Children of Dust

by Ali Eteraz

  I entered the arrival lounge looking for my family friend Ziad. Amidst the robed locals and bulky American contractors, I found him easily. He was a tall, dark-skinned bald guy, with a strong mouth and straight nose. He wore blue jeans and a University of Vienna T-shirt. His shoulders were broad, and below his shirt sleeve I could see a calligraphic verse tattooed on his arm.

  After we collected my luggage we got into an SUV—a Jeep—and sped out onto a highway that cut through the barren landscape, the road empty at this hour. The vehicle droned on the black asphalt. We went under a series of overpasses, and the moon blinked on and off.

  Ziad asked me about the nature of my trip. He thought I was in the Middle East to find employment—that was, after all, what I’d told him when I asked him if I could crash with him.

  “So what kind of job are you looking for?” he asked. “Do you want to go back into the legal field?”

  “Let’s not discuss this right now,” I said, straightening up. Truth was I had no intention of looking for a job. “How about we talk about the beauty of the night? This is such a haunting drive.”

  “Is your résumé up to date? You did some contract work for a law firm recently, right?”

  “Come on,” I said. “Is this really necessary?”

  “If you aren’t here for a job,” Ziad said, “what are you going to do for the next few months?”

  I chewed on my nails. I pinched the bridge of my nose with my thumb and index finger. My contacts felt dry and scratchy. I could feel little particles of sand going into my throat and cutting into my larynx.

  Then all my anxiety blew off and was replaced with bravado.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?” I asked in a loud voice.

  Ziad looked perplexed. “I don’t follow.”

  “Who am I?” I asked, poking my chest emphatically. “What’s my name?”

  “Amir,” Ziad said.

  “No,” I said. “No, no, no. You want to try that again?”

  “Not really,” Ziad replied.

  “Ali Eteraz,” I said. “That’s my name.”

  “Ohhh, riiight. Ali Eteraz!” Ziad’s voice became sarcastic. “You mean the anti-terrorist, anti-extremist, anti-Osama Islam blogger and activist who has written such essays as ‘Open Letter to Reformist Muslims’ and ‘The Hoor’s Last Sigh’?”

  “Yes,” I said, pounding my hand on the armrest. “That Ali Eteraz. The one who is going to foment an Islamic reformation in the Middle East.”

  Ziad blinked hard, bit his lip, fiddled with his cruise control, and sprayed water on the windshield. He didn’t say another thing till we got to his apartment.

  2

  Ali Eteraz—which meant “Noble Protest”—was my newest manifestation, the latest phase in my attempt to satisfy my congenital covenant with Islam. Ali Eteraz was the force that shattered the abracadabra of silence that had cocooned me after the towers fell in New York, that had kept me cushioned from reality during the several intervening years of law school in Philadelphia. Ali Eteraz was the one who made me lift up my head and take stock of the world at a time when I was happy simply to play my video games, make my money, and try to start a family. It was Ali Eteraz who got me involved with Islamic reform—an underground movement involving Muslims around the world who challenged the theocrats and terrorists that had taken over the religion.

  Signs of Ali’s emergence preceded his birth. After 9/11, but before my conversion to reform, there were fleeting moments—upon hearing of a suicide bombing in Madrid, say, or a beheading in Iraq, or a blown-up girls’ school in Pakistan—when my conscience would threaten to ignite. The combustion was never able to sustain itself, however.

  That had changed in January of 2006 during the Danish cartoon fiasco. Upon the publication of a series of trivial and badly drawn cartoons in an irrelevant newspaper in Denmark, Muslims rioted in multiple locations, killing innocent non-Muslims and making an intimidating show of force. That such cosmic insecurity could be prompted by such comic absurdity was the final straw. “Enough!” said Ali Eteraz at that moment. “Islam doesn’t belong to the idiots.”

  At the time I was a lawyer in Manhattan and lived in a penthouse on the Hudson. When I realized that there was a hunger in the world for someone to take a stand—a hunger that I myself had first felt almost half a decade earlier, when I yearned for a denouncer—I threw myself into my new persona. I put pen to paper and wrote outraged and incendiary essays denouncing the “snake lords” who manipulated Islam for military and political benefit, Muslims who supported the death penalty for apostates, Muslims who refused to accept that Islam promised equality of all people, Muslims who stifled speech in the name of religion—it was these Muslims who received the brunt of my criticism.

  The issue of apostasy, deserting one’s faith, was important, both to me and to the reformists. Too many Muslims who dissented against terrorism and theocracy were being declared apostates and attacked, maimed, or killed. I marshaled Islamic scriptures to demonstrate that apostates shouldn’t be punished. I studied the works of scholars past and contemporary. I corresponded with students and thinkers around the world, and together we parsed individual Quranic verses, even single words, as well as countless hadiths, all in an effort to prove to our extremist co-religionists that there was no Islamic basis for the killing of apostates. It was tedious but necessary work.

  The more I wrote, the more like-minded Muslims I met. Hailing from many countries, we became a small, decentralized network of activists. Some were well known, others anonymous. Some had prominent positions in universities, others wrote for newspapers, and still others were on the ground, right in the thick of the violence. Sometimes we kept in touch, and sometimes we pretended to ignore one another.

  We wrote to ayatollahs in Iran who had passed death fatwas upon journalists and implored them to reconsider. We wrote to Muslim governments, petitioning them to protect their female legislators. We raised funds to popularize and publicize a translation of the Quran that didn’t promote supremacism. We created a letter-writing campaign against stoning. We fought legislation in Pakistan that would have punished women as adulterers even if they were raped. We gave talks related to the separation of mosque and state in Islam. We identified all the positive strains of reform in the Muslim world and passed that information on to media figures and writers in the West.

  Our efforts were resisted by many die-hard Muslims. They called us apostates, seeing us as the radicals, and refused to speak to us.

  We were also mocked by anti-Islam bigots. Because we dared to suggest that Islam didn’t have to be authoritarian, they called us deceptive.

  All these obstacles only caused me to become even more assertive.

  Whenever I got discouraged, I told myself that in today’s age, when the most vocal Muslims had apparently lost their moral compass, being a real servant of Islam required rebuke and dissent. It required being a renegade willing to protest, to wage a life-affirming counter-jihad against the nihilism of jihadists, to toss away magazines of bullets and replace them with magazines containing bullet-points of knowledge. Only everyday Muslims like me—like Ali Eteraz—who were willing to stand up and resist the fanatics could prevent the Ka’ba’s cloak from being ripped off and murals of blood drawn upon its denuded walls. Islam could be made beautiful only when there were no constraints on the creation of beauty.

  Ignoring my work as a legal associate, I wrote more, researched harder, and spent more time on the Internet. Echoes of every bomb blast reverberated in my heart. The wails of those who were victimized by Muslim monsters haunted my soul. Islam was being destroyed, and I couldn’t sit idly by. My life became one of resistance and tension. It had no room for mundane matters. Not for laughter. Not for love. Not even for calm and relaxation. I was part of something greater than history. There was a civil war within Islam and I had every intention of my side’s winning.

  I put everything into this war of ideas and I paid for it dearly.

  I lost
my job, my apartment, all my money, and my family. And apparently I was losing my war as well: the voices of violence were outshouting the voices of reason. Finally, in despair, after many nights consorting with Khayyam’s beloved, I forswore the faith of my ancestors and told people I wanted to have nothing more to do with Islam. In my delinquency I bought a one-way ticket to Sin City, USA—viva Las Vegas!—where I lived in a ghetto, wrote poems to dark goddesses, and intoxicated myself upon ghazals. Roaches scurried through my chest hair at night, and in the morning I was wakened by boys throwing rocks against my window. It was an inglorious and miserable crash.

  Once I was in Vegas, the only activity I engaged in was to park my car at the Stratosphere at the northern end of the Strip and then walk all the way to Mandalay Bay. On the way I would pass the domes of the Sahara, the gardens of the Alhambra, the sinking ship in front of Treasure Island, the burning water of the Mirage, the sad facade of the Aladdin, the dilapidated visage of the Sands, and the pyramids of the Luxor. I repeated the walk the next night, and the next. My eyes were sunken and my soul was morose.

  My torpor would last approximately three months.

  One night, when I was at the end of my walk at Mandalay Bay, I was suddenly fixated on two robotic camels munching on fake date palms in a plastic oasis at the end of a long escalator. Their appearance was so sudden and perplexing that I couldn’t stop looking at them. I sat down on a bench facing them, the better to take them in. Then the camels spoke to me. “Go to the Middle East!” they said.

  The camels, with their pronouncement, touched off an idea in my head. Suddenly I came up with a way to resurrect the reform, and myself.

  That was when I had told Ziad I was heading over.

  3

  The next morning at breakfast, Ziad and I had omelettes with cilantro and tomatoes, along with Moroccan mint tea with the leaves still in. We took a kettle and our little green cups out onto the balcony overlooking the city.

  To the right a palatial new building was under construction. I could see dark-skinned Indians and Sri Lankans going up and down ladders. The Arab foreman sat in his SUV talking on his cell phone.

  To the left I could see the dome and minaret of a mosque. It struck me, now that it was bright out and I was refreshed from sleep, that I was in a Muslim country—and not just any Muslim country, but an Arab Muslim state. It was a stark reminder of the fact that the wheels of history had made their revolutions, and Islam, which began with Arabs but then got passed to Persians to Mamluks to Spaniards to Ottomans and Indians, had once again come back under the protection of the Arabs.

  “Doesn’t the call to prayer happen publicly anymore?” I asked, turning to Ziad.

  “Five times a day,” he replied. “Every single mosque in the city.”

  “How come I didn’t hear anything this morning?”

  “In the new houses the windows are soundproof.”

  “So what’s the point of the public azan?”

  “Gotta maintain the illusion of this being an important Islamic country.”

  “What if I—”

  Ziad read my mind. “If you want to wake up for the morning prayer? You need to do what you do in the West.”

  “Set my alarm?”

  He nodded. We sipped our tea in silence. I studied the architecture all around and I asked Ziad how he felt about the construction.

  Sore subject. He complained at length about how long the nearby towers had been under construction and how the first and second waves of construction workers had given way to a recently arrived third—fresh—batch. “They never let them stay too long,” he said bitterly.

  As the sun rose higher and we started to become sweaty, Ziad finally prodded me to talk openly with him. I began by apologizing for my behavior in the car.

  “I understand,” he said.

  “I was just trying to sound cool. I really don’t believe that I’m deserving of even an iota of respect. The one thing that I’m good at—rhetoric, basically—doesn’t merit much attention.”

  “You’re a good organizer, it seems,” Ziad said. “You can bring different types of people together.”

  “All I’ve done so far for Islamic reform is to act as a sort of cheerleader. I jump up and down with the colors of the movement emblazoned across my chest, and because I’m able to rabble-rouse and instigate, a few people start paying attention.”

  “If you’re a cheerleader, I hope you shave your legs,” Ziad said. “Because judging by your chest—”

  “Very funny. All I’m saying is that I want to make a solid contribution. Something that’s more tangible than words and Web sites and letter-writing campaigns. Something longer-lasting. Something that Muslims can touch and feel. And that’s why I came to the Middle East.”

  “Why the need to be here?”

  “It’s the heart of Islam,” I said. “The Arabs, as a whole, are considered Islam’s elite.”

  “You know that most of the Muslims in the world—nearly 80 percent—are not Arab.”

  “I know that,” I said. “But Arabs today are a symbol. They represent Islam in most people’s eyes. And symbols are very important. Back when the Abbassid Caliphate was sacked in 1258 by the Mongols, the symbols associated with Islamic leadership—specifically, the mantle and sword of the Prophet—were moved to Cairo under the guardianship of the Mamluks, and thus it was they who became the presumptive leaders of Islam. Just because of the symbols. Today the caliphate is long gone—”

  “Good riddance!”

  “—but the symbol of Islam is now the Ka’ba, and as you’re well aware, it’s the Arabs who guard it. So if there’s going to be anything that will sway Muslims in the rest of the world, it’s going to have to be stamped by the Arabs—whether I as an American Muslim, or my friends in Pakistan, or Muslims in Indonesia like it or not.”

  “Didn’t you write an essay arguing that Mecca and Medina should be made into independent protectorates like the Vatican? What was it called?”

  “Mecca Is Not a Monopoly.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “I read it.”

  “In an ideal world, perhaps,” I replied. “But to accomplish that now there would have to be far too much bloodshed. We need less of that. I’m not sure that I ascribe to that position anymore. The goal has to be to work with Arabs, not against them. This is the only hope for Islamic reform.”

  “So that’s why you had to be here?” Ziad asked, looking thoughtful as he poured another round of tea into our cups. Then, handing me a full cup, he said, “I’m about to burst your bubble.”

  “Sure. Have at it.”

  “No one here is going to listen to you,” he said with crushing finality.

  “Why not?”

  “You aren’t a shaykh and you aren’t a noble. On top of that, you’re a Pakistani-born American. To many Arabs that makes you dirty and an imperialist. This is what you are in their eyes, even if your intentions are pure as the driven snow—and I don’t doubt they are. This is all you can be to them. This is the rebuke you’ll run into the moment you go into a madrassa or a mosque and try to get some support around here.”

  “I know what you’re saying. Hell, I’m told I have no authority even among the Muslims in America—but I still persist.”

  I didn’t mention that my persistence had already led to one monumental crash.

  “I was only trying to give you a reality check,” Ziad said. “I’m not a naysayer. I may not be a reformist, but I do want to help you.”

  I took another sip of tea. It made my insides hotter than my skin, and yet my body felt cool and light. Suddenly a great smile broke out across my face and grew into a grin. Then came outright laughter.

  “What?” Ziad said, looking down at his pants. “My fly isn’t open.”

  “If you walk past all the Arab-and Islam-themed casinos on the Strip in Las Vegas and then get on the walkway leading from the Luxor Hotel to Mandalay Bay, there are these two talking camels. One night we had a conversation—”


  “Wait. I’m not following,” Ziad said. “And I don’t remember putting hashish in the tea.”

  “I’m not high,” I replied. “Let’s just say I didn’t come all this way without a scheme tucked away in my dirty imperialist mind.”

  “Oh, a conspiracy. Now I wish you were high,” Ziad said. “Let’s take this inside. I don’t want to be executed.”

  4

  The aim of my plan was twofold: freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. If Muslims could believe what they wanted without fear and say what they wanted without reprisal, I was confident that the intelligent and humane among them would rise to the top and excise the extremist cancer from Islam.

  To accomplish my goals I had come up with a plot involving a shaykh, a sculptor, and a princess.

  The Shaykh

  A few months earlier I had heard that a scholar who had previously risen to great heights among fundamentalists had taken an important turn. In front of an audience of men and women who were clamoring for the death penalty for any person who converted from Islam, this shaykh—on satellite TV no less—had thundered, “This is not liberty!”

  It was an important statement, because until now Islamic reformers had been unable to demonstrate the principle of liberty through the Quran and other Islamic texts. Whenever we made any citations or references to liberty, our detractors quickly dragged us down in a battle of citations, while freedom of conscience was further curtailed. This shaykh, however, had transcended the problem by turning liberty into an unimpeachable truth that didn’t need to be proven. It just was. It was a monumental thing.