Life Stories #47: Shahan Mufti

Subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes

photo: Dmitry Gudkov

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I chat with Shahan Mufti, who brings his personal family history together with the history of modern Pakistan in The Faithful Scribe. Mufti’s parents met on the day of their arranged wedding, which also happened to be the day India launched an air strike against Pakistan; a few years later, they emigrated to Ohio, where Mufti was born—then came back to their homeland after the Iranian hostage crisis began to stir anti-Islamic sentiment in the U.S.

Mufti would eventually return to pursue an American education; today, as a journalist who describes himself as “100% American and 100% Pakistani,” he regularly travels between the two countries, reporting on events in Pakistan for Western media outlets. We talked about his family, and about how he sees Pakistan as the central battlefield in a war between Islamic tradition and Western modernity…even though it’s the first nation to make an explicit attempt to find the common ground between the two at a constitutional level.

Listen to Life Stories #47: Shahan Mufti (MP3 file); or download this file directly by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). You can also subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

22 October 2013 | life stories |