Book Review: On The Road to Kandahar - Travels Through Conflict in the Islamic World by Jason Burke

The final chapter of Jason Burke's book, On the Road to Kandahar: Travels Through Conflict in the Islamic World is titled "Conclusion: London and Pakistan," and therefore I received fair warning. It was disconcerting, nevertheless, when I came to this sentence and realized that it was absolutely the last one.

The lights came on first in the distance over the city and then closer in the village and then long looping strings of multicolored bulbs flickered into life above the gates of the shrine and very soon it was almost dark and we walked away.

For 281 pages, I had been spoiled by the breakneck pace and the thrill of the next adventure packaged in some great writing. After he walked away from the Bari Imam shrine on the outskirts of Islamabad with his friend and Pakistani journalist, Ershad Mahmud, I fully expected Burke to jump into yet another battered old car with yet another translator, drive once more over bumpy roads through inhospitable terrain to find yet another nook of the 'Islamic world' in which to meet many people — farmers, teachers, children, doctors, pharmacists, militants, freedom fighters, mullahs, writers and journalists, coalition soldiers, the Taliban — and then write all about it in great descriptive detail in his lucid, thoughtful, perceptive, honest style.

The book begins in Kurdistan around the time of the First Gulf War in the summer of 1991, with a 21-year old Burke crossing the border into northern Iraq from Turkey and ends, 15 years later in that tiny shrine outside Islamabad, in the immediate aftermath of the July 2005 London bombings. The journey that begins as a "post-adolescent adventure" with pre-conceived notions of Islam and of what Muslims look like, with religion as a hazy backdrop and not necessarily the focus, ends on the thought that there is "no general theory that could explain 'the Islamic world' and that to search for one was not only futile but in fact counter-productive."

In the intervening period, Burke's travels take him to Afghanistan, Iraq, Algeria, Britain, Thailand, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Uzbekistan and back to Kurdistan and Pakistan. They take him to tired old villages bombed out of existence in the wars of the past decade and a half, their people, homes and lives spilling out on to the streets and fields along with the rubble; to the funeral of a 13 year old Palestinian child, a casualty of the Israeli response to the intifada; into the toilets of the Bagram airbase north of Kabul on whose walls are scrawled words of fear and wisdom of American soldiers; into the front lines of the second Iraq War, at the wrong end of shells bombarding a convoy of vehicles; into prisons housing ex-torturers under the Saddam Hussein regime and failed suicide bombers; into many hotels, mosques, schools and homes to meet members of the various groups fighting and killing for their various ideologies.

Article Author: Sujatha Bagal

Sujatha Bagal is a writer based in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. She also blogs about parenting, travel, books, movies, food and politics at Blogpourri, which she started in Bangalore to document life as an expat in that city.

Visit Sujatha Bagal's author page — Sujatha Bagal's Blog