Children of Dust (25 page)

U
ntil now the extent of Sam’s own activism had been rather limited, because he lived in his mother’s basement. However, he was always looking for a chance to play with the “big boys” at elite universities. He had a gold mine in me. Since I was, in many ways,
tabula rasa
, a clean slate, when it came to activism, but had access to a great deal of money through the MSA, he figured he could work through me. One of his great ambitions was to get the big three of pro-Palestinian activism—Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and Edward Said—in one panel discussion.

“How amazing would that be?” he said. “Two Jews and a secular Christian laying out Israel’s injustices.”

I was just coming to learn each thinker’s importance to the cause and nodded excitedly. “That would be special.”

“Trouble is, they all cost a lot of money. I can’t finance it, but I think your organization has the pull to get that sort of funding.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I replied. Over the next few days I contacted Chomsky, Finkelstein, and Said and inquired about their honoraria. The news wasn’t good. “With the second
intifada
heating up,” I explained to Sam, “they’re all really busy and really expensive.”

“How much did you offer? They’ll come for the money.”

“Chomsky’s baseline is five thousand,” I said, reluctant to disappoint Sam, who was playing such a role in my greater visibility. “I’m sorry, but I can’t pay out that kind of money to just one guy. Maybe six thousand for all three.”

“That’s not going to work,” Sam said. “Let me see if I can find other speakers.”

After a few days Sam returned with information about a pair of lesser-known lecturers. One was a professor who would argue that Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and Gaza were detrimental to the peace process. The other was a speaker coming from Europe.

“The professor is obviously solid,” Sam said. “But the European is the more intriguing prospect. He’s an observant Jew who formerly served in the Israeli military.”

“So a pro-Palestinian Israeli European?”

“Pretty much.”

“Is he cheap?” I asked, going straight to the bottom line.

“Very.”

I told Sam I’d manage to get the funding through the MSA, and we came up with a schedule for both speakers.

“Send me their writings,” I requested before hanging up.

Shortly before the European’s talk, which was scheduled first, Sam sent me a sample of his writings. Despite being creative and evocative, they were aggressive and polemical. The writer was a veritable machine gun of rhetoric. He turned everything into Jew versus Gentile and claimed that the very idea of Jewishness was a conspiracy. Although he made seemingly sophisticated literary references to characters and authors such as Don Quixote and Thomas Hardy, he never moved far from his main point: putting the entire blame for Israeli actions upon Judaism.

Something about the articles didn’t sit right with me. Reeking of bigotry, they argued that as long as Israelis were Jewish, peace wasn’t possible. The obsession with trying to impose certain inherent tendencies upon Jews, all negative, reminded me of my tutor Qari Adil in Pakistan, who used to say that God had made apes and monkeys out of Jews.

I pictured the European writer in my head. Earlier I had imagined a dapper man with professorial glasses, but now he seemed more akin to
a hungry rat. I went back to his writings, but they felt so blood-soaked that I couldn’t even keep them on my computer. When I lay down on the bed to think, he chased me from the shadows. My stomach filled with acid and I felt like throwing up—I abstained only because I imagined he would run out of the shadows and lap the vomit up.

Suddenly my computer chimed the arrival of a new e-mail and I returned to my desk. Rabbi Aaron had learned of the event and was sending a concerned message to various community leaders and the university’s chancellor—and me—requesting that the event be canceled. He thought that the speaker would create further antagonism between the communities.

Rabbi Aaron’s concern confirmed to me that inviting the writer had been a mistake. Yet I didn’t want to accept that I had erred. The world of Islam needed people to engage in
resistance
, I reminded myself. Besides, canceling the lecture would undermine my hard-earned status among Muslims.

I pushed my chair back and stretched, looking up toward the ceiling. At the highest level of my bookshelf, where I kept the Quran and other books I didn’t read, my eye was caught by the turquoise-colored binding of a book written by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. He called to me, and I pulled down the book.

During World War II, Levinas’s parents were murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania, and he himself had lived under German captivity. His wife and daughter had escaped imprisonment by hiding in a monastery. Levinas’s encounter with the Nazis became one of the focal points of his worldview. He tried to devise a philosophy that would help him address the contradiction that what was presumed to be the world’s greatest civilization was capable of producing murderous institutions like National Socialism.

