IN THE LIGHT OF WHAT WE KNOW, by Zia Haider Rahman
Reader alert: This is
a book rave. I am in awe especially of
pages 96-101: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Princeton, Oxford, Statue of Liberty,
identity, patriotism, science, philosophy, Muslims, Jews, Christians, religion
in general -- informative (and for me transformative) five pages in a novel
that is chock full of very human feelings exquisitely expressed on every page. Be prepared to find yourself in the minds of
people you might never know otherwise.
Two Muslim men, one from Pakistan but born in Princeton,
N.J. to a Pakistani diplomat, the other from Bangladesh (East Pakistan) but
raised in Oxford, England, son of shop-keepers.
The two of them met in college and kept in touch. When together their conversations were
soul-searching, and fill the pages of Rahman’s book. One of those conversation took place in New
York in the 1990s.
The first one says he has an American passport and is
thrilled when, after returning to America from a trip abroad, he hears “Welcome
home!” from a U.S. immigration officer at JFK.
The other (who has a British passport) says he would give his life if UK
immigration officers at Heathrow would greet him that way after a trip. On impulse, they take the ferry to Liberty
Island, where they stand together in front of the famous plaque with the poem
by Emma Lazarus, a New York Jew whose forebears immigrated to the U.S. from
Portugal.
To the two friends the words seem to come from God/Allah (or
perhaps the Virgin Mary), welcoming other immigrants from Europe, the “huddled
masses yearning to breathe free …” In the 1920s and ‘30s that would include
some of the great Jewish minds of the day, many of whom ended up at Princeton. One of the men imagines that one of those minds
must have belonged to his hero, the logician, Kurt Godel (1906-1978).
Not so, says his friend, who points out that the champion of
the “true but unprovable” theorem was not Jewish but a Lutheran-born theist who
believed in a personal God. As such he
was out of step with Albert Einstein, Godel’s colleague, a secular Jewish Deist
who believed in God, but in the abstract, following the famous 17th-century
Dutch Jewish philosopher, Spinoza (and hero of my youth, after D.T. Suzuki and
Joseph Campbell.) And now? Pope Francis
says even atheists, along with believers, will go to Heaven as long as all of
us do good on earth! (I wonder if he
read this book.)
