SOHRAB AHMARI: FROM ISLAM TO ATHEISM TO CATHOLICISM

Writing  for the National Review, Madeleine Kearns, comments on From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith, by Sohrab Ahmari, an Iranian, and his journey from Shiite Islam, to atheism, agnosticism, and finally to Catholicism. Ahmari had come to hate the brutality and repression of Islam to such a degree that he rejected it entirely in favor of Marxist atheism. He explains:

·       “Living in an Islamic theocracy — where God appears in the form of floggings and judicial amputations, scowling ayatollahs and secret police — has a way of souring one on things divine. Years later, I read a wise young Iranian dissident who argued that if the Islamic Republic collapsed one day it would leave behind the world’s largest community of atheists. This is a perfectly plausible theory.” https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/04/08/sohrab-ahmaris-road-to-catholicism/

Consequently, we hear of many Iranian conversions to Christianity, once they move to the West. We wonder why this doesn’t seem to be the case among many other Muslims. Perhaps it is because the Mullahs resorted to the strictest repression to enforce their control over a formerly secularized Islam? We can only hope that this same repression will cause the formerly secularized Turks to rise up against the brutal Islamist Erdogan.

Why the attraction to Marxism? Kearns provides an illuminating explanation:

·       …the primary attraction of Marxism, much like that of today’s identity politics, is the same as that of religion itself: All offer a structure of meaning, an anthropology of the human person, and a means to salvation. In this sense, such ideologies are but secular religions. Under Communism, humanity is not separated into sheep and goats but into oppressed and oppressors. The individual is not a sinner betrayed by his own will and redeemed through Christ, but a saint betrayed by the powerful and saved through revolution and redistribution. While Christianity calls for the voluntary transformation of the individual, Communism seeks the involuntary transformation of the collective. The former seeks to persuade, the latter to impose.

Impose? Yes! This has been the hallmark of every Marxist regime. No need to wonder why! What led to Ahmari’s conversion? Kearns suspects that there must have been many factors. However, she only offers one:

·       As an ambitious London-based journalist for the Wall Street Journal, Ahmari reported on an Afghan smuggling ring in Istanbul, where he began to see the abuse of human rights as irrefutable evidence of the reality of sin — and, more, as a reflection “in externalized and concentrated form [of] my own miserable spiritual state.” In this regard, the key to Ahmari’s conversion is, presumably, the key to most conversions: humility.

Humility isn’t a manufactured virtue. It’s a realization of our true and broken moral status. It is the essential self-perception that should accompany every honest freethinker about the depths of our guilt and shame, but it is an awareness that is so destabilizing that it causes us to repress it with a blanket of positive affirmations and “good deeds” to the contrary. If only this truth became a trumpet blast that would drive us all to the Savior to find His mercy!