you can see a tremendous storm, a black cloud, which was full of lightning. We were quite far from the camp. I remember thinking, “If that storm hits us now, we’re completely stuck.” We were not in a four-wheel drive, just a pickup. We would really have been stuck. There was a moment of seeing one of the most beautiful desert scenes I had ever observed and photographing it and worrying about getting back in the car and getting out of there.
March/April 1999
I think I am an off-the-beaten-track person. So when the Spanish government set up travel routes in Andalucía, it was an ideal assignment. I was living outside Barcelona, and I was given freedom and time to explore places that were not so obvious. This photo was taken in the small village of Pampaneira in the Alpujarras, a mountainous region in the province of Granada. Here, the same place where the Moors held out long after they were expelled from Spain, a woman walks home with flowers.
November/December 1992
This was shot in Brunei, which is a tiny country on the big island of Borneo. It’s in the most virgin of virgin rainforests. The photo is of two scientist-painters who are just painting details of things they see. Definitely not a place where you’d wander off by yourself. I knew that in this area there were more snakes per square meter or kilometer than anywhere else in the world. The whole time I was there I was looking for snakes. Not only because I wanted to see one, but you never know what snakes can do to you. I never saw even the tail of a snake. I think I was there for a week.
The man who was most helpful to me there was a very experienced Danish botanist; Carl Hansen was his name. He showed me some plants and interesting things. Hansen wandered off on his own, being very experienced, up to a hilltop perhaps a mile or so away. He knew the route very well, but he got caught by the dark. Of course, there’s no way you can work your way back through dense rainforest in the dark.
He stayed there overnight. But in the rainforest, it rains. Hansen got good and wet. What he was bitten by, I don’t know. It was nothing like snake bites. He came back to the camp feeling very bad. A nurse in the camp tried to take care of him. I actually left the next day, but found out before I had left Brunei that he was helicoptered to a hospital and died there. From the experience in the rainforest, Hansen himself is what I probably remember best. He was a kind and gentle professional botanist, and I became quite fond of him. Also, he was the only one there who went out of his way to help me do my job. I realized that I’d taken the last photos of him alive, and I got in touch with his wife and sent her two or three really good photos of him working in the rainforest.
September/October 2008
Getting off the autoroute, taking the old roads, there are a lot of beautiful little towns, full of little inns and restaurants and interesting things to see all the way. This particular photo, it’s a sort of a spoof on the little terrace. Somebody made black figures, looking like real people, out of some kind of a black boards, so what you see is a silhouette of a person and the ancient town of Loja in the background.
I think the most memorable thing about this trip was seeing the room where Washington Irving lived in the Alhambra. It’s not open to the public, at least it wasn’t then, and there’s not much in it. It’s just a little corner of the Alhambra, where I’d been many times, but that I had not seen before.
November/December 2008
A friend and colleague by the name of Alia Yunis wrote this story about the best chocolate factory in Damascus, which also happens to be one of the best in the whole world. It was extremely memorable for many reasons. Back to my stomach slightly, it’s the best chocolate I’ve ever eaten. I became friendly with the owner, Bassam Ghraoui, and for several years afterward, at Christmas, to my vast surprise, I’d get a box of chocolates. What made it more poignant, I guess that is the word, was what has happened to Syria and all the good people I met since then. I think you feel a disaster like that a lot more strongly if you know the place, and you know the people, and you know how nice they are.
I phoned them about a year ago. The main factory closed down because it’s part of a war zone, but they were still producing some chocolate in sort of a protected area of the Damascus. Whether they’re still there or not, I don’t know, but if they ever see or hear this, God bless them.
March/April 2015
My latest assignment was in Tangier last year, but this photo had nothing to do with the story. It happens to be a main square in Tangier where I took a break from work, and I sat there and had lunch and put a camera on my table, and occasionally as something interesting passed by, I would just click the shutter. I wasn’t looking through a viewfinder or anything like that. I just propped the camera on the table. I think if this photo works, it’s simply because it shows everyday life. A typical, normal scene in Tangier, typically Moroccan.
