The Former Life of a Writer, or Thoughts on Courage

Some have asked recently about my interest in politics - specifically the politics of international relations and radical Islam. I have tried for the three years I have been on Twitter to keep that part of my writing out of "Lichen Craig".  But...I find that passion takes me where it will, and more and more my interest in politics creeps into what began as a pro-LGBT account to promote my fiction. Judging by the inquiries, many would like to hear the story, so here it is.

In 1983 I made my first trip to France with the man who would become my husband for near twenty years. I was 21 years old, wide-eyed and curious about other cultures. I had lived in Denmark for a time, so wasn't entirely ignorant of Europe, but I had never had any interest in France in particular. I was pleasantly surprised; it was Christmas, and lights, French carols, family, people off work, holiday shopping, chocolate and great food, were everywhere. I fell in love with my adopted culture. My fiance's family was in many ways a traditional one: generations of French blood back to medieval times and probably beyond. My father-in-law had spent years in the French army fighting in Algeria - my fiance had spent time there as a child, playing with donkeys in the streets with his Muslim companions, and picking up Arabic.

One night Dominique and I decided to go to a local Middle-Eastern restaurant for couscous, and we invited his dad and stepmom along. His father flatly and unapologetically refused. He would not enter an Arab business. My fiance grumbled to me about how racist/ethnocentric his dad was, how hopelessly old-school, how stupid. We laughed and went to dinner and had a great time. Through the years his father would make many anti-Arab, anti-Muslim comments, causing us to roll our eyes. We were young - we knew it all.

I suppose it was about 1993 when I stumbled upon a book that changed my life. Journalist Jean Sasson teamed with a member of the Saudi royal family to write Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia. The book has since been reissued (2010) and has become a sort of classic of the study of Islamic popular culture. For me it was an eye-opener; I had no idea that women were treated thus in the Middle East. Stoned? Walled up in rooms to starve and die? I was horrified and sickened by the book - and permanently fascinated by a culture that allowed such things.

I began to read everything I could get my hands on, first about women living in Islam, then about Islam itself, about the histories of Islam in various countries, in Europe. During one trip to France we visited the lovely city of Clermont-Ferrand in the French mountains (Massif Central), where we saw the cathedral where the First Crusade began. For the first time I understood that it began - three hundred plus years of warfare - as a result of Moorish Muslim invasions of the Holy Land and of mainstream Europe. Islam had been overrunning Europe by sword, since the seventh century when its founder prophet taught his followers that his faith was the only answer, that the rest of the world must bow to it ("Islam" means literally "submission"), and those who refused to do it had to be forced by violence.  I later visited Poitiers, where Charles Martel stopped the Moors, two thirds of their way into the north of France in the eighth century.

For many years, I worked in various jobs and wrote/edited for extra pay on the side. I never wrote politics - I dabbled at wildlife and ecology, education, social issues, edited a local newspaper. Nothing terribly controversial. Then came 9/11.

Those of us born before say . . . 1985 or so all remember that morning well. For me, a phone call came from a friend. None of the usual cheery hello, but just, "Turn on the TV. NOW."  I turned on NBC - I remember Tom Brokaw's voice. The first plane had just hit a tower. At that point, everyone was horrified but assuming an accident, an unfortunate, tragic accident. Then about five minutes in, the second plane . . . like many others I watched it aim for the tower and plow into it; my jaw dropped. I still remember my brain scrambling, desperate . . . trying hard to connect dots. The slow and horrible realization that this was no accident.  I remember Tom Brokaw going silent for what seemed like forever but was probably a full half-minute or more, while his brain - and that of his producers no doubt - did the same gymnastics mine did. After that I remember little, save spending the morning curled on the corner of the sofa with a Kleenex box and my heart heavy with indescribable grief, staring at the TV screen, my day's work neglected.

Most of us were changed forever on that day. I know I was. I started to reread the books that had interested me. And I read more. I began to talk to people . . .to Muslims I knew, to those who had left the religion. Life went on and years passed, and I continued to obsess and gather knowledge. I read the Koran, I read books discussing and interpreting it. I read others on Christianity and Judaism, trying to understand why this level of violence occurred in this one of the three faiths of Abraham.

Back in about 1998 I had made a visit to Paris, and during the course had to visit a magazine in the Muslim section of the city. I had visited there before, and had enjoyed the friendly street vendors and exotic products from the Middle East, spices in the air, colors and sights. I had loved the restaurants. I was looking forward to revisiting that neighborhood of the city. As I stepped out of the subway into the light, I was hit in the face by the unexpected sight of a sea of burkas - for blocks and blocks as far as I could see. I strained my ears to hear a word of French, but could detect only Arabic around me. Men stared as I stepped carefully around people on the sidewalk. I was petite, young, blond, white, dressed modernly - and feeling very vulnerable. I had heard that Paris had changed and that the Muslim population had established closed enclaves unfriendly to non-Muslims, but hadn't quite understood fully until I witnessed this. It saddened me. Not because it was a piece of multiculturalism but because it was NOT. It seemed to be intent on erasing Paris itself... in these streets there was no trace of the Paris I loved. I remember thinking to myself that Tehran was in the middle of Paris now. This was not multiculturalism, it was the denial of the host culture altogether. I took a cab out to avoid walking the sidewalk again.