Levinas concluded that the world had gone fundamentally wrong for three thousand years because thinkers didn’t treat ethics as the most important branch of philosophy, opting instead to make metaphysics and science more important.

He based the importance of ethics upon the fact that even before a person could say, “I think; therefore I am” a person first had to prove
that the “I” existed, which could happen only through what Levinas called an “ethical encounter” with another human being.

In other words, we recognized our self or “I-ness” only when we were singled out by another person’s “gaze.” Being recognized like this, in a face-to-face encounter—in an encounter that gave us our consciousness—was a privilege available only to humans. Levinas said that this entire encounter occurred in the realm of expressions. It was a force. We didn’t know
when
it happened; it just did. It occurred even before we could think about denying it, and it rendered us responsible for each other. In other words, what most people called “love at first sight” occurred between every living being at all times, but most of us chose not to acknowledge it.

I recalled my encounter with Rabbi Aaron in the chapel the time that I chose not to hear his reply. We had been face-to-face, but I had behaved as if he were faceless. That feeling of being estranged from another human being was what people like the European speaker wanted. Such people wanted me to think of Rabbi Aaron as a Jew, and a representative of the state of Israel, and nothing more.

Levinas was a burst of light for me. He cut through the conflict-based understanding of humanity that postmodernism had imparted. He seemed to say that life was about more than the pursuit of power.

Unfortunately, the part of me that was Amir ul Islam—the
imam
, the head of the congregation, the one who had felt exalted by the affirmation of Arabs at the rally—didn’t want to hear this new definition of life.

I tried to make him listen.

I got up and wrote an e-mail to Rabbi Aaron and other community leaders and told them that it was too late for me to stop the European from speaking. However, I said, in order to advance the spirit of harmony and reconciliation, and as a peace offering, I personally wouldn’t go to the event and would pull the MSA’s sponsorship from the speech.

Amir ul Islam rasped and clawed at my gesture.

Then he was gone.

A
bstaining from attending the lecture didn’t make me feel good, as I’d hoped it would. In fact, I felt as if I had let down my people. I felt like a traitor. A prophetic
hadith
, “My community cannot agree upon an error,” echoed endlessly in my head. It said to me that any person who breaks away from the community is in the wrong.

Thus, when various members of the MSA asked me why I hadn’t shown up at the event, I didn’t tell them about Levinas. I lied and said that I’d been sick, or that I’d had pink eye, or that I’d felt the event would go more smoothly if I wasn’t present. I didn’t want to be different than my fellow Muslims or publicly register a complaint against the established consensus. Even though I felt as if Sam had foisted his ambition upon me under the guise of Islam, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him to stop. I simply had to go along.

In that manner I passed the few months until graduation, and then I moved away to D.C. to be as far away from Islamic leadership as possible.

A
few months later I was sitting in my office on the third floor of a gray building a block from the White House. I had obtained a fellowship for aspiring lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice, having given up my goal of studying Islamic law. My new aim in life was to become an antitrust lawyer and defend small businesses against monopolists and multinational corporations.

Melanie, one of my colleagues, sat across the desk from me with a Starbucks cup in her hand. It was the beginning of the work week and we were having our regular Monday discussion about big ideas. She was my opposite in many ways, and we both enjoyed picking holes in each other’s arguments. We had previously talked about Christianity and Judaism and feminism and existentialism.

Today’s subject was Islam.

“I have a great deal of respect for Islam,” said Melanie. “It’s one of the great religions in the world. It sets forth an additional monotheistic basis—besides Judaism and Christianity, I mean—upon which the world can affirm human dignity. I think that’s significant.”

I objected. “I don’t think human dignity is, or should be, based upon religion. The basis of human dignity comes simply from the in
herent autonomy and individuality of every person. Religions should supplement that but not be the exclusive source.”

