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By Root 669 0

azan I’d done the previous fall, I told him I didn’t want to talk about it. When I heard that the Secret Service had discriminated against a young Muslim leader during Karl Rove’s announcement of new faith-based initiatives at the White House, I laughed in amusement. I dismissed multiple invitations to pro-Palestine rallies. I found other things to do at the time of Friday prayers and used my lunch break to visit the Smithsonian and look at nudes. I read all of Salman Rushdie’s works. I wrote a play mocking the idea of the mahdi without worrying whether Muslims might consider it blasphemous. When I ran into a group of Muslims agitating for an Islamic state, I told them that their aims were foolish. I began befriending secular Iranians and Indians. I went to clubs. I went to Miami Beach for a getaway. I drank. I enjoyed smoking Nat Sherman cigarillos.

Now, thinking back on all that, I rebuked Melanie.

“I’d like to live as a man who doesn’t owe anything to a particular community and doesn’t have demands made upon him by that community. The poet Hafiz has a beautiful line that goes to this point: ‘Not once has the Sun told the Earth: you owe me. Look at what beauty has come from that.’”

Melanie didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she said—gently, sadly, prophetically—“The world doesn’t contain such beauty, Amir.”

She turned out to be right. The next day there was a mass execution in New York: two aerial scimitars lopped off heads in Manhattan.

Please don’t let them be Muslim!” I thought when the second airplane hit the Twin Towers.

I thought it again when a plane hit the Pentagon and we were evacuated from our offices, in case more death was to follow. I stumbled along with all the other pedestrians around D.C., looking to the sky to see if a fuselage was about to fall on us.

I spent the rest of the day watching TV at a friend’s house in nearby Rosslyn, and we continued to discuss the likelihood of the attackers being Muslim. By evening I was back at my apartment in Bethesda, resigned to the fact that the attacks had been carried out in the name of Islam. That night I put on the ghazals of Ghalib as rendered by Jagjit Singh and I began writing.

I felt an unbridgeable distance from those militants across the globe that I’d long ago felt drawn to and then, more recently, had felt pity for. I had used to think that while their methods were disreputable, they were simply misguided people trying to rectify undeniable injustices around them. Now, having seen their vision of justice, and recognizing how far it was from actual justice, I felt only anger. What made their actions even more reprehensible was that they had carried out their murders in the name of Islam. In a singular moment they had destroyed all the hard work—of education and awareness—that Muslims the world over had done over the years. Just as Ittefaq’s friends had excommunicated me solely because I was an American, bin Laden and his men had passed a death fatwa against the whole of the West, including the Muslims within. This showed that while the attackers waved the flag of Islam, they cared, really, for something else—something that had nothing at all to do with Islam. They were power-hungry postmodernists.

I lifted my pen for a moment and wished that someone who knew Islam well would stand up and denounce them. I wanted that denouncer to say to the fanatics that, in a world where violence is deified, there’s no difference between worshipping God and worshipping Satan—and thus Muslims might as well prostrate themselves to Iblis.

I wished someone would stand up because I knew it wouldn’t be me.

I set my writing aside and lay down on my bed, tucking my head beneath the cool side of the pillow. Soon after I closed my eyes, Ghalib’s verses lulled me to sleep:

My soul is full and it would be good to drain the blood.

The problem is limits: I have but two eyes only.

BOOK V

The Reformer—Ali Eteraz

In which the author, aghast at the militant and murderous use to which Islam is being put, becomes an activist and goes to the Middle East to start