Children of Dust (22 page)

I got into the Humvee and the Rangers locked up. Looking out the window, I waved at the assembled relatives. I felt like I was leaving a part of me with Dada Abu and my grand-uncles. These were the people through whom I was supposed to weave myself into the tapestry of Islam.

As the Humvee whirred into the desert, hurtling past the sand dunes, over the cracked bridges, and past the caravans of Gypsies in blue and purple, I felt as if I needed to blame someone for destroying my opportunity to connect with my history. Again, though, rather than
blaming Ittefaq and his angry Islamic cohorts, I blamed myself. It was because I was an inadequate Muslim that they had consigned me to being an American and made me feel that I had nothing to contribute to the
ummat-e-islami
.

This was all my fault.

Not theirs.

W
e cut our trip short by four weeks and went to Uncle Saad’s house in Karachi to wait for the next available flight to America. We ended up with a few days to kill before the flight, and we spent them slumming around his living room, too discouraged to do any sightseeing. Ruing my lost chance to get hold of the special family tree that would have showed the link back to the first Caliph, I raised the issue of our heritage with Uncle Saad over lunch our first day back.

“You know I came here to try and find out more about my history,” I began.

“I thought you came for a wife.”

“That too, but I really wanted to connect with Islam.”

“Were you able to?” he asked. “Did that happen in Sehra Kush?”

“No,” I said dispiritedly.

“Why not?”

“Well, I never got hold of our family tree.”

“You didn’t ask your Uncle Tau?”

“I never got a chance.”

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “what are you looking for? Maybe I know.”

Ammi, who was at lunch with us, spoke up. “He’s trying to find all the connections to the Siddiqui name.”

“I have the names going back four generations only,” I told him. “That’s all Pops remembered.”

I took out my notebook and set forth my research. Uncle Saad read through it carefully.

“So you want to go further back than this?” he asked.

“I have to,” I said. “I’m trying to get all the way back to Abu Bakr Siddiq, the first Caliph.”

Uncle Saad stopped eating and looked at me quizzically. “
The
Abu Bakr Siddiq?”

I nodded eagerly.

A big smile spread across his face—a sardonic one. Soon it became a snicker.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked.

“It’s nothing,” he said, stifling another snicker. “I wish you the best. I do.”

“No. Tell me right this instant,” I demanded. “Tell me why you’re laughing.” My ears were hot with embarrassment.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes,” I said, though I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like what he had to say.

Uncle Saad glanced at Ammi, then turned back to me. “That Siddiqui thing isn’t real,” he said, no longer smiling. “It’s a joke. No, it’s not even a joke; it’s a forgery. No, it’s not a forgery, because that implies an intent to cause harm. I don’t know
what
it is.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” I asked, the castles of pride in my mind crumbling.

“It’s all an accident,” Uncle Saad said. “The reason that we’re named Siddiqui is because a couple of centuries ago one of our ancestors, a man who converted from Hinduism to Islam—his name was Savekhi—opted to take on a name that sounded close to his original name when he became Muslim. That’s really all there is to it. Savekhi became Siddiqui.”

“Hindu?” I said, my throat choking up. “Convert?”

“Is this right?” Ammi asked, jumping back in. “My husband told me the thing about being Siddiquis.
He
thought it was true.”

Uncle Saad nodded. “When your father was growing up, we were new to Pakistan and had nothing. Dada Abu probably let him believe
we were connected to Abu Bakr Siddiq to make him feel good. It was a convenient lie, since the actual Abu Bakr was a migrant and so were we. Or maybe it wasn’t Dada Abu who told those tales. Maybe these stories were passed around by the government.”

“But Uncle Tau has a book,” I objected. “Pops said it has the family tree.”

Uncle Saad waved a dismissive hand. “You can buy a hundred books like that. There are a million forgers who will happily tell anyone on the street that they’re related to the Holy Prophet. Then everyone runs around calling themselves Syed or whatever. Biggest fraud there is.”

Abu Bakr Ramaq, purported heir of Islamic royalty, descendant of pure Arab blood, child of Islam’s greatest leader, started to tremble. The revelation entered my bloodstream, inciting an insurrection of rage. That rage was quickly followed by the hollow void of defeat. Images of tall Arabs in fluttering white robes, riding fast camels across vast deserts before settling in the alluvial fields of Punjab, leaving behind the Mongol savages—those images all disappeared in an instant. The luminosity of my fantasies, which had given those images their exalted flavor, turned to darkness. The vivid colors ran into my blood and become a blurry, indistinct mess. Everything threatened to tumble out of my tear ducts, but I held back by sheer willpower, unwilling to give up my last vestiges of pride.

Now the ancestor I saw in my head was a muddy,
lungi
-wearing farmer who was short and round and bald. Carrying a puny scythe, he squatted in a rice field, working for a Muslim feudal lord among a group of sweaty Sikh and Hindu men, all of whom were illiterate and dark-skinned. Perhaps there was a dot on his head from some pagan ritual; perhaps when he went home he ate a bland dish of rice and vegetables without any meat; and perhaps when he walked he was such a coward that he wouldn’t even dare kill an ant or a fly because he was afraid he might come back as that creature in his next life.

Savekhi. The name echoed in my head. The name of a Hindu. A non-Muslim. I was a descendant of a
nothing
.

With a deep sigh I hung my head. A few days later, somewhere above the Atlantic, Abu Bakr Ramaq was extinguished.

I
had exalted the people of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan as the highest of believers. I had vested them with the authority to judge my
iman
, my belief; my
taqwa
, my piety. If only those righteous Muslims had cut open my chest and seen how the four chambers of my heart pumped blood suffused with Islam—yet they didn’t. I was sneered at by the very ones who were supposed to embrace me. I was rejected by the ones who were supposed to be purer—in character, in culture, in chivalry—than Americans. The brilliance that I’d associated with Islam just a few months earlier had now turned black. After a period of mourning and melancholy, I craved vengeance. I sought to undermine all that the presumably purer Muslims held sacred.

I transferred to a Christian university in Atlanta for my junior year and started studying philosophy. There I petitioned Dr. Conrad, a bespectacled, dark-haired professor with a Transylvanian twinkle in his eye, who wrote various books on atheism, to give me individualized lessons in a philosophic system called
postmodernism
. All I knew about it was that it was feared and reviled by Muslims nearly as much as Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses
.

I went to Dr. Conrad’s office once or twice a week for these lessons. Sitting amidst heaps of manuscripts and ancient books, we pored over
the writings of the major thinkers in the movement. These included Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard, as well as related thinkers such as Adorno and Horkheimer, existentialists such as Nietzsche and Sartre, postcolonialists such as Said and Spivak, and feminists such as Irigaray and Butler. Our meetings took place late in the evening when the halls of the Philosophy Department were empty. We talked in whispers, because he didn’t want his colleagues to know about our secret soirees. “Too many damn theologians pretending to be philosophers at this university,” as he put it. It was the theologians of the world that I most wanted to undermine.

When each session finished, I would stalk home through the night like a wraith in the shadows. I felt wicked and powerful. I was Muslim become malfeasance.

Postmodernism had a singular aim: it threw off the strictures of authority. It taught you how to unshackle yourself from the discipline and punishment imposed upon you without your consent. It exposed the myriad ways in which religious forces enchained humans, often without their knowledge. It was the inverse of bondage.

“According to Lyotard,” Dr. Conrad said. “There are no meta-narratives. This is perhaps the guiding principle of postmodernism.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning that there is no grand theory. Meaning that religion is insufficient to explain the world.”

Unlike Islam, which postulated that we owed certain duties to one another because we were all children of God, postmodernism said that all relationships were power struggles and that duties weren’t inherent in our nature but were imposed by the most powerful. Thus we have a father exerting himself upon a son, and the son revolting. Men ruling women, and women recognizing their subjugation and fighting back. The wealthy manipulating the poor, and the poor rising up and vanquishing the rich. Priests imposing their laws, and freethinkers cutting those laws down like twigs. Everything was connected by conflict.

Soon I was introduced to Richard Rorty, depicted on the cover of his book as a dapper, gray-maned gentleman in a white suit. In his short book
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
, he declared that there was no such thing as truth “out there.” He said that language didn’t have a fixed
meaning; that language was just a collection of “malleable metaphors.” Language wasn’t divine, therefore; it was man-made—made by the
strongest
of men. This argument would frighten any Muslim, because in Islam, God had become Text, or language.

“A Muslim wouldn’t agree with that,” I pointed out. “Muslims believe that the Quran is uncreated. This means that the words in the Quran are one and the same as God.”

“I’m sure, though,” Dr. Conrad said, “that there have been people—perhaps Muslims themselves—who don’t believe that the Quran and Allah are synonymous with one another.”

I nodded. “There were. They were called the Mutazilites. Though there aren’t any more of those.”

Dr. Conrad shrugged. “They’ll make a comeback.”

“What would you say about the
huruf al-muqatta’at
?” I asked.

“Translation?”

I rummaged in my backpack and pulled out a copy of the Quran. “There are certain strings of letters in the Quran,” I said, flipping through to the beginning of the second chapter, where one such string—
alif lam mim
—could be seen. “They occur in various parts of the Quran. Muslims believe that no human being knows the meaning of these letters. If all language is man-made, as Rorty alleges, then we should be able to figure out what these mysterious letter combinations mean.”

I thought I had Dr. Conrad on the ropes. He pushed his eyeglasses up on his nose and stared at the letters.

“Oh yes,” he said suddenly. “I read an article about these. The author, who was a Muslim, said that these letters are actually hieroglyphics from an earlier language—one that was prevalent in Arabia before the advent of Arabic. He said that the three letters found at the beginning of the Chapter of the Cow—those that you’re pointing at—actually make a picture, much the way that Chinese words are actually symbols.”

“So what are the letters
alif lam mim
a picture of?”

“A cow, I believe.”

“There’s a picture of a cow at the beginning of the Quran’s Chapter of the Cow?” I exclaimed.

“Seems like a reasonable, rational explanation, doesn’t it?”

I nodded slowly. “So then, according to a postmodernist, the Quran is simply a number of things that Muhammad pieced together from whatever was floating around in the air?”

“A postmodernist would say that Muhammad was simply doing what any great novelist does. Or, in Rorty’s words, he was a ‘strong poet.’ Like Homer or Shakespeare.”

“Then Islam is nothing more than a compelling story that a lot of people came to believe in unison?”

Dr. Conrad nodded. “A postmodernist calls that a myth. In Islam’s case it spread worldwide, mostly because the Arabs were an ascendant military force, but also because Islam, with its messenger Prophet and archangel and monotheistic God, offered stronger imagery than what was out there at the time.”

I gathered my materials and took my assignments home. Reading through my books, I noticed that while postmodernists appreciated religion for making advances in ethics and morality, they argued that people no longer needed to rely on religion to know the right way to behave. Religion was considered nothing more than a “personal idiosyncrasy.”

“What does that mean?” I asked Dr. Conrad the next time we met.

“It means that religion is analogous to a nervous tick or an obsessive-compulsive disorder,” he said. “Religion isn’t something which is shared universally by all people, because all people aren’t the same religion and even people of the same religion don’t practice the same way. Therefore, religion can’t be universal and thus can’t universally guide humanity’s behavior.”

“So how do we know how to behave?” I asked. “What
is
shared universally?”

“We look to reason.”

“But how do we know what reason is saying?” I asked.

“One way to do it is to look at what everyone else is doing.”