The Book of Strangers

"If you turn the clock back to the late 1960s, early 70s, everybody was looking for something and barking up many different trees. I had looked at many different philosophies and religions and writings, I’d got to the point where I’d read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, and I always remember one line in that book where he says, ‘You could tell by the way his hand rested on his thigh that he was a man of knowledge.’ That indication of knowledge being something existential and embodied, rather than theoretical, was something that immediately attracted me. I met Ian Dallas in the early 70s, and what struck me at our first meeting was that he hardly spoke about Islam at all. He spoke about this society, and about how when you look at it, for all the freedom that people have, in many ways it’s a sick society. At that point he was a muqaddam, the representative in London and America of a well-known shaykh from Morocco, Shaykh Muhammad ibn Al-Habib. He seemed to know everyone who was worth knowing at the time. He knew the Beatles, he knew Edith Piaf, he’d acted in a couple of films by Federico Fellini. He’d written some of the very early plays for BBC when they were first starting out. So he’d been at this pivotal point in the development of the media as we understand it today. He was clearly someone who’d gone through everything that people were looking for, and then beyond that – I found that very interesting. And in The Book of Strangers I saw what I had been looking for: it was a description of a society that was very much information-based, but very poor in terms of wisdom. In the initial stages of the book there’s a young man at a university, thirsty for knowledge but not knowing where to find it. Looking at all the people around him, he says: they don’t understand life, and then he goes out in search of this Book of Strangers. It’s not science fiction, but it’s set at a point in the future, where very few people have access to physical books – all ‘knowledge’ is on microfiche, or electronically recorded data. So he foresaw the age of digital information. It’s an information-based society, where even students are monitored, and their access to information is restricted according to what is deemed necessary for their requirements. So there’s that Big Brother element that you’re not allowed to find out too much. But then the main character in the book decides to leave. He has this meeting with a nomad, and the nomad says, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow at dawn, if you want come with me.’ And they’re going out into the desert, beyond this bubble of so-called civilisation, into a completely different world, which this society would define as backward and primitive, but, in fact, amongst whose people are people of great wisdom and knowledge. Although it was written before the film, it’s a bit like THX 1138 , George Lucas’s first film: it’s that journey from a completely covered-over society, where everything is regulated and monitored and conditioned, and making an escape from that into the open world, into the fresh air of creation."