The Silk Road and Beyond attempts to capture lived realities across Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Finland, Britain, USA, Palestine, Switzerland, Finland, and the subcontinent. It also aims at initiating readers into encountering Muslim heritage across the four continents where cultures share commonalities beyond the narrowly defined premise of conflicts. This book is an effort to capture history, literature, mobility, crafts, architectural traditions, and cultural vistas by focusing on diverse Muslim individuals, communities, cities, and their edifices. It attempts to reconstruct deeper and munificent aspects of Muslim histories and lived experience that often stay ignored by the writers and travellers. Normative accounts of cities such as Bukhara, Jerusalem, Isfahan, Fes, Samarkand, Granada, Palermo, Cordova, or Konya may lifelessly posit them as sheer tourist destinations, ignoring their cultural and historical depth. Written in an autobiographical genre, this book benefits from a 40-year-long exposure and encounters with the vibrant lives across the four continents as experienced by a curious Muslim academic at different stages of his life. The reader can explore and relish these predominantly Muslim locales along with a frequent exposure to r socio-intellectual institutions in Europe and the United States.
...this volume celebrates and explicates in great detail the cultural history of the thousand year Islamic ummah, executing at the same time a form of travel writing that presents a welcome advance on the western genre. Instead of viewing his subject from the outside, the writer demonstrates a warm personal engagement with the terrains through which he is moving, meeting minds with the people and their cognate Islamic cultures, all the while conscious of the evidences of a glorious stage in the history of mankind.
