Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

  Rushdie insults even the women of the Prophet! Now, I can argue with ideas, but what should I do with insults? Insults are the business of the court…According to Islamic principles, when a man is accused of heresy he is given the choice between repentance and punishment. Rushdie was not given that choice. I have always defended Rushdie’s right to write and say what he wants in terms of ideas. But he does not have the right to insult anything, especially a prophet or anything considered holy.

  Mahfouz’s response pointed to an enduring fact of so much Muslim intellectual life, a lasting sense that the Prophet is sacrosanct, that his status as a model of holiness and virtue in all things is not to be disputed; and therefore, that the demonstrable pruning and cherry-picking of the sources in support of what, on greater study, could only be seen as a fiction, curated for effect, that this process of “constructing” the Prophet’s identity is not an acceptable subject of public discourse; and finally—and most odd to me—that time spent on the thorny matter of the Prophet’s historicity is taken as evidence not of one’s interest in truth but rather of one’s craven dependence on the West, which—one is summarily scolded—does not itself have left any sacred symbols of its own and therefore mars and makes a mockery of the only such symbol still unsullied by the destructive cynicism and faithlessness of the European Enlightenment. Some version of a similar argument is offered in support of the eternity of the Quran and its status as the preeminent voicing of the Godhead in human language. I find both positions only more and more perplexing with the years, especially as, with each successive reading of the Quran, it’s become only clearer to me how indebted it is not only to the time and place in which it arose but also to the psychology of the one whom I cannot but see as its author, Muhammad. (For Muslims, to speak of Muhammad as the author of the Quran is a surpassing blasphemy; only God could have authored such a miracle, we are told; Muhammad was just a holy stenographer, if you will, taking divine dictation.) My own journey from childhood faith to adult certainty about the very human contingency at the heart of Islam’s central narratives is a tale beyond the scope of these pages but one that, someday, I will try to tell in all its tortured entirety. When I do, I will attempt it without an ounce of malice and may still not survive its publication. For now, let me try to stay alive and just say these three things: as Muslims, (1) we are more affected by the example of the Prophet than we realize; (2) we are shaped by the stories we tell about him in ways that elude our daily understanding; and (3) there will be no meaningful philosophical shift in the sociopolitical substratum of the Muslim world until the example of the Prophet and the text of the Quran are exposed to a more robust interrogation of their claims to historical truth. This may all sound both reasonable and unsurprising to you, non-Muslim readers, and may strike some of you, Muslim readers, as uncomfortably close to the sorts of calls for a reformation of the faith that so many have found historically ignorant at best, mortally insulting at worst. And yet the fact that I can barely say it all without some fear of reprisal is, ignorance and insult notwithstanding, a true measure of how far we, Muslims, still have to go.

  3.

  A rondo, then, whose recurring leading theme leaves my aunt Asma dangling midthought and drops us now in Abbottabad for its culminating recapitulation. The year is 2008. The setting is the home of my father’s middle sister, in the northeastern suburb of this almost-mile-high city in North Pakistan, where in three years’ time, Osama bin Laden will be found and killed. To anyone who knew much of anything about Pakistan, the fact that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad when he was killed signaled the obvious. Abbottabad is a military town, a kind of Pakistani West Point, filled to the brim with soldiers, cadets, officers. My aunt Ruxana—a name without any connection to the Prophet’s circle, although her only son is one of the two Mustafa cousins I alluded to earlier—lived there for most of her adult life, married to a colonel in the Pakistani army who was also a lecturer at the military academy. I’d been to Abbottabad many times when I was growing up, and what always struck me about the place was its histrionic sense of order, reflecting the civic ideal I heard so much about whenever I was in my parents’ homeland: stability and prosperity guarded and ensured by the armed forces. Abbottabad was like a commercial for martial law, the sort of place not only where the trains ran on time but also where the call to prayer didn’t sound either as loud or as persuasive as it did elsewhere. To me, the notion that bin Laden had been living there for six years without the direct support of the Pakistani military was utterly implausible.

