Children of Dust
Children of Dust is a book about the evolution of the author from Abir, Amir, in reformist blogger Ali Eteraz. In his book, he tells his story since childhood from a village in Pakistan and ending his life in the United States and his attitude to Islam. The story of Eteraz’s life makes it possible to consider in detail the complexity of the lives of many Muslim children and the process of their search for themselves and relation to their faith.
Most of his childhood Abir and his family were very poor and lived in squalid conditions in the poor neighborhood. Children of Dust tells the story of child abuse and neglect, poor system of primary education in rural areas of Pakistan, sadistic attitude of religious teachers for children and their devastating impact on the life of a young person. (Afeef J., 2009)
Islam, of course, played an important role in Eteraz’s story that neglect led to behavioral problems that arise from them. He exerted violence against Muslim girls and this is reflected in the future on his relationships with women. Of course, Islam permeated his life, but the author himself admits that his religious education was not ideal in Pakistan.
His early education in religion did not include broad concepts in Islam. The only formal education he received in various madrassas, where his parents sent him to study the Holy Quran. In his book, Eteraz suggests that his parents sent him to these madrassas because they had no alternative. (Waterman D., 2010, p.48) Madrassa is an Arabic school, in which there is a physical, psychological and sexual abuse of young boys.
Eteraz tells about the fear that he felt and sadistic teachers, who brutally punish Muslim children. In 1991, Eteraz’s family finally gets the opportunity to move to the United States due to the fact that Abir's father received medical residency. (Schilken R., 2009) The study of Islam in America was not enough as well as he received in Pakistan. When he came to America, mosques and religious life for Islamists was somehow linked to the political and cultural connotations that are sometimes relevant today. History Eteraz life in the USA is an example of the lives of many Muslims, who immigrated to America, having grown up there and studied in school and then in college since the 1980s up to nowadays.
Parents impose Islam as a tool, which will protect him from the social problems of US society. Abir started attending high school in Alabama. In America, after communicating with his US peers, Abir starts to worry about losing the favor of Allah. This results in the fact that it is becoming increasingly fundamentalist in their Islamic religion. In the last part of the book, Eteraz writes a lot about how he became an Islamic fundamentalist.
According to him, the story of his life is the influence of radical Islam to him and redemptive ending. What Eteraz writes about Muslim college activists is the actual experience for many Muslim students in the United States.
Koran supports all forms of corporal purity, one must be clean before Allah in body and spirit. In the US, Abir is surrounded by young women who openly manifest their sexuality. Abir reads volumes of Hadith (a collection of sayings of Muhammad) to organize his growing radicalism in the matter of faith. (Afeef J., 2009)
After moving, his mother, who previously practiced relatively free understanding of Islam, turns sharply against all forms of Western secularism, such as movies, dancing, games, music, television and the arts in general. In this regard, she begins to wear the hijab (head-dress), to emphasize that she is a Muslim woman. Islam and its divergent beliefs were central to the everyday life of Eteraz’s parents. In Mecca, they rubbed the chest of their son against the black corner of the sacred Kaaba, and Allah named him Abir ul Islam.
At the University, Abir wanted independence and decided to change his name from Abir ul Islam to simply Amir. At the same time, sexual desire of Amir stands in conflict with his piety, and the search for his wife becomes relevant. As a student of the University, Amir describes his relationship with the Muslim women. Eteraz finds its relations with Muslim exciting event because it enjoys the power of a woman he does not get fully because of his religious restrictions. (Eteraz A., 2009, p.246)
Building a healthy relationship with another person would require a lack of power, which was not typical for Eteraz until he, as an expat in the Middle East, produces its first real friendship. His relationships with the Muslim women were deplorable - Muslim girls serve only for sexual purposes as an unattainable ideal, and, thus, it makes possible to feel power over another person. He declined to communicate with non-Muslim girls and came to the realization that he needed to find a good, pious Muslim girl, which eventually led him to travel to Pakistan. (Afeef J., 2009) His visit to Pakistan becomes a defining event, due to which he returned a changed man.
At the University, Amir has new neighbors in the Muslim room. Since they do not drink and do not go to parties, young Muslims spend their time watching movies. One of these films is rather an ambiguous film The Siege. On the one hand, suicide bombers are depicted as pious Muslims; on the other hand, the film exposes the martial law in response to terrorist acts. (Waterman D., 2010, p.49)
It makes the Amir reflects on their faith. While many Muslims around him praising Osama bin Laden, Amir - still believing himself a descendant of the Caliph, Rushdie's Satanic Verses he regards as a real threat, as they cast doubt on the divine status of the Quran. Rather than to burn the book, Amir hides it in the library in the section Art History knowing that devout Muslims do not face it there. Book Four Amir became President of the Association of Muslim students, considering himself “Muhammad to the MSA”. However, it is understood that it is a farce. (Eteraz A., 2009, p.247)
When his family immigrated to the United States, he, like many other Muslim children in the United States was faced with strict rules of his family and his Muslim upbringing, while trying to become an ordinary American teenager.
A few years later, in 1999, Eteraz back to Pakistan, but found that his old house moved to the Taliban, and many of the teens in his village acted as a suicide even during training. Thereafter Eteraz escapes from Pakistan. When he returns to the United States, he tries to understand Islam is to teach people that the fundamentalist, radical Islam terrorists is not the only way and that Islam is a great religion, in which you can really trust. The final book tells the Amir, who is in Kuwait, and chose the Arab world for his ambitious project of Islamic reform. He once again and eventually changed his name to Ali Eteraz.
He lost everything else, including his legal career, his money, and his family. Amir prolonged contact with his host, Ziad, strongly influenced his ideas of reform and allowed him to convert to Islam at a simple level, without all of the political and intellectual overtones.
Many common events in the journey of Ali brought many discoveries that allowed him to conclude that he was obsessed with the wrong covenant, which pushed the primary Covenant of Alast on the back burner. (Eteraz A., 2009, p.333)
This book is a memoir of a Pakistani-American. This story tells how Eteraz coped with too stringent imams at Madras in his village in Pakistan, how he accompanied the Tablighi Jamaat around the United States and how after 9/11, Eteraz life changed.
The book Children of Dust gives some idea of the humanity of the American Muslim, Ali Eteraz and ways of formation of his personality and attitude toward Islam. Telling his personal story that is full of experiences and challenges, Eteraz shows what faces American Muslim.
Works Cited
Afeef , J. Book "Children of Dust": From Madrasahs to Middle America. Patheos. 2009. Web 1 June 2016
Eteraz, A. Children of Dust : a Memoir of Pakistan. New York: HarperOne. 2009.
Schilken, R. Book Review: Children of Dust by Ali Eteraz. Blogcritics. 2009. Web 1 June 2016
Waterman, D. Ali Eteraz’s Children of Dust. Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 2, No. 2. 2010. Web 1 June 2016
