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Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman

An Afternoon with Sheema Khan

Introducing Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman

Of Hockey and Hijab is the newly-published compilation of Sheema Khan’s contributions to The Globe and Mail. In these thoughtful essays, Sheema Khan—Canadian hockey mom and Harvard PhD—gives us her own pointed insights on the condition of being a modern and liberal, yet practicing, Muslim especially in Canada. Tackling a host of issues, such as terrorism, human rights, Islamic law, women’s rights, and the anti-veil controversy, she explains Islam to the greater public while calling for mutual understanding and tolerance.

Date: Saturday November 7, 2009
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: Auditorium, Noor Cultural Centre
Admission: $5

Sheema Khan writes a monthly column for The Globe and Mail on issues pertaining to Islam and Muslims. She holds a PhD from Harvard University in chemical physics, along with numerous patents on drug delivery technology. She has served on the Board of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (2004–2008), and is the founder of the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) and its former chair (2000–2005). She testified as an expert witness on Muslims in Canada before the O’Connor Inquiry, and has appeared before a number of parliamentary committees. In addition, she has spoken at numerous NGO conferences and government agencies on issues of security, civil rights, and Muslim cultural practice. She is currently a patent agent in Ottawa.

Richmond Hill Book Club Meeting: Shantaram

The Richmond Hill bookclub (part of DesiLit) is going to have its next meeting on Wednesday, November 4 and discuss the book Shantaram, a very interesting book.  The author is a convicted Australian bank robber and heroin addict who broke out of prison and lived in Mumbai in hiding for many years.  After his experiences, he wrote the book and then went back to finish his jail sentence.  He has managed to capture the intricacies of Mumbai - the lifestyle, the people, the cafes, the crimes, the slums in Mumbai, etc.

 

When:   Wednesday, November 4 at 7:15 PM. 

Where:  Meeting will be held at Indigo on Highway 7 and Yonge

What:    Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

About the Book:

Shantaram is a novel influenced by real events in the life of the author, Australian Gregory David Roberts, filled with mostly fictional adventures. In 1978, Roberts was sentenced to nineteen years' imprisonment in Australia after being convicted of a series of armed robberies of building society branches, credit unions, and shops, which he had committed to feed a heroin addiction after his marriage ended and he lost his daughter. In July 1980, he escaped from Victoria’s Pentridge Prison in broad daylight, thereby becoming one of Australia's most wanted men for the next ten years.

In the fictional story, Roberts' main character arrives in Bombay carrying a fake passport in the name of Lindsay Ford. Bombay was only a stopover on a journey that was to take Lin from New Zealand to Germany, but he decides to stay in the city. Lin soon meets a local man named Prabaker, who he hires as a guide but soon becomes his best friend and renames him Linbaba. Both men visit Prabaker's native village, Sunder, where Prabaker's mother christens Lin with the name Shantaram, meaning Man of God's Peace. On their way back to Bombay and after a night out, Lin and Prabaker are robbed. With all his possessions gone, Lin is forced to live in the slums, giving him shelter from the authorities and free rent in Bombay. After a massive fire on the day of his arrival in the slum, he sets up a free health clinic as a way to contribute to the community. He learns about the local culture and customs in this crammed environment, gets to know and love the people he encounters, and even becomes fluent in Marathi, the local language. He also witnesses and battles outbreaks of cholera and firestorms, becomes involved in trading with the lepers, and experiences how ethnic and marital conflicts are resolved in this densely crowded and diverse community.

The novel contains several other characters, notably a number of foreigners of varied origin and local Indians, highlighting the rich diversity of life in Bombay. Lin falls in love with Karla, a Swiss-American girl who refuses to love him back, befriends local artists and actors landing him roles as an extra in several Bollywood movies, and is recruited by the Bombay underworld for various criminal operations, including drug and weapons trade. Lin eventually lands in Bombay's Arthur Road Prison, where he endures many beatings and other physical and mental abuse by guards, while existing under extremely squalid conditions, along with hundreds of other inmates. However, thanks to the protection of Afghani mafia don "Abdel Khader Khan", Lin is eventually released, and works in black market currency exchange and passport forgery. Having travelled as far as Africa on trips commissioned by the mafia, Lin later goes to Afghanistan to smuggle weapons for mujahideen freedom fighters in Afghanistan. When his mentor Khan is killed, Lin realizes he became everything he grew to loathe and falls into depression after he returns. He decides that he must fight for what he believes is right, and build an honest life. The story ends with him planning to go to Sri Lanka which lays the premise for the sequel to this book.

For more information on this book club or to RSVP your attendance please contact:

Renu Mehta,  Moderator - DesiLit BookClub in Richmond Hill,  Tel: 905-770-0942, Email: renum@rogers. com

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rusdhie

Let me preface this review with a list for those cannot, probably through no fault of their own because they did not go to school on the subcontinent, recite by rote the cream of the Mughal lineage:  Babar, Hamayun, Akbar, Jehangir, Shah Jehan, Aurangzeb.  Let me also preface it by saying that if you, like me, are a fan of the life, the times and the vision of Akbar, the third of the Mughal emperors,  this is a book you will not be able to put down.