  My father and I were in Abbottabad visiting Ruxana in October of 2008. She was then still alive, though already sick with the leukemia that would eventually kill her. It was my first time back in Pakistan since 9/11, and I found a country very different from the one I remembered. Any love or admiration for America was gone. In its place was an irrational paranoia that passed for savvy political consciousness. Looking back at that trip, I see now the broad outlines of the same dilemmas that would lead America into the era of Trump: seething anger; open hostility to strangers and those with views opposing one’s own; a contempt for news delivered by allegedly reputable sources; an embrace of reactionary moral posturing; civic and governmental corruption that no longer needed hiding; and married to all this, the ever-hastening redistribution of wealth to those who had it at the continued expense of those who didn’t. There was much talk of conspiracy on that visit in 2008, the usual stuff I’d been hearing for years—about 9/11 being an inside job, perpetrated now by American intelligence, now by the “Jews”; or the 2005 earthquake in Swat caused by American bombings; or the convoluted attempts to construe Bhutto’s assassination as the result of US meddling—but I’d resolved no longer to argue with my relatives or storm out of family dinners.4 During that trip, I resolved to stay calm through the crazy talk, to stanch my outrage, to listen for an emotional logic driving the thoughtless and obsessive suspicion. What I heard as I listened with new ears was fear. I heard the worry of a world treated to seven years of military and political bullying under the cover of “fighting the terrorist threat.” By 2008, it was clear there would be no end to the bloodshed that the Bush administration had started based on pure fabrications, and it was easy to understand the terror that motivated the infuriating stupidity of my Pakistani relatives: that they might find themselves next up in the round of imperial slaughter, future victims of this new era of unending American vengeance.

  But I digress.

  To resume: the setting is my aunt Ruxana’s home in Abbottabad, a bungalow-style construction dating from the Raj, its spacious rooms appointed with flourishes of British style. In the living room, the cherry wainscoting gives way to a fading William Morris wallpaper of boughs and branches; over the various fireplaces scattered through the house are mirrors and candelabra and mantel clocks; and, in the guest room where my father and I are staying—my mother isn’t feeling well and opted to stay back with her parents in Rawalpindi—the taxidermied head of a blackbuck mounted over the bed. Ruxana has made us an extraordinary dinner of shaami kebabs and okra masala and tandoori naan baked in the clay tandoor oven out back. Her head is covered with a shawl, but not for modesty’s sake. She has no hair left. Her light brown skin is turning yellow-gray. She moves with the labored effort of one summoning strength she doesn’t really have.

  Ruxana returns from the kitchen, drops a new round of hot naan into the bread basket, takes her seat alongside her husband, Naseem, a short, stout man with a straight, strong back. His speech, like his mustache, is clipped and confident. I have never not seen that scowling smirk on his face, not a look of contempt but of a man enamored with control. Even his arm as he lifts the cup of lassi his wife has prepared bears the self-curtailment of a life made sense of through military drill. My cousin Mustafa, twenty-nine, a bank teller, is here. His sister, Yasmin, thirty-two, a pediatrician, is not. The conversation has turned to the bombings that have become a fact of daily life in Pakistan. In his usual peremptory manner, Nasee
m explains the dilemma in brief, declarative sentences. The problem is simple, he says, though no one wants to admit it. Pakistan created this cancer in its fight with India; now the cancer has turned on its host. I ask him for clarification, and this leads to a vigorous lesson in Pakistani foreign policy, circa 2008:

  “We are stuck between two enemies. Afghanistan to the west. India to the east. The history of politics in this country is defined by our borders. India, through Kabul, has meddled in our affairs from the beginning on the western front. I hope I don’t need to explain to you what they’ve done to us along the northern and eastern fronts.” He paused, waited for me to respond. I shook my head, affirming that, of course, I needed no explanation of the existential threat Pakistan has always felt along its Indian border. “So what are the means of control? The militants were willing to fight our fight in the north. We befriended them along the western front to keep our influence alive in Afghanistan. But when you feed a monster, it grows. When it attacks you—because it always will—you have only yourself to blame.”

