Ali Eteraz's Children of Dust is a spellbinding portrayal of a life that few Americans can imagine. From his schooling in a madrassa in Pakistan to his teenage years as a Muslim American in the Bible Belt, and back to Pakistan to find a pious Muslim wife, this lyrical, penetrating saga from a brilliant new literary voice captures the heart of our universal quest for identity.
Children of Dust begins in rural Islam at the lowest levels of Pakistani society in the turbulent eighties. This intimate portrayal of rustic village life is revealed through a young boy's eyes as he discovers magic, women, and friendship.
After immigrating with his family to the United States, Eteraz struggles to be a normal American teenager under the rules of a strict Muslim household.
In 1999, he returns to Pakistan to find the villages of his youth dominated by the ideology of the Taliban, filled with young men spouting militant rhetoric, and his extended family under threat. Eteraz becomes the target of a mysterious abduction plot when he is purported to be a CIA agent, and eventually has to escape under military escort.
Back in the United States, with his fundamentalist illusions now shattered, Eteraz tries to find a middle way within American Islam. At each stage of Eteraz's life, he takes on a different identity to signal his evolution. From being pledged to Islam in Mecca as an infant, through Salafi fundamentalism, to liberal reformer, Eteraz desperately struggles to come to terms with being a Pakistani and a Muslim.
Astonishingly honest, darkly comic, and beautifully told, Children of Dust is an extraordinary adventure that reveals the diversity of Islamic beliefs, the vastness of the Pakistani diaspora, and the very human search for home.
I really enjoyed this book. I think it is important to learn all we can about Islamic culture and Pakistan plays a very important role in the United States' war on terror.
Reading about it through the eyes of Eteraz was enlightening, profound, touching, and yet also humorous. Ali Eteraz takes us through his life from birth to his twenties and his journey with Islam and how it conflicts with his western education.
However, the lesson that we drew was that in order to really repent for our sins, we had to prosecute and convict ourselves in front of others, as the adulterer had in front of the Prophet and the Companions.
Besides, since we were all brothers in Islam, we had an obligation to assist one another in our psychological flagellation. That would help keep us from repeating our sins in the future.
In short:it was out of concern for our friends that we had to berate them publicly.
Briefer:humiliation was kindness
I liked that this book read more like a novel, than dry non-fiction, a tale divided into five parts. But that doesn't take away the experience of the author and what the reader takes away from this book. It was very well-written and enjoyable.
Fascinating may be an overused word, but it does describe the memoir of Abir ul Islam, as he narrates the different stages of his young life and his emotional wrestling with Islam. It should be mentioned that according to the author, the book is a work of creative nonfiction. All the events are true to the best of his recollection. However, some of the characters are composites, segmented, or transposed. We are also informed that identities and locations have been changed to protect lives, reputations, and privacy. This is a deeply moving chronicle of the struggle of a a young Pakistani who aspired to rise to the apex of his religion.
From the moment of his birth in 1981 in Lahore Pakistan, Abir was marked out as special. His twenty-two year old father had made a covenant with Allah that if he were blessed with a son, he in turn promised that his son would become a great leader and servant of Islam. And thus begins the story of Abir ul Islam, whose name translates as Perfume of Islam.
Divided into five books, Ali Eteraz weaves a great yarn narrated with grace, respect and humor. We are given a far reaching view of Muslim life in both Pakistan and the USA, as we learn about Abir`s aspirations to rise to the apex of his religion in order to fulfill his father`s covenant. Travelling with Abir, we experience his physical and psychological childhood abuses encountered as a student in the madrassa; the immigration with his parents to the United States where he attempts to deal with life in high school while his parents are embracing fundamentalism; his fully embrace of the superiority of Islam over everything else while attending college, which culminates in a trip to Pakistan in order to find a pious Muslim wife; his disillusionment with life in Pakistan and his exploration of anti-Islamic ideas at a new university where he still remains associated with Muslims; and finally being fed up with the militant and murderous use which Islam is being put, his turning to activism and traveling to the Middle East to start a reformation.
The author`s storytelling gifts are amply confirmed with his expertly voiced narration, his masterly evocation of time and place, and his eye-opening detail that at times are even surprising, if you have depended on popular media for your knowledge of Islam.
Ali Eteraz was born in Pakistan and has lived in the Middle East, the Caribbean, and the USA. He graduated from Emory University and Temple Law School, where he was selected for the Outstanding Scholar`s Program at the United States Department of Justice. He worked for awhile in corporate litigation. The author regularly contributes to True/Slant and he has published articles about Islam and Pakistani politics in Dissent, Foreign Policy, AlterNet, and altMuslim. He is also a regular contributor to The Guardian UK and Dawn, Pakistan`s oldest English-language daily.
This is the very personal account of a boy's amazing journey, as he grows out of abject poverty and superstitious Islamic devotion, to become a respected internet voice -- one that hopes to rescue the world from extremism that seems to have come from the same place as the author. There are gaps in the telling (perhaps he is saving something for future works). And so many frank admissions of deliberate guile, one might reasonably question its absolute veracity. But there is plenty here to inform those mystified by much of what calls itself devout Islam today. Including many quite genuine laughs.
