I met Ali Eteraz--in so far as virtual encounters can be termed "meetings"--by chance. I was live-blogging game after game of the 2006 World Cup when, at some point during the USA-Italy match from Kaiserslautern (an improbable 1-1 tie), he made his first appearance in the comments: "we are such an undisciplined team. 22 fouls in 50 minutes is unreal. you expect fouls like that from juniorhigh players."
Note the we: Like me a relatively recent immigrant--Ali was born and raised in Pakistan and teened in the Deeply Bible-thumping South before graduating to Manhattan; I was born and raised in Lebanon, teened in New York City--we'd appropriated the United States as our own in most ways possible down to Team USA's cleats, not least because Pakistan and Lebanon generally place, in soccer's world rankings, somewhere below Liechtenstein and the Caribbean spit of sand known as St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Immigrants from soccer's lesser gods tend to identify with their adoptive land's lords, if they can field a better team. That was the case for Eteraz and me during the World Cup.
(Eteraz photo)
His second comment was not as innocent. I can't quite reproduce it here, though you're welcome to read it for yourself. His subsequent comments had the same Artemio-Cruz-on-his-deathbed quality, with the advantage that Eteraz was just starting out, and my admiration for him was born: The wit tangling with fulminations, directness that would humble a Bill O'Reilly, intelligence and originality by the megawatt, and through it all, a distinctive attempt, more often successful than not I'd say, to forge a third way for Islam (and for himself as a Muslim): none of the dull, serrated belligerence of the lunatic Salafist fringe, but none of the conventional Islam-is-for-lovers-of-peace bromides, either.
We lost touch about a year after the World Cup, though his writings popped up anywhere two or more progressive Muslims aggregated around a blog. Eteraz, it always seemed to me, would like to be Islam's Martin Luther. He's never encumbered by humility (which served him particularly well as a shield in the Age of Arrogance that were the Bush years), even less so by doubt that he could be wrong. It's not arrogance. It's not dead certainty. It's conviction, informed and critical, a form of anti-ideology that dogmatically hounds and demolishes dogmatists. He knows their language and their methods. That's what makes him, to them, dangerous.
He's not for the faint-hearted. Whether he's mocking Barack Obama's pole-length tango with Islam, hailing "state-sponsored Sufism" or shaking up the West's progressive Muslims from their torpor, he grabs throat and soul and doesn't let go.
And now he's made it. Children of Dust, his memoir of growing up in Pakistan and the United States, was published in late October by HarperCollins. (The title, inspired by the Koran, is a riff on a satanic taunt of god for creating Adam of clay.) If St. Paul had his epiphany when he fell off his horse on the road to Damascus, Eteraz had his, in reverse, when he got back on his horse and high-tailed it away from the totalitarian ideology of the madrassas where his family had enrolled him. Here he was, a devout Muslim looking to deepen his faith happily and voluntarily in a madrassa, only to discover a world as bleak as Orwell's English boarding school (in "Such, Such Were the Joys") and as rigid as a Maoist reeducation camp, but allegedly in god's name. (Listen to Eteraz describe the transformation in his interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross).
There is a Voltairean feel (the Voltaire of Candide and Zadig, which owe plenty to the literature of the East) to the outline of Eteraz's narrative down to the way he summarizes his chapters: "Book V: The Reformer--Ali Eteraz, In which the author, aghast at the militant and murderous use to which Islam is being put, becomes an activist and goes to the Middle East to start a reformation."
It fits.
I'd always imagined Ali Eteraz as a novelist. Non-fiction is too constraining for his mind, too much like the madrassa of his youth. It pays the bills but doesn't satisfy the soul. Sure enough, Eteraz describes the book as "creative non-fiction." It's a memoir, but on Eteraz's terms: he aims to mold the world to himself rather than defer to the reverse. He never gives you the sense that he can't pull it off.
Besides, it's as simple as that: Islam needs Eteraz. So does the West.
See Also:
- Eteraz's Web Site
- Pakistan: Country Profile
- Racism, Islam and Barack Obama
- What's a Madrassa?
- Fort Hood and the Prejudice of Speculation
- Best Books of 2007: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
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