Children of Dust: A Memoir of Pakistan

Not all Muslims are Terrorists, some actually fight that. This is one's story
Children of Dust by Ali Eteraz ISBN 978-0-06-156708-7
Review by Chris Phillips
Eteraz has written an autobiography. He gives a direct and vivid gaze into his life growing up in Pakistan and as a Muslim. The book details his history from birth and before (his parents actions are recounted) to the present, the time of the book's writing. It depicts an interesting journey from his blind faith to moderate conservatism in Islam.
There are several dynamics utilized to illustrate these transitions. The story of his parent's beliefs and personal trials begins the tale but fades into the shadows by the book's end. Much as anyone else matures and moves on, Eteraz has shown how this relationship and others changed from dependence to independence with him, but also changed him.
Another dynamic is name changing. When he was born, he was named Abir ul Islam which means "Perfume of Islam." Throughout his life he changes his name a total of 5 times eventually settling on Ali Eteraz, which means "Noble Protest." Each name change defines Eteraz as a different person with respect to Islam, his family and the world in general. In turn each name describes much of what goes on in his life.
Although there are several terms and turns of a phrase that were unfamiliar to this reviewer, the definition or explanation are smooth. This style lends itself to the smooth readability of the book.
Eteraz uses the central theme of his growth with respect to Islam as it parallels his life and how he lives it. In many ways this spiritual theme lends itself to a better understanding of moderate Islam and definitely opens the understanding of moderate Muslims throughout the world. Although the case is depicted via Eteraz's personal perspective, his encounters with others throughout the Muslim world reveal that his feelings and interpretations are similar to many in that world. His responses and reactions to terrorist activities is one of horror that someone could interpret the Quran as a reason for violence.
As Eteraz deals with the issues of Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists, he maintains a "balanced" perspective. The same smooth style and logical presentation reveal more about Islam than all the "noise" created from terrorists and extremists. He tries to understand the fundamentalists since his parents are active in such a group in Louisiana. Even here he attempts to effect a rational change while acknowledging the differing opinions involved. In Book IV The Postmodern - Amir ul Islam, Chapter 8, pgs 268 - 271, he deals with the issues of a conservative Pakistani-American watching the Twin Towers collapse from his Washington, D.C. office. His chagrin that it was done by extremists claiming divine sanction is the theme throughout the final section of the book. He becomes a reformer in an attempt to change the ascendancy of these extremists into positions of power in the Muslim world. His ultimate conclusion is that reason and common sense would dictate the moderate position, but it will take dramatic changes in the cultures to make it effective nation-wise.
Eteraz is consistent and focused in describing his life in this context. He shows friends, family and lovers in a descriptive manner that is fair to the people involved but also revealing about their motivations and thoughts. This contributes to the "real" feel for the book and the writing style that makes this book work.
The title comes from an illustrative quote in the Quran 17:61. Where Iblis, Islam's Satan, refers to Mankind as "Children of Dust" and implies that all Men are beneath his notice and insignificant.
The book is excellently written. It is very enjoyable as well as informative. It should be read by anyone attempting to understand Islam and Muslims in general. Students of religion or spirituality will be enlightened and entertained by this.
The reviewer received the book directly from the author. Publisher Linbrook Press ([...]) (.95 SRP/Amazon)

Interesting and creative narrative
I loved reading this book. It was an interesting way to address one's own religious past, and one that seems very import as an experience in the immigrant American-Muslim community. If you're looking for an analytical book to gain a better understanding of the overall situation in Pakistan or "the muslim world", this isn't it. Rather, it is a very personal, deep, unique and moving story of one man's struggle through early life between Pakistan and the United States as a Muslim. You would be hard-pressed to find a story as heart-felt and at times brutally honest as this one about the same topic.

It's an excellent read that pulls you along - I strongly recommend it for people who already have a base of knowledge about Islam/Pakistan.

A look inside the very psyche of a person whose thinking is dominated from birth by Islam
So many young children take the devotions of their parents somewhat methodically--mechanically--with little desire for deeper understanding. Religion is far too complicated. Its dull rituals merely interfere with a child's desire to roam about the neighborhood and interact with other playmates or simply play with their imaginations.

Not so with author Ali Eteraz who invites us to look inside his mind, the psyche of a person whose thinking is dominated from birth by the Islamic religion. In Children of Dust: A Memoir of Pakistan, Eteraz's parents have made Islam and many of its divergent beliefs such a centerpiece of his everyday life that the impressionable youth becomes obsessed with it. When visiting Mecca, they had rubbed their son's chest against a black corner of the sacred Ka'aba, Allah's dwelling place on earth, naming him Abir ul Islam.

From his earliest memories when he is told his name Abir ul Islam means he will be great before Allah and men both on earth and after death, this young boy's life is profoundly influenced by his parents religion. He adopts it with all its strict methodic prayer rules, social compulsions, and anathemas toward those who do not practice Allah's commands. He readily accepts women wearing a chador (covering the face and body below eyes) or niqab (covering face above eyes) to hide their beauty as the Quran dictates.

Sent to a madrassa where he can memorize the Quran and thus be blessed in a special way by Allah both on earth and after death, Abir rebels against the savage beatings given readily to boys who do not recite promptly or correctly at his school. He questions more the manner in which the Quran is taught, rather than the difficulty of memorizing the entire book.

Although he blames a life threatening fever on a jinn (a devil), chances are that the author's bout with typhoid probably came from the unhealthy living conditions imposed on his family. Pops, as Abir calls his physician father, never really establishes a profitable medical practice due to intense competition from traditional Pakistani healers.

For most of Abir's early life in Children of Dust, his family is extremely poor living in squalid conditions in some of the poorest neighborhoods or districts. Here, open sewer ditches fill with household waste and animal and human excrement. These ditches barely carry away the refuse they contain. Planks of wood served as bridges to cross the ditch. Prior to Abir's illness, he had accidentally stepped into one of these sewage ditches.

In 1991 according to Children of Dust, the Eteraz family finally gains entrance into the United States after Abir's father receives a medical residency. Abir attends high school in Alabama where he becomes fearful of losing Allah's graces after interacting with American youth, both boys and girls. Now he becomes increasingly fundamentalistic in his Islamic religion.

Where the Quran upholds all forms of bodily purity including a provision where a single drop of urine on ones clothing or flesh would make the entire body unfit before Allah, now Abir's life is surrounded with young women flaunting their "filthy" sexuality in openly charming yet damning ways. Abir reads volumes of hadiths (collection of Muhammeds sayings) to help organize his growing mental radicalism.

His mother, who formerly enjoyed a freer understanding of Islam, now turns dramatically against all forms of Western secularism: dancing, movies, plays, music, pictures, television, paintings, family portraits, etc. She begins dressing in a hijab (head covering) claiming that "women who don't wear the scarf are not true Muslims."

During his college years in Manhattan, Abir concludes that Islam is the superior religious interpretation for mankind. He returns briefly to Pakistan seeking a dutiful woman with similar religious sentiments, hoping a wife will satisfy his intense sexual urges. A marriage, he thinks, will keep him faithful to the Quran's teachings and in Allah's special favor that was given him as an infant when his parents touched him against the Ka'aba seen in the picture.

Yet, Abir begins to hear stabbing contradictions to his religious formalism. He learns about atrocities committed in the name of Islam by agents who clearly consider themselves religious fundamentalists. He finds it impossible to rationalize their actions with the Quran. Bombings and killings even if they are to thwart tyranny and oppression, still cannot fit Abir's religious philosophy of life.

His mind reels at the thought that Allah could ever condone such activities such as the bombing of the twin towers on 9/11. He is jolted into passionate consolation for the thousands who died, and into abject hatred for the Islamic fundamentalists who claim responsibility in the name of his very own God.

Children of Dust is a highly intelligent read where I gained an incredible amount of knowledge about Islam, Allah, the Quran, and Muslim thinking from the thoughts of a man who has spent his life trying to align strict Muslim beliefs with the modern world. I admire him for disclosing his beliefs. His prose flows effortlessly even though it includes many italicized unfamiliar words which are cleverly explained without parentheses.

After a lifetime of thinking that such a restrictive Middle East dress code was imposed on women by tyrannical men, I actually hunted and then read, for myself, the actual verses in the Quran which describe Allah's prescriptions for dress. Although I cannot condone them any more than I can ignore the Bible's Yahweh who not only ordered but sanctioned slaughtering captives, I can now see why so many other requirements and rituals such as prayers, fasting, legal issues, punishments, marriage details, and the like, flow from a belief in the Quran as Allah's Holy Word.

Children of Dust will make you feel you've experienced living within the hot and dusty confines of Pakistan, especially its poverty stricken areas. It will open up to you the frustration faced by a true Islam, who is attempting to practice a holy life in the United States, even though his very religion is decried by the ignorant. It will appall you with the harsh task at a madrassa as youth attempt to memorize, word by word by word, the Holy Quran. It will forever trouble your mind, just like it stressed author Ali Eteraz, that the word Muslim, a beloved word which should be at the very foundation of a fundamental world order of love, has become in the minds of so many, a fundamentalist's cry for tyranny, hatred, and terror.

You Know When
Muslim Child
Being Muslim (Groundwork Guides)

A Remarkable Story!
Before Ali Eteraz aka Amir ur Islam aka Abu Bakr Ramaq aka Amir aka Abir ul Islam was born his father promised God that he would be a great leader and a servant of Islam. Children of Dust by Ali Eteraz is a memoir of the author's coming to terms with that accord or mannat.

The Table of Contents reads like a map of Eteraz's geographical and personal journey. In Book One: The Promised -- Abir ul Islam (Perfume of Islam) he is a child living in Pakistan attending a religious school (madrassa) to memorize the Quran. In Book Two - The American - Amir, he is a teen living in the Bible Belt trying to blend in with his new American peers. In Book Three - The Fundamentalist - Abu Bakr Ramaq (Spark of Light) he is attending college in Manhattan and embraces Islamic fundamentalism. Book Three follows his disappointing return to Pakistan where his old friends reject him as "too American." In Book Four - The Post Modern - Amir ul Islam he inwardly adopts anti-Islamic ideas at his new university while outwardly feigning Islamic piety. The final book, Book Five details the author's transformation to Ali Eteraz (Noble Protest) in which he becomes an activist against the violence committed in the name of Islam.

Eteraz is a gifted writer covering a wide swath of emotions in Children of Dust. When describing an unexpected emotional awakening at party in Dubai with Pakistani laborers, Eteraz lyrically writes:

It [a song] melted away my skin and sinew and made me a part of the men around me. These men who were raised from dust, lived in dust, and would eventually rest in dust. I felt one with them. I was not alone. We were many. We were all children of dust.

At other turns, Eteraz hones a light comedic touch such as this passage:

A Muslim leader [he was president of his university's Muslim Students Association] . . . had to be what others thought a perfect Muslim should be. The trouble, of course, was that I was far removed from piety . . . and therefore the only solutions were to genuinely achieve piety or fake.

As a true postmodernist I opted for the latter and called it art . . . .

The only disappointment came at the end of the book when Eteraz leaves loose ends concerning his family.

Overall, Children of Dust is a riveting story of one man's quest to fulfill his pre-birth covenant.


Publisher: HarperOne; 1st edition (October 13, 2009), 352 pages
Review Copy Provided Courtesy of the publisher and FSB Associates.

Amazing Book - I will give it 10 stars.
I have not been moved by a book in a long time, but I was touched by this book. It portrays Muslims as humans, who have the same problems as everyone else - money, education, employment, struggle of an immigrant, and then they have additional struggle of finding a balance between their religious identity and the culture of their adoptive country. It provides insight into that struggle, and how it would be so easy to loose that battle. The book touches some raw nerves in the Muslim Diasporas, it airs some dirty laundry, which no doubt will irk a lot of Muslims especially the one inclined towards fundamentalist ideology, and it highlights the conflict that Muslim youth face.

The book is amazing because it makes no apologies, and there is no negativity. Ali Eteraz does not demonize the religion or his personal conditions. He makes us all realise that even when things are bad, there is beauty and normalcy. The book is beautifully written. It is not about black and white, it is the story of various shades of grey. It is a sad book, but it is also joyous book. The book does service to Muslims in America that many scholars and fist thumping Muslims have been unable to do. Children of Dust, is a story of humanity, and it makes Muslims human, again.