WHAT A JOURNEY!

Sohrab Ahmari has had a fascinating life. Born and raised in Iran, where his parents were part of the secular professional class, he rejected the Islamic faith of the mullahs with its censorious condemnation of daily life. He found its teaching and practice full of gloom and doom as well as hypocritical and cruel. The religious police were corrupt and venal. He loved all things Western and learned to speak English from watching American movies. His idols were Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker! His uncle moved to the USA for his college education and remained there. His mother divorced her architect husband and moved with her 13 year old son to join him in 1999. They lived in Utah where he adopted a goth lifestyle and rejected the obsession of his American schoolfriends and their families with sports. As a nerd he rejected belief in God, the Mormonism of Utah and discovered Nietzsche reading his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. After reading the works of the French existentialists he adopted Marxist-Leninism and Communism. At Utah State University and the University of Washington he joined the Trotskyite Workers’ Alliance. At one point he mistakenly read the Gospel of Saint Matthew and was transfixed by the Passion narrative. He was impressed by the injustice meted out to Jesus as evil men betrayed, condemned and tortured an innocent man. His sacrifice left a searing imprint on his mind. Communism became intellectually constricting so he turned to postmodern writers who demolished all truth in favor of social justice and rejected Western civilization as a repressive apparatus designed to control people who are the victims of impersonal forces. Victims do not have to be responsible therefore there are no guardrails and debauchery was the preferred lifestyle.

On graduation he joined Teach for America and was assigned to Brownsville, Texas to teach minority students. The teachers were instructed to regard their students as oppressed victims who could not be expected to rise above their backgrounds. However Sohrab was influenced by a roommate who emphasized hard work, honesty and tough discipline. He began to see that good teaching could overcome disadvantages with good order and expecting more of his students. The identity politics and intersectionality adopted by the teacher unions failed the students whereas standards of good conduct and an objective morality enabled them to excel. His disillusionment with Marxism was hastened by reading Vaclev Havel, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell and Natan Sharansky. His fling with utopianism withered away and he became a budding conservative yet without abandoning his dissolute lifestyle.

He enrolled at Northeastern University School of Law and began writing a blog. He managed to publish several posts in prominent outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and Commentary. He found his true vocation as an opinion journalist. In graduation he joined the Wall Street Journal as a book review editor and then moved to London to become an editorial writer for the Journal’s European edition. He was influenced by Leo Strauss’s critique of relativism and the law of contradiction – that both claims to truth could not be equally true. Science could not answer the why questions of why there was something instead of nothing. What was the soul and conscience? He read The Five Books of Moses, the Pentateuch and Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph Ratzinger and decided that this was the truest account of God and man and the relationship between the two.

Through an Anglican evangelical he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and began to read the Scriptures daily. He started to worship at Holy Trinity Brompton near Harrods but was not impressed with the sermons that could be distilled into “We have been saved. How blessed we are for that! So continue to develop a personal relationship with Jesus.” They were too light for him and profoundly abstract. There was no depth to it. No sense of authority or the value of the church. What about sin, the conscience and sanctification. The worship was cheesy and irreverent. Then one Sunday he visited the Catholic church next door known as the Brompton Oratory. The beauty of the church and the liturgy blew him away. There was Order, Continuity, Tradition and Confidence in the Mass. The homily on the Holy Spirit in the Church wove together Scripture, the Church and the world in our time. He found himself praying “Forgive me. Cleanse me.” He decided to become a Roman Catholic. His instruction over six months before he was baptized was from A.N. Gilbey’s, We Believe. He developed a plan of life which included morning prayers, reading Scripture and studying the Catechism. His favorite book was The Confessions of Saint Augustine. What a journey!