Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [116]
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