Kathleen Jamie is a poet, a Scot and a winner of literary awards
who teaches creative writing at St Andrews. In her footloose
girlhood she followed the hippy trail, recording her experiences in
a book published by Virago as The Golden Peak. Those were the days
of innocence and incense. For Kathleen, the initial attraction of
Gilgit, a busy trading centre in the foothills of the mighty
Karakoram Mountains, is the library, a tattered relic of the Raj.
Here she falls in with the Major, an admirer of the British, who
billets her with his Shia Muslim cousin, whose purdah-observing
wife and family provide the core of the book. In the wake of 11
September 2001, no doubt encouraged by interest in the area as well
as in all things Muslim, an enterprising publisher, Sort Of Books,
sent her back to revisit her old haunts and supply a framework -
prologue and epiloge - for a reprint. Kathleen, now married with
two children of her own, accepts. The hippy-trail is no more -
she's the only foreigner in the Northern Territories. In Gilgit,
she finds babies grown to adulthood, but their elders little
changed. One thing nags. She needs to know what her benefactors
thought of what she wrote, the betrayal which is the inevitable
result of writing about those who chose to live behind the veil:
'Were you angry with me?' 'Yes!' Then, smiles. 'For a short time.
But it's an old matter now.' The threat of war is harder to lift,
the consequences far more dire. The future? Hope lies not in what
Jamie describes as the poisoned chalice of tourism but from within.
The discharge of obligations is as much a part of Muslim life as
its restrictions, as she discovers when she realizes that Mohammed
Ali Changezi, her guide on her return, quietly pays for the
education of the son and daughter of a family destroyed by war. A
fine book: warm-hearted, perceptive, enriching, illuminating.
Elisabeth Luard is the author of Still Life (Kirkus UK)
When ten Pakistani men walk into Kathleen Jamie's small Scottish
town on a peace march, in November 2001, she is thrown back to her
own travels in Northern Pakistan and a book she wrote a decade
earlier. Among Muslims is the account of Jamie's time travelling
alone and living among the Shia and Ismaili Muslims in the Northern
Areas - the mountainous regions wedged between Afghanistan, India
and China and one of the most volatile borderlands in the world. A
bold, sympathetic and superbly written book, Among Muslims delves
into Jamie's own Scottish upbringing to find links with the
purdah-observing lifestyle of her Shia Muslim hosts. It is a
privileged account from an acclaimed poet, who during her travels
was often literally the only woman on the bus. Among Muslims was
originally published as The Golden Peak. For this edition, Kathleen
Jamie returned to Pakistan to write an Afterword and Preface.
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