Gai Eaton is the author of three major works on Islam which have
had a profound influence on young Muslims in the West,
offering them an alternative both to extremism and to the narrow perspective of immigrant parents. Now, as an octogenarian, he looks
back on his troubled early life and on the circumstances which led him,
at the age of 30, to Islam. This autobiography is the story of a
born
sceptic's search for faith while preoccupied with questions of race and
class, sex and money. After a strange childhood completely isolated
from other children, he was educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge
to become, succesively, an actor, a teacher and journalist in Jamaica
where he was involved in the island's politics, a diplomat, a writer
and finally, consultant to the leading Islamic institution in Britain.
He describes what he has called the 'Victorian drama' of his parentage
and the life of deception he was obliged to lead to protect his
elderly father's reputation. Fascinated by the vagaries of human
behaviour and the strangeness of human destinies he has observed
the human scene with a novelist's eye and traced the profound
changes in attitudes and tastes which have taken place in a single
lifetime. At the same time he has recounted his youthful adventures
with the clear-sight and understanding only possible for someone whom
age has freed from the passions which once possessed him. What
makes this work unique is the juxtaposition of hindsight with diary
entries made at the time, which gives a quality of immediacy to a
true story that includes reminiscences of a writer whose first
encouragement was from T.S. Eliot, to the diplmatic life and an
outline of the Sufi path.
GAI EATON is the author of King of the Castle: Choice & Responsibilty
in the Modern World (1977), praised by Bernard Levin for its 'vigour,
clarity and wit'; Islam and the Destiny of Man (1985): 'An urgent piece
of writing, a reading of "what we are and where we are" - TLS; and
Remembering God, Reflections of Islam (2000), described by Seyyed Hussain Nasr as 'a call from the heart meant to reach across the boundaries that separate the West and the Islamic world'.
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