A God Who Hates Read Free

the waste of life that is the young Muslim who blows himself up in the midst of a crowd of schoolchildren. He kills twenty-eight people and himself because he is entirely deluded by the lie, forced on him by his God, that the deaths of these children will buy him entry to paradise and his houris. Isn’t that young man striving to identify with that ogre, that God who hates, squatting on the hilltop in that melancholy village? Does he not hope to control and influence others through fear? If we want to transform others like the unfortunate young Muslim suicide bomber into reasonable human beings and preserve our world, we first have to help them see their ogre clearly and show them how to exchange their God who hates for one who loves.

2.

The Women of Islam
     
    PEOPLE HAVE OFTEN asked me what turning point brought about the dramatic change which altered the course of my life. I believe my life really began in the third grade when I learned to read. From that point on, I developed an insatiable appetite for every book that came my way. By the time I got to the fourth grade, I was getting lost in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gone with the Wind,
and the mysteries by Agatha Christie. My teachers, family, and family friends were generous in their attention and treated me as if I was a gifted child because of my precocious reading habits.
    Even then, I loved to talk and talk and talk. I believe that the first thing that encouraged me to develop my talent for writing and public speaking was a comment made by my Arabic literature teacher. One day, in one of my exercise books he wrote, “I like your common sense and discernment. You have talent which you must nurture by reading until it matures. The road is a long one, but the fruit of the cactus emerges in all its sweetness from among the prickly spines.” So, I was to be, with his encouragement, “the fruit of the cactus,” the gift of a prickly plant, and his lines encouraged me to begin writing. The way my family spoke about me provided the rest of the push I needed toward learning. When I heard my father talking about me, as he sat with his friends in the evenings, he sounded is if he were speaking of someone possessed of an unusually high degree of intelligence. I was embarrassed to hear him speak of me in that way. His lavish praise placed a great burden of responsibility on me and, from that moment on, I never wanted to disappoint him.
    My maternal grandmother was my ideal and played a major role in my life. My most precious memory of her is the stories she would regale us with when we were little and gathered around her every evening. She showed me the worth of a woman, as well as how one could be trod under the heels of one’s husband in the Muslim world. She was a strong woman, and, had she been allowed the opportunities I enjoyed, she would have been the Arabic Margaret Thatcher. She was also a sad woman who could be harsh, but for a long time, I never knew the secret that lay behind the profound sadness in her eyes. By the time she was in her early twenties she already had three sons and two daughters. A smallpox epidemic swept through her village and carried off a large number of its inhabitants. It stopped at her door and took away her three sons, leaving only her daughters. My grandfather awoke in the night to find himself enveloped not in sadness, but in shame. He had become a “father of daughters,” and, of course, my grandmother was held responsible for his disgrace, as she had borne him those daughters.
    My grandfather was the local
mukhtar
—the head of the village—and his position did not permit him to remain without sons. Since he held my grandmother responsible for his disgrace, within a week of the death of her sons, my grand-father forced my grandmother to approach one of the village’s best-known families and ask for their beautiful daughter’s hand in marriage … for him. By her own accounts, my grandmother made a very good job of describing