Books by Gai Eaton

This work is a profound analysis of the most urgent concerns and questions facing us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Touching on religion and the application of religion to society, Gai Eaton illustrates the subtle harmony of a religious perspective and its ability to transform both the individual and society.

A best-selling introduction to contemporary Islam. The author is concerned not simply with Islam in isolation, but with the very nature of religious faith, its spiritual and intellectual foundations and the light it casts upon the mysteries and paradoxes of the human condition.

Now in his 80s, Gai Eaton describes how, after a strange childhood completely isolated from other children, followed by a Cambridge education and life as an actor and later as a diplomat, circumstances led him at the age of 30 to Islam. Fascinated by the vagaries of human behavior and the strangeness of human destinies, he has observed the human scene with a novelist's eye and traced the profound changes in attitudes and tastes which have taken place in a single lifetime. He recounts his youthful adventures with the clear-sight and understanding only possible for someone whom age has freed from the passions which once possessed him. What makes this work unique is the juxtaposition of hindsight with diary entries made at the time, which gives a quality of immediacy to a true story that includes reminiscences of the diplomatic life and an outline of the Sufi path.

King of the Castle examines closely many of the unquestioned assumptions by which we live our lives, comparing them with the beliefs that have shaped and guided human life in the past. It begins with a consideration of how secular societies attempt to possess their citizens, body and soul and how, as a consequence, the necessity of redefining human responsibility becomes an ever more urgent imperative. The book continues with a presentation of the traditional view of man as ''God''s Viceroy on Earth'', with an eye to its practical implications in a world that has all but forgotten, under the pressure of mass social persuasion, that man must always be free to choose his own ultimate destiny. The author''s thesis is a passionate yet incisive plea for the restoration of the sacred norms of religion, as against the debilitating and falsifying aims of a profane world-view based on no more than recent scientific and technological achievements.