The journey that has changed me: Tharik Hussain

The journey that has changed me: Tharik Hussain

Kia speaks to the author Tharik Hussain and explains why his book about Muslim Europe changes their thoughts about their own religion

If I had read "Minarette in the mountains" in my youth, I would have thought about my religion with aout certainty. My parents were immigrants from Bangladesh to Great Britain and the effort to capture their identity, they followed a strongly prescriptive version of Islam that was not very funny.

Author Tharik Hussain

I - or you - read a book like this, we might have felt more secure in terms of our place in the world. The problem is, of course, that a book like this did not exist until Tharik Hussain wrote it.

The author and travel writer wrote several travel guides, including Lonely Planet Saudi Arabia, who came into a closer choice for a travel media award 2020. He is a moderator of the award-winning BBC documentary America’s Mosques: A Story of Integration and has two decades of experience as a specialist for Muslim heritage.

in Minarets in the Mountains: A Journey Into Muslim Europe sets out with his wife and daughters through the Western Balkans - home of the greatest indigenous Muslim population in Europe - to explore a region in which Islam has shaped a millennium for more than half.

Tharik and his family visit Islamic lodges who cling to mountain slopes pray in mosques that are older than the Sistine chapel, and learn something about their own identity as British, European and Muslims. Here Tharik tells us about the journey that has changed him.

We don't often hear from Europe's indigenous Muslim communities. Why is that?

The idea of ​​an indigenous Muslim identity in Europe - an identity born in and in Europe - is to admit that Europe is as Muslim as it is Christian, Jewish or pagan (and everything else).

This refutes the normalized right -wing extremists, anti -Islam -anti -Islam, who claim that Islam is something new and foreign, but everyone who knows their Islamic history knows that they appear in Europe more or less at the same time as in the Middle East: the 7th century, and it never left.

Tharik Hussain Tharik visited the Islamic site Blagaj Tekke in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Another reason why this is not a normal part of our discourse - especially in our genre of travel literature in English - is that the authors who historically wrote about these people and this region were not Muslims and therefore considered the "other" Europe; The result of a foreign presence, if you want - a nonsensical tropus that is still repeated for fourteen centuries later.

What was the most surprising thing you learned when writing the book?

How surprising is the idea of ​​an indigenous Muslim Europe for people, and not just for the Europeans. I have spoken to people and media around the world and it is a bizarre concept for them - the idea of ​​a lively European Muslim presence that is not the result of postcolonial migration.

Mehmet/Shutterstock Stiri Most, an Ottoman bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina

I was also surprised at how much of what I discovered, my own - admittedly empathetic - ideas of what this region would look like, as it was far away from the popular image of a gray, monolithic former Soviet blocks.

It was rich in different stories, colorful, exciting, creative and extremely beautiful and naturally full of Muslim legacy, which was previously denied to me, be it the unique European-Muslim art style of the region or the Muslim tradition of protecting the oppressed (Jews in Europe).

What were some of the joys (and challenges) of traveling with two small daughters?

The joys are the perspectives that they bring to where we go and what we see. I am a middle -aged British born in Bangladesh. They are two teenage girls mixed descent. They see and experience the world very differently and remind me of privileges and exclusion for which I am blind. You also have this great astonishment that many of us lose with the age and the associated start of cynicism.

Tharik Hussain Tharik's family in front of the ecobar house with their hosts in Palamartsa, Bulgaria

The challenges are similar to those who you meet when you travel with someone for a long time. The intensity, dealing with the mood of everyone, accepting with the personality traits of the other, etc. - nothing extraordinary, because they are a really wonderful society!

we come to the journey that she has changed. Which region or trip did the most affect it?

Since two young parents were bankrupt, we could only afford a longer stay in Larnaca - about nine hours, I think. To kill the time, I looked for sights nearby and pushed a mosque on Salzseen. The sound tempting and immediately after arrival we went to a short day trip.

Vera Larina/Shutterstock The Tekke of Hala Sultan in Larnaca, Cyprus

I remember that I arrived at this dilapidated and neglected old place - long before the recent renovation work - and the older caretaker came from his dusty and lonely cabin to hand over a little thin book with the title The Tekke of Hala Sultan.

I didn't think much and put the book in my pocket. We strolled around the weakly illuminated and poorly maintained mosque from the Ottoman period, surrounded by palm trees with a view of the salt lakes baked by the August sun. My wife and I were pretty upset when we came across a grave in the mosque complex.

At that time we tended to a conservative Islam-after all, we went to Saudi Arabia-and the idea of ​​graves next to worshipers was a no-go.

We went and pushed my daughter Amani in her buggy, a bit disappointed, but glad to have killed a few hours. But years later, after I left life in Saudi Arabia disillusioned, I opened this book and found that the mosque and the associated grave were allegedly the place where an aunt of the Prophet Muhammad had been buried.

I realized that an aunt of the Prophet had come to Europe and that nobody had bought to tell me. I came to the conclusion that I belonged here and started to prove this with the work that I have tried since then.

Which trip do you want to repeat?

With the backpack through Indochina - Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia - as a family. My daughters were at an age at which they were able to wear their own backpacks, and although we spent some of our time in Thailand around in a rental car, we mostly hiked on this trip with trains, tuk-tuks, buses and boats through the region, ferries and one or the other aircraft than we really introduced them to the experience of independent travel. <

Class = "Media-Credit"> Yannick Messerli/Shutterstock Angkor Wat in Cambodia

We stayed on stilts on little -known beach islands in huts, hiked through the Temple of Angkor Wat, herds of wild elephants discovered in their natural habitats, ate the most delicious local dishes and of course visited places of Indochinese indigenous Muslim culture as a whole. It was just bliss.

Do you still have a dream destination you haven't seen before?

Well. Too many to list! But trips on the Silk Road and South America are probably at the top. I rarely want to "do" in one place.

Are you a planner or onlookers?

I'm always somewhere in between. I like a loose travel route, but I also love to be able to say freedom: "Spread that" or "It looks interesting, should we stay here a bit?"

Hotel or hostel (or camping)?

If you travel alone, hostels for the interesting folklore and atmosphere. If I'm only with my wife, it's nice hotels - and mixed when we are all together. I like camping, but it's not so enthusiastic.

What was your most important travel experience?

Solo: Explore Muslim Thailand on behalf, be able to really immerse yourself in local culture, in a way that is impossible on a pure vacation. The physical ruins-in the raider-style tomb-to find long neglected Thai sultanates on overgrowed, jungle-covered hills and to break with Thai Muslim Sufis during the Ramadan are just two moments of this trip that really protrude.

Family: Backpacking by Indochina for the reasons described above.

Finally, why travel?

How many reasons do you want? I do not think it is a coincidence that almost all ancient mystical traditions of all faiths who are looking for wisdom encourage to wander around on earth. I think travel has a strong transforming effect on our being, whether they believe in a soul or not.

we really start to know each other; We learn to detach ourselves on the excessive dependence on the world; We are humiliated; We become more grateful for what we have; We recognize our own insignificance in the big cosmos ... that is the deep answer.

the flat: The world and the people in it are just so damn beautiful!