“I don’t think humans are either individualistic or autonomous,” Melanie countered. “I think all of us owe a lot to the communities we come from. You, for example, owe much of yourself to Is—”

I cut her off. “Owing the community?” I scoffed. “No. I don’t owe a community anything. My interaction with a particular community has to do, solely and entirely, with the accident of having been born into it. From that moment on, a community may impart things to me, but that doesn’t mean that I ‘owe’ anything to that group as an adult. You’re trying to create obligations by making me feel guilty. I don’t accept that.”

“But we owe what’s in our heads to the community we come from,” Melanie said, beginning to sound heated. “In my case that’s the Christian church and in yours it’s Islam. Your thoughts aren’t really your own. You’re
nothing
without the community. It’s through established practice, through engaging in the wider community, that a person’s consciousness is created and sustained.”

I started to feel a little heated myself. I felt as if Melanie was trying to set forth an argument that would push me back to Muslims when I was quite happy as I was. Since graduation I had tried very hard to make myself an individual apart. I had told my parents that they’d have to accept the fact that the
mannat
wouldn’t be fulfilled. When I ran into an excited Muslim who’d heard about the public
azan
I’d done the previous fall, I told him I didn’t want to talk about it. When I heard that the Secret Service had discriminated against a young Muslim leader during Karl Rove’s announcement of new faith-based initiatives at the White House, I laughed in amusement. I dismissed multiple invitations to pro-Palestine rallies. I found other things to do at the time of Friday prayers and used my lunch break to visit the Smithsonian and look at nudes. I read all of Salman Rushdie’s works. I wrote a play mocking the idea of the
mahdi
without worrying whether Muslims might consider it blasphemous. When I ran into a group of Muslims agitating for an Islamic state, I told them that their aims were foolish. I began befriending secular Iranians and Indians. I went to clubs. I went to Miami Beach for a getaway. I drank. I enjoyed smoking Nat Sherman cigarillos.

Now, thinking back on all that, I rebuked Melanie.

“I’d like to live as a man who doesn’t owe anything to a particular community and doesn’t have demands made upon him by that community. The poet Hafiz has a beautiful line that goes to this point: ‘Not once has the Sun told the Earth: you owe me. Look at what beauty has come from that.’”

Melanie didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she said—gently, sadly, prophetically—“The world doesn’t contain such beauty, Amir.”

She turned out to be right. The next day there was a mass execution in New York: two aerial scimitars lopped off heads in Manhattan.

Please don’t let them be Muslim!” I thought when the second airplane hit the Twin Towers.

I thought it again when a plane hit the Pentagon and we were evacuated from our offices, in case more death was to follow. I stumbled along with all the other pedestrians around D.C., looking to the sky to see if a fuselage was about to fall on us.

I spent the rest of the day watching TV at a friend’s house in nearby Rosslyn, and we continued to discuss the likelihood of the attackers being Muslim. By evening I was back at my apartment in Bethesda, resigned to the fact that the attacks had been carried out in the name of Islam. That night I put on the
ghazal
s of Ghalib as rendered by Jagjit Singh and I began writing.

I felt an unbridgeable distance from those militants across the globe that I’d long ago felt drawn to and then, more recently, had felt pity for. I had used to think that while their methods were disreputable, they were simply misguided people trying to rectify undeniable injustices around them. Now, having seen their vision of justice, and recognizing how far it was from actual justice, I felt only anger. What made their actions even more reprehensible was that they had carried out their murders in the name of Islam. In a singular moment they had destroyed all the hard work—of education and awareness—that Muslims the world over had done over the years. Just as Ittefaq’s friends had excommunicated me
solely because I was an American, bin Laden and his men had passed a death
fatwa
against the whole of the West, including the Muslims within. This showed that while the attackers waved the flag of Islam, they cared, really, for something else—something that had nothing at all to do with Islam. They were power-hungry postmodernists.

I lifted my pen for a moment and wished that someone who knew Islam well would stand up and denounce them. I wanted that denouncer to say to the fanatics that, in a world where violence is deified, there’s no difference between worshipping God and worshipping Satan—and thus Muslims might as well prostrate themselves to Iblis.

I wished someone would stand up because I knew it wouldn’t be me.

I set my writing aside and lay down on my bed, tucking my head beneath the cool side of the pillow. Soon after I closed my eyes, Ghalib’s verses lulled me to sleep: