Author Aatish Taseer didn’t meet his father, Salman Taseer, the former Governor of Punjab, Pakistan until he was 21 and their relationship was, to say the least, complicated. In 2009, he wrote a book about the experience, Stranger to History, about his journey to meet his father that was also an exploration of what it means to be a Muslim in the 21st Century.
Aatish (left) with his mother, journalist Tavleen Singh, and his father Salman Taseer.
Shortly after Aatish made contact with his father, in early 2011, Governor Taseer was assassinated by his own bodyguard for pardoning a woman who had been sentenced to death for allegedly insulting the Prophet Mohammed.
During the assassin’s trial, the defense used Stranger to History as evidence that the assassination was justified. The assassin was eventually found guilty and put to death but he is commemorated to this day with a shrine to which people bring offerings and prayers.
It’s a story that sounds like it was plucked from an ancient myth.
Aatish Taseer, author of Return to Self: Excursions in Exile.
But it was real life for Aatish, he survived it, and since then, he’s written for The New York Times, Time Magazine and Vanity Fair among others and, this week, has a new book out that brings together his catalog of travel features for T Magazine, published by Catapult/Harper Collins:
On this episode of Tell Me About Your Father, Aatish Taseer talks with Matt Phillp about the complicated response he continues to have to his father’s violent assassination, the value and beauty of going on a pilgrimage, what it means to identify with a nation, and how it feels to have been ejected by one.
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