My assignment was at the American Legation in Tangier, and part of that was to photograph classes in reading, writing, Moroccan cuisine and handicrafts for Moroccan women. The Legation was originally a diplomatic mission, and now it’s partly a museum, partly a center of Moroccan studies. For me, the most interesting part, which was really most of my story, was on how, sponsored by the institution, Moroccans are teaching Moroccans literacy, Moroccan arts and crafts, and Moroccan cuisine. I had not been back to North Africa for some time, but the moment I arrived in Tangier, I realized strongly how much I had missed that part of the world. I was happy to be back. I felt at home, and people made me feel at home.
On the first day, I visited the different classes and their teachers, introducing myself and gently taking a few photos, always asking permission when it seemed appropriate. The classes were fascinating to observe, and gradually I grew closer to the subject, and more and more I found that the women accepted me and were quite happy and proud to be photographed.
On my last day, I photographed a lively cooking class with some 12 women. The atmosphere was great; the ladies were very helpful in the sense that they just let me get on with my often close-in photography as if I were not there.
A most extraordinary thing happened when I was about to leave. I packed my camera bag, then simply addressed the class, expressing my thanks for their helpfulness and excellent baking. To my astonishment, as I walked out the door, one of the women started clapping her hands. I turned around and suddenly they were all clapping.
A touching and unique moment. I realized that something special had happened. It was perhaps the most special of all my memories from all those years of traveling.
As it happens, at age 85, it may have been a fitting farewell for what may have been my last assignment for AramcoWorld.
www.toreigeland.com
All articles photographed and written by Tor Eigeland are searchable at aramcoworld.com.
As Sultan of Delhi over the next quarter century, Shams-ud-din Iltutmish proved extraordinarily able. Backed by the umara chihalgani (forty amirs), the elite corps of Turkic nobles, he extended the Sultanate’s realm from the Khyber Pass, along today’s Afghanistan-Pakistan border, east to the Bay of Bengal, on the opposite side of the subcontinent. He won a reputation for courage, wisdom and generosity while staving off not only usurpers but also the armies of no less a threat than Genghis Khan. The strength of his sultanate allowed for endowments to religious and scholarly institutions, the standardization of a currency and support for poets and philosophers. Near what was to be the end of his reign, in 1229, he received a title and robes of honor from the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad.
A century later, the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta noted Iltutmish was remembered for being “just, pious and of excellent character.” As an example, Ibn Battuta recorded Iltutmish’s decree that the seeking of justice be open to anyone who sought it, signaled by wearing a red-colored robe: “When [Iltutmish] held a public audience or rode out [from the royal court] and saw someone wearing a coloured robe he looked into his petition and rendered him his due from his oppressor.”
In short, upon his death in 1236, he had paved the way for his son Rukn-ud-din Firuz to inherit a stable, prosperous and highly cultured monarchy, if it hadn’t been for one thing: Firuz’s “inclinations were wholly towards buffoonery,” according to contemporary chronicler Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani’s Tabaqat-i Nasiri. Firuz’s younger brother Bahram proved equally disappointing.
Aware of both his sons’ shortcomings, Iltutmish had a controversial backup plan in place: He designated the office of sultan to his eldest and most self-disciplined child: Radiyya, his daughter. The 16th-century Persian historian Firishta described her as imbued “of every good quality which usually adorns the ablest princes.” During her father’s reign, Firishta continued, “[she] employed herself frequently in the affairs of government; a disposition which he rather encouraged in her than otherwise, so that during the campaign in which he was engaged in the siege of Gualiar [modern Gwalior, a rival city south of Delhi], he appointed her regent during his absence.”
When the umara chihalgani questioned his appointment, Firishta recorded Iltutmish’s attempt to reason with them: “[My] sons give themselves up to wine and every other excess and none of them possesses the capability of managing the affairs of the country.” He added that Radiyya “was better than twenty such sons.”
None of this stopped Firuz from shoving his step-sister aside and seizing the throne for himself upon his father’s death in 1236. Or, more precisely, he had his mother, Shah Terken, do it for him. The harem’s chief concubine, Shah Terken was, according to Firishta,“a monster of cruelty.” Even before Iltutmish’s death, she had taken advantage of the umara chihalgani’s misgivings about Radiyya as a female ruler and bribed them to support Firuz.
After Iltutmish died, she set her sights quickly and directly on 31-year-old Radiyya. She arranged for a deep pit to be dug along the path where the princess frequently went horseback riding. However, the plot was discovered, and Radiyya was spared.
