Where the Wild Frontiers Are

""Manan Ahmad's essays on American intervention in the Muslim world are cantankerous, literate, biting, and contrarian. He argues back against the poobahs of superpower arrogance. He demolishes shibboleths. He peers into the rotten foundations of the Neoconservative castles in the sky and finds them crumbling in the jaws of the termites of fallacy. His is a canny insurgency of the keyboard and the kilobytes. Like the unleavened bread in which Indian rebels hid their encrypted communications during the Great Rebellion of 1857, Ahmad's columns disguise a lethally witty response to the casual sadism of empire."" --Juan Cole, University of Michigan and author of Engaging the Muslim World ""The Chapati Mystery blog has provided some of the most well written and historically aware commentaries on the War on Terror over recent years. It has also emerged as a refreshing alternative to the opinion pages in the mainstream media. Manan's posts are sometimes angry, sometimes funny, but always engaging. He can be combative and elegant in the same sentence. I urge anyone who has an opinion on Pakistan, (and who doesn't?) to read this. I also wish this book was one thousand pages long!"" --Mohammed Hanif, author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes ""If you read only one book about Pakistan this year, read this. A rare combination of erudition, dark humor, and clarity of thought, strips bare the prejudices which distort America's view of Pakistan. This is not the country of the US imagination--a near-failed state where bearded fanatics and mad mullahs burn the American flag while darkly plotting to seize control of the nuclear bombs. Manan Ahmed's Pakistan is a diverse and dynamic country with a rich past and promising future. Its history is shaped by Islam, by British colonial rule and, more recently, by American support for its military dictators. Its future lies in democracy. But this book is not only about Pakistan. It is also about the United States, and its peculiar blindness to the way it slips into the old habits of British colonial thinking. Creating a Pakistan in its imagination very different from reality, it convinces itself that without its firm guidance the country would descend into chaos. Despite its professed commitment to democracy, America has never really learned to trust 'the masses' of Pakistan or indeed of other Muslim countries. This book should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in understanding why the United States has repeatedly failed to build an effective relationship with Pakistan."" --Myra Macdonald, senior Reuters journalist, blogger, author of Heights of Madness ""Ahmed belongs to the proud tradition of dissenting academic voices, and specifically one that utilized blogging to engage with the general public."" --Salman Hussain, editor of Tanqueed ""Ahmed has an expert grasp of Pakistani and Afghan history, but he also takes advantage of the blog post's inherent informality, interrogating his own assumptions and allowing for the kind of uncertainty rarely tolerated in an op-ed. It is easy in retrospect to award points for Ahmed's powers of clairvoyance, but more credit should be given to him for the quality of the analysis he displays here... Potentially unpopular, this analysis is also shrewd and penetratingly precise. Our world could use more of it."" --Jacob Silverman, author of Terms of Service and contributing editor of The Baffler