Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [112]
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