Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [73]
I believed in an Islam that was permanent, unchanging, and solid. Being Muslim wasn’t just a state of mind, as bin Laden argued, but a state of existence. Islam was all-consuming. A total condition. A state of submission to the will of the Almighty. It wasn’t a system or formula or prescription that one utilized for a little while, in order to gain revenge against one’s enemies. Islam was way bigger than that; it was the primordial state of being. Bombing and killing, marauding and murdering, taking up arms against America and Israel—these were a waste of time. They were childish acts carried out by insecure Muslims, by precisely those Muslims who judged success in life according to worldly terms.
What mattered, as I saw Islam, was the afterlife. That was the most important part of living. Bin Laden, meanwhile, was not concerned with the afterlife.
The other false prophet, a siren of secularism, the author of a book called The Satanic Verses—modernity’s anti-Quran—was Salman Rushdie. He was out to undermine every Muslim’s faith, it seemed to me.
I had heard about The Satanic Verses in Pakistan when the book, newly published, had spurred riots and book burnings. Back then I had lived in a world where all books and writing utensils were considered sacred. Ammi had often told Flim and me that “if a book so much as falls to the floor, you better pick it up; otherwise the Day of Judgment will arrive.” When I heard that people were burning a book, I become anxious. One day I even snuck out to the site of a public protest after it had been cleared and poked through the burning tires to see if something remained of the novel.
That was then. Before I learned that I was a Caliph in waiting. Now I had to protect the flock of believers. Sitting in the stacks of the university library, I read through the novel in order to figure out how to undermine it.
It was a secularist’s manifesto. The wondrous Prophet Ibraham was depicted as heartless. A girl in charge of a group of eager pilgrims cruelly led them to an oceanic death. An imam who resembled the Ayatollah Khomeini was shown as wily and power-mongering, rather than pious and honest (as any true, God-fearing ayatollah would be). The whores of Mecca took on the names of the Prophet’s wives. Finally came the real problem: the part about the Prophet Muhammad and the circumstances surrounding the revelations that became the Quran. This part suggested that first Satan and then Muhammad’s Persian scribe Salman had both tampered with the Quran, changing words outright.
It was this part that made the book vile to Muslims, because it promoted doubt. Skepticism opened the door for believers to think there was a chance that revelation wasn’t from God, that the Quran was written by men and thus wasn’t otherworldly. Widespread skepticism would be the ultimate victory for secularism, which had previously subjected the Torah and the Bible to just the same attack. What the secularists wanted—Rushdie among them—was to establish the supremacy of reason over and above revelation, something that all religious people had an obligation to resist, because if reason became dominant, the world would fail.
I had learned these things from reading the text of a 1999 lecture titled “The Changing Face of Secularism and the Islamic Response,” given by Zaid Shakir in Aylesbury, England. In that lecture he claimed that secularism was un-Islamic. Whereas God said in the Quran, “I have only created jinns and mankind that they might worship Me,” secularism demanded that we worship the earthly, the immanent, the tangible. Shakir explained that secularism forced the people of the hereafter to become the people