By Yousuf Ibnul Hasan
It was March 1984 when my HR chief asked me to prepare a short course on Islamic Banking and Finance for a high-profile organisation in the United Kingdom. It was an exciting assignment, but I must confess that my English at the time was not polished enough to attract an audience to a subject as apparently dry as Islamic banking. My conversation, however, was reasonably fluent and pleasant, and I could hold the attention of men and women while discussing almost any subject. The weakness was not in my ideas; it was in the language through which I had to present them.
I had been a rather careless student of English. This was particularly embarrassing because my father, uncles, aunts and brothers were all extremely particular about grammar, punctuation and the proper use of English. In our family, a misplaced comma could almost become a family matter! I had therefore inherited the expectations of a literary household without always inheriting its discipline.
Those were the days when computers were not sitting on every desk, and Microsoft Word had not yet arrived to rescue people like me from their grammatical sins. There was no spell-checker politely warning us that we had made a mistake; there was no artificial intelligence waiting to rewrite our sentences; and there was certainly no undo button to save us from our own carelessness.
My most faithful companion was a Remington typewriter. I could type at nearly seventy words a minute, a speed that sometimes made the poor machine protest. On more than one occasion, I believe the typewriter became so irritated with me that it simply stopped working.
It had been with me since 1970, a gift from my father, who had purchased it during his first visit to the United Kingdom in 1961. That old Remington had witnessed almost everything: books, articles, confidential reports, workshop material and countless pages that were never published and were eventually destroyed in the interest of the nation and, perhaps more importantly, its elite.
Finally, I prepared the material for a six-hour workshop, divided into two hours a day over three days. My objective was not to impress the participants with difficult English or sophisticated terminology. The subject was too important for such decoration. I wanted the material to penetrate their minds and help them understand the importance, practicality and viability of a financial system that I had studied during my postgraduate education.
When the workshop began, the organisers arranged for an interpreter to explain my presentation in English. In those days, I understood the subject much better than I could explain it in polished English. The interpreter therefore became, quite unintentionally, the bridge between my knowledge and my audience.
The workshop ended with words of appreciation. One of the executives, who later became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, placed one hand on my shoulder while holding his coffee cup in the other. In a warm and almost requesting tone, he suggested that I should write a manual on the subject so that many more people, especially bankers, could benefit from what I had presented.
That simple request stayed with me.
From 1985 onward, I began developing the course systematically. By 1990, I had managed to give it the shape of a small, handy manual. It was not a commercially published book. I simply photocopied it and distributed it among participants wherever I conducted my workshops.
For the next several decades, the little manual travelled farther than I could ever have imagined. From 1990 until 2024, I distributed copies to workshop participants in cities and countries I can no longer properly count. Readers found mistakes, pointed them out, suggested improvements and, sometimes unknowingly, became my volunteer editors. Every criticism made the next edition a little better. Every reader who corrected a sentence contributed something to the book that would eventually emerge many years later.
What began as workshop notes gradually became a body of knowledge. Finally, in July 2025, after more than four decades of development, revision, teaching and correction, the manual became a properly published book. Amazon placed it on its global bookshelf, where readers from different parts of the world could purchase it.
And then came one of the most unexpected and heartwarming experiences of my literary life.
I received a message from Papeete in French Polynesia, written by a lady who had purchased the book and taken the time to express her appreciation for the effort and thought behind it. What touched me even more was that this appreciation did not stop there. Later, a professor of economics from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and a PhD student from Vancouver, Canada, also reached out to share their thoughts and appreciation.
These messages, arriving from such distant corners of the world, reminded me that a book may travel far beyond the boundaries imagined by its author. It was a deeply humbling experience to realise that ideas born in one part of the world could find readers, appreciation and perhaps a small place in the hearts and minds of people thousands of miles away.
I smiled.
A book that had taken its author more than forty years to develop had found readers in places I had never expected. The world, it seemed, was not as small as we imagine, and sometimes the reader you hope for is thousands of miles away.
Then I looked towards Pakistan.
There, the story became somewhat different.
I managed to have one hundred physical copies printed in Pakistan. I announced the book on social media. I wrote to universities, banks, libraries, business associations and other institutions that, in one way or another, should have had an interest in Islamic banking and finance.
I waited.
One month passed. Then another. Then another.
Six months passed, and I received not a single responsenot even a polite No, thank you.
Silence can sometimes be louder than criticism.
The irony was almost too perfect. Universities have libraries. Banks proudly promote Islamic banking. Business associations frequently debate and sometimes criticise Islamic banking. Conferences are organised, seminars are held, speeches are delivered, and papers are presented. But when a practitioner actually writes a book about the subject after decades of teaching and field experience, apparently the book becomes invisible.
Perhaps our problem is not that we dislike books. Perhaps we simply dislike paying for them.
In Pakistan, book reading, book collecting and book purchasing appear to have become activities reserved for a very small percentage of the population. Meanwhile, many traditional bookshops have gradually given way to businesses selling burgers, jewellery and everything else that promises a quicker turnover.
The book has become a strange creature in our society. Everyone loves it, provided somebody else buys it.
If you are an author, you quickly discover another fascinating tradition. Someone will approach you with great affection and say, Please send me the PDF. Another will ask for a complimentary copy. A third will say, I am very interested in your work, before requesting a free copy without any intention of reading it.
The tragedy is not that people ask for a free book. The tragedy is that they sometimes ask for it to display rather than to read.
There is an old saying: You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. I have discovered a Pakistani variation: You can put a book in someones hand, but you cannot make him open it.
And perhaps another saying suits the situation even better: A book is a gift to the mind, but only if the mind is willing to receive it.
I have spent more than forty years writing, rewriting, teaching, correcting and improving this book. I began with a Remington typewriter when computers were still a luxury. I wrote pages that had to be retyped whenever a mistake was made. I carried the subject from workshop to workshop, country to country and generation to generation.
Eventually, the world gave the book a place on its bookshelf. Readers thousands of miles away opened it and wrote to me. Yet in my own country, where I had hoped the book might find its greatest audience, I discovered a curious breed of book lovers who love books most when they are free.
Perhaps that is the real suffering of an author. You do not suffer only while writing a book. You suffer when you realise how few people are willing to read what you have spent a lifetime writing.
And yet, I continue to write.
Because an author writes first for the truth he believes in, and only afterwards for the reader who may discover it.
After all, a seed does not stop being a seed merely because someone refuses to plant it.
Your criticism would have been kinder than your silence. A book can survive a no, and an author can learn from it; what is difficult to bear is silence from those who claim to love books.
The columnist is a Program Consultant in Islamic Banking and Applied Finance, teacher, trainer, author, banker and broadcaster. He can be reached at pride4pen@gmail.com.
