Purchase
A Memoir Of Pakistan
HarperOne
October 2009
On Sale: October 1, 2009
352 pages
ISBN: 0061567086
EAN: 9780061567087
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction Memoir
Ali Eteraz's Children of Dust is a spellbinding
portrayal of a life that few Americans can imagine. From his
schooling in a madrassa in Pakistan to his teenage
years as a Muslim American in the Bible Belt, and back to
Pakistan to find a pious Muslim wife, this lyrical,
penetrating saga from a brilliant new literary voice
captures the heart of our universal quest for identity.
Children of Dust begins in rural Islam at the
lowest levels of Pakistani society in the turbulent
eighties. This intimate portrayal of rustic village life is
revealed through a young boy's eyes as he discovers magic,
women, and friendship. After immigrating with his
family to the United States, Eteraz struggles to be a normal
American teenager under the rules of a strict Muslim
household. In 1999, he returns to Pakistan to find
the villages of his youth dominated by the ideology of the
Taliban, filled with young men spouting militant rhetoric,
and his extended family under threat. Eteraz becomes the
target of a mysterious abduction plot when he is purported
to be a CIA agent, and eventually has to escape under
military escort. Back in the United States, with his
fundamentalist illusions now shattered, Eteraz tries to find
a middle way within American Islam. At each stage of
Eteraz's life, he takes on a different identity to signal
his evolution. From being pledged to Islam in Mecca as an
infant, through Salafi fundamentalism, to liberal reformer,
Eteraz desperately struggles to come to terms with being a
Pakistani and a Muslim. Astonishingly honest, darkly
comic, and beautifully told, Children of Dust is an
extraordinary adventure that reveals the diversity of
Islamic beliefs, the vastness of the Pakistani diaspora, and
the very human search for home.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2025 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy