Travel World guide

It’s a pretty quick read and full of information. Written as a conversation between subjects and the author, he has entertaining and rarely heard of facts to make situations more interesting than they would be in a text book.

The entire book is based on the travels of John Moschos, and Orthodox Christian monk, and a fellow monk friend of his leaving from the area near Constantinople in 587 and travelled around the contemporary Byzantine Empire of the late sixth century. They visit monastaries, holy sites, hermits, stylites, seemingly insane ascetics. One of them who was actually commanded by his bishop to desist in his extreme ways lest he harm himself while being crouched over in a 4″ high cage in the blazing sun for years on end.

Dalrymple follows Moschos in his travels except 14 centuries later explaining in detail and with sorrow the extreme changes which have taken place due to Muslim invasion, persecution, and denegration of Christian communities. Interviews and conversations with Armenian, Jacobite, Coptic, Greek, and Antiochian Orthodox (all one Church, just the cultural identity around the parishes) as well as a few Catholics, all but one of whom were Marionites, more than just a few Muslims (almost all of whom are Palestinians), a few Nestorians, and in Alexandria what was left of the Jewish community, too small to even have the minimum amount of males to keep up the synagogue services fill the pages in conjunction with quotes and anticdotes from Moschos.

Some of the stories are extraordinarily tragic such as interviews he has with Armenians and Jacobites concerning the rounds upon rounds of massive holocausts the Muslim Turks have wrought on them and are now denying as “Christian Myths and Propaganda” (such as the 1.5+ million murdered by the Turks in 1915 alone). Dalrymple even has a evening long conversation and stroll through the city with the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem at the time while he is told the tragedies and discrimination the Armenians, Christians in general but especially the Armenians are under going under the Israeli government.

Most of the stories, though, even when they are tragic, are given a humorous spin by the author. He is a master writer and is able to put the most complex of histories into laymen’s terms.

Over all it is an excellent read, well worth the read and I highly recommend it. Of the 35 or so books I read a year, this is one of the best, probably in the top three.

As an Indian and a history buff it was really satisfying to read this book.Being a resident of Delhi it is a great thrill to be living in a city which has a glorious past and the evidence is there in all the monuments that dot the city.To read a book that incorporates all these elements in the narrative juxtaposing the past and the present is a treat.The author’s non judgmental stance on an alien culture is really refeshing.

This is a gem. I have given it as a gift to several friends who have either lived or travelled in the Middle East. If not a gift – I then have loaned a copy…here and there because I truly believe it to be a must read…Dare I say, required reading of anyone who wants to know about the comparitive history of early Christianity. I am so pleased that it has finally crossed the Atlantic!I am not so patiently waiting for the Scottish author to produce another….

In 587 A.D., a Byzantine monk named John Moschos set off from Mount Athos in Greece, traveling around the eastern Mediterranean to Egypt, collecting anecdotes, aphorisms and legends of the desert monks, or, as he called it, “the wisdom of the desert fathers.” The result was a book entitled The Spiritual Meadow, which is still in existence. Using Moschos’ book as his guide, author William Dalrymple made the trip himself in 1994, to see what was left of the Christians of the Middle East. Of course, what he was really visiting were the last fading vestiges of Byzantium itself. This fascinating book is a combination of travelogue, history and muckraking journalism. The muckraking journalism part I did not care for (because I don’t like feeling helpless), but the historical aspects of the book appealed to me greatly. I knew next to nothing about this region when I started reading this book. It was saddening to read of the slow but inevitable death of the Christian faith in the Middle East. Wars, persecutions, political power games and emigration have virtually assured its extinction, probably within the next 20 years. Most horrifying, to me, was the case of the Palestinian Christians in Israel. The book definitely gave me the impression that the state of Israel is not a benign force.

The real strength of the book is, in addition to his vivid prose, Dalrymple’s sense of humor. I chuckled many times throughout the book. Especially amusing to me was the Coptic monks’ obsession with poultry breeding. My favorite parts of the book were the historical background on the places he visited and the conclusions Dalrymple was able to draw using his prodigious knowledge of Christian art (he is an authority on Celtic illuminations). Parts of the book I found really thrilling, such as Dalrymple’s near-epiphany when he recognizes an ancient picture found in Egypt as being identical to a page of Celtic illumination and is then able to build a case whereby a shipwrecked Coptic monk was the source of all Celtic illuminations. I also felt a chill when Dalrymple realized that the liturgical melody he was hearing was probably the oldest melody in existence.

I would not want to make this trip for myself, because unlike Dalrymple, I don’t have a sense of adventure that is willing to deal with gun-toting religious zealots, paranoid citizens of repressive countries and insane local despots in third-world countries. But I suppose someone has to do it, and we are fortunate that that someone was Dalrymple. His literary and historical knowledge served him well on this trip. This is an odd book that caused me to think about a lot of things in a different way, and for that reason I would recommend it. It was an excellent follow-up to Julius Norwich’s A Short History of Byzantium.

After sharing tales of our separate tours of Greece, some 35 years apart, I was told by the Chancellor of the University System of New Hampshire, in which I teach, “You must read From the Holy Mountain.” I interpreted that as an assignment, and ordered the book. I hereby thank my chancellor for his recommendation.

Not since Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has a travelogue been so much more than a tale about a trip.

From the Holy Mountain is about a Scottish Roman Catholic who, in 1994, decided to retrace the steps taken and chronicled by Fr. John Moschos back in 587 A.D. Dalrymple visits Eastern Orthodox monasteries in the Middle East where, even as late as 1994, local Muslims came to worship, and brought animals to sacrifice to Christian saints whom they believed capable of divine intervention in their lives. The book is about Greece and Turkey and Syria and Lebanon and Israel and Egypt in 587 A.D., in 1994, and episodically in-between.

William Dalrymple is a skilled writer whose prose moves at a fast pace, without sacrificing the detail and anecdotes which lend humor and humanity to his story. Dalrymple has the gift of conversation. His interpersonal encounters keep the story alive.

Dalrymple has a prodigious vocabulary, and visits some obscure places, so the book is best read with a dictionary and a good atlas nearby.

For anyone with an interest in any of the countries mentioned above, an interest in the Byzantine or Ottoman Empires, an interest in early or modern Christianity, in early or modern Islam, or simply with a traveler’s soul, From the Holy Mountain is a great book.

P.S. Added in December, 2005: In these troubled times, From the Holy Mountain is especially relevant, as it illustrates how Islam and Christianity can coexist in the Middle East, and sheds light on the problems between Israel and her Lebanese and Palestinian neighbors. Perhaps that should make the book a “required reading” in many courses in the social sciences.

`City of Djinns’ offers us a history of Delhi that gradually draws us back in time as the book progresses, interspersed with an account of the authors own time living there. There are beautiful watercolour illustrations throughout that were painted by the authors wife and which are reproduced in black and white. These really add an extra dimension to the book and I enjoyed coming across a new painting every ten pages or so. Dalrymple’s descriptions really conjure up life in the Delhi of the past, as well as making you envisage modern day life based on his own events and experiences. You can almost taste, smell, see and hear the Delhi he so richly paints for us and some of the Islamic poetic phrases he stumbles across are at times simply breathtaking. Delhi is portrayed as a mix of Sikh, Muslim, Hindu and British in one bubbling pot, with the creativity and conflicts this diversity engenders. The friendships Dalrymple strikes up are a pleasure to read and add some humour and insight to the overall book. All in all, this was a delightful read that captures the essence of Delhi in just over 300 pages. It is easy to read and offers an accessible introduction to the various stages of Indian history from the perspective of one town. This is well worth checking out if your interest was piqued enough to have searched for this book or even if you have stumbled across the product page by accident.

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I loved Dalrymple’s FROM THE HOLY MOUNTAIN and this book is just as good. Young (age 25) Dalrymple with his wife Olivia spent a year in Delhi doing research and has written a fascinating book about a colorful city with a long and turbulent history. What makes the book so interesting is not its history but Dalrymple’s day-to-day dealings with the Delhi-wallahs he knows. There’s his penny-pinching Sikh landlady Mrs. Puri, who has built an impressive financial empire in Delhi since she arrived penniless from the Punjab in the partition of 1947. Dalrymple gets quite few laughs from her tight-fisted philosophy, but also ultimately reveals her to be a vulnerable human being. There’s also his irrepressible driver, Mr. Balvinder Singh of the International Backside Taxi Company who takes the Dalrymples on hair-raisingly fast rides through the throng of Delhi traffic, all the while cursing other drivers and pointing out attractive women along the roadside. But the person in Delhi that Dalrymple obviously has the most affection for is the gentle Muslim intellectual, Dr. Jaffrey, who has a beautiful story about virtually everything. The Delhi that Dalrymple reveals is not what I had expected. My favorite parts of the book were about the partridge fights, the storefront healers, and the mysterious subculture of the eunuchs who support themselves not only by dancing at weddings but by threatening to flash if people don’t give them money. Dalrymple makes several interesting excursions, among them a trip to Karachi to visit the writer Ahmed Ali and a trip to the hill station of Simla, the scene of so many illicit romantic intrigues in Kipling’s stories.

One thing I found extremely interesting about the book is that the rule of the British has been virtually forgotten by the Indians. Yes, the English left their language behind, but it has evolved into a colorful dialect all its own (which Dalrymple shockingly compares to American). This is a thoughtful and provocative book, written with charm and good humor. Dalrymple’s own language verges on the poetic throughout the book. Here’s a sentence describing the elderly Muslim exiles now living in Pakistan: “The old men swam together through great oceans of nostalgia before finally coming ashore on a strand of melancholy.” What more can I say? It’s a beautiful book. There’s a useful glossary of Indian words appended as well as a detailed bibliography. Olivia Fraser Dalrymple supplied the evocative watercolor artwork. I’m planning a trip to India when I retire four years from now. I’m so glad I read this book.

For all those folks who have a deep interest and appreciation in the history and “goings on” of the sub continent William Dalrymple’s book “City of the Djinns” is like a sweet Indian Jalebi treat, just waiting to be enjoyed and savored. In his own way, Mr. Dalrymple, an ex-pat, Scotsman is a 21st century Marco Polo re-discovering many of the hidden facets and stories of mother India that have been lost during her journey to “now”.

The book itself is extremely well written, easy to read, and never boring. It consist of a series of cat and mouse interplays of Mr. Dalrymple’s personal stories (while living with his family in Delhi) which logically flow into investigations of the various Delhi historical eras and their remaining monuments and marks on the people and city of today.

Additionally, there are delightful illustrations and drawings done by Mr. Dalrymple’s angel of a wife Olivia, who has accompanied him in this love affair he has with India.

Bottom line – if you live in Delhi or plan on visiting, this book is a must, and even if you don’t plan on going there anytime soon, you’ll want to after reading this book.

Yes! My title nabbed from the Amazon reviewer. Dalrymple’s journey through the middle east, retraces the Byzantine traveller-monlk, John Moschos, author of, The Spiritual Meadow’. In the late C6th, accompanied by his pupil, he set to gather the wisdom of the desert fathers from Mt Athos, to Kurdisatan, then south through Syria, the Lebanon, Palestine, and on up the Nile. Dalrymple’s trip in the early 90s was frought with tensions which today would cause an angel trepidation. The book was a revelation to me, filling in considerable gaps about the foundation and correlations of so many parties in the fermenting region. Muslim fundamentlists provide stiff opposition to Dalrymple’s historical and current enquiries. But they are not unique in this. His evocation of place is crisply poetic and touched with memorable detail. His feel for people is very sympathetic. A work justly applauded.

A really wonderful book about the city of Delhi. Dalrymple and his wife go to spend a year living in Delhi (how did they afford this?), and he uses this arrangement as a way of chronicling the present day status of the city and delving deep into its history. He’s done a very nice job of moving back and forth between present and past, managing to keep all his meetings and interviews with various experts quite interesting. The only part which lost my interest was an extended look into Sufi mysticism, but I just skimmed it and moved along. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in India, and especially to anyone planning a trip to Delhi.

As an orthodox Christian who grew up in one of the churches visited in the book (The Coptic Orthodox Church), I can say that this is one of the most moving and important books I have ever read. I applaud the author for bringing to light the truth of what really happened to Eastern Christians. He has successfully refuted Islam’s biggest and longest enduring lie: that it has been always tolerant and accepting of Christians in the lands that it conquered. The ravages that Islam has inflicted and continues to inflict on the earliest and purest Christian traditions is a tragedy only exceeded by the indifference the remainder of the world’s Christians have had towards this 1400 year long ethnic cleansing. I am glad that we are protecting the Baltic Muslims from an inhumane and hateful Serbian government. Isn’t it time to protect the Christians of the Middle East from ongoing slaughters, persecutions, and injustice that has lasted for well over a thousand years? Finally, the book also invites Christians of all denominations to explore their roots and introduces them to a Christian faith inherited from the apostles themselves, a faith that has withstood the test of time.

I read this book after a brief stay on Mt. Athos and a month-long tour of Istanbul and Turkey. As an American-born, Eastern Orthodox Christian, I was familiar with the general history of Christianity in this part of the world. I did not know or appreciate the extent to which Orthodoxy has dried up or been driven out of Turkey, the Levant and Egypt. It is truly sad. Outside of Greece, the Orthodox world has the feeling of a ghost town.

Dalrymple’s book brought a vividness to much that I witnessed firsthand but didnt have the background to appreciate. He is a far more intrepid traveller than I. Highly recommend, it is an enjoyable, entertaining and thought-provoking travelogue for any who are interested in Orthodoxy, the middle east or simply good travel writing.

This is a truly great book in that it shows us how people from different cultures and religions were able to live together in the Middle East in a not so distant past.
It is really sad that this once very culturally rich area of the world is now dominated by hate and fear.
I gave the book only four stars because it lacks a table of contents, there are no maps whatsoever that may follow the author’s travels and the pictures included, besides being only a few compared to all the places Dlrymple visited, don’t have a coherent order.
Otherwise, the book is a true pleasure.

dalrymple is simply one of the best travelogue writers today as he lives, breathes, imbibes the culture & history of the places he travels to. in this book, he takes you to the delhi (india) of old, a once beautiful and cultured city and revisits the historical, political and cultural forces that shaped it. dalrymple does all this with a keen eye and a sympathetic ear for the inhabitants of the new delhi. he shows an unusual understanding for the people who once lived there and who live there now, their aspirations & fears. even more remarkable is the fact that, the empathy dalrymple feels comes through while he successfully avoids sounding patronizing in his depiction of old & new delhi. all in all a fabulous and very enjoyable travelogue, historical account and sympathetic tale from a man who truly belongs without having been born or raised there…..

? City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi ? William Dalrymple HarperCollins 1993

? City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi ? was my travel reading for my first trip to India in the summer of 2007, a trip which began and ended in Delhi. Having read other writers and other Dalrymple books on India before I set out, I read ? City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi ? first on my outward journey, and then reviewed it again as we made our way back to Delhi on the last stage of our tour. The book was an invaluable resource, supplementing the ill-informed and poorly spoken guides who were difficult to understand and unable to answer questions in any depth. Dalrymple’s book helped me to tie the city and its sites and history together into some sort of coherent whole. I also found the pen-and-ink illustrations by Dalrymple’s wife Olivia Fraser very illuminating. Although at first sight they struck me as much too calm and uncluttered to convey the true image of the places they posed, I later came to appreciate how they captured the inherent essence of their subject and spoke volumes in their simple way.

As a journalist, Dalrymple has a knack for finding the right people to talk with – people with living memories of the time he writes about, who can bring to life the crumbling ruins they inhabit and instil us with visions of the beauty that once radiated in Delhi. It is certainly difficult to see today but reading the stories did help me to understand the sensibilities of some of the ? Delhi-wallahs ? we encountered in our travels.

My one criticism of the book is that he reuses material that has appeared elsewhere, which broke the rhythm of my involvement with his story and made me feel uncomfortable. These passages were extensive, and not changed sufficiently to feel new in any way. I was surprised that his editors allowed this to pass, unless there were deadline difficulties.

The overall impression that I was left with is that India today is still suffering from the reverberations of the devastation of partition, which brought incomprehensible tragedy and hardship and touched almost every family in India in one way or another. As we watch India vie for its place in the globalised technological marketplace, we will understand her better if we remember this recent back-story in her development.

William Dalrymple has a great writing style and a deep apetite for understanding the historical and cultural context. He neither takes the clinical distant approach to his subjects neither does he use a patronizing attitude to India. If you have been to Delhi, the book will be a great reading; if are planning to go there, it should be required reading. You will enjoy your trip so much more. Even if you don’t go to Delhi, it is just a wonderful reading. Olivia has done a great job in her illustrations.

I, a patrologist, found this book quite amazing. Dalrymple’s brilliant blend of travel and history, both ancient and modern, makes this book a gem for those interested in the near east, its Byzantine past, and especially the ancient churches’ status of the day.
I got two second thoughts, however, some time after reading the book:
1) Does Dalrymple really communicate with the adherents of the churches (in other words: does a taxi-driver neccesarily know more of the state of things than the official spokesmen – a western forced democracy-misunderstanding, I think: let’s hear the taxi-driver AND the patriarch/state official -). And which languages does he really know (an essencial information for any critical reader).
2) Dalrymples agenda: to record the last remnants of a dying culture. Is not this a too pessemistic view of things? The oriental churches are, sadly, not prospering. Quite the opposite. But are they dying? I think not. Their situation is changing. This has happened before… (no reason not to make an effort to preserve and support, of course – like this book!)

So, to conclude: I really recommend this book! My second thoughts are maybe just another reason to promote Dalrymple. He makes one think twice.

Whether you plan to visit Delhi, have been blessed to have been there, or just want to read an informative, good traveler’s (note: not tourist) tale, then City of Djinns should be on your list of books to read. William Dalrymple paints a picture full of humor and fascinating detail, mixed with love and frustration. Which is what Delhi is: fascinating, frustrating, fun, and full of incredible people. Delhi is multi-layered and not easily explained. Delhi has to be experienced. Yet, Dalrymple brings to life a lot of the feeling of this magnificent city. More importantly for me, he brings to life part of its history, details history books leave out, alley ways that deserve to be explored. As a traveler blessed to return to Delhi fairly often, I have found the details of Dalrymple’s book adding value to my visits – by knowing which alley ways might just be explored.

This past summer I was doing archaeological work near Antakya, Turkey when a friend I was travelling with loaned me this book. I read it in just two days, and then went back and read it at a more leisurely pace. I think that Dalrymple is a fabulous author, and while much of the material that he writes of is quite distressing, he manages to make the book humorous at the same time. Quite a feat. This book is a must for anyone who has travelled in the Near East. You may find that you have run into some of the same characters as Dalrymple.

A Djinn is a spirit, not visible to the naked eye, and to see one in Delhi, India you have to cleans yourself from the natural world by fasting and prayer . In the ancient city of Delhi there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Djinns who serve to testify of both Delhi’s glorious and hideous past. Delhi is one of the oldest cities in the world and for the past 3000 years has reincarnated itself. To uncover its culture and civilization takes the care and commitment of an archaeologist, or a journalist. William Dalrymple is an award winning journalist. In 1994 he was awarded the Cook Travel Award. In City of Djinns, William Dalrymple paints a vibrant portrait of Delhi past and present with colorful words. His journalistic research and unique writing skills call forth the spirits of both times past and present, illuminating for the reader the incredible history of this city.

His humorous and provocative description of how he spent a year in Delhi, with his artistic wife Olivia, while he researched the city’s history brings contemporary Delhi alive. True to life characters, like his authoritative spendthrift landlady, Mrs. Puri, or his slightly maniacal taxi drive Balvinder Singh, give his settings an unusual liveliness. Add India pigeon lovers, mystical healers, an enterprising group of transvestites (eunuchs), the baffling Indian bureaucracy, weddings, parties, funerals and religious holidays and “voila” you have an entertaining and informative travel/history book.

If you are going to, or ever have been to Delhi, India you owe it to yourself to read City of Djinns. Recommended.

This is a sad tale. The author retraces the steps of a Christian monk’s journey through what is now Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt, which was made more than a century before the Middle East was conquered by Arab armies and permanently lost to Islam. It seeks to remind us that some of these countries made up what was once the heartland and cradle of Christianity with an overwhelmingly Christian population. This book covers many aspects such as history, religion, architecture, politics, ethnography as well as the author’s account of the lives of the people he met during his journey. The book’s primary focus, is what remains of the Christian Middle East although the lives and beliefs of the Muslims and adherents of other religions such as a strange sect known as the Yezidis, are mentioned in passing.

As the author travels through each place, he refers to the accounts of his predecessor, John Moschos in the Spiritual Meadows, which gave a vivid detail of what life was like for its sixth century inhabitants. For a while we are taken back to a world lost forever. What I find amazing is that although centuries apart, we can perfectly relate to many of their lives and experiences. The author then gives a contemporary description of what he saw in that place and the conversations with the people he met. In many of the places, the large numbers of hermits and pious Christians as well as the quasi-Christian Gnostic sects of Moschos’ Middle East are gone for good.

In Istanbul, the once great Christian city of Constantinople, the author meets the remnants of the once large Armenian and Greek communities. The Greeks of Istanbul now number only a few thousand compared to 400,000 in 1923. Although, living in a secular country, they face discrimination and prejudice. Even the Orthodox Church’s Patriarchate is constantly under threat from fundamentalist’s bombs.

In southeastern Turkey, the author meets with the last of the Turoyo-speaking Orthodox Christians known as Surianis, who speak a language close to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus. Once there were 300 Syrian Orthodox monasteries. Now, most of the monasteries and churches stand empty or have been converted into mosques. A pathetically small handful of old monks continue to maintain the last few functioning monasteries. There will be no replacements for them.

What I found touching were tales related to the author by the Suriani and Armenian survivors of the Turkish massacres who lost their whole families. The Armenians of this region have been completely exterminated or expelled. In the 1915 massacres, the women of Diyabakir were gang-raped and the men had horse-shoes nailed to their feet. Out of a 19th century population of 200,000, the Surianis now number only 900 in their homeland, most of whom are the descendants of those who successfully defended themselves against the Turks and Kurds at a village called Ein Wardo (where they barricaded themselves when they knew what was being done to the Armenians). However, even now killings and kidnappings continue.

In Antioch, once a bastion of Christianity in the 6th century, only a handful of Christians remain. Here, the author relates how an Italian missionary friar continues to secretly baptize Armenians from the mountains who have pretended to be Muslims ever since the 1915 massacres.

In Egypt, the author met the Coptic Christians whose lives and those of their families are constantly under threat by Islamic fundamentalists. Here, hardline Muslim preachers attack Christianity on government TV and Christian schools had to raise wall for protection. So long as only the churches were burned and Christians killed, the government turns a blind eye until when the fundamentalists finally took up arms against them.

Although there are no polemics against Muslims in this book, I am grateful that the author was truthful enough to mention the sufferings of the Middle East Christians. Most politically correct Western authors who have written about the Middle East have displayed a clear Muslim bias and negate all historical facts which portray Islam in a negative light.

Even though this book serves more as a travelogue, I believe people are more important than places. As a Christian living in a Muslim country, I can completely relate to the lives of those whom the author met. Abandoned and ignored by the Christians of the West and knowing that there will be none who would speak up for them (as the Muslims of the world have done for the Palestinians, Bosnians and Kosovar Albanians), the Middle East Christians keep silent on the atrocities committed against them for fear of retribution. America and the West are afraid of offending their Muslim allies even as the Muslims in these Western countries and their apologists are succeeding in their public relations campaign to mislead the general public that Islam is a tolerant religion. Western journalists do not want to cover the stories of Middle East Christians as it is politically incorrect to do so and they may be accused of prejudice against Islam.

One must remember that the South Africans prevailed against apartheid because of world support and media coverage. They knew that the whole world was watching and every atrocity committed got published in the papers which in turn, turned public opinion against the regime, leading to its eventual downfall. Even today, Coptic Christians are regularly being killed by Muslim fundamentalists and yet not only such news are intentionally hidden or downplayed in the media but the same Muslim clerics who say “Islam means peace” used to preach in the same mosques where the faithful attack Christian homes and shops after performing Friday prayers.

For those in the West who are interested in knowing more about Middle Eastern Christians, I suggest that they read this book together with “The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam” and “The Dhimmi” both by Bat Ye’or. An excellent book giving some information on the Jewish communities in Islamic lands is “Jewish Communities in Exotic Places” by Ken Blady.

As the book unfolds, William Dalrymple discovers the layers of history of Delhi, much like the excavator mentioned toward the end.
As he ventures to find remnants of a culture in Pakistan, and later in Daulatabad, you feel you’re on the journey yourself. Having visited Delhi only recently, I wished I had read the book before going there. Without being overly patronizing or eurocentric, he shares his journey with us. Watch for the everyday people that know extraordinary ones- the dancer who knows the unani doctor, the jeweler who knows the eunuch queen well, and the likeable Dr. Jaffrey who is the underrecognized authority on Delhi.
I whole heartedly recommend this book to anyone who’s a travel, history or India buff.

..that’s what William has put into this book. It is an excellent account of the year he spent in India with his wife. At the very outset of the book my admiration for William grew ten fold when I realized that to fully appreciate and highlight his experiences he had chosen to live as a paying guest in Delhi as opposed to finding more sequestered living quarters.

But the book itself masterfully weaves in and out of the past and persent which both appear just as colorful through his eyes. I like the fact that he went out of his way to explore places that few Indians would visit and categorically dispell any myths that the world may have about such places (the eunach colony in Delhi).

Lovely depection of India its people and its history……..

This is an excellent read, full of fascinating people and places and all, and Dalrymple’s a great storyteller. The one problem I have with it is that,while the whole theme of the book is the tragic way Christians have been wiped out or marginalized throughout the Middle East over the past 100 years, the book often takes a somewhat condescending–even facetious–attitude toward the actual practices and beliefs of these same Christians. You want to ask, Is it worth trying to preserve, if so ridiculous and superstitious from our eyes? (but at the same time, what would be the strength of their faith if it was reduced to the bland Sunday-evening variety of Christianity which a lot of us know? does silliness go hand in hand with depth?) Well I guess it’s a tension, in tone, that there was no way Dalrymple could get around. Among many other virtues, the book is pretty enlightening (I think) about the politics of the Middle East–like what a total mess occurred in Lebanon, no “good guys” to speak of.

Delhi is a city of many flavors. Some can be tasted, some viewed, some just felt and still others which are just to be believed……just taken for granted.
This little book by Dalrymple brings to life a new flavor on almost every leaf.
One moment you will have your heart racing finding yourself in the midst of a mehfil at the pinnacle of Delhi’s literary history and a page later you will suddenly be transported to dereliction of today’s old Delhi, description of mouth watering delicacies from Dara Shikoh’s wedding is contrasted by thirst and hunger of Daulatabad death march.

The book is remarkably lucid and continuous yet it webs off to touch an aspect of Delhi’s life and pulse, leaping off once in a while, only to loop back again to complete a full circle.
Alternating between past and present, like day and night, the author spans over 3000 years of Delhi’s history and history of its peoples in an ingeniously funny and at the same time poignant way.
Dalrymple is a genius of pen and perception and City of Djinns is simply a superlative work of art.

Whilst travelling around the Middle East for the past two weeks ,I have enjoyed the companionship of such a well written account of the region, its politics and religion. What bothers me is that, while the author passed through Jordan on his way from one troubled Christian community to another, he failed to comment on the fact that a large minority of Christians appear to live in complete harmony with their Muslim neighbours in Jordan. Dalrymple covered the distressing tales of Turkey,Syria,Lebanon,Palestine,Israel and Egypt but ignored Jordan and its apparently contented and respected Christian community, perhaps because it did not fit with his gloomy synopsis.

This book is a travel book – it takes you on a journey around the Middle East. You visit places you have read about in the paper and seen on the news, places which have been described as lawless, violent and populated by religeous extremists. You never knew how distorted and wrong this perception has been. You will find this quite a surprise. This book opened my eyes to the realities and complexities of this part of the world in a way that no other source has done. It is much more than a travel book. The book is based on retracing the steps taken by an ancient Christian monk, who wrote a book of his travels. Exploring this history and the fate of many peoples over the centuries paints an emotional and rich picture of human struggle. This book puts this history right on centre stage as the only way to understand what is happening in the Middle East today. It does so with such force that you may forget you bought a travel book. I would like the people who run my countrys government to read this book before they decide on foreign policy for this region. BUY IT – It will leave you unable to read another book for weeks.

Gareth

This book, 90% informative and 10% humorous, equals 100% reading enjoyment. It’s a delightful and entertaining history of Delhi, India told in a very ingenious way: it runs in reverse pattern from conventional history books in that it starts with the most recent history first and then gradually works back into time, ending in the ancient. However, what I enjoyed the most was how the author always introduces some present-day aspect (an existing ruin or a living person) as background material on which he weaves his historical journey in and out of Delhi’s past and present. For example, a Dr. Jaffrey is his link to the Red Fort; a now very old Indian-born English woman, Alice, describes her associations with Lutyens, the creator of New Delhi; a Pakeezah Begum, a crown-princess and librarian, is one of the last surviving descendants of the Mughal emperors and becomes the modern-day connection to history of the Mughal dynasty; and the very decrepit Residency tells you about Delhi’s romantic past in the era when it was beautifully intact.

I don’t know why, but to me the most poignant stories told were about the Anglo-Indians who ended up abandoned by both Britain and India after the birth of an independent India. I never realized such unfortunate people existed, becoming political refugees denied rights by India, the country of their birth; and by the UK, to which they had blood ties. Mr. Dalrymple interviews a few of these people who by now have grown old and are the living remnants of hardball politics of a bygone era. They give their personal accounts of their own hardships. As victims abused by the system, they were denied basic privileges. These interviews are still quite vivid in my memory.

In the midst of all the daunting history of this city, Mr. Dalrymple intersperses his daily experiences in the form of funny stories about his landlady and apartment; plus he pokes fun of the heat, the noise, the traffic, the driving–all the typical Indian imageries that have been branded in our minds. While these did add diversion to the detailed history, my one fault with the book is that these incidents happened to be the same-ole, stereotypical situations that have been run to the ground about India. I was disappointed that he didn’t exert a more pioneering in spirit and come up with more original subjects. Nevertheless, he has a natural talent for describing comical situations (or do I mean describing situations comically?). In spite of this one criticism, I ended up with big smiles on my face many times. And his prowess at transcribing the English spoken in India to the tee can’t help but put a grin on your face.

In summary, this is an excellent read just for the sake of learning about a fascinating place. I especially recommend it for history buffs and I heartily recommend it to familiarize yourself with Delhi if it’s on your list of travel destinations. I can honestly say that after reading City of Djinns, I most definitely will invest my next time in Delhi looking into some of the sites and districts brought to life in this book.

The young British travel writer William Dalrymple retraced the path of the 6th century monk John Moschos through the then predominantly Christian Middle East.

Dalrymple provides an in-depth look at this little visited and unreported region. In 1994, heady with the praise from his acclaimed books “In Xanadu” and “City of Djinns” he toured Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt. He first visits the holy mountain of Athos in Greece and inspects the oldest surviving example of Saint Moschos’ “The Spiritual Meadow.” The Greek Orthodox caretaker monk is horrified to learn that he has been tricked into permitting Catholic Dalrymple, a “heretic,” access to the sacred text. All through the region the Christian population is dwindling. Attacks on the persecuted minority by Muslim neighbors and the lack of opportunity in countries where they are a fringe group has led many to flee the countries that have been their homes for millennia. Dalrymple describes Christian churches being renovated for use as mosques. There is an excellent section describing the fortress like Armenian community of Ein Wardo built on a mountainside in southern Turkey The besieged Christians living there have had to fend off repeated genocidal attacks from their Muslim neighbors. Their olive trees have been burned and they are the prey of both the army and of rebels operating in the area. His criticism of the oppressors of the local Christian minority is politely muted until he comes to Israel where he put his full outrage on paper. Christian Armenians maltreated by Turks is no cause for alarm. On the other hand in Israel, where Christian Palestinians suffer under Israeli rule, Dalrymple hotly denounces the Israeli oppressors. Dalrymple visits the ancient monasteries of Israel including Saint Moschos’ home monastery Mar Theodosius, near Bethlehem. These monasteries are timeless places where day to day life differs little from what it might have been a thousand years ago. There is a good description of many other churches and monasteries of Israel. At a church near Jerusalem, he helps a monk refill with oil the miraculous lamps that never need refilling!

If you can get over the fact that the twenty-five year old Dalrymple writes with an annoyingly smug self-assured lecturing tone that implies that he has solutions to thousand year old problems which have no solutions, this book gives an broad based look at a little known and poorly understood region.

After Dalrymple’s amazing first book “In Xanadu”, “City of Djinns” is a very worthy follow-up. It deals not with a journey but with the author living in Delhi for and extended period of time. William and his wife Olivia live in an apartment in Delhi with a Sikh lady and her crazy husband. Together and separately, they explore the various strands of the city.

Like “In Xanadu”, Dalrymple combines erudite historical investigation with a humorous account of life today. The historical aspect of the book is very complicated. Delhi has an ancient Hindu history, a Muslim Mughal one, a Punjabi/Urdu one, the Partition phase and its modern story. In this book, Dalrymple tries his hand at digging through a bit of them all. From the violence of the Gandhi assasination riots to the extravagances of the Mughal court, he leaves nothing unturned.

His warm and clever perspective shines light on a city where so many cultures and ways of life come side by side, from the modern secularised Sikhs (like Balvinder, their taxi driver) to the huge hermaphrodite community in the city. A highly informative and entertaining book.

I must add my compliments to William Dalrymple, who has written an extremely objective and important book on the obstacles Orthodox Christianity has faced in the Middle East. The author, a Roman Catholic from Scotland who has written several books about his experiances in India, is no zealot. He has written a very human story, on occasion very humorous, but ultimately sadly tragic on the pressures and prejudices dedicated Christians have been facing in Turkey, Israel and Egypt over the past century. He is a very good writer and has touched some sensative areas as evidenced by the reviews on this provocative and courageous book. He knows his history and is right on the mark. A must read.

The book is a journal of William Dalrymple’s travels to the Christian sites of the Middle East. The “Holy Mountain,” refers to Mt. Athos in Greece where William begins his trip. He travels through Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Turkey.

In the 600′s a monk named John Moschos (an exact contemporary of Mohammed) traveled throughout the Byzant and wrote a book about it called The Spiritual Meadow. John Moschos documents the beginning of the decline of Byzantine Empire and Byzantine Christianity. William Dalrymple tries to loosely follow the trip that John Moschos took. He sort of documents the final days of the remnants of Byzantine Christianity in the Middle East.

The last Christians in Istanbul (Constantinople) are all leaving. Most of the remaining Greeks in Turkey are elderly. The Copts, as always, are being persecuted and murdered–but persevering. Officially, according to the Turkish government, there were never any Armenians in Turkey. The Turkish government is going around to remote villages and asking peasants if they know of any stonework with Armenian script on it. The government then sends out construction crews that pulverize the stones, then cart them away for disposal. Most of the Maronites have left Lebanon. So have many of the Orthodox. In Israel, the government is essentially doing the same thing to Christians as the Moslem governments are. They are just doing it more moderately to not attract international attention.

He does find some areas where Christianity is very vibrant. I was totally seduced by the Copts. The Syrian Orthodox are quite authentic and close to earl y Christianity. Another interesting thing is that in certain isolated indigenous areas, there is a strong overlap and tolerance and even sharing of religious worship between Moslems and Christians.

The book is chock-full of fascinating observations and anecdotes about religious practice in the region. He really drives home the historic truth that Christianity is a Middle Eastern religion, in opposition to so many who think of it as European. The author’s education is in Byzantine Art history, and so he makes many informed observations of artwork he observes on his trip.

What’s interesting is that as a travel book, he can be looser than in other forms of writing. He can state his own opinions and impressions without having to substantiate, be objective or have journalistic confirmation, etc.

The Catholic TV channel, EWTN has reported at length on the exodus of Christians from Israel. They fear that the “Holy Land” will become just a museum of Christianity. These reports are consistent with Dalrymple’s observations.

This book re-awakened by desire to return to India, and experience once again the madness, and beauty that is India. He made me realise that I had viewed Delhi superficially in the past, only scratching the surface, and never plunging into the dark depths of what lay beneath the rapidly growing megalopolis. I would recommend the book to anybody visiting India or its capital.

However, the author himself only superficially touched on Delhi as well. The title itself indicates he was focussing on Mughal Delhi, and was not particularly interested in much more. It shows in that it is suprising that a book could be written about a city which has had a Hindu prescence for millenia and barely touch on them. It would be as in one wrote a history of Montreal, and concentrated on the Anglophones, never touching on the fact that the city was founded by the French, and was at best a small anglo enclave in a French sea. The Hindu roots of the city, rooted as they are in the epic war of the Mahabharata, are relegated to a passing comment of a rumble between a couple of tribes of cave men. His comments about the lack of Hindu monuments in the city are astounding naive, given that many of the great Muslim, and even Moghul monuments were constructed from the debris of temples destroyed by the intolerant conquerors of Delhi in the middle ages. His treatment of Punjabis, which alternated between shrewd business people to village bumpkins fed into stereotypes, except when he touched on the horrific massacres following the death of Indira Ghandi.

Kudos to Dalrymple for a great work, but too bad for his overly narrow vision. While the great Moghul and Islamic architecture astounds, the spirit of Delhi has alway been Hindu, in that it seemingly continously undergoes the cycle of death and rebirth. The author never understood that.

_City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi_ by William Dalrymple is an excellent portrait of a fascinating city. I have to admit, having read a few travel essay books on India that the image I had of the city was of a fairly uninteresting place, a “city of gray bureaucracy” as the author put it. Dalrymple showed me just how wrong I was in this intimate depiction of Delhi, past and present.

One of the first things the reader learns in this book is that there is more than one Delhi. The two main Delhis are Mughal Old Delhi and Punjabi New Delhi, each keeping largely to itself, each “absolutely certain of its superiority over the other.” Old Delhi has been inhabited for thousands of years, its Urdu-speaking elite (both Hindu and Muslim) having lived in the city for many centuries, the city an ancient one of sophistication and culture, though also a city in severe decline, with many of its once magnificent palaces, gardens, tombs, and mosques, once examples of the “silky refinement” of Mughal architecture now crumbling into ruin, decaying into “something approaching seediness.” Many of its citizens are among the last to practice trades dating back to Mughal times, and a large number of them live in exile in Pakistan. In contrast, New Delhi is a growing, booming, bustling city of hard-working nouveau-riche entrepreneurs, largely comprised of people whose roots only go back to the catastrophic days of Partition in 1947, when hundreds of thousands of Punjabi Sikh and Hindu refugees poured into the city. Though I did not get a sense of great conflict between the two Delhis, there was some tension; there are those Old Delhi elites who regard the Punjabi colonizers as unrefined, unsophisticated, vulgar, and even boorish, while there are Punjabis who despise the residents of Old Delhi as “effeminate, slothful, and degenerate.”

There are however really more than just two Delhis; some count seven Delhis (the current New Delhi being the eighth), while others count 15, 20, or even more. Even New Delhi is he wrote in 1989 not that new; it is a “groaning necropolis, a “graveyard of dynasties.” Many different centuries exist side by side, making it a city “disjointed in time,” a city of nouveau-riche Punjabi immigrants of the latter part of the 20th century co-existing with Anglo-Indians from the days of the Raj and fakirs, sadhus, and even eunuchs (which really surprised me) that would have been at home during the days of the Mughals.

Dalrymple takes the reader to the many amazing sights and experiences of all the Delhis. He visited a Sufi enclave, positively medieval in character, home to mystic dervishes sought by all manner of pilgrims for enlightenment, for prayer, for salvation from djinns, which many – even Sikhs and Hindus – believed in. Dalrymple spent time and effort trying to penetrate the enigmatic society of eunuchs; no longer guarding Mughal harems, they have a complex and hidden society, complete with territories, India and Pakistan-wide council of eunuchs, and a Central School of Dance, where eunuchs learn folk, traditional, and modern dance, performing at households that have had weddings or births (informed of such by their network of informants), their presence seen as both a blessing and a curse. He visited festival celebrations such as Dusshera, the Hindu feast celebrating the victory of Lord Ram over the demon Ravanna, Dilwali, the Hindu festival of lights, and al-vida, “the goodbye,” the last Friday of the fast of Ramadan, a major event in the Old City. He journeyed to see pigeon fanciers (a passion of the long gone Mughal court), partridge fights (another Mughal tradition), old Anglo-Indian families (who came to suffer the worst racial prejudice of both Indians and British, most having emigrated to America, Canada, and Australia, the few that remained were as he wrote “the optimistic, the old, or the nostalgic”, staying on despite some remaining Indian resentment as well as increasing poverty), and a hakim clinic (hakims being Muslim doctors practicing ancient Greek and Unani medicine, the latter of which was derived from heretical Nestorian Christians, fleeing to Sassanid Persia to avoid Byzantine Empire persecution, passing on their knowledge to the Persians, who in turn passed those skills to early Arab conquerors of Islam, who brought their skills to Central Asia and then eventually to India when refugees fleeing Genghis Khan arrived in the subcontinent in the 13th century).

In addition to a tour of places in Delhi, as one might gather the author covered a great deal of history, interweaving it in a skillful manner as it related to his various travels and encounters. Much of the history covered Mughal times though he also covered at length the Raj, Partition, and even as far back as the incredibly ancient times of the great Hindu epic _Mahabharata_, an ancient epic much like the Greek _Iliad_, which like the _Iliad_ has some basis in fact, though it became a story that imposed much later and more elaborate material culture (among others things) from the 4th century AD on what were events that originally transpired in the 9th century BC.

The author provided detailed profiles of many residents of Delhi, past and present. Mr. Balvinder Singh, was a notable figure, an “individualist who believes in the importance of asserting himself,” a taxi driver who befriended William and his wife Olivia, a hilarious character to read about at times. Also important were Mr. and Mrs. Puri, the Sikh couple that was their landlords and who also became friends, and Dr. Yunus Jaffrey, a gentle scholar of classic Persian, an expert on Mughal times. Notable past figures included the murderous tyrant Sultan Tughluk, the 14th century Moroccan adventurer Ibn Battuta, the highly artistic but brutally cold-blooded Shah Jehan (he constructed the Taj Mahal), William Fraser (an early 19th century Scot who styled himself a local ruler; Dalrymple compared him to Mr. Kurtz from _Heart of Darkness_), and Sir Edwin Lutyens (a fabulous architect who was regrettably quite racist).

This is a superb book on Delhi’s history without the textbook type narrative that usually is associated with books like these.
Appreciating Delhi is difficult for most non-Delhi wallahs for the ostentatious ways and too aggressive nature of its modern day denizens..but having read this book is like lifting the screen to see a much more beautiful and unbelievably long past of the city; to date a city’s history till that long back is truly an amazing feat shown by Dalrymple here.

Dalrymple gives comprehensive and unbiased accounts from the city’s birth to it present day status, toggling between anecdotes of his own experiences in the city. In doing so, he succeeds in bringing out the secret lives of the eunuchs, passionate pigeon fights in Old Delhi, the wild rule of William Fraser in the jungles of Mehrauli, the frivolous codes of the decorum practiced in Mughal period, the popularity of the Sufi saints and their powers and much more to help you envisage the rich heritage of the city.

this book is great.I really like the way W.D. describes his living in Delhi, he is funny and he never patronizes.
I found strange how he always finds this amazing people there just to help him.
he is very educated but sometimes I think he shows off all his knowledge..
anyway my next trip to india will be to delhi

What an impressive travelogue this tome is. This young Catholic Briton went traveling around the eastern Mediterranean, following in the footsteps of a late-antiquity monk, John Moschos. He meets many elderly representatives of the declining Orthodox churches in their ramshackle abbeys and monasteries throughout the Near East. Dalrymple had an amazingly keen ear for recording (or reconstructing) conversation, and the humor, quaintness, poignancy, and sometimes grief he evokes sounds true. He listens with a straight face to monks discussing recent appearances of St. Stephen, listens to a broken old priest describing the forcible dispersal of his flock, even pays a visit to the tomb of John Moschos himself. The church that houses it was once a thriving community of faith, but at the time of Dalrymple’s visit only one old nun was left.

Some of the humor is at his own expense. In Syria he tries to wrangle a visit to a remote community of archaic Christians, the Nestorians, or Assyrian Church. He is rebuffed, but a helpful local suggests that he contact an emigre community of these believers–back in his neighborhood of Ealing! “Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late twentieth
century: go to the ends of the earth to search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you find they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London.”

The book is marred by some ugly anti-Zionism that he must have soaked up in Britain during his university years. He treats his escapades with the Turkish and Syrian authorities almost as comic opera, but unloads some real loathing on Israel. Typical background passages begin something like, “After the 1948 war, in violation of international law, Israel…” as if the 1948 war were Israel’s idea, or as if the Arab goal of exterminating the Jews were in accordance with international law. Several of the accusations made by the Armenian priests in Israel cry out for fact-checking, but since this is a travel and not an investigative book, there is none.

Interposed through the text are excerpts and paraphrases from Moschos’ book. From these we revisit the ancient stylites and dendrites, who inflicted physical mortification upon themselves in the belief that suffering in this life made for an easier time in the afterlife. Throughout, we also get a little archaeological background of different locations. They aren’t all ancient: The Baron hotel in Damascus still has Lawrence of Arabia’s unpaid bill framed behind the front desk, though the gardens and ponds outside have long since been replaced with urban seediness.

A mostly fine travel book with a great premise.

I was familiar with the author’s previous works on India and Central Asia so I had high expectations when I bought From the Holy Mountain. I’m glad I did it!

Dalrymple, a Roman Catholic from Scotland, recreates the journeys of the Christian monk John Moschos who wandered from city to cave to monastary throughout the Levant in the 6th century. In so doing the author provides a glimpse of what life is like for the dwindling Christian population still living in the Middle East today.

What he finds is both fascinating and tragic. He meets some of the last surviving members of the tiny Greek communities in Istanbul and Alexandria. He braves PKK terrorists in Turkey and Muslim terrorists in Upper Egypt. He visits desperate Christian Palestinian refugees inside Israel. He breaks bread with besieged monks in Syria and Lebanon. He talks with a Maronite warlord in Beirut. He interviews the vulgar inhabitants of a modern Israeli Jewish settlement called Ariel.

This book is eye-opening. For instance, I had the impression there were far, far fewer Christians in the Middle East than the 14 million quoted by the author. I did not know the astonishing extent to which Islam has retained the rituals, habits and customs of early Eastern Christianity. I was also unaware that Coptic Christians comprise roughly 20% of the Egyptian population. And I did not know how much early Celtic Christianity was influenced by the Byzantines.

One complaint: I’m afraid sometimes Dalrymple mentions too much and in the heated political and religious atmosphere this is not always a good idea. For instance, was it really wise of the author to have remarked on the fortifications currently being undertaken at Ein Wardo? He writes that he has disguised the identities of some of the people he met for precisely this reason. I hope he’s right.

Dalrymple has a well-developed sense of humour. Some of the situations and attitudes he comes across would be funny if they were not so tragic. The author is a scholar and probably the most interesting travel writer to come along in years. This past February I had the good fortune to hear him speak at the Royal Geographical Society on the White Rajahs of India, the subject of his next book. He is as fascinating in person as he is in print, a mixture of Bruce Chatwin, Robert Byron, and Paddy Leigh Fermor — which in my book is almost as good as one can get!

For a long time William Dalrymple has been regarded by both me and others as a great modern day writer-historian-adventurer, who goes off on quests in the less trodden paths of the world, digs up historical information, makes connections that would have eluded most and then writes about it in a very informative, entertaining, erudite and funny manner.

All of these are true of “From the Holy Mountain”. Here, he decides to follow in the footsteps of a Byzantine monk in order to investigate the history and current status of the Eastern Christian Churches. This he does, going to monasteries of denominations as varied as the Maronites, the Greek and Syrian Orthodox as well as the Copts. He also makes his usual fabulous observations which in this book might be new to many people in terms of the similarities between Eastern Christianity and Islam in terms of ritual as well as the degree that Christianity can be thought of as a Western religion. He does much to broaden the conception and knowledge of most readers about Eastern and general Christianity, as well as indulging us in some kind of off-beat, romantic notion of the various harsh and desolate monasteries and caves in the wasteland deserts of the Middle East, having been (and some still being) inhabited by eccentric recluses from the world.

However, in describing much of the political situation, he lost me. He seemed slightly anti-Israel from “In Xanadu” but here, he shows that he is extremely biased. Although I’m sure many (although I don’t know how many) of the persecutions and troubles of the Palestinian Christians described in the book are genuine, the fact that he jokes about his visits with Lebanese warlords and how civilised they were while showing vitriol in the section about the Israeli govenment shows that he is not being very consistent. To me, it undermined many other political statements he made (such as largely blaming the Maronites exclusively for the troubles in Lebanon) for if from everything I know about Israel he was quite selective about the material he chose to include, this could mean he was just as selective and biased about other material.

I still liked the book very much for its descriptions and details of the Eastern monastic lifestyle then and now, but the political bias inserted a sour note. I think whatever your persuasion, if you’re interested in the material, it’s a great book, just be aware that he is quite biased.

Dalrymple and his wife decided to spend a year in Delhi.A year that was dedicated by both of them towards understandingthe city, it’s culture, and it’s vibrancy. Unlike Bombay, or Calcutta, Delhi is not a city of throbbing activity. In fact, it can be downright boring at times. Yet Dalrymple goes beyond the obvious attractions (and pitfalls) and brings out the colourful nature of a city which has been a centre of political and social activity for thousands of years. In his little tales, Dalrymple takes on the responsibilty of giving a hue and fabric to the nature of the city not necessarily through it’s numerous monuments and ruins, but through it’s people. From his curmudgeonly landlady, her geriatiric and libidinous husband, a wild and deliciously irresponsible Sikh taxi driver, and even a brand of ostracized eunachs, Dalrymple weaves the story of a city through their eyes. This is really a refreshing way of approaching a narrative about a city. Compare this to say, Paul Theroux, who, with his instinct for observation, paints a city through his eyes. Well, that’s fine, but the fact it sometime peoples eyes can get jaundiced. Compliment with soft flowing sketches and watercolour prints by his wife, Dalrymple does a wonderful job of establishing his love for a city with gentle ease.

This book was really great. Anyone who has a passion for history would love this book. It takes us from the “late classical-early medieval” period up to the present in the middle east, with the thesis that only now is the final end of ancient Byzantium occurring. The ancient Christian civilization coexisted for 1400 years with the other cultures; now,however, for a number of reasons, the last Christians are feeling compelled to leave. I have already ordered John Moscos’s “Spritual Meadow” so I can compare what Dalrymple says to my reading of the original. Also, I should comment on how delightful his stories about stays in the old, surviving monasteries were. A few of the chapters raised my eyebrows a bit–however, I was moved by the monastery of St. Anthony in Egypt, and what was said about monasticism and prayer. This is definitely a book to read, whether your interest is middle east history, religion, byzantium, or travel!

“City of Djinns” is by far the best travel book I’ve ever read. It transcends the genre. It was given me by an historically minded Delhi-wallah, and he couldn’t have offered a better volume. Mr. Dalrymple not only spent a year in Delhi, he spent centuries in the history of the 7 Delhis that have been built and lost. This is not a “go here, see this” sort of travel book. It is a “discover the wonder” book. Modern Delhi is a mess of a city, but Mr. Dalrymple takes us deeply beyond the mess into the wonder that exists and the magic that was. The incredible political and family history of Shah Jehan the founder of Delhi (Shahjehanabad)is the “Godfather” story of family members who would stop at nothing to win the empire. There is a severed head in this story that makes the horse’s head in “The Godfather” look like child’s play. This small portion of “City of Djinns” is worth the price of admission. I’ve spent a few months in Delhi, and this book would have made a better introduction than any of the usual guidebooks, as it is, it will make my return to the “City of Djinns” all the richer.