  My father was hunched over his plate on the other side of his sister, her arm resting on his shoulder as he ate. She gazed at the side of his face and brought her finger to his cheek. Feeling her caress, he looked like he was going to cry.

  “The problem is the children,” Naseem continued. “The madrassas are filled with them. Filled! Madrassas teach them, feed them, fill their heads with talk of jihad from the time they’re four and five. By the time they’re ten they want to fight! We’re filling the country with boys like this. That’s where this endless supply of young men is coming from, young men happy to blow themselves to bits.” As Naseem stopped on a thought, I reached for a kebab from the plate at the center of the table; I broke up the patty into pieces as he continued: “Tactically, I understand it. It makes sense why we did what we did. In theory, it’s a playbook taken from the Americans. Terrorism worked well for them in Central America, El Salvador, Nicaragua. What we didn’t account for was the difference in proximity. Using a strategy like this so close to home was bound to have an effect it would never have had for the Americans.”

  “That’s not true, Abu.” It was my cousin Mustafa, who sat on the other side of the table. He was holding an apple from which he’d yet to take a bite. The assertion had been softened by an upturned, halfhearted interrogative tone. Like his father, Mustafa was short and stout, but there was nothing rigid or severe about him. He cowered in the shadow of his father’s carefully groomed imperiousness. Since the onset of his late adolescence, I’d suspected Mustafa was gay. For the better part of the following decade, I hoped—arrogantly, no doubt—to find some way to broach the subject with him, somehow to convey that, should he need support from within the family to live his truth, whatever that might be, I could be counted on. No such conversation ever transpired. Two years ago, I heard from someone in the family that he’d left Pakistan and was living in Holland with a male partner.

  “How so, beta?” Naseem asked.

  “The Americans put off the payback. But it came, sooner or later.” He shrugged as he spoke, seeming almost to retract the thought as he offered it. When he was finished, he took a bite of the apple in his hand and studied his father’s face as he chewed.

  “But you see—that was tactical genius. September eleventh was an act of war that changed the history of how war will be fought as long as there is fighting to be done.” He looked at me, then at Father, whose gaze—now glaring—had lifted from his plate. “I’m not saying it was a good thing, Sikander. I’m talking tactics. From a pure military point of view. You have to be able to see the genius in it.”

  “Genius? What genius, Naseem-bhai?” Father’s tone was sharp, a clear contrast to the affectionate address. “Look at the chaos it started.”

  “Who truly started the chaos we may not agree,” Naseem replied just as sharply, though the ensuing silence seemed to give him occasion for regret. “I was talking purely from a battlefield perspective, but yes, you are right to signal the difficulty in managing an entire campaign of such tactics. That is what has failed here in Pakistan. Which is what I was trying to say before. About the cancer we created and that has consumed us.”

  Father looked down into his plate. His agitation was apparent. Ruxana stood and moved her hand gently along his shoulder. “Anyone want more naan?” She was looking at her husband.

  “I’m fine,” Naseem said in Punjabi.

  “I won’t say no, Rux,” Father said to her as if to oppose him. “They’re too good.” She smiled and turned to me.

  “I’m still working on this one,” I said, showing my plate. Ruxana headed for the kitchen, but stopped at the doorway and looked back at us: “Get the arguments out of your system by the time I get back,” she said sweetly.

  “No argument here,” Naseem said, forcing a smile. Once she was gone, he turned to Father again: “You see, bhai, the effects of war are always personal, but in fact, war is the least personal thing there is. Which can make it hard to see objectively.” Father was scooping food with his morsel of bread, feigning absorption in his meal. When he looked up, chewing, it was at me. There was a warning in his eyes.

  I didn’t heed it.

  “What would it mean to manage a campaign like this effectively, Uncle?” I asked.

