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egion—are dry and relatively harsh, a reflection perhaps of the desert environment. Life in the desert
was tough and literally a place of black and white, with few colors and little diversity until the late
1950s, when oil wealth began to trickle down. Today’s modern Arabian Peninsula is a far cry from
the environment of the 1940s and 1950s. Many homes in the Gulf have countless coffee table books
with glossy photographs of the pre-oil Arabian Peninsula. We see black-and-white photographs taken
by adventurers like Wilfred Thesiger showing rake-thin Bedouins with long straggly unkempt hair
looking incredulously into the camera lens. We hear from our elders of the intense harshness of life in
the desert. Children and adults would die at the slightest sign of illness. Dysentery and diarrhea were
frequent killers. I recently came across the photocopy of a notebook detailing the names, birth dates,
and causes of death of a group of my relatives from 1850 to the 1940s. The vast majority died of
forms of dehydration shortly after birth while others were afflicted much later in life.
The way we currently interpret our texts leaves little room for discussion or philosophizing and
wondering. Fifty years ago, you could go to mosque, read Quran, and then get on with your daily life
by going to work, earning an income, and raising your family. Today it is possible to spend your
evenings reading hundreds of fatwas, or collecting videos of suicide bombings or of executions of
“enemies of Islam,” or of atrocities committed by Westerners against Muslims in various countries of
the broader Middle East. Or listening to very moving, hauntingly beautiful recitations of the Quran.
This means that we are, each of us, able to intensify and magnify the emotions that we would normally
feel. This of course applies across the entire spectrum of human interest, from pornography to gaming,
from playing the stock market to doing research at a university. We become enclosed in a virtual
world of inhuman emotional intensity. This pattern is repeated across the deserts of Arabia and the
bedsits of suburban London, and the open fields of Rochester, Minnesota.
I remember how when my friends and I were children and teenagers, and then young men in our
twenties, we would laugh, and also cry quietly, at the desires that we were faced with, and the
commands not to lose our self-control. I had a good friend with whom I would pray during some
years and whom I would accompany to wild parties in other years. Do I want to go into the details
here? Not really, to be honest. Suffice it to say that my experiences showed me that people with a
great desire to be good, and a great desire to experience life, can easily lose their way. My friend
would oscillate with the regularity of a pendulum from one extreme to the other. One year he would
be praying and visiting Mecca and repenting, and then he would appear drunk with his arms around a
woman or two about to engage in revelry.
I think of this pendulum movement a lot. I experienced it myself in different ways. Many people I
know personally, or know of, have gone through the debauchery-and-repentance cycle. It is not
something specific to being a Muslim, or to growing up in a Gulf Arab country, or even in a Middle
Eastern country. When I was in my teens, my mother introduced me to the classics of Russian
literature. One of the greatest of Russian writers, Leo Tolstoy, was well known not only for his
debauchery but for his repentance as well. The equally great writer Dostoyevsky was also a man
obsessed with religion and questions of the divine, and yet he was a slave to his passions—