Iftikhar Malik's Top Book Recommendations

Iftikhar MalikWhile Baldwin’s heroines in her two novels are three South Asian women, along with a host of other ordinary men and women, her short stories cover a wider canvas and involve Ukrainians, North Americans, South Americans and Europeans, as well as a fair representation of South Asians. Here again the characters are mostly immigrants who, otherwise well-established law-abiding citizens, often get... (Source)

Iftikhar MalikNora Baker is known in British history as the first ever woman to have been awarded the George Cross, but very few people know that she was a young Muslim woman, allegedly killed by the Nazis on the allegation of being a successful British spy. Noor Inayat Khan was the daughter of an Indian Muslim Sufi mentor, a classicist and non-conformist of genteel traditions. Noor was born to her American... (Source)

Iftikhar MalikYes. Away from the sordid realities of South Asian politics, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s fiction offers a fresher, warmer and reflective perspective, though no less melancholy. What the Body Remembers is a story of two Sikh women married to a landowning Sardariji from Rawalpindi, who has an engineering degree from Balliol and lives a very disciplined life trying to combine both East and West in his... (Source)

Iftikhar MalikLike political contestation between India and Pakistan, their respective nationalist historiographies are equally contentious and, in their efforts to offer grand narrative, they do not shirk from an abrasive self-righteousness. While amongst Pakistani nationalist historians, their country has been a historically ordained reality varying from its Indus Valley distinctness to its predominantly... (Source)

Iftikhar MalikFarzana Shaikh’s earliest historical study, based on her doctoral research, was a timely attempt to investigate the quest of a cohesive political community anchored on the historical and intellectual ethos of worldwide Islam within a specific South Asian context. That volume had tried to move the discourse on Pakistan’s evolution from the prevalent paradigm of high politics of a few powerful men... (Source)

Mani Shankar AiyarYes, it is the very best book I have read on Pakistan. If Pakistan can introspect, it will have to recognise that in their Islamic republic, as Omar Khayyam said all those centuries ago, “the two and seventy jarring sects confute” – all these sects are part of the family of Islam. The question of whether there should be a Muslim nation or not on the subcontinent is one that is only of historical... (Source)