The pivotal character in the novel is a young Italian man who arrives in Akbar’s court at Fathepur Sikri calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore”, which translates from the Italian as “Mughal love child”.  He claims to be Akbar’s uncle because his mother was Babar’s sister, Qara Koz, a black-eyed princess whose beauty was famed to stun into submission even the most cantankerous of men.

Qara Koz’s name was stricken from her family’s records – though the women, down to Akbar’s time, had a verbal record of her as ‘the hidden princess’ – after she, having being surrendered, along with her sister Khanzada, as part of the spoils of a battle Babar lost to the Samarkand king Shaibani, was rescued by the Persian king Shah Ismail when he defeated Shaibani, but refused to return to her brother’s court, which Khanzada happily did, instead choosing to stay with Shah Ismail as his consort. She kept with her a maid servant, known tellingly as ‘the Mirror’, whose role became increasingly important as the story unfolded to its somewhat sordid end.

When Shah Ismail abandoned Qara Koz and the Mirror as he fled a battlefield in a loss to the Ottoman Turks, she threw in her lot with Argalia, who had lead the Turkish forces through many defeating battles, including the one against Shah Ismail. She became the love of this life, a love he was willing to die for. Argalia started out his life as Arcalia, a boy from Florence, Italy, who left after his parents died to find his fame and fortune, and achieved both by proving himself to the Ottoman Emperor.  He eventually returned to Florence with Qara Koz, where her beauty and her charm continued to mesmerize, until his death at the hands of a mob that had turned against her.  She and the Mirror were forced to flee to the New World with one of Arcalia’s childhood friends, Ago Vespucci, whose uncle, incidentally, was the Amerigo Vespucci.  Ago Vespucci was Mogor dell’Amore’s father.

In this novel, I met Akbar at his most visionary, his most cruel, his most lavish and his most troubled, the latter particularly by his decadent sons, especially Salim, who was in line to inherit the throne – though Rushdie does not venture into the reasons it was inherited by Jehangir.  I met Akbar’s mother, his aunts, his wives, his concubines and his advisors in the court, as well as prostitutes, artists and felons who inhabited the city outside it.  I met men and women from the Florence of the time, and shared their celebration of a festive, secular life in the face of a powerful Catholic Church that periodically imposed punitive, vindictive, puritanical measures on them.

Among the things I enjoyed most about The Enchantress of Florence was Rushdie’s perspective whereby he makes Akbar’s court the centre of the known civilization of its time and the envy of royalty across the entire eastern hemisphere.  It is an Indocentric view of history rarely found in fiction, or, for that matter, ‘fact’.

Although the bibliography for this novel rivals that of a doctoral dissertation, a caveat, perhaps tongue in cheek, in the inside cover reads: “The Enchantress of Florence is a work of fiction.  A few liberties have been taken with the historical record in the interests of truth.”  There were times when I was not sure if what I was reading was history or if it was Rushdie weaving a story in his inimitable fashion, but in the end I did not care. This novel is classic Rusdhie – the plethora of well-developed characters, the brilliance in story telling, the signature magical realism. The latter, incidentally, at first is used to overlook the chronological problem with the fact that Mogor dell’Amore is so young that Qara Koz would have had to have been in her sixties to have given birth to him; at the end of the book, however, that chronological glitch is given an explanation that is more reality than magic.

The one place where the book did not work for me, ironically because of the use of magical realism, was with the character of Jodha, who has come down through history as the love of Akbar’s life and his favourite among his many wives and consorts.  Rushdie draws her as a creation of Akbar’s imagination, though the pleasures they enjoy are a bit too carnal for the intangibility of imagination, and the anger and envy she inspires in the other wives is a too petty for the almost surreal.  Despite the artistic license he permits himself to such a successful end with this novel, it simply does not work to have a character known to have existed in history be drawn inside the less concrete world of magical realism.

 

Review by - Janice Goveas

 

 

 Janice Goveas works in fiction and playwriting.  A collection of her plays, Margaret in Search of Herself and Other Plays , was published by In Our Words Inc, in December 2008. Her short fiction has been published in The New Quarterly, Pitkin in Progress and Icarus Ascending and is scheduled to be published in the third volume of the anthology Her Mother’s Ashes.  Her plays have been staged in the US and Canada.  During the 2008-2009 season, she was the Artist in Residence at Rasik Arts in Toronto  She has facilitated the Desilit-Toronto Book Club and the Desilit-Toronto Writers’ Group, and has read her work at Masala! Mehndi! Masti! every year since 2006.  She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont and an MA in Spanish Literature from Syracuse University.  She recently became a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada.