I first met Willam Dalrymple while travelling in Turkey. He accompanied me in my carry-on baggage in the form of From the Holy Mountain, pressed on me at the last minute by a relative with an urgent ‘you must read this’. Read it I did over the course of four weeks, often longing to get back to our little apartment off Istiklal Caddesi in Taksim, or for my driving shift to end so I could gobble up more pages between one glorious ruin and another. Dalrymple overtook us on his journey from Greece to the Sahara in the footsteps of John Moschos, the 6th-century monk who visited his brothers in monasteries throughout the Byzantine world.
One of those awesomely informed writers who is adventurous enough to follow his passions, Dalrymple’s writing style is part Boy’s Own Annual, part doctoral thesis, inquiring yet undogmatic.
He traces his restless and excited questing partly to his education at Ampleforth in North Yorkshire. The Benedictine monks there were as given to hunting and beagling as they were to inculcating a passion for history and words in receptive charges like young William. They also introduced him to Robert Byron’s great travel classic The Road to Oxiana, which clearly provided the inspiration for his first book, In Xanadu, written during Cambridge term breaks.
Religion is an important theme in all Dalrymple’s books, from the early Christians to Hindusim, Islam and various sects with blurred theological borders from Greece to China. Extensive travels in the Islamic world and living in India have left this self-described wobbly Catholic open to all religious faiths, observing many other paths up the mountain. Now he speaks as a fervent advocate for Islam as lived by the vast majority of its adherents, reminding those who need to be reminded, of its similarities to Christianity. He condemns the bigotry and poor journalism that perpetuate a huge misrepresentation of Islam in the West as much as the damage caused from within by the Wahabi mullahs in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Afghanistan who have marginalised moderate Islam over the last 20 years.
In his earlier books, Dalrymple hangs his travels on history in the best In The Steps Of … tradition. He locates and visits the remarkable stopping points of much earlier travellers, sometimes at huge inconvenience. It is detective work in walking boots with his tattered original source in his rucksack, distracted from the main route