By JEFF MINICK
From Fire by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith by Sohrab Ahmari, Ignatius Press, 2019, 225 pages; order at www.ignatius.com or call 1-800-651-1531.
In his foreword to Sohrab Ahmari’s From Fire by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap., writes that “St. Augustine, whose own conversion took place in an age and in a climate not so different from Ahmari’s, would remind us that history is the great destroyer of human illusion and vanities. But it is also the great wellspring of personal and ecclesial hope….We should never underestimate the power of personal witness, because without a living example of love that people can see and follow, truth is mute and sterile.”
In this account of his journey to faith and to Roman Catholicism, Sohrab Ahmari gives us this power of personal witness. Here is a man who came of age under the ayatollahs in Iran, who as a boy declared himself an atheist, who immigrated as a teenager to America, where he embraced both Marxism and hedonism, and who one day found himself entering a Catholic church looking for truth, peace of soul, and grace.
As a boy in Iran, Ahmari was raised by his father, a chain-smoking, financially irresponsible architect who drank too much, by his mother, who eventually left her husband and accompanied Ahmari to America, and by his loving grandparents.
In recounting his boyhood, Ahmari reveals a picture of Iran much different from the one presented by the American media. His grandparents, Baba Nasser and Maman Farah, practiced their Islamic faith, but it was a “private matter.” His parents were “secular, liberal people” who practiced no religious faith and who “were excessively lenient by Western standards, let alone Iranian ones.”
School in Iran presented Ahmari with a radically different take on religious faith. “It wasn’t until I started my formal education that I realized how Islam — Shiite Islam, to be precise — permeates human life.”
After giving us an excellent explanation of the differences between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Ahmari looks at the teaching of the Koran in Iranian schools, its preeminence in the curriculum, the required memorization of verses, and the disciplinary measures employed by his religious teachers. Despite this indoctrination, by the time he left Iran for the United States, Ahmari had become an unbeliever.
While living in Iran, Ahmari had idealized the West, particularly the United States. He watched American television and movies, listened to modern Western rock music, and read books in English. His father’s parting gift was a copy in Persian translation of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.
He arrived in Utah speaking perfect English and did extremely well in his studies in public school, but became disillusioned when the reality of America conflicted with the fantasies he had concocted from Western entertainment.
He wanted friends who “reverenced Pink Floyd, detested religiosity, and thrilled to tales of extraterrestrial visitors and conspiratorial G-men in black suits.” Instead, he found contemporaries, many of them Mormon, interested in athletics, dancing, and dating. He dressed in black, joined the other “Goths” in his school who shared his antipathy for the mainstream, and proclaimed himself a nihilist.
He writes that his opinions “were marked by an acute ignorance — about the Bible, about Judeo-Christianity and Western civilization, about American history and religion’s place in it. But when did that ever stop teenagers from spouting their opinions?”
In college and afterward, Ahmari experimented with other systems of philosophy and politics, Communism and existentialism in particular. Regarding both philosophies, he has much to say as to why they attracted him. He writes, for example that “Marxism’s greatest attraction was its religious spirit,” an observation that surely applies to many progressives who today seek in socialism the God they have abandoned. He read Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, some of the novels of Camus, some philosophy from Sartre, parts of Karl Marx.
From these belief systems, he moved to post-modernism. As he came to an end of this part of his journey, Ahmari read Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, an “anti-Communist masterpiece” that helped turn him away from totalitarianism.
After graduation from college, Ahmari worked for Teach For America, attended law school, and eventually found Christ, significantly through reading Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth. “It was to this one book, more than any other,” Ahmari tells us, “that I owed, and still owe, my soul and my salvation.”
Ahmari’s account of his conversion is remarkable for several reasons. First, there is his walk through the fires of atheism, Marxism, existentialism, and post-modernism. In just a few short years, this bright young man toured the pathways of philosophy and history of the last two centuries, looking for meaning in his life, an explanation for the human condition, and eventually deciding that none of these constructs provided adequate answers to his many questions.
Here in From Fire by Water we have both a summation and a rejection of the philosophical ills of modernity.
In addition, Sohrab Ahmari puts down in print with exactitude and clarity so much of what is wrong with our culture. Here are just a few samples:
On his attitude as a student, a type seen among many of our young people today: “The trouble was that I entered college convinced that I already knew everything there was to know. The point of high education, I thought, was to reaffirm and broadcast my own ideas.”
On his qualms about Islam: “There is good and beauty in Islam, to be sure….But in broad swaths of the Islamic world, the religion of Muhammad is synonymous with law and political dominion without love or mercy.”
Of his time for Teach For America and the influence of his friend Yossi, an Israeli American dedicated to his students and setting rigorous standards for them: “It really was the case that, even in the direst classrooms, teachers could make tremendous gains with students by emphasizing hard work, honesty, and tough discipline.”
On the negative side of relativism: “Downstream from relativism (and positivism and historicism) was the unraveling of civilization itself.”
On totalitarianism: “Whether they called themselves Communist or National Socialist, modern totalitarians were kindred spirits, united by the faith that man was infinitely malleable.”
On his new life as a Catholic: “Short of dying right after Baptism, the best course was to attend daily Mass, make frequent use of the Sacrament of Confession, and live by our Lady’s admonition at Fatima: Love. Pray. Suffer. Repent. The journalist and the peasant girl alike were called to do the same things. Only, one of the two was luckier than the other, for it required her far less intellectual striving to accept these teachings.”
Many of us, particularly those who are converts, take great pleasure in hearing the stories of others who have crossed the Tiber. Though the essentials of each story are often the same — a search for truth, a longing for real answers to life, a deep desire for God — the details of each individual conversion differ, and therein lies the satisfaction of hearing these stories.
Sohrab Ahmari’s From Fire by Water is an extraordinary recounting of such a journey, a confession along the lines of St. Augustine, a saga of struggle, seeking, and the working of divine grace in the human soul.
Highly recommended.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress