Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [113]
Amir ul Islam rasped and clawed at my gesture.
Then he was gone.
7
Abstaining 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.
8
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 inherent 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