About
Welcome to Haid Dasalami’s weblog, where you can be serious if you insist, but if you’re seriously offended by free self-expression, the Jewish state, shameless tomatoes and cucumbers scandalously cohabitating, cartoons, pork, teddy bears, falafel, the pope, ancient statues of Buddha, Christian churches, music, art, and the female form—the list goes on!—you’re likely to get your laughs here by being mocked, ridiculed, and derided.
As far as I know, the moniker “Haid Dasalami” was first used in an old Saturday Night Live TV skit. That’s where I first heard it, at least. Ever the boy juvenile, I began using it—just for laughs, a few times—as a pseudonym when I started commenting on anti-jihad and counter-terrorism blogs some years back, experimenting for a time with spellings involving a hyphen or apostrophe before finally settling on the simple graphemic representation I employ today. Eventually lark became habit, and one day I realized there was no turning back—neither from the blogger persona I had created nor from the gathering darkness in dar al-harb.
I’m aware that my pseudonym doesn’t exactly lend itself to my being taken seriously, but in the end that’s precisely why I am unwilling to abandon it. When I started down this road I wasn’t in fact to be taken seriously. I was just joking around, having fun, and for a long time I was oblivious to the menacing and frightful black cloud hanging over us all, ominously portending a bleak and desolate future where all we hold dear has vanished in the dark of night.
I admire those who risk their necks to warn us about the coming storm, and compared to courageous souls like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, or Geert Wilders I’m just a joker in hiding anyway, so in that respect the name is apropos. Haid Dasalami has six grandchildren and he is not willing to put them in harm’s way, so a pseudonym and other precautions are necessary. Do I exaggerate the threat to me and my family if I publicly curse the darkness? I sure hope so, but among various death threats I’ve received over the last few years, the impaling video Abdul once sent me—accompanied by promises to boil my organs in oil—sure seemed serious enough.
In real life I am many things: husband, father and grandfather, artist, government bureaucrat, author and writer, jazz pianist, cardsharp and more. I am a Latin-rite Catholic, a certified catechist commissioned in the Church, and a lifelong student and researcher of authentically Catholic eschatology. (I know things about one possible future under the Mohammedan yoke, conditionally predicted, that you probably don’t want to imagine). In my backyard I’m known, derisively by some and respectfully by others, as “The Defender of the Faith.” I no longer teach formal classes or lecture, but I still always have a private student or two, usually catechumens or lapsed Catholics looking for direction, even though I try hard not to acquire new disciples. But I am who and what I am, and you can’t keep the light under a bushel, not even if the light is really tired of shining. In this regard I have also discovered that I am an old man. Oh, and I make a hell of a chili dog—all beef, of course, as Allah commands.
Yes, I am many things, but one thing I never thought I’d be is an anti-jihadist.
Before 9/11, I had a close Muslim friend yet I knew virtually nothing about Islam, and I cared even less. My impression then was that my friend was similarly disinterested, but we were both destined to become a lot more fervent in our beliefs, as it turns out. Images of the Beslan and Twin Towers atrocities, among numerous others, will do that to you.
More and more often now, people can be found who have decisively chosen a side, either the darkness or the light. Many like my friend have gone the way of radical Islamic extremism, either by active involvement in the dark side or by empathetically turning a blind eye—it matters not which, in the end. They submit because Islam is the faith of the ages, the faith of Abraham, and we cannot, must not, resist. Concerning myself—the esteemed Haid Dasalami, now with more fatwas on my head than Salman Rushdie—I fortuitously discovered a luminous path laid out just for me. After all, it’s no grand, noteworthy, or unique achievement to be one of Abraham’s descendants, whom God can raise up even from the ordinary stones on the ground, as Our Lord colorfully pointed out.
But behold: A greater than Abraham is here.
