Tinderbox - M.J. Akbar

Recommended reading for sure, the title belies the scope of the research. This is gripping stuff capturing a strain of history about the rise of Islam in the Indian subcontinent culminating in the recent past with a bleak outlook of the future of Pakistan. Whats remarkable is the length of the book is remarkably short for the scale of events captured.

The book begins by capturing the roots of Muslim discontent and oddly its traced back to the sack of Delhi by Nadir Shah ( a Shia). Shah Waliullah and his more notable disciples instilled the seeds of a jihadist movement which flickered on and off (and is currently a raging inferno). The British drove the last nail on the Mughal coffin and earned the wrath of the jihadist movement. Typically they responded by playing the Hindus (who were in a majority) against the Muslims right unto 1857 when the last Mughal emperor was forced into exile and hence feeding into a vicious cycle of suspicion between the two communities. The script changed when the British went along with a modernist thread of Muslim led by Syed Ahmed Khan and this thread carried to culmination the idea of a Pakistani nation. The narrative captures the Indian Freedom struggle from the viewpoint of the key Muslim players and there are moments when you are awestruck at how close the history of South Asia may have been radically different from the nuclear precipice whose edge we teeter on. Gandhi's letting go of the Khilafat movement , the Congress rejection of overtures from the Muslim league, Jinnah's outsized ego (though remarkably during the earlier part of the freedom struggle he outshone much of the Congress in his sagacity and vision of a united India) drove a permanent wedge between the two communities. Partition was inevitable by the late 1930s much to the dismay of Gandhi.

The only criticism that you can place on the book is that it allocates much less space to post independence Pakistan (though to the author's credit its the right proportion on a historical timescale). The statement that captures the fall of Pakistan aptly is that for the opponents of Partition Jinnah died too late and for the proponents of a secular Pakistan he died too early. With Jinnah's death it is the rise of Maulana Maududi and his radical islamist vision of Pakistan manifesting in the Jamaat-e-Islami party that takes over much of the historical narrative. Weak and opportunistic civilian rule gave way to arrogant military rulers who took the country into ill advised wars which led to their downfall. Bhutto instead of seizing the moment handed over in a platter indulged in petty deals with the Islamists and carrying out medieval policies (declaring the Ahmaddiya sect as non-Muslims). Zia's rise and the damage (seemingly permanent) to the fabric of Pakistani society is aptly captured.

The tale is narrated at a breathtaking pace and though the author switches at times between multiple narratives - its a class act of ensuring that this book is a page turner throughout. The present is sobering with Pakistan arming itself to the teeth with nuclear warheads. The book is as pacy as a novel in the Bourne series , but alas it isn't fiction and even worse, it's too close for comfort