by Ali Eteraz
Since 2001 there had been many instances where the world had thought that an Islamic “Martin Luther moment”—something as dramatic as Luther’s nailing of the ninety-five theses on a church door—had occurred. The instances that I’d heard about so far, like the woman who’d posted a women’s rights manifesto on the door of a mosque in West Virginia, had all been staged and therefore were of only limited value. In my estimation, though, a genuine Martin Luther moment had occurred in the Middle East with the televised declaration of the shaykh—and yet no one seemed to be paying any attention.
My first goal, thus, was to get an audience with this shaykh, learn more about his positions, and then publicize his courage to the rest of the Muslim world. Once Muslims saw someone of the shaykh’s stature—an Arab in a white robe who considered himself a fundamentalist—taking such a stand, it would (I dared hope) create a flood of other shaykhs echoing similar sentiments. I would then create an institute, a think tank, for the shaykh and his newfound followers. Their task would be to issue combative declarations against extremists, to challenge the reign of those who declared other Muslims apostates, and to write persuasive edicts linking Islamic texts with notions of equality, liberty, and community.
My institute would change Islam for the better.
The Sculptor
The shaykh represented freedom of conscience, while an Arab artist I encountered—the sculptor in my threefold plan—represented freedom of expression.
When I was living in New York, someone sent me lithographs by an aged Arab sculptor. The artist had cast the human form into stone and clay and captured the magnificence and tragedy and tension of a body undergoing tumult and torture. He did this at a time when extremists declared images to be idolatrous, when the Taliban bombed the Bamiyan statues, when the Deobandis in India declared photography haram, when mere cartoons were considered threatening to Islam. This sculptor’s courage—his insistence on affirming visual art in the face of all detractors—was inspiring. I decided that I would promote his work all over the world. His sculptures would be the hammer by which the idols of dogma and recalcitrance would be shattered.
Once the ban on images fell, all the other bans on expression would fall away as well. That was my hope.
The Princess
Obviously, all of these ventures I had dreamed up would cost money. Or, as Ziad put it, “No shit, Sherlock.”
The princess in my three-pronged approach would be the solution to that concern.
I had been following the immense amounts of money going in and out of the Arab countries. Financiers bloated upon oil wealth were buying real estate in Europe and America, including landmarks like the Chrysler Building in New York. They wanted to buy sports teams, purchase Grand Prix auto races, acquire huge numbers of the most expensive racehorses, and sponsor international tennis tournaments. They had purchased large stakes in the world’s major banks, such as Citigroup; major oil companies, such as British Petroleum; major retailers, such as Barneys and Bloomingdale’s. They had gotten involved in the American casino business: nine percent of the largest casino corporation in Las Vegas was owned by an Arab company. The largest condominium project in the world, a Las Vegas project called City Center, was also financed by Arab lenders. Arab banks had been able to muscle into the international banking scene by creating a subsector called Islamic finance, and it was the fastest-growing field of the securities industry.
“This means there’s a lot of money here,” I commented to Ziad.
“That doesn’t mean wealthy Arabs are going to give any of their money to you,” he pointed out reasonably. “They’re obviously into business.”
“I know,” I said, stepping onto my soapbox. “But you have to figure that where you’ve got rich old guys in business, you’ve got rich younger wives into charity. In the Enlightenment all the great advances in arts and humanities were paid for by wealthy wives. Rousseau was patronized by a nobleman’s wife. Voltaire had a queen. I bet the same thing will happen with Arabs and Islam: noblewomen will back universities; they’ll finance theaters; they’ll donate to museums and even fashion magazines. The super-wealthy equate culture with luxury, while activists like me equate culture with freedom. It’s a win-win for both.”
“How the hell are you going to get a princess to give you money?” Ziad asked.
“In Las Vegas the casinos are always looking for what they call ‘whales.’ These are well-known big spenders to whom the casinos make a presentation about their establishment, hoping to lure the spenders in. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to meet the shaykh and the sculptor and come work with them to establish our think tank. Then we’re just going to have to go from princess to princess until one agrees to fund us on a trial basis. If we can manage to perform well for a year, we’ll have set up the world’s first Islamic reformist institute. In the heart of the Arab world no less!”
“Interesting proposition,” Ziad said, nodding. “But if you call a princess a whale, you’ll get executed for sure.”
5
When I wasn’t with Ziad or plotting my schemes during those first few days in the Middle East, I was on the Internet.
Rogues and rebels; murderers and miscreants; polemicists and pundits; victims and women; whores and virgins. They had all flocked to it. The Internet was the place where the jihadists recruited and the counter-jihadists monitored. On the Internet patriarchs promoted ideas about the lesser station of women, and women militated for equality. Blogs and e-mail lists; forums and chat rooms; Facebook and instant messages; YouTube and MySpace. These were to Islam what the printing press had once been to Christianity. They blew the whole thing open. The Internet made it apparent that no one was in charge of Islam. It created a free-for-all. A Wild West of words and vitriol. Each Web site was its own OK Corral. Each pamphlet and video and essay was a gunfight. There were no sheriffs. There was no authority. There were no jails. There was no accountability.
