Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among The Converted Peoples (Vintage International) - Plot & Excerpts
A Pathan clan was descended from a remote ancestor; the Yusufzai, as the name suggests, were the sons of Yusuf. Some Yusufzai families had full family trees, but Rahimullah could trace his family back only three generations. His grandfather, he said, would know more. The past went back only as far as people’s memories; people didn’t have the means of assessing or fixing the past before family memory. Time here was like a river; it was hard to mark any precise point in the flow. People didn’t always know how old they were. Rahimullah gave 1953 as the year of his birth; but on his birth certificate the year was 1954. As for Rahimullah’s young servant, small and dark and smiling, with nice strong teeth and a very full head of wavy black hair, he could be eighteen or nineteen or twenty; no one could now tell. Rahimullah’s father was born in 1918 (as his son said) to a poor farming family. Shortly after he was born both his father and his mother died (possibly in an epidemic, though Rahimullah didn’t say); so the boy was literally an orphan.
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