Muslim Saints of South Asia: The eleventh to ... - blog blog blog

FOREWORD
Christopher Shackle
In many ways the new millennium is indeed a New Age for humanity,
a time in which we are all inexorably becoming ever more closely
linked with one another. Human nature being what it is, however, the
multiplication of increasingly close economic ties and mechanical
social connections is a process which too often outruns our capacity
to understand and to appreciate the diverse religious and cultural
traditions with which we now find ourselves in such immediate
contact. To use the fashionable image, the Other against which we
once were safely able to define ourselves at such a comfortable distance
is now a much more immediate presence. Given the instincts all too
successfully instilled by the early evolution of mankind, the instant
reaction to this situation is to sense the threat of strangers getting
too close rather than to perceive the opportunity of getting to know
some different new friends and something of from where they come.
Openness is certainly the basic requirement for this process of
mutual understanding to take place, and is sorely needed if we are
properly to move together into the new world of global co-existence
into which we have all so rapidly been thrust. But understanding
requires not just openness but also knowledge, as is nowhere more
apparent today than in the lethal fog of misunderstandings too often
born of closed minds and ignorance which prevents so many from a
proper appreciation of the world of Islam. The events of recent years
have shown, as never before, the urgent need for informed and
sympathetic accounts of the kind which alone can hope to help open
hearts as well as minds.
It is just such a window of understanding which is opened through
this book by Professor Anna Suvorova, herself a distinguished
Russian scholar of Urdu literature and South Asian Muslim culture.
In its original version, it was deservedly very well received in Russia,
which has its own clear needs for studies of this kind. It now appears
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