“The minds of the people revolted at these scenes,” wrote Firishta, and they began to rally around Radiyya. The amirs imprisoned Terken, and although they acted to advance Radiyya to the throne, Firuz retaliated militarily. This brought on the stirring gesture for which Radiyya is most remembered: Recalling her father Iltutmish’s decree, on the eve of the battle, Radiyya appeared wearing not royal attire, but the red-colored robe of one who seeks a redress of grievance. She appealed directly to the people and the army, and thus defeated Firuz, who was captured and put to death—in all likelihood together with his mother—in November 1236.
Under Radiyya, “all things returned to their usual rules and customs,” Juzjani reported. “Sultan Radiyya was a great monarch,” he observed, employing the masculine form of her title. “She was wise, just and generous, a benefactor to her kingdom, a dispenser of justice, the protector of her subjects, and the leader of her armies … endowed with all the qualities befitting a king,” he recorded.
Still, the chronicler felt compelled to editorialize: “[B]ut she was not born of the right sex, and so in the estimation of men, all these virtues were worthless.”
This, in fact, was what the power-hungry umara chihalgani was hoping for: a “worthless,” subservient woman they could manipulate from behind the scenes. But Radiyya, it seems, was neither so easily fooled nor foiled. Appearing unveiled in public during the traditional royal procession, she used her first official act as sultan to set the tone for her reign as one of self-assertion and even defiance.
“She ruled as an absolute monarch [and] mounted a horse like a man, armed with bow and quiver, and without veiling her face,” Ibn Battuta reported. Other historic accounts say she cut her hair short and, wearing men’s robes, sat among the people in the marketplace to listen to their grievances and render judgments.
Not only did she rule astutely, but also, as historian Peter Jackson noted, she was the only sultan of her time whom Juzjani described as a military commander. Like her father, she took diplomatic steps to keep the Mongols in check, but she also put down insurgencies: She crushed a rebellion by one of the old guard who objected to her on the grounds of her sex, and she campaigned against other rival incursions. Surviving coins minted in her name were imprinted with “commander of the faithful” and “most mighty sultan.”
While all this may have irked the umara chihalgani, its members didn’t feel compelled to do much about it until Radiyya started threatening their job security by appointing an Ethiopian slave, Jamal ud-din Yaqut, to the post of Lord of the Stables (Amir-i akhur, or amir of horses, i.e., Sultan’s equerry). The job commanded great prestige because it put him in daily, ear-whispering distance of the sultan. Peppering the court with spies, the nobles began digging for dirt. Lacking anything concrete, they fell back on one of the oldest political tricks in the smear-campaign handbook.
“A very great degree of familiarity was observed to exist between [Yaqut] and the Queen,” wrote Firishta. Whether or not Radiyya shared more than just a master-subject relationship with Yaqut will never be truly known. What ultimately mattered, according to Jackson, “was that Radiyya sought to develop a power-base of her own and neglected the Turkish slave elite which she and Firuz had inherited from their father. Her dependence on Yaqut and his promotion to the rank of intendant of the imperial stables must be seen in this context.”
To extinguish the threat, the amirs began openly to challenge the sultan. But Radiyya was beloved by the citizens, especially in Delhi, and the amirs knew that overthrowing her on her home turf would prove difficult. In the spring of 1240, they convinced one of their fellow amirs, the provincial governor of Bhatinda, Malik (King) Altunapa, to conjure up a rebellion in the Punjab as bait to lure Radiyya away from Delhi.
While she was away, the umara chihalgani had Yaqut murdered, and then they dusted off her hapless half-brother Bahram and set him on the throne.
Worse yet for Radiyya, the Bhatinda campaign proved a rout. She was captured, and Altunapa imprisoned her. Then, in a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction twist of fate, she and Altunapa, whether from love or ambition or both, married, and he pledged to reinstate her as sultan.
The newlyweds marched upon Delhi, hoping for triumph, but their army was no match for the forces the amirs rallied around Bahram. Deserted by their troops after a humiliating retreat, Radiyya and Altunapa, according to Juzjani, were captured and executed by Hindus near the Punjab city of Kaithal on December 25, 1240. She was 35 years old.
