The paleantologist Zahoor is trying to do his research while General Zia is launching a campaign to Islamise knowledge. Science is being rewritten and called Islamic Science. The teaching of evolution is banned. Nothing is natural or accidental; everything is ‘revealed’ and ‘ordained.’ On a fossil dig in the Salt Range of the Punjab, an area that once lay beneath the Tethys Sea, Zahoor’s granddaughter, Amal, finds proof of the ‘dog-whale’. No one knows it yet but she has found Pakicetus, the oldest known primitive whale. Back at home bad news awaits. Amal’s baby sister Mehwish has become blind and Amal will have to stay home to raise her. Mehwish’s world is both magical and terrifying. Through Amal she learns to read a seeing person’s alphabet. She can also ‘see’ Amal’s drawings of primitive whales. Her grandfather teaches her illegal English love poems.
Elegant, sensuous and fiercely intelligent, The Geometry of God takes an argument that is in danger of becoming stale-that of fundamentalism vs free thinking among Muslims-and animates it in a wonderfully inventive story that pits science against politics and the freedom of women against the insecurities of men.
Published Date: 29/11/2007 Format: HardBack ISBN: 978-81-291-1279-8 Publisher: Rupa & Co Rating:
