Book cover: Image courtesy Shahan Mufti; portrait: Photo by Dmitry Gudkov courtesy Shahan Mufti
A former freelance journalist, Shahan Mufti went to Islamabad, Pakistan, on assignment in 2007, expecting to stay a few months.
“When I landed, just by chance, things blew up in the city,” he says. “There was a standoff at a place called the Red Mosque,” between fundamentalist militants and the Pakistani government. Suddenly, the capital had turned into a war zone. “I was in the wrong place at the right time.”
A few months turned into five years, and the experience led Mufti to explore his own family’s connections to the country’s history. Though he was born in the United States, Mufti’s parents are from Pakistan, and he grew up in both countries.
Looking through a trunk in early 2008, after his grandfather died, he found a family tree created by one of his ancestors during the 19th century that traced his roots. Mufti was struck by the similarities between that world and current events. He saw his ancestor “being influenced and molded by forces that were really identical and in some ways mirroring the political, social forces that I was writing about and experiencing.”
An assistant professor of journalism at the University of Richmond since 2012, Mufti drew on his years of news reporting, interviews with extended family members and visits to ancestral villages to write the book “The Faithful Scribe: A Story of Islam, Pakistan, Family, and War.”
It’s the focus of UR’s One Book, One Richmond program for this academic year.
Released in 2013, “The Faithful Scribe” has not lost its relevance. “That’s partly because of the very sad and real reason that the war that I wrote about, it still continues,” Mufti says. “There are American forces still in the region.”
But, he adds, “The explicit focus on Pakistan is not necessarily the reason people are picking it up,” he says. Rather, readers are drawn to “the more universal themes of the book about Islam, politics, identity, home and the movement of people.”
Mufti hopes that people will read his book and see that many of us come from more than one place and that there is no need to choose just one identity.
On Feb. 15, Shahan Mufti will speak at a keynote event to explore “The Faithful Scribe” in greater depth with the community. For details, see onebook.richmond.edu.
