Homeland Elegies(22)

Most literary Muslims I would meet in the years ahead seemed to share the broad outlines of my aunt’s feelings about Rushdie and The Satanic Verses. Some of it was driven by envy, no doubt. Rushdie’s travails made him the most famous author alive. But there were those with no real basis for envy who still objected to the work. Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate—himself no stranger to fundamentalist attacks—told the Paris Review in 1992 that he found Rushdie’s novel insulting:

Rushdie insults even the women of the Prophet! Now, I can argue with ideas, but what should I do with insults? Insults are the business of the court…According to Islamic principles, when a man is accused of heresy he is given the choice between repentance and punishment. Rushdie was not given that choice. I have always defended Rushdie’s right to write and say what he wants in terms of ideas. But he does not have the right to insult anything, especially a prophet or anything considered holy.



Mahfouz’s response pointed to an enduring fact of so much Muslim intellectual life, a lasting sense that the Prophet is sacrosanct, that his status as a model of holiness and virtue in all things is not to be disputed; and therefore, that the demonstrable pruning and cherry-picking of the sources in support of what, on greater study, could only be seen as a fiction, curated for effect, that this process of “constructing” the Prophet’s identity is not an acceptable subject of public discourse; and finally—and most odd to me—that time spent on the thorny matter of the Prophet’s historicity is taken as evidence not of one’s interest in truth but rather of one’s craven dependence on the West, which—one is summarily scolded—does not itself have left any sacred symbols of its own and therefore mars and makes a mockery of the only such symbol still unsullied by the destructive cynicism and faithlessness of the European Enlightenment. Some version of a similar argument is offered in support of the eternity of the Quran and its status as the preeminent voicing of the Godhead in human language. I find both positions only more and more perplexing with the years, especially as, with each successive reading of the Quran, it’s become only clearer to me how indebted it is not only to the time and place in which it arose but also to the psychology of the one whom I cannot but see as its author, Muhammad. (For Muslims, to speak of Muhammad as the author of the Quran is a surpassing blasphemy; only God could have authored such a miracle, we are told; Muhammad was just a holy stenographer, if you will, taking divine dictation.) My own journey from childhood faith to adult certainty about the very human contingency at the heart of Islam’s central narratives is a tale beyond the scope of these pages but one that, someday, I will try to tell in all its tortured entirety. When I do, I will attempt it without an ounce of malice and may still not survive its publication. For now, let me try to stay alive and just say these three things: as Muslims, (1) we are more affected by the example of the Prophet than we realize; (2) we are shaped by the stories we tell about him in ways that elude our daily understanding; and (3) there will be no meaningful philosophical shift in the sociopolitical substratum of the Muslim world until the example of the Prophet and the text of the Quran are exposed to a more robust interrogation of their claims to historical truth. This may all sound both reasonable and unsurprising to you, non-Muslim readers, and may strike some of you, Muslim readers, as uncomfortably close to the sorts of calls for a reformation of the faith that so many have found historically ignorant at best, mortally insulting at worst. And yet the fact that I can barely say it all without some fear of reprisal is, ignorance and insult notwithstanding, a true measure of how far we, Muslims, still have to go.





3.


A rondo, then, whose recurring leading theme leaves my aunt Asma dangling midthought and drops us now in Abbottabad for its culminating recapitulation. The year is 2008. The setting is the home of my father’s middle sister, in the northeastern suburb of this almost-mile-high city in North Pakistan, where in three years’ time, Osama bin Laden will be found and killed. To anyone who knew much of anything about Pakistan, the fact that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad when he was killed signaled the obvious. Abbottabad is a military town, a kind of Pakistani West Point, filled to the brim with soldiers, cadets, officers. My aunt Ruxana—a name without any connection to the Prophet’s circle, although her only son is one of the two Mustafa cousins I alluded to earlier—lived there for most of her adult life, married to a colonel in the Pakistani army who was also a lecturer at the military academy. I’d been to Abbottabad many times when I was growing up, and what always struck me about the place was its histrionic sense of order, reflecting the civic ideal I heard so much about whenever I was in my parents’ homeland: stability and prosperity guarded and ensured by the armed forces. Abbottabad was like a commercial for martial law, the sort of place not only where the trains ran on time but also where the call to prayer didn’t sound either as loud or as persuasive as it did elsewhere. To me, the notion that bin Laden had been living there for six years without the direct support of the Pakistani military was utterly implausible.

My father and I were in Abbottabad visiting Ruxana in October of 2008. She was then still alive, though already sick with the leukemia that would eventually kill her. It was my first time back in Pakistan since 9/11, and I found a country very different from the one I remembered. Any love or admiration for America was gone. In its place was an irrational paranoia that passed for savvy political consciousness. Looking back at that trip, I see now the broad outlines of the same dilemmas that would lead America into the era of Trump: seething anger; open hostility to strangers and those with views opposing one’s own; a contempt for news delivered by allegedly reputable sources; an embrace of reactionary moral posturing; civic and governmental corruption that no longer needed hiding; and married to all this, the ever-hastening redistribution of wealth to those who had it at the continued expense of those who didn’t. There was much talk of conspiracy on that visit in 2008, the usual stuff I’d been hearing for years—about 9/11 being an inside job, perpetrated now by American intelligence, now by the “Jews”; or the 2005 earthquake in Swat caused by American bombings; or the convoluted attempts to construe Bhutto’s assassination as the result of US meddling—but I’d resolved no longer to argue with my relatives or storm out of family dinners.4 During that trip, I resolved to stay calm through the crazy talk, to stanch my outrage, to listen for an emotional logic driving the thoughtless and obsessive suspicion. What I heard as I listened with new ears was fear. I heard the worry of a world treated to seven years of military and political bullying under the cover of “fighting the terrorist threat.” By 2008, it was clear there would be no end to the bloodshed that the Bush administration had started based on pure fabrications, and it was easy to understand the terror that motivated the infuriating stupidity of my Pakistani relatives: that they might find themselves next up in the round of imperial slaughter, future victims of this new era of unending American vengeance.