The Price of Belonging

FOR ME, GROWING UP IN A FUNDAMENTALIST, religious dictatorship like Pakistan, I was taught to live in fear of and hate our Indian neighbors who might attack us at any time. I was taught to believe in the supremacy of one religion above all others. I was taught that this religion needed our state to defend it and we, as Pakistanis, were the ultimate expression of the arc of history that inevitably bent toward humanity, united under one God.

That spell of ideological indoctrination and belonging ruptured like a million balloons when I was authentically exposed to the writings of the great minds of the Western intellectual tradition. I felt that my intuitive conception of a higher power had more in common with Spinoza than anything I was taught to believe and was indoctrinated with in Islamic studies. When it came to religion, I agreed more with Freud than Mohammad! I had more Jewish heroes at one point in my development than Muslim heroes. From Kafka and Sarte to Noam Chomsky. After many years following the rigid path of the New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, I found myself coming full circle with the love, compassion, and flexibility of Muslim Sufis like Maulana Rumi and Baba Bulleh Shah, with whom Spinoza actually had more in common than Western philosophers like Plato or Descartes. I learned about fighting injustice, facing oppression with integrity, and deception with honesty from the civil rights activist W.E.B. Dubois.

At the same time, I learned from Franz Fanon about the idea that colonialism encourages the colonized population to aspire to the experience and position of the oppressor through its emphasis on language. I had gone to an English private school in what was a former British colony. I learned to speak and write perfect English, cementing my place among the elitist “brown sahibs” whose destiny was seemingly to rule over the unwashed, uneducated masses who spoke only Urdu. In school, we had focused more on Shakespeare than Mir