I am a Dark Elf
Ali Eteraz
More than any maulana, my morality is a by-product of a dark elf named Drizzt Do’Urden. Surely most do not know the name. Nor can they be expected to because Drizzt is not a man. He is not even real. He is, in fact, the main character in R.A. Salvatore’s legendary Fantasy Series for The Forgotten Realms.
Who is Drizzt? Drizzt is exile. Drizzt is immigration. Drizzt is assimilation. Drizzt is self-hate. Drizzt is victim of racism. Drizzt is brilliant. Drizzt is accomplishment. Drizzt is what Bigger Thomas wasn’t, what Malcolm X was but for a moment, and what Muhammad is not permitted to be. Drizzt Do’Urden, the Dark Elf, also known as the ‘drow’, is honor.
When around the age of fourteen, newly arrived in America, I first read about Drizzt in The Crystal Shard, defending his friends with his double scimitars, fighting pirates, trolls, orcs, and the nefarious assassin Artemis Entreri (he with the soul sucking dagger), I only saw Drizzt as a warrior. We were at a mosque. I remember it was my cousin’s birthday and we were supposed to be reading portions of the Quran in celebration. But I placed The Crystal Shard under the rehal (Quran holder) and went seafaring with Drizzt and his friends: Cattie-Brie, the red haired archer; her adopted father Bruenor, a blacksmith dwarf; and Wulfgar, the Norse Barbarian, armed with the glorious warhammer, aegis-fang (crafted from mithril). The more I read the more I realized that I was a nerd and that I wanted to be an expert fighter with dual scimitars.
But then I noticed that there was far more to Drizzt that drew me to him; specifically, the mirroring of his personal history with mine. His was a tale of a man in search of a home.
Drizzt grew up in the Underdark, in an underworld city called Menzoberanzan, amidst the dark-elves, called the drow. The drow had once been serene forest-dwellers, but having lost their empire had been forced underground, where their skin turned the color of night. Their hair turned white. Their eyes turned black. They shrank in size. They became evil and succumbed to the meanest of tribalism. Menzobaranzan came to worship a violent — double-L named — goddess called Lloth. Their city was organized by houses which were ranked in power according to how many acknowledged killers each possessed. It was a place given to violence, tyranny and dogma. Drizzt was born to the ninth house, which by a stroke of breeding fortune and much machination, was ready to massacre many of the houses before it. Drizzt’s expertise at swordsmanship and stealth had set him up to be an instrumental component of the future plans of the Do’Urden house. But Drizzt could not come to commit one of the heinous deeds assigned to him. A little thing called morality sprang up in him. Not pity; plain honor. He was immediately exiled into the Underdark, where he was alone and preyed upon, until he finally resolved to leave the Underdark and come up to the outerworld despite the age old taboo of a dark elf not being welcome.
During the time the drow had been pushed into the Underdark, great myths of their destructive powers, of their demonic fury, had spread in the world. They were feared and reviled and no one wanted them around, because no one believed they could be good. When Drizzt emerged to the sun his skin couldn’t bear it and he had to shield himself with layers of clothes. When he came upon people he was insulted. Others simply fled from him or plotted against him. Yet alone in a new world he withstood his adversaries and their simple-minded racism, and the rest he won over with his demeanor, intelligence and friendship. Still, he realized that he wouldn’t find complete acceptance in the urban centers and he took to the far away mountains called The Spine of The World, where he was befriended by a grumpy old dwarf, his adopted daughter, and he began to live with the outcasts of the world.
Through all these tribulations what set Drizzt apart was the fact that he was not satisfied with an honorless life. He longed, even in a world which called him ‘drow’ as an insult, villified his entire race, and treated him spitefully, to be…elegant. He learned their language and spoke it better. He traveled among them and learned their customs such that the ladies of Silverymoon invited him to their city. He shielded those that needed help and rose up defiantly against assassins — both of the body and spirit. He went to the Sylvan Elves, his ancient cousins, and helped them revitalize their forests (because Drizzt was a Ranger, and therefore, an environmentalist).
In short, Drizzt taught me all I needed to know to be a Muslim immigrant in a strange new land of non-Muslims and — thankfully for a lower income kid — it cost me nothing monetary to befriend him. He waited for me at the library, ready to impart his wisdom — which wasn’t theoretical or pedantic, like the sermons at the mosque, but actual. Manifested in behavior. A morality that was living, walking, talking. Action. Through his troll-killing, dragon slaying, unicorn saving, I realized that fighting was just a metaphor for righteous struggle. That righteousness and bravado were not mutually exclusive. That there was power in good and pleasure in gracefulness. That a man could give and grant forgiveness.
