4 ideas
Aatish Taseer was raised in Delhi by his Sikh mother, journalist Tavleen Singh, and barely knew his father, the Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer. Aatish then travelled from Istanbul through Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran to Pakistan to understand the faith-based identity his father claimed.
Aatish's father drank, did not pray and was not devout, yet he insisted he was fully Muslim. The book argues that for many modern Muslims, Islam works as an inherited communal and political loyalty, a side one belongs to, rather than a set of beliefs one holds. That is why unbelief does not weaken the identity, and why criticism of the community is experienced as betrayal.
Orthodox Islamic self-understanding treats the pre-Islamic past as jahiliya, an age of ignorance. Converted peoples who adopt this view are cut off from their own ancestral history. In Pakistan this means rejecting a shared Indian past, including temples, languages and pre-Islamic culture, in favour of an imported Arab-centred history. The result is a people alienated from the land and the past they actually come from.
This contrasts with Pakistan's disowning of its pre-Islamic past. It suggests that how thoroughly a religion erases prior history depends on whether a people keeps a strong national memory older than the faith.