Ibn Battuta, however, recorded a more embellished account of her death: Defeated, Radiyya stumbled into a farmer’s field, hungry and exhausted, begging for food. The farmer gave her a crust of bread, and she fell asleep beneath a tree. Catching sight of jewels glinting in the embroidery of her garments, the farmer killed her and buried her, and “taking some of her garments, he went to the market to sell them.” The plan backfired when local authorities suspected the farmer of theft, beat a confession out of him and recovered Radiyya’s body. (To this day, the actual location of Radiyya’s grave remains uncertain: Delhi, Kaithal and Tonk, in Rajasthan state, all claim the honor.)
Not unexpectedly, Radiyya’s half-brother Bahram was deposed for incompetence after two years on the throne. The sultanate itself endured two more centuries until it fell to the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur.
Of all the sultans of Delhi, Radiyya is perhaps the best remembered in popular culture, even eight centuries later. The subject of poems, plays, novels, Bollywood films of highly varying quality and, last year, an epic mini-series on Indian television, she continues to capture the social imagination of India and the world.
Art direction for the “Malika” series is by Ana Carreño Leyva; calligraphy is by Soraya Syed; and the logo graphics are by Mukhtar Sanders (www.inspiraldesign.com).
I first heard of Muslin on a hot summer night in Karachi, Pakistan. It was sometime in the late 1960s. I was at the verandah table arm-wrestling with my school homework. My father was at the other end drinking tea. I can’t recall now how the subject came up, but I probably asked him something about the British colonial times. It was a topic on which he held forth occasionally. He must have answered me, for he always did. Then—and from here on my recollection is clear—he said, “Muslin.” Not knowing what muslin was, I looked at him questioningly. “Our muslin. The British destroyed it.”
“What’s muslin?”
Muslin, he said, was the name of a legendary cloth made of cotton, fit for emperors, which used to be made way back in the past. Muslin from Dacca had been the finest, he said, from where it used to be shipped to the far corners of the world.
“Dacca?” I asked, surprised.
Pakistan from 1947 to 1971 consisted of two parts geographically separated by 1,500 kilometers. At one side of the Indian subcontinent, bordering Burma, was East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh. On the other side, bordering Afghanistan and Iran, was West Pakistan, which became present-day Pakistan. We were Bengalis from East Pakistan, whose capital was Dacca, which is now spelled Dhaka. It was then a provincial town in which rickshaws plied quiet streets beneath a modest skyline. Its old quarter by the river Buriganga was a maze of lanes, redolent with Nawabi-style cooking. Life was slow. A major outing for the family was going either to one of the two Chinese restaurants or to a movie at one of the four cinema halls. To be told now that it had been world-famous for a kind of cotton cloth was a bit of a shock.
But muslin, my father said, was no more.
“What happened?”
“The British,” he said, “wanted to sell their own cotton goods, and they destroyed the local industry. In Dhaka, the weavers disappeared. So did their muslin.”
A pause. Then he added, “They say the British cut off the thumbs of the weavers so that they couldn’t make muslin anymore.” And with that, he got up from his chair and walked away.
Generations of Bengali girls and boys have grown up with this legend, largely apocryphal, but in its arc and symbolism, an indelible metaphor. The story of muslin is one of contrasts and opposites: of artistry and murder, of splendor and penury, of loss and memory.
MUSLIN FESTIVAL 2016 was held in Dhaka from February 6 to 8, with seminars, workshops, the launch of the comprehensive book, Muslin: Our Story, and a preview of a documentary video, “Legend of the Loom.” An evening program on the grounds of the old mansion of the Dhaka nawabs featured a sound and light show, a dance drama and a runway of models in saris of contemporary muslin. The centerpiece of the festival was the exhibition “Muslin Revival,” held throughout the month of February at the National Museum.
At the entrance to the exhibition, I walked into a long, narrow space with hundreds of cotton threads—thin at the top and swelling to thicker dimensions at the bottom—suspended from the high ceiling, blown by fans. Twirling and spinning in the dark air, their motion replicated the action of cotton yarn being soaked in the flowing waters of Bengal’s rivers.
