Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [119]
I took another sip of tea. It made my insides hotter than my skin, and yet my body felt cool and light. Suddenly a great smile broke out across my face and grew into a grin. Then came outright laughter.
“What?” Ziad said, looking down at his pants. “My fly isn’t open.”
“If you walk past all the Arab-and Islam-themed casinos on the Strip in Las Vegas and then get on the walkway leading from the Luxor Hotel to Mandalay Bay, there are these two talking camels. One night we had a conversation—”
“Wait. I’m not following,” Ziad said. “And I don’t remember putting hashish in the tea.”
“I’m not high,” I replied. “Let’s just say I didn’t come all this way without a scheme tucked away in my dirty imperialist mind.”
“Oh, a conspiracy. Now I wish you were high,” Ziad said. “Let’s take this inside. I don’t want to be executed.”
4
The aim of my plan was twofold: freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. If Muslims could believe what they wanted without fear and say what they wanted without reprisal, I was confident that the intelligent and humane among them would rise to the top and excise the extremist cancer from Islam.
To accomplish my goals I had come up with a plot involving a shaykh, a sculptor, and a princess.
The Shaykh
A few months earlier I had heard that a scholar who had previously risen to great heights among fundamentalists had taken an important turn. In front of an audience of men and women who were clamoring for the death penalty for any person who converted from Islam, this shaykh—on satellite TV no less—had thundered, “This is not liberty!”
It was an important statement, because until now Islamic reformers had been unable to demonstrate the principle of liberty through the Quran and other Islamic texts. Whenever we made any citations or references to liberty, our detractors quickly dragged us down in a battle of citations, while freedom of conscience was further curtailed. This shaykh, however, had transcended the problem by turning liberty into an unimpeachable truth that didn’t need to be proven. It just was. It was a monumental thing.
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