I spent hours traversing its vast spaces. The aim was to find all the millions of pieces of news relating to Islam—coming from newspapers and blogs and governments—and then rearrange them in such a way that Islamic reform seemed to be the dominant force in the faith. When there was a terrorist attack, it was an opportunity not just to condemn the extremists (for their violence) and the orthotoxics (for their apathy) and the Wahhabis (for their political use of Islam), but also to popularize the names of key figures in the reformist movement, to plug their books, to market their pamphlets. All of this had to occur in the blink of an eye.
I called it “psy-ops for the future of Islam.”
Ziad called it “psycho jihad.”
6
By the end of the first week we’d fallen into a pattern: while Ziad was at work each day, I did the above-mentioned Internet surfing, wrote e-mails, put out calls to my contacts, and devoured newspapers. When he got home, we generally went out into the city.
We visited the major outdoor souk and haggled with aged sellers, went into the interiors of the large mosques, drove near the royal palaces, and ate Lebanese and Indian cuisine at fancy restaurants.
We marveled at the new building projects and counted the number of Porsches in any given parking lot.
As we drove up and down the streets, we saw migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia wearing thick overalls in various colors. They’d run out of the shade every few minutes with brooms in their hands, sweeping the sand from the asphalt under the sizzling sun. Ziad and I made a game out of trying to identify which country particular laborers were from.
“One hint I can give you to make your guessing easier,” said Ziad, “is to not guess Muslim countries. They don’t like having laborers from Muslim countries here.”
“Why not?”
“They start agitating for rights.”
As we were wandering through a mall one day, I saw some shelves of books in a corner shop that sold mostly cigarettes and candy. I went to take a closer look. Of the three rows of books, the topmost were
mostly books of Islamic creeds, discussing such things as tawhid and the virtues of fasting. The second row was predominantly Arabic translations of Danielle Steel novels. The third row seemed to be devoted to alarmist books. The one on the end of that row had a picture of Dajjal, the Islamic Antichrist, on the cover, and the pages were full of end-of-the-world prophecies and predictions.
Moving on, we passed by a clothing store, where we saw two bearded men in robes taking a young man’s cell phone from him. The boy seemed to be complaining, but the men didn’t listen to him; they just yelled at him to scurry off.
“What was that about?” I asked.
“Long story.”
“I want to know.”
“That boy just got caught out by the vice police.”
“I don’t see any police,” I said, looking around for uniforms.
“They’re undercover. Those guys with the walkie-talkies that took the phone. They’re just mall security taking their jobs too seriously.”
“Jesus. Is he in trouble?”
“No. I think he just lost his phone.”
“But why would they take his phone?” I asked.
“I guess the police have become technologically savvy.”
“Meaning…?”
“You know that you aren’t allowed to talk to a girl in public, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Sure.”
“One way kids get around the ban is with technology,” Ziad explained. “Boys and girls go to malls and hang out in their segregated corners, cell phones in hand. Then they all turn on the Bluetooth network and are able to identify one another using the screen names that show up. Basically, when you turn on Bluetooth it creates a map, and you can essentially see who’s who just by moving your phone around. It’s like finding treasure in a video game.”
“That’s amazing,” I said, marveling at how fast technology evolved. “But what about the fact that the women are covered?”
“Easy,” said Ziad. “Once you’ve identified a girl and she acknowledges you with her eyes or with a gesture, she’ll send a picture over to your phone.”
“This is incredible!”
“It’s a new technology,” Ziad said, “and it generally works pretty well, but I guess the police must have figured it out and started cracking down.”
“So they took that boy’s phone?”
“Yup.”
“Let’s follow him!” I said.
“Why?”
“That’s a recruit! We’ll tell him about our idea. How we’re trying to usher in a culture of autonomy and freedom that opposes the vice police. We won’t say we’re reformists or anything. Just concerned Muslims.”
“First of all,” Ziad said. “I’m not a reformist.”
“All right. I’ll talk to him.”
“Second of all, it’s just a bad idea in general.”
“Come on,” I urged. “Let’s just get him interested in the think tank. Don’t you see? This is a sign. Right before us we see repressive Muslims in action! It’s people like the vice police who give tacit and explicit support to all the authoritarian and extremist Muslims of the world. That boy is our ally!”
“I don’t think that boy would want to work with you,” Ziad said.
“Why not?”
“Because, look,” said Ziad. “He’s already gone and purchased a new phone.”
Turning, I saw that the boy had gone up the escalator to another floor of the mall and, with his new phone extended, was walking around looking for girls on the network map. The mall police, oblivious, patrolled their route underneath.
It upset me that there had been a resolution and it hadn’t involved me.
7
I found out that my designated sculptor was going to be overseas for a while, so I had to consign myself to waiting.
However, in the meantime I got a promising lead with respect to the shaykh. Rashad, one of the shaykh’s young supporters in England, who wrote to me occasionally, was going to be visiting mainland Europe for a few days and was willing to talk with me there. He extended me an invitation to meet him in Vienna, and when I arrived he came to pick me up from my hotel in a limousine. He was about my age, in traditional Muslim clothing, and his head was covered. He gave instructions to his driver in Arabic.
Soon we were seated in Rashad’s favorite Viennese restaurant. After making some small talk about the weather and our favorite philosophers (Nietzsche and Heidegger, respectively), we ordered our meal and began discussing reform.
“I read your seven-part series on Islamic reform in the Guardian newspaper,” he said.
“What did you think?”
“It was different,” he said warily.
“You didn’t like it?”
“It was an information overload. Muslims aren’t ready for all of that. Religions change slowly.”
“That’s why I want to meet with your teacher,” I replied. “He has a better sense of the tenor of Islam than I do. He’s in step with its rhythm.”
When our food arrived, we ate in silence for a few minutes, appreciating tastes and smells.
Eventually Rashad broke the silence. “What do you want to talk about with him?”
“I just want to ask him some questions,” I replied. “I want to have an honest discussion with him so that we can place issues of reform and moderation before other Muslims and show them that there’s nothing reprehensible in being tolerant and egalitarian. I want to talk about how he went from being a youth who was involved in fundamentalist groups to someone who is quite critical of them. I want to know what battles he has with extremism. I want to know if the Islamists trouble him, and how he responds. What sort of narrative is he building that other Muslims in the world can adhere to? Where does he stand on the separation of mosque and state? Things like that.”
“These sound like interesting subjects,” Rashad replied, “and we do talk about them regularly. I’ll speak with him and try to arrange a meeting. Perhaps someday soon you could just go over to his house and hang out with him and his family.”
“That would be wonderful,” I said excitedly, imagining a salonlike atmosphere in a large desert home. I could see myself discussing the finer points of Islamic history with an erudite teacher of moderation, tolerance, and liberty. I imagined the shaykh being something akin to Islam’s John Locke and smiled at the thought of meeting him.
“I’m a little confused, though,” Rashad said toward the end of dinner.
“Why?”
“What are you trying to get out of meeting with the shaykh? It seems that you’ll just become a glorified messenger for his ideas.”
“When they started up the Pony Express to deliver the mail in frontier America,” I replied, “the horse was as important as the mail.”
“There seems little reward in it.”
“It’s a thankless job, but someone has to do it. Haven’t you read about the heavenly rams? On the Day of Judgment they’ll put people on their backs and zip them across the Bridge of Sirat, suspended over hell, and take them safely to the other side.”
“You’re aware that those are the same rams which had been sacrificed by Muslims at the Eid festivals in this life?”
Folding my napkin with exaggerated precision, I ignored him.
We both ordered dessert, enjoying Vienna’s famed baked goods, and then parted ways. Before leaving, Rashad promised that I’d hear from him again about a potential meeting with his teacher.
As I thought back over the meeting in my hotel later on, I was pleased with the way it had gone. I hadn’t come across as desperate or as a schemer—or at least I didn’t think so. Thus the shaykh wouldn’t be threatened when he met me, and if I could earn his trust then he might be willing to chair my institute.
Optimistic now, I started doodling potential names for the think tank.
8
Once I was back at Ziad’s I felt good about the future.
Now while he was at work I started venturing out, often spending time at
the malls. Eventually I got bored with that and headed farther afield, finding and delighting in hidden souks. These were open-air markets, dusty and hot without air conditioners or fans, at which migrants from all around the world sold foods, wares, clothes, and used goods. Whereas the mostly Arab clientele in the malls wore dishdashas and abayas and niqabs, the market’s clientele wore mostly denim, topped by collared shirts and blouses. Many of the women didn’t cover, and there was no sign of any policing or monitoring. These souks reminded me of the old Pakistani bazars, seeming less formal and more jovial than any Kuwaiti mall I’d been in thus far.
The first day I discovered such a market, I walked around with a smile on my face. I sniffed cologne at one stall and then browsed through a magazine rack containing books from all over the world. I walked past a group of Filipinos, male and female, hanging about and carelessly chatting with one another. I heard clusters of Egyptians talking loudly with one another. A Lebanese man tried talking to me in English about how he was going to move to Canada. Toward the end of that day, as one of the Indian jewelers selling used watches closed up shop, his tiny companion, a dark-skinned Sinhala girl, walked past close enough for her hair to brush against his arm, and when they walked away, he momentarily reached forward with his hand and touched her fingers. I tried to pull out my phone camera to capture this moment of fleeting intimacy, this act of natural liberty, but by the time I got the lens in focus, the couple had gone.
After I got back to the apartment, Ziad and I went to a small café for dinner and I told him about my day while we waited for our food to arrive.
“It was lively,” I reported. “It was loud. There was music playing. I didn’t expect to see such…” I began, struggling for a word.