Homeland Elegies: A Barack Obama Favourite Book 2020

What I heard as I listened with new ears was fear.

The Satanic Verses was my first experience of both magical realism and metafiction.

(For Muslims, to speak of Muhammad as the author of the Quran is a surpassing blasphemy; only God could have authored such a miracle, we are told; Muhammad was just a holy stenographer, if you will, taking divine dictation.)

If you can do anything else with yourself, anything more certain, you owe it to yourself and to everyone you love to do that. But if you can’t, if you need to be writing, well, then, one of the joys of the lonely journey ahead, beta, is the comfort of reading. A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.”

Out the window, the dramatic mountain vistas had given way to the familiar concatenation of sometimes ramshackle roadside constructions, stores and schools and homes, tea stands, food stands, pumping stations; the earlier evergreen of the Hazara steppes now replaced by sundry shades of drying earth, from ecru to umber, mud-brick walls and sand-brow

the original Companions of the Prophet recast as sex-crazed purveyors of snuff films whom even Rushdie’s satirical genius could not have imagined.

The world looked to us—and now I speak as an American—to uphold a holy image, or as holy as it gets in this age of enlightenment. We have been the earthly garden, the abundant idyll, the productive Arcadia of the world’s pastoral dream. Between our shores has gleamed a realm of refuge and renewal—in short, the only reliable escape from history itse

“What’s a Nero complex, Auntie?” I asked. “Right. That’s something Albert Memmi talks about in his book The Colonizer and the Colonized. I’ll send it to you. He says that when you come to power through having usurped it, you’re never free of the worry that your claim to power is not legitimate. And this fear of illegitimacy, this sense of being hau

“Maybe that’s because I’m not a child anymore. I’m twenty-five.” “Latif was right. The longer we stay, the more we forget who we are.”