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Wrote the following this past summer as a prelude to starting work on my book. Would appreciate any feedback I can get (now that I've decided to finally get down to work on it)...

Preface

Baghdad, July 12, 2006

After two hours staring at my laptop, I’ve decided there is no right way to begin this story. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that there is no beginning to speak of at all, and there will not be an end, at least not in the conventional sense of story-telling where all the threads and arcs and motifs of a well-constructed tale disembark at Resolution Station like long-lost siblings and fuse in a moment of filial reunion. There will be no such cathartic passage in this yarn. This story is plucked from an on-going saga, like a strand of power cable ripped from a whole, its exposed copper ends still sizzling with electric charge.

It’s fitting, I think, that there are no bookends to my story, no neatly packaged narratives infused with the standard elements of plot and structure. This is not a novel, or a memoir, though it has a pinch of both genres. Writing about war, and there will be plenty of that in the pages that follow, inevitably means writing about history. But this is not historical prose. Writing about terrorism, that nebulous word which I promise the reader will be used sparsely, leads ineluctably to discussions of culture and civilization. But this is certainly no treatise on social anthropology or a psychological study of peoples in conflict. As a logical progression then, writing about the War on Terrorism could mean writing about the history of culture and civilization, which is really what all this mess comes down to, but unfortunately that’s not my intention either.

Today is July 12, 2006, and today I’ve decided to tell a story. It’s as simple as that. Don’t ask me why I chose today to start. You could just as easily ask the Universe why it chose 13.7 billion years ago to go Bang; you won’t get an answer. I am a Muslim. But I can’t claim to be writing about Islam because I am an atheist (some might argue that being an atheist negates me being a Muslim but trust me, it doesn’t: if you’re born a Muslim, there is no escape, even if you deny the existence of God and maintain that the Prophet Muhammad was nothing more, or less, than a really smart guy). Being an atheist-Muslim isn’t why I decided to start writing today either, though one could logically conclude that being one in Baghdad at a time when Muslims are slaughtering each other could inspire a writer to write. Especially an atheist-Muslim writer who naturally becomes implicated in the bloodletting on at least two different levels: I am a Muslim, a Sunni, which, other Sunnis in Baghdad would argue, puts me in opposition with the Shia. But being an atheist means that both the Sunni and Shia consider me an apostate which, in the logic of certain Sharia courts, means I must forfeit my life (i.e. there is no escape from Islam but death and the subsequent punishment – eternal damnation, which is really no escape at all). In other words, it’s not fun being an atheist-Muslim in Baghdad.

Or anywhere else.

But I don’t want to talk about that right now. Perhaps later. I was talking about telling a story.

My father was a storyteller. It’s what I remember most from my early childhood: my father telling stories, from the Arabian Nights, folktales from the Islamic tradition, stories infused with morality but told in a way that was not didactic, the stories of my past, of my history. If I think about it now, I realize that these were tales told to signify something. I’m sure of it, here in this low-rent hotel room in Baghdad where the past is a mere smudge on my consciousness and the present moment is all I know. But the telling of those stories was meant for something more than simple bedtime distractions. More than a way to put me to sleep, they were meant to awaken me. And they did, only it took a few decades.

So here I am, a few decades later, in my hotel room in the Kharrada Out district of Baghdad, a dark, dingy place where the curtain hangs from its rod by a few tenuous threads and the dripping of the bathroom sink marks the erratic passage of time. Drip DripDrip Drip. Asynchronous rhythms are the proper beat for Baghdad; they make sense amid the senselessness of this war and they inspire a disjointed prose. Same with that other war, the one in Afghanistan. My journey to this hotel room passes through that war as well. These are the small jihads that frame the Great Battle that will be at the heart of what I’m going to tell.

That battle is about waking up; and despite the fact that my story plays out in real wars, with all the requisite carnage, intrigues and sufferings that are the proper domain of humans at war, the war I’m talking about isn’t the one devouring Baghdad’s streets, or the one slowly consuming Afghanistan, although this war, my war, is set in these strife-torn places. The wars that are the product of the War on Terror are hopeless; they cannot be won. My war is different, not only because there is hope of victory, but also because it is a war being fought on the battlefields of thought. My war is a war of identity, a battle between competing selves. It is a war playing out in the living rooms and prayer halls of the western world, anywhere there are Muslims struggling to reconcile their traditions with the realities of secularism.

That’s the real war. Everything else is dream and fantasy.

*

Dusk is a time for dreams in Baghdad. It’s when the phantoms come out, the demons of our dream-world, those bearded fanatics of CNN fantasy, the bug-eyed banshees of the 15-second clip beating their chests and howling for the blood of the unbelievers. There is a war on in the World Out There. There are belligerents and beneficiaries. As in all wars, there is suffering and there is, paradoxically, bliss. Yes. Bliss. This is the over-arching irony of War. It can be whatever you want it to be. It can even be fun.

But more on that later.

The fact is, I’m not exactly sure what War means, so if you’re looking for answers, I suggest you stop reading now. What I am certain of is that I have found my way home and this story will be about that journey.

Iraq, of course, is not my home. But it’s on the way. So was Afghanistan and Syria; Iran and Saudi Arabia; Thailand and of course Turkey – captivating and conflicted Turkey, my home in the usual sense, the place I lay my hat, where the electric bill is in my name and my landlord accepts rent payments in cash at his doorstep, with a smile that reveals rotting teeth like neatly aligned watermelon seeds. But the journey I’m going to recount doesn’t start there, nor does it start in Rawal Pindi, where I was born, or Toronto, the home I had to leave before I could discover the meaning behind the stories my father once told. You see, I’m also a storyteller. But the stories I tell are all true, as real as the occasional bursts of machinegun fire outside my window, as immediate as the armed guards keeping watch outside my hotel door.

Those are the stories I want to tell. Real stories about real people surviving the bitter realities of life. These people are the stewards of life’s deepest meanings. They have taught me how to live.

But this story is also about me, and people like me, which is to say people caught between the historic upheavals of two very different worlds. I am Pakistani-Canadian, and there is the crux of the problem. I am a Muslim-atheist-apostate, an extension of the problem. I am also a secular-spiritualist, a writer-photographer, a friend-lover, a pacifist-war junkie. We are not unique, people like us, folks caught in the hyphen. In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the whole of humanity is a vast collection of conflicted individuals, fragmented personalities stitched together by well-placed punctuation, an army of grammatical Frankensteins searching for continuity. So in a sense, this story is also about us, all of us in this Rubic’s Sphere of a world.

I know it all sounds a bit confusing but for an atheist-Muslim-pacifist-war-journalist, how else is it supposed to be?

Fittingly then, my story opens with chaos and confusion, and the writhing spasms of a world suddenly consumed by fire and brimstone. In the beginning there was darkness. In the beginning, there was nothing but the rubble and debris of a world trading certainty for uncertainty. Perfect place to begin.