The word “muslin” is popularly believed to derive from Marco Polo’s description of the cotton trade in Mosul, Iraq. (The Bengali term is mul mul.) A more modern view is that of fashion historian Susan Greene, who wrote that the name arose in the 18th century from mousse, the French word for “foam.”
Muslin today has come to mean almost any lightweight, gauzy, mostly inexpensive, machine-milled cotton cloth. The word has lost all connection to the handwoven fabric that once came exclusively from Bengal. Cotton, stated the historian Fernand Braudel, was first used by the ancient civilizations on the Indus, while the art of weaving itself has been traced back to much earlier times. This head start perhaps was why ancient India became proficient in making cotton textiles. They became a staple export commodity to the Roman Empire, and they expanded in volume in the Middle Ages with the growth of the “maritime Silk Road” in the Indian Ocean.
From the very first, Bengal was in the lead. As textile historians John and Felicity Wild noted, while a great many varieties of “largely plain cotton” were produced in the three areas of Gujarat, the Coromandel Coast and Bengal, “it was the east coast and especially the Ganges Valley [that] offered the finest qualities.”
Arab merchants came to dominate the Indian Ocean trade from the eighth century onward, when considerable volumes of Bengal’s cotton textiles began to reach Basra and Baghdad, as well as Makkah via Hajj pilgrims. To the east, it went to Java and China, where in the early 14th century the traveler Ibn Battuta wrote that it was highly prized. He noted that among the presents sent by the Delhi Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughluq to the Yuan emperor in China were 100 pieces each of five varieties of cloth: Four were from Bengal, named by Ibn Battuta as bayrami, salahiyya, shirinbaf and shanbaf.
While all travelers to the region waxed lyrical about Bengal’s fine cotton cloth, it was the first-century ce Roman author Petronius who, in Satyricon, formulated the dominant trope about muslin as ventus textilis (woven wind): “Thy bride might as well clothe herself with a garment of the wind as stand forth publicly naked under her clouds of muslin.”
So what made it so special, so translucent, so softly gossamer? How did Dhaka—and only Dhaka—produce this finest of muslin?
This question lay at the heart of the exhibition. Wall-mounted videos showed each step of this lost art, from the sloping riverbanks where cotton plants flourished to the final bales of muslin ready for shipping. The waters of the great Meghna river sloshed on speakers and heaved on a huge screen as a background refrain to a display of manuscripts, documents, photos and illustrations, books and coins, tools of the trade—including a startlingly fine-toothed boalee (catfish) jawbone that even now seemingly strained to catch debris from raw cotton—Gandhian spinning wheels, a rough-hewn country boat, a full-sized handloom and a series of muslin dresses scrupulously recreated from famous collections.
The production process for Dhaka muslin was spectacularly demanding from beginning to end. The cotton plant itself, phuti karpas (Gossypium arboreum var. neglecta), not only was unique to the area, but also only grew, as the British Commercial Resident in Dhaka James Taylor wrote in 1800, in “a tract of land … twelve miles southeast of Dacca, along the banks of the Meghna.”
All attempts—and there were many—to grow it outside that one natural habitat failed. Its fibers were the silkiest of all. Contrary to all cotton logic, when soaked in the Meghna’s waters they shrank instead of swelling and dissolving. Alternate sections of its ribbon-like structure flattened and actually became stronger so that even the ultra-thin thread spun from it could withstand the stress when wound in the frame of the loom.
This thread was spun in intensely humid conditions, usually in the morning and evening, and then only by young women, whose supple fingers worked with water bowls around them to moisten the air, or else beside riverbanks or on moored boats. They often sang as they spun, and if the river was shrouded in fog, passing travelers brought back tales of muslin being made by mermaids singing in the mist.
Even the seeds for the next planting season were specially treated to keep them ready to germinate. After being carefully selected and dried in the sun, they were put in an earthen pot in which ghee (clarified butter) had been kept. Its mouth was sealed airtight, then it was hung from the ceiling of the hut at the height of an average individual over the kitchen fire to keep it moderately warm.
The most delicate, the very lightest of fibers were spun into muslin thread, and this was obtained by using a dhunkar, a bamboo bow tautly strung with catgut. The special bow for muslin cotton was small, and only women did the work—presumably because a light touch was needed. When it was strummed (dhun also means a light raga in classical Indian music) in a distinctive way, the lightest fleece from the cotton pile separated from the heavier fibers and rose into the air. One theory is that the strumming, by vibrating the air over the cotton pile, reduced its pressure enough to allow the very lightest fibers to be pulled upward. It was these finest of fibers—a mere eight percent of the total cotton harvest—that went into the making of the finest muslin.
Indeed, Dhaka muslin was woven out of air.
It was late in the afternoon when I left the museum and hopped on a rickshaw to head home. All around me cars, buses, vans, auto-rickshaws and motorbikes screeched, squealed and caterwauled. Crowds jammed the pavements, spilling on to the streets. Beggars implored; urchins scurried. Dhaka by any measure is the most crowded city in the world, a metropolis lightyears removed from the small town I had known when I first heard of muslin as a boy. It seemed unreal that this was the place that had once produced that fabled fabric. It seemed even more improbable still that it would do so ever again.
And yet, hanging airily from the ceiling at the exhibition, there was a freshly woven length of transparent cotton labeled, “New Age Muslin.”
Mughal emperors wore dresses made of Dhaka muslin, and this became another crucial signifier of its quality. In the Mughal scheme of things, all authority and power was vested in the emperor, who manifested a God-given “radiance.” The display of pomp and the magnificence of the imperial lifestyle, therefore, was not merely personal gratification as much as it was political expression, an essential display of the empire’s grandeur. Muslin, by being worn by the emperor, became a part of the Mughal apparatus of power.
Few dynasties in the world have had the artistic sensibilities of the Mughal emperors, which they displayed in remarkably integrated forms of architecture, literature, gardens, painting, calligraphy, vast imperial libraries, public ceremonies and carpets. The Mughals often embellished their muslin-wear with Persian-derived motifs called buti and embroidery known as chikankari. More crucially, they incorporated it within their aesthetic framework, giving names that drew on the idioms and images of classical Persian poetry for the different varieties of muslin: abrawan (flowing water); shabnam (evening dew); tanzeb (ornament of the body); nayansukh (pleasing to the eye); and more. Although Bengal was ruled by Muslims from the 13th century onwards, it was Emperor Akbar’s general Islam Khan who re-cast Dhaka as Bengal’s capital, giving it distinct Mughal contours. It was during Akbar’s half century of reign in the late 16th century that mulmul khas (“special clothing,” or muslin diaphanously fine) began to be made exclusively for the emperor and the imperial household. It was Akbar again who deemed muslin suitable for India’s summers and who designed the Mughal jama, men’s outerwear with fitted top and a pleated skirt falling to below the knees.
There are many stories about the translucent quality of the mulmul khas. One of the most enduring is that of Emperor Aurangzeb chiding his daughter princess Zeb-un-Nisa, a poet well-versed in astronomy, mathematics and Islamic theology, for appearing in transparent dress in court. She replied, to the astonishment of her father, that her dress, in fact, consisted of seven separate layers of muslin.
A handloom rested on the floor at the exhibition, the kind that once wove muslin. It was the Indian pit treadle loom, one that has remained relatively unchanged over roughly 4,000 years. It was a thing of bamboo and rope, at which the weaver sat with his feet in a pit dug below to operate the treadles. I walked around it, looking at it from all sides, baffled that this rudimentary construction had snared whole empires in its almost invisible threads.
Weaving is as old as Bengal, conspicuously present in its oldest literature. In the Charyapadas of the 10th century, written on palm leaves in the oldest form of the Bengali language yet known, the loom, yarn and weaving represent mystical concepts. Weavers populate the mangalkavyas written by medieval Bengali poets; they are also present in older ballads, chants and songs as well as depicted in terra-cotta.
On the museum walls were photos of weavers and spinners, the women and men behind the magic fabric. Faces of rural Bengal—sunburnt, lean, teeth stained with paan, stoic. It was impossibly backbreaking, mind-numbing labor, supported fore and aft by large groups of farmers, washers, cleaners, dyers, sewers, embroiderers and balers, all organized, in typically Indian fashion, by religion and caste.
How did they do it? How did they make a storied cloth that, when wet with evening dew, became invisible against the grass below? German scholar Annemarie Schimmel put it well when she wrote of their “unsurpassed ability to create amazing works of art with tools which appear extremely primitive today.… Who today could weave the fabric described as ‘woven air’?”
Dhaka’s muslin was felled by colonialism’s potent mix of the Industrial Revolution and the Maxim gun. Before that fall, though, there was another rise. Europeans came to India at the beginning of the 16th century and were astonished not only at the quality and volume of its cotton textiles, but also by its extensive, far-flung trade. Soon Indian cotton textiles were exported more than ever to Europe, in exponentially increasing volumes, with Bengal taking the lion’s share. Fortunes were made. As the economist K. N. Chaudhuri noted, from the earliest times “exports from eastern India … were a perennial source of prosperity to merchants of every nation.”
At its peak, muslin was on display at the French court where, at the close of the 18th century, Empress Josephine’s muslin dresses set the course for the Empire Line style in France and later in Regency-era Britain. That style centered around muslin, since only “filmy muslin,” wrote Christine Kortsch, author of Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction, “clung Greek-like to the body … and no color would do but white.”
But muslin’s days were numbered. The British colonial apparatus, whether in the form of the East India Company or as direct rule by the Crown, was a vast extractive machine. So too had been the Mughal state, which had herded the weavers into designated workshops called kothis to labor in harsh, even punitive, conditions. But compared to the pitiless operations of the British, the Mughals were models of mercy. On one side, both Company and Crown squeezed the farmers and the weavers until nothing was left, then squeezed some more. On the other, a factory-produced, mass-product “muslin” rolled off the newly invented power looms in Lancashire cotton mills. Aided by a raft of tariffs, duties and taxes, British cotton textiles flooded not only the European markets, but the Indian ones as well, bringing Bengal’s handloom cotton industry, and muslin, to its knees.
Along the riverbanks, phuti karpas became extinct. Famines swept through the previously fertile land of Bengal, and spinners and weavers changed occupations, fled from their villages or starved. Only jamdani, known as “figured muslin” due to the flower and abstract motifs woven on it, survived to the present times.
The muslin festival culminated an arduous two-year effort by a small research team affiliated with Drik Picture Library, a Dhaka nonprofit that began in the 1990s and has since evolved into a cultural institution aiming to change representations of Bangladesh. At Drik’s offices, where youthful energy and defiant political posters underline a buoyant commitment to social issues, I talked with Saiful Islam, its ceo and author of the exhibition’s book Muslin: Our Story (and, I should add, my younger brother). He and his team pursued cotton species and fabrics; sought out vanishing communities of handloom weavers and spinners; and interviewed historians and fashion designers on three continents as well across the length and breadth of Bangladesh.
“I have many wonderful memories,” he said. “Once, when I was staying overnight with one weaver family, they laid out a hearty supper. Afterwards, when I wanted to sleep, they brought in a bed that had been made specially for my stay. I was a city guy, and they wouldn’t let me sleep in the rough. Our village folks might be poor, but they are amazingly hospitable.”
Drik, partnering with the National Museum and Aarong (the crafts division of brac, the globally known ngo based in Bangladesh), capped its efforts by recreating a fabric close to the muslin of old: “New Age Muslin.” It has located a plant that could be the phuti karpas. “We will know for sure,” he said, “once the complex lab tests are done.” It was also gratifying, he said, “to see the general rise in the public awareness of the extent to which muslin is part of Bangladesh’s heritage and history.” But “it is now up to Bangladesh, its government and people, to take it forward.”
Dhaka’s muslin awaits the next chapter of its history. So does, I am sure, my father, who died in 1984, but who is no doubt looking down from somewhere up there with considerable interest.
http://bengalmuslin.com
Although Khan is newly published as a novelist, a black filing cabinet in her office overflows with poems, short stories, plays, musicals, journals, first drafts and even some abandoned novels she began writing from the time she was growing up in Toronto, Canada. “My family has always loved art and literature and especially poetry,” explains Khan, whose parents were raised in Pakistan. “I think I love writing because my parents taught me to venerate the written word.
“Writing is my first love,” emphasizes Khan, whose other passion is not far behind: justice. A former immigration attorney in Toronto, Khan holds multiple degrees in law, including a doctorate in international human rights law that focused on the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia that began while she was a student at the University of Ottawa, Ontario. Whether as a lawyer or a writer, she says, “I’ve really been doing the same thing all my life through different paths, and that is telling the stories that matter and representing voices that are often silenced or marginalized. It is important to me to do work that I think is humanizing.”
If that’s your goal, then why crime novels?
I’m a lifelong fan of the mystery genre, and the crime novel is the form most suited to the stories I want to tell. It gives me the ability to let my characters grow over the course of several books. I use that form to explore stories about history, culture, art, politics, religion and the places where all these things intersect. I’m very comfortable with mystery storytelling as a narrative structure, and I find it engages the reader quickly. In The Unquiet Dead, I’m able to tell a story about the genocide in Bosnia even though it’s framed as a murder mystery in Canada. And in The Language of Secrets, I’m writing about a terror plot in Toronto but also about the beauty of Arabic, Urdu and English poetry.
In both of your novels, you use a conventional “whodunit” plot structure—a mysterious death investigated by a detective and his partner. But neither book is simple or generic. What’s really going on?
I use that conventional form to explore two central themes in my books: the notion of identity—what it’s constructed of, what it means to us, how we are defined by or constrained by it—and the notion of justice. I believe justice is a complex notion. It takes many different forms, which you see as you work your way to the end of both of my books.
Tell us about your lead detective, Esa Khattak. Like you, he’s a Canadian of second-generation Pakistani heritage.
Esa is a man who is very connected to his Muslim heritage and who believes in the strength of multiculturalism. He is comfortable in his own skin even though he usually exists in a place of tension as a police officer who sometimes has to investigate his own community. I’ve written him as a character who is reserved and thoughtful. There is some of me in Esa. He has my family roots and Canadian roots in common, and he is comfortable in that multicultural environment and in moving among different communities, as am I. What I wanted to suggest in Esa is that he is open to the world and that’s something he cherishes in other people. This reflects my sense that we need to educate ourselves about a wide variety of cultures, languages, histories and traditions and understand that our own experience is not definitive; it’s simply one of many.
How about his partner, Rachel Getty?
In telling a great story, you need to be able to connect to the characters and humanize them. The books are definitely about Esa and Rachel. I knew that I needed a foil for Esa, someone completely different but who still has core values in common with him. They stand for themselves, but they also stand for themes that I want to explore, such as identity, alienation and belonging. With Rachel and Esa helping, it shows that we all hold certain things in common, and that we can actually bridge existing divides.
The Unquiet Dead has excellent reviews from both the media and readers. What do you think generated this response?
I’ve heard that readers love Esa and Rachel as a set of characters. They love each of them for what they stand for, but they also love the dynamics between the two, and they like many of the secondary characters. I also hear from survivors [of the Bosnian war] that they feel their experience has been accurately represented. That means a great deal to me.
Before you wrote your novels, you were the editor of Muslim Girl, a Toronto-based magazine for young women. Tell us about that experience.
I was hired by the publishing company in 2006 to shape a vision for the magazine that was about reclaiming a voice for Muslim women and girls and allowing them to tell their own stories. This was really important to me because as a Muslim woman I have experienced feeling marginalized and spoken for or spoken to and really resenting that. I wanted to correct that portrayal and add dimension to the conversation. I spent three years there, and it was wonderful how much I learned about the diversity of these [Muslim] communities. Those girls inspired me.
What’s in store for your readers next?
I am working on two more books in the Esa Khattak-Rachel Getty series. We mystery writers try to keep our characters going for as long as humanly possible! I’d also like my readers to understand the things we hold in common and to appreciate that there is a heritage and history of beauty that is inspiring and life-affirming to my central characters in particular. A better world requires all of us to be kinder and better informed. That’s what I struggle with myself, and that’s what I try to put into these books.
One review described your books using the phrase “the intersection of human suffering and human decency.” Can you elaborate on that?
I’ve spent much of my professional life reading, teaching and writing about human rights and the ongoing crimes that take place in the world. That means I am keenly attuned to underrepresented stories of suffering and also to the lifelong impact of violence. That’s a grim place to spend your time and your intellectual life, and it can often seem hopeless. But what I’ve found is that it’s never hopeless. In the face of horror and senselessness, I am always able to find that impulse for decency. And that’s the most beautiful thing in the world to write about. ]]>