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Tales told by a global nomad

Syed Badrul Ahsan journeys through history's landscapes
RAANA Haider is a spirited storyteller. And the stories she relates have all been part of her life, for she has been a pivotal figure in them all. She has seen it all. Her writing is fast paced and her diction vibrant and substantive. As you turn the pages of this work (it would not do to simply call it a travelogue. for then* Is much more to it than that), you understand the human understanding and the depth of appreciation she brings to her tales, for Fragrance of the Past is about the good times lost in history. If you have cared about Marco Polo and Hiuen Tsang and Vasco da Gama, enough to recall the world they saw opening up before them, you will read Haider. She subtitles Iter work A Middle Eastern Itinerary. In a broad sense, though, it transcends geography and reaches out to the ages of glory that simply do not happen to be there any more.
Haider’s good fortune is in having come by opportunities in life. Buttressed by good, modern education, she went on to observe lives and cultures first as the daughter of a diplomat and then as the spouse of a diplomat. Those diplomatic stints for her father and then her husband opened up for her the vistas which she now reopens for her readers in her works. She has had other works and you can be fairly certain more will be on the way. Which is as much as to say that in Haider, we happen to have a scholar who, through a sophisticated use of the English language (and that is something you cannot say about many of our Bengali writers in English), recreates in our times the cultures and social mores and with that entire historical eras which once went into the making of civilization. And where else but In the Middle l ast can one go looking for the roots that clutch? It is not simply religion -•- Judaism,
Fragrance of the Past A Middle Eastern Itinerary Raana Halder
Taara-lndia Research Press
Christianity, Islam --- that the region is noted for. Neither is if those unending regional or geopolitical conflicts that define its basic character. As Raana Haider takes her readers through the chapters of this work, indeed through the composite and yet diverse landscape of the Middle East, she makes you see what you may not have really observed before you stumbled on her book. And that Is most pleasing, for the sensibilities. For it is the sensuousness associated with the Middle Eastern past that Haider causes to sprout in her essays once again. A particularly appealing aspect of Fragrance is the references the writer makes to travel literature in earlier periods of history. Haider's scholarship, rich as it is, necessarily takes into cognizance the intellectual achievements of (hose who have preceded her in observations of landscapes and cultures. She cheerfully informs readers, "I am also tracing the path taken by countless other travellers who have put into writing their remembrances." And thus you get to be reminded of pioneers such as E.G. Browne, Ibn Khaldun. Al-Maqdisi, Ibn Battuta, Dame Freya Stark, Richard Francis Burton and, of course, T.E. Lawrence. It is in such exalted com pany, we can safely assume, that Raana Haider now finds herself. She is a global nomad.
And well she might be one. Her voyages take her to Egypt, to the chronicles of not just Tutcnkhamun or Nefertiti but also Nefertari and Queen Hatshepsut. The Nile, moving through history and through the ages, remains a point of reference for civilized humanity; and Haider takes us along its meandering ways. And then, of course, there is Cairo, with all its eastern symbolisms, its noise, its vigour and its refusal to take things lying down. But if Cairo excites you, there is the eternal city (or call it the oldest capital in the world) which cannot but transport you back in time, almost making you
wish you did not have to return to your own era. That Is how Damascus exercises a hold on the mind, any mind In a larger sense, though. It Is the whole cultural mosaic that is the Middle East which holds you in its grasp. You move with ease and with a surer sense of history from Aleppo to Iripoli to Beirut to Isfahan. In Baghdad, the crucible of civilisation us Halder calls it, she relives history even us she attempts to come to terms with the changes being wrought in Saddam Hussein's name. Statues, banners and what have you dot the city. But beneath the surface, the underlying modernity, is that stuff that has consistently made of Baghdad a symbol of timeless exoticism. You could say almost the same about Damascus, for in that old and yet pristine city, there are frequent reminders of the Assads --- Hafez, Bashar and the one who perished before he could take charge. But Damascus remains on a higher level, despite the despots who have periodically commandeered it.
The charm in Haider's narrative is as much in offering a discourse on contemporary men and matters as it is on a recapitulation of the glories that once were. Think here of Persian carpets, specimens of art that are trod on. Wonder about the splendour that is no more, the poetic mist you know as Persepolis. History, as Haider reminds us in so many ways, is indeed the moving caravan we always assumed it was. But it is a caravan which is dependent on what men made of it in the past. In the Middle East, for all the
apparent similarity In cultural mores and traditions, there are the differences, subtle as also glaring, which give its various regions a degree of diversity armies have fought over and scholars have consistently tried to decipher. Afghanistan, of course, is not exactly the Middle East. And yet it cannot be seen apart just as Iran cannot be observed in isolation from the Middle East proper. Raana Haider draws your attention to the cultural enrichment that in centuries past embodied Herat. And Kabul and Kandahar were not much behind either. In a way, almost without your being conscious of it, you begin to reflect on the times you Inhabit. The interplay of politics involving the Soviet Union and the United States, the serial destruction of the land wrought by the Mujahideen and then the Taliban, followed by the incompetence of the Karzai regime, all give a rude tug to the heart as you imagine the affluence, in cultural terms, that the country epitomised in the past.
For the Middle East, the old halcyon days are no more. But as you read Raana Haider, you spot those days through the rundown windows of time and go through the history they gave form to. And you come away with the sad realization that the world you inhabit is rather mediocre, unlike the one which shines through in Fragrance of the Past. And that happens to be the truth.
Syed Badrul Ahsan Is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.