Celebrating liberalism in Islam

NEW DELHI: At a time when TV network images of Islam and jehad are permeating McWorld, Pico Iyer’s novel Abandon — launched on Friday — celebrates its liberal face. Through the quest of John Macmillan, an Englishman in California studying the works of 13th century mystic Rumi — a table-top icon in America now — Iyer brings to us the love, compassion and poetry that Sufism has gifted to the world.In his romantic novel, the Sufi mystic is the global soul.
‘‘America has a lot to learn from the world, it’s as if a 16 year-old was trying to lord over 80-year-olds. Had Bush and his men travelled and met real people from abroad, they would have been more respectful and less likely to bomb Iraq,’’ says Iyer. The writer uses his work like a ‘‘hand grenade to explode’’ the Western assumptions about Islam.
The idea came to him in 1993 upon seeing some Mughal miniatures, at a time when Demi Moore and Madonna were ‘‘reciting Rumi verses on a CD to be put out by Deepak Chopra’’. For the next seven years he researched his novel. It was proof-read and ready on September 12, 2001.
Yet, it seems that the events of the previous day is the context for his novel. ‘‘The turmoil in the Islamic world was nothing new, the embassy bombings in Africa were just as disturbing, it’s only as if America suddenly woke up to it,’’ he says.
The 46-year-old backpage essayist of Time magazine says he witnessed the clash between civilisations every time he travelled.
But why is Sufism and Rumi still an American fad? ‘‘My suspicion is that it’s a mixture of the genuine and the distorted,’’ he answers. ‘‘Rumi wrote devotional poems which could be easily used as over-the-table verses used to impress your girlfriend,’’ Iyer explains. ‘‘There is a great spiritual thirst in the West today, a great fear of being abandoned.’’
The novel probes Californian insecurities and connects it to the ultimate surrender to the unknown that Sufis sing of. Which, perhaps, is nirvana for the global soul for which Iyer is a poster-boy.
Born to a Tamil father and a Gujarati mother in England, Iyer moved to California after graduating from Oxford, the same path that his protagonist charts.
He made a second home in Japan 15 years ago, after he fell in love with it. Iyer has now married his Japanese partner and lives a self-admittedly ‘‘eccentric life’’ in the suburb of Nara, 90 minutes from Kyoto, for eight months a year.
‘‘There are no cars, bicycles, TVs or newspapers; the phone rings once in three days and it’s mostly a wrong number and I have never been on the web,’’ is how Iyer describes his existence.
If he wants to check a fact, he goes to a bookshop and looks it up. He uses the desk of his ‘‘wife’s daughter to write all day and goes to bed by 8.30 pm as there is nothing to do beyond that’’.