There is a lesson in this for Muslims. Use literature to teach honor.
See, usually in order to teach youth the proper way of daily behavior, Muslims recite hadith about Muhammad relating to moral righteousness. Such lessons generally begin cryptically with the assertion “that Muhammad was the walking Quran” and end in an altogether disinterested youth. This is not going to work. The first problem is that the hadith are the jurist’s handmaiden, not the adolescents cup of tea. Second, the books of sirah, those biographies of Muhammad, never expose, or permit him, to have normalcy. No childhood, no flaws, no sadness. Muhammad is made into insan e kamil, the perfect man. This, too, is a problem. A hero isn’t he who begins or ends in perfection; a hero is simply he who struggles with life. In fact, a hero struggles with life more than the average man. As Camus said, we love literature because in literature men find culmination. With the Prophet, especially as he is depicted in the religious literature, there is no culmination — the guy is infallible from the very start.
Permit me two examples of what I mean. The first is from a sirah that many young Muslims in the west are given during adolescence. It is written by Martin Lings. In this biography, which is some 40 or 50 chapters long, Muhammad is married by the 5th or 6th chapter and action has completely moved onto this adult life. Pardon? What use does a 14 year old have for what happens to a grown up man? All the biography ends up doing is to enforce — reinforce — the idea that childhood is either irrelevant or unworthy of treatment. This creates the condition for children to loathe their current state of childhood jouissance and aspire to be adults sooner than they are psychologically capable. They seek to do things to prove their adulthood. Stupid things. Their psyche is not adequately prepared to engage in politics, to discuss Islam, but they do it any way, and it is no surprise that they are unable to resist when the oligarchs tell them that Islam is about loathing infidels and changing the nation-state model to reintroduce the Caliphate. They want to turn into stoic and taciturn leaders because this all they have seen in their role-models. Many end up turning into wannabe mullahs.
The second example are those few pieces of literary trash – mostly in Arabic and Urdu — that do detail the childhood of the Prophet. These books start with the anecdote that when Muhammad was a child, walking under the sun, a cloud perpetually hung over him to keep him cool. This is immediately followed by the anecdote that at the age of eight, two angels came down at night, cut open Muhammad’s chest and washed his heart with milk from Paradise so that he became purified. This literature is so intent on demonstrating Muhammad’s uniqueness that it makes him irrelevant. Muhammad comes to be someone who never told a lie. Well of course not! He had his damn heart washed by angels! A child’s logic is exquisitely simple: since no milk has purified me, I don’t have to stop lying. Muhammad becomes the goody two-shoes that no one wants to be.
Some parents, like mine, do realize that their children have no interest in the literature they are distributing, so out of desperation they just hand the youth entire hadith collections. The parents figure that since a hadith is a narration by Muhammad, the child will be able to become like Muhammad by reading them. Nevermind that a hadith is only a narration ascribed to Muhammad and that the hadith are as complicated as American legal case-law, with as much diversity, error, and chaos. Thus hadith about being good are set along others relating to inheritance laws. Thanks for the lesson folks! I’m an expert at drafting Islamic wills at the age I am having wet dreams!
Given all these problems was it any surprise that I opted to become a devotee of a pointy eared purple eyed freak named Drizzt Do’Urden? It was far easier to make and be friends with Drizzt than with Muhammad. So what if Drizzt didn’t have a flying horse called Buraq (he did have a big cat) or couldn’t take you to see God? Fact is, Drizzt was the better friend, and that really is all an adolescent needs.
In conclusion, if you are Muslim in the west, it is my suggestion that when you have children, give them Drizzt Do’Urden (and Cadderly the Cleric also — a sort of imam who talks to plants). Drizzt is moral and good and righteous and he knows how to negotiate a hostile world and assimilate with a new society even while rejecting evil — and all this without having to theorize, or rhapsodize, or perform hermenutical gymnastics.
How is it that surrounded by wannabe mullahs I managed to learn about honor? I guess because I read literature that touched me.
Ali Eteraz is the author of the prose work Children of Dust, forthcoming on October 13 with HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins. The American Library Association calls it “elegantly written” and the poet Fatima Bhutto insists it is “an astoundingly frightening, funny and brave book.”