Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [125]
“Or what?”
“Or maybe you’re just desperate to be relevant.”
9
After my illuminating—but discouraging—talk with Ziad, I started working even harder on Islamic reform to compensate for the doubts I felt about its usefulness.
I started by setting up a legislation monitoring system for Muslim countries—a system that would track reformist laws in Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and Egypt to start with but would eventually expand to all fifty-five Muslim-majority countries in the world.
The initial focus of the project was to be in the area of criminal law. The goal would be to identify all the various activists who favored repealing the anachronistic Sharia—or Islamic law—punishments, such as stoning, amputation, and lashing. I would then put those activists in touch with reformist scholars of Islam, who would help provide them with a religious basis for changing the law. In other words, the system would facilitate an alliance of reformist theory and action.
I printed out hundreds of documents in various languages, paged through history books by the score, and began translating articles by lawmakers and political leaders who supported progressive initiatives. I read the platforms of large political parties, compiled the names of major liberal clerics in every country, and trolled the Internet for reports by international human rights agencies.
The model for this project was the collaborative activism that had led, a couple years earlier, to the Women’s Protection Bill in Pakistan. In 2006 a number of activists in Pakistan gained sufficient influence over legislators and leaders that they were able to get repealed certain Sharia-based punishments that had been imposed upon women by General Zia ul Haq decades earlier. The reform effort centered, particularly, around laws that imposed the punishment for adultery—stoning—upon a woman who was raped. The repeal effort had been nearly thirty years in the making but had stalled in the face of pressure from conservative clerics. Eventually, a number of reform-minded religious scholars allied themselves with the feminist cause, and that alliance gave the bill the new energy that got it passed.
My view was that since many of the reforms in the Muslim world—such as the Women’s Protection Bill—required changing laws that had originated in some inappropriate interpretation of Islam, the most helpful thing for social activists would be to have a place where they could connect with religious scholars who could provide a religious imprimatur for achieving progressive aims. In other words, I wanted to make sure that Muslims’ lives were improved, but I also wanted the credit for those improvements to go to Islam.
The project gave me a way to lose myself. I became consumed by press releases and news reports, by unjust laws and the search for religious justice. My agitation became a walking apparition that stalked the house.
Eventually my tension started to wear on Ziad. Whereas he had come home from work as early as possible when I first arrived, now he came home later and later. When we finally sat down to eat, he rarely talked, and if he did say something it was trivial. If I talked about my work, he seemed to bristle and become even more distant. We started cutting dinner short so that I could go off to my computer and he to the couch in front of TV, where night after night he fell asleep.
One night I decided to confront him. Perhaps the issue wasn’t my work but something else entirely.
“Knock knock,” I said, entering his bedroom.
Lying back with his head on the pillow, he wiggled his toes in acknowledgment. The curtains were pulled tight, and it was freezing in the room, the air conditioner on high. A pale aromatic candle burning in the bathroom sent its ghostly smoke into the bedroom. There was a big tower of novels on the bedside table, but none was open. An iPod sat next to him; though he wasn’t wearing the headphones, I could hear faint music coming from the earpiece.
“This is your house,” I said awkwardly. “I feel like I’ve taken over.”
“You’re my guest,” he said. “It’s not