Braced

Got away from Infinite Jest for long enough periods over the last two days to read Ziauddin Sardar's very entertaining and informative Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim. It's a very readable book, giving a deeply thoughtful but often humorous account of various of the writer's forays into different Islamic 'worlds', reminding me of just how limited my own engagement with what be seen as the totality of that world is. In fact, my encounters have involved generally what might be seen as Islam at its best - what I would consider its true face. Sardar is rightfully excoriating with regard to some of the faces he's been exposed to.

The chapters towards the end spoke with particular force to me. His account of the events surrounding the publication of The Satanic Verses was a reminder of just how embattled many Muslims of British background must have felt at that time. I came late to the debate, as it were, only grasping just how and why the novel was so offensive to the community several years later. It would be useful, I think, for every self-satisfied liberal secularist of the Fay Weldon variety to read this bit just to let them know that there are such things as perspectives different from their own with careful thought and intelligence behind them.

The only problem for me in reading Desperately Seeking Paradise has been that its honest sense of gloom and something close to despair added to my already less than rosy, distinctly un-cosy view of the world engendered through Wallace's magnum opus. Both are bracing reads, and I suppose useful in a world that demands being braced for whatever comes next.