  “Do you know Clausewitz, beta? The trinity of war?” I shrugged. Clausewitz was only a name to me. “Three parts of war: the individual, the circumstance, the collective,” Naseem said, using his middle, ring, and pinkie fingers to count out the categories. “You can reframe each of these in various ways. The individual soldier; the unpredictability of the situation; the state. Or passion, intensity, the emotional case for war; chance—like winter coming too soon for Napoleon’s campaign into Russia; and the reasoned, political will to finance the fight. Mastery of the first two parts of the trinity is what we saw on September eleventh. The last part, the collective—that is what has yet to be properly worked out. Al Qaeda is too dependent on the individual, who in turn is too vulnerable to the variations of chance circumstance. What is needed is a state structure flexible enough to encourage the sort of individual agency and creativity we saw on that day. This is what can transform the innovation into a possibility for collective and political action.”

  “Okay. I understand, but what does that really look like?”

  “We’ve seen it before. The North Vietnamese. Sparta. But the best example is still the sunnah.” I stole a look at Father, knowing this was likely to get a rise out of him. Sunnah was the word we Muslims used for the customs of the Prophet and his Companions, the traditions outlined by the practices of that first community of believers, whose example was still seen as a viable template for possible utopia in much of the Muslim world. “I’m not referring to it from a religious point of view per se. You can take that or leave it. Here in Pakistan, we tend to take it—but all the same. My point is the vision of a community that does not bifurcate its military and political aspirations. The question of policy will always contain the question of warfare. ‘War is just politics by other means,’ to bring it back to Clausewitz. Yes, of course, the question of warfare is ultimately always subordinate to that of civil order, but it is wrong to think of it as a separate question. You cannot make the world as you wish to see it; you cannot keep it the way you want it, not unless you are willing to fight to do it. That is the meaning of war. And the more a society understands this reality, the better. The human being is a battling creature, beta. That will never change. To pretend otherwise is to delude ourselves. We fight as a way to make meaning of our lives. That is why protecting the citizens against war is always a recipe for long-term civil disintegration. The nation must be brought into the military mind-set. Muhammad, peace be upon him, did this better than anyone ever has. Not only was he a good man, the best of men, he was also a great military man, one of the greatest. The fashions come and go, and right now, it’s not in fashion to think this way. But history is clear. The real leaders, the ones we r
emember—they are the ones willing and able to lead their societies straight into the fight.” I was tempted by a rejoinder to his mention of Sparta: What had they given the world but their unfortunate victory over Athens? I knew what his reply would be. To him—to so many Muslims—Athens had nothing on Mecca or Medina; for them, Muhammad was Socrates and Pericles and Themistocles all rolled up into one. They saw the Prophet and his first followers as the wisest, most courageous of our species ever to step upon the earth and imagined their assembly—attendant dramas and all—as a polity without peer, worthy of eternal emulation. I knew no occasion to sing these predictable praises would be forgone. I held my tongue.

  Taking my silence for encouragement, Naseem cited the great American presidents as proof of his point about the fundamental military basis of great leadership: Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt. I recall thinking it was starting to sound rehearsed, as if he’d shaped what he was now saying for other captive American ears before mine. Bear in mind, this was back in 2008, still a full half decade before the eruption onto the international stage of ISIS and its black standard bearing the insignia of the Prophet’s personal seal. In returning to all this, in writing it out, I find myself wishing Naseem and I had been able to have that conversation, the one about ISIS. The principles Naseem was outlining were, of course, central to the disgusting social and military project that would come to bloom in Syria and Iraq like toxic desert dogbane, a demonic, self-referential refraction of that first Muslim community Naseem invoked, the original Companions of the Prophet recast as sex-crazed purveyors of snuff films whom even Rushdie’s satirical genius could not have imagined. That would have been a discussion worth having, but it wasn’t meant to be. I would never see him again. By summer of the following year, Ruxana was dead, and Naseem wouldn’t outlive his wife by much. While taking a walk in the Shimla Hills above the city three months after his wife’s passing, he would succumb to a myocardial infarction. His body, like his wife’s, would be buried the same day—per Muslim custom—meaning no one from my family had time to get back to attend either funeral.