By 2006 I was divorced. My ex let me know that my father-in-law, to whom I'd been close and who had been suffering from cancer for a time, had passed away in France. I thought back to his words, all his words, warning of the coming of Islamic extremism. The advent of the internet had allowed information to reach me and others in ways it never had before (my dad always calls it a library in the living room).  My knowledge of the subject through years had grown and ate at me. I felt a tinge of guilt at the times we had laughed at my father-in-law and assumed him outdated and ethnocentric. On the contrary, he'd obviously come to understand a few things from his years in a Muslim country. My brother-in-law had gone to live and teach in Algeria after about 1998, and after 2001 violence had risen in the streets there against all Europeans/non-Muslims. In the end, he barely got out by the skin of his teeth in the middle of the night. His lover, a young man who was Muslim but associated with Europeans and dressed and acted Western, had suddenly disappeared.

Denmark, which I had known well as a teenager, was under attack for publishing cartoons. This pained me not only because it was Denmark but because back in 1986 I'd earned a journalism degree and had the idea of freedom of expression pounded into me. The notion that anyone could be killed for expressing an idea was astounding for me. And now...Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh had been butchered on an Amsterdam street by Muslims for making a film about Islam's treatment of women. The extremist menace was growing. My ire had grown, and like any writer, I was driven to channel it into writing. The first article - and I used a pseudonym, a bit frightened of writing frankly about Islam - was about Denmark: http://europenews.dk/en/node/6517.  I felt out of my element; I had no formal education at university in politics, but I did have a brain. I saw so many around me so much smarter and more articulate. I worked daily and hard to learn from them. My article was quickly picked up all over the internet, I was paid, and best of all . . . a gentleman scholar from Denmark wrote to tell me how much he liked it and thought it was accurate.

I kept writing. I wrote on the growing enclaves in Paris. I wrote about Theo Van Gogh, about freedom of speech, about Islam and real history and the revision of history by apologists and liberals. I wrote it all - all that had eaten at me for years. Haters - yep, I heard from them. I got some death threats. I was careful never to mention where I lived. But I made friendships too . . . with people I never would have imagined. Like the young people who ran a website devoted to telling the stories of those who had left Islam at great peril to their lives and welfare. Or the scholar who worked to educate people about what Iran was pre-Islam (Iran, "Persia", was one of the last Middle Eastern areas to be conquered
by Islam). Once, he warned me about being lured to a meeting in Paris with a source who turned out to be a former soldier of Sadaam Hussein's inner guard; that man meant me harm. I talked with people who grew up in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, and had left the religion. They passed information on to me for stories. I did a guest stint on a national radio show a few times to talk about the rise of radical Islam in the U.S. I felt safe doing it because no one could see my face. I manned a blog called ASKEW, focusing on the plight of victims of Islamic ideology - Muslim and non. I got thousands of hits a week. (I took it down two years ago, when the host went out of business.) I got letters in response to my articles that I will never forget - like the one from a physician in London, a Muslim, who said my articles often made him angry but that he could find no flaw in my arguments or research, to his frustration. In the end, after writing for a few years, I was asked to speak at a large conference in Florida, side-by-side with people I so admired. I was flattered and astounded that they considered me one of their own, an "expert" on radical Islam.

But I had to admit to myself - and it was hard - that I hadn't the courage my associates had. These people lived daily looking over their shoulders, lived daily with death threats from Islamists. Some lived under guard, behind electric fences that made a sort of prison around their properties, in Western countries far from their places of birth. Many had been rejected from their Muslim families for their truth-telling. I hadn't the courage to show my face in Florida and risk my safety.  And truth be told, it was all taking a toll on me, mentally and emotionally. It wasn't interesting anymore; it was damned depressing.

You see, the more you learn, the more you really look into the truth of radical Islam, the more you realize what it is. You hear the comments of people bent on being politically correct and you stifle laughter: if they only knew how out of touch they are, how astoundingly dark the truth is. How insidious the danger is as it silently creeps further into cracks in Western culture - cracks made up of naivete and of the political double-speak of politicians who have no idea what kind of threat they pave the way for. I became more depressed the more I realized and understood; I hadn't the spirit for it.  I am tough - I've lived a tough life and well - and it was the first time I saw a lack in my character, the first time I saw a limitation to my own courage. It was humbling.

I had to quit. I had to find my sanity again. I had to find light in the world, to balance the darkness I'd wallowed in for those few years. And so I turned to writing about animal training and animal husbandry, editing nursing journals, and finally, writing a novel. That was 2012.

Now...I see what is happening in the world, and in Europe, and I find my own lion awakening again. Once again, I am inspired by the courage of those working to disseminate the truth about Islam's most radical followers - radicals are actually the Muslims who follow Islam as it is really written. (While "moderates either delude themselves or struggle within themselves to find an alternate "interpretation" of a faith built upon the musings of a cold killer and his god.)

This time I have balance - I write on other things; I hold onto my emotional well-being jealously. I'm older, wiser, and I know the toll writing can take. But I find myself pulled back into that world I left - where top leaders of nations lack basic education on something so terribly important to our futures and consequently say the most idiotic things in public interviews. Where Shariah Law continues to creep into Western cities. Where most people blithely go about their lives talking about their latest job and love interest and post selfies on Twitter and never give a thought to the coming threat. Except in a week, perhaps, when 17 innocents are mowed down by Islamic fundamentalists in Paris. And then. . . like the masses do so many times, they pause, say "what a shame", then forget about it in a week and go back to their lives. But the Islamists . . . they aren't forgetting.  And increasingly, I find that I can't forget either, and more frequently I rejoin the conversation of those brave ones who refuse to forget it even for a day.

It's a struggle that goes to the heart of who I am. The written word has defined me since I was 12 years old, when I found my voice as a writer. To me, it represents freedom, the singing of a soul. The thought of it being silenced fills me with a dread and fury that I cannot adequately describe to you all. And so, I have to continue to pick up the pen, like those braver souls around me, and light my one small candle - and tell the unpleasant truth about an unpleasant subject. For indeed, JE SUIS CHARLIE.