Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [99]
Savekhi. The name echoed in my head. The name of a Hindu. A non-Muslim. I was a descendant of a nothing.
With a deep sigh I hung my head. A few days later, somewhere above the Atlantic, Abu Bakr Ramaq was extinguished.
BOOK IV
The Postmodern—Amir ul Islam
In which the author returns from his disappointing sojourn in Pakistan and begins exploring anti-Islamic ideas at a new university, where he nevertheless insists on remaining associated with Muslims and ends up becoming president of the MSA
1
I had exalted the people of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan as the highest of believers. I had vested them with the authority to judge my iman, my belief; my taqwa, my piety. If only those righteous Muslims had cut open my chest and seen how the four chambers of my heart pumped blood suffused with Islam—yet they didn’t. I was sneered at by the very ones who were supposed to embrace me. I was rejected by the ones who were supposed to be purer—in character, in culture, in chivalry—than Americans. The brilliance that I’d associated with Islam just a few months earlier had now turned black. After a period of mourning and melancholy, I craved vengeance. I sought to undermine all that the presumably purer Muslims held sacred.
I transferred to a Christian university in Atlanta for my junior year and started studying philosophy. There I petitioned Dr. Conrad, a bespectacled, dark-haired professor with a Transylvanian twinkle in his eye, who wrote various books on atheism, to give me individualized lessons in a philosophic system called postmodernism. All I knew about it was that it was feared and reviled by Muslims nearly as much as Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.
I went to Dr. Conrad’s office once or twice a week for these lessons. Sitting amidst heaps of manuscripts and ancient books, we pored over the writings of the major thinkers in the movement. These included Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard, as well as related thinkers such as Adorno and Horkheimer, existentialists such as Nietzsche and Sartre, postcolonialists such as Said and Spivak, and feminists such as Irigaray and Butler. Our meetings took place late in the evening when the halls of the Philosophy Department were empty. We talked in whispers, because he didn’t want his colleagues to know about our secret soirees. “Too many damn theologians pretending to be philosophers at this university,” as he put it. It was the theologians of the world that I most wanted to undermine.
When each session finished, I would stalk home through the night like a wraith in the shadows. I felt wicked and powerful. I was Muslim become malfeasance.
Postmodernism had a singular aim: it threw off the strictures of authority. It taught you how to unshackle yourself from the discipline and punishment imposed upon you without your consent. It exposed the myriad ways in which religious forces enchained humans, often without their knowledge. It was the inverse of bondage.
“According to Lyotard,” Dr. Conrad said. “There are no meta-narratives. This is perhaps the guiding principle of postmodernism.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning that there is no grand theory. Meaning that religion is insufficient to explain the world.”
Unlike Islam, which postulated that we owed certain duties to one another because we were all children of God, postmodernism said that all relationships were power struggles and that duties weren’t inherent in our nature but were imposed by the most powerful. Thus we have a father exerting himself upon a son, and the son revolting. Men ruling women, and women recognizing their subjugation and fighting back. The wealthy manipulating the poor, and the poor rising up and vanquishing the rich. Priests imposing their laws, and freethinkers cutting those laws down like twigs. Everything was connected by conflict.
Soon I was introduced to Richard Rorty, depicted on the cover of his book as a dapper, gray-maned gentleman in a white suit. In his short book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he declared