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From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith, by Sohrab Ahmari

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Review

"Sohrab Ahmari is emerging as one of the finest minds and writers of his generation, and the story of his conversion recounted here will stay with the reader for a very long time."— Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, from the Foreword "From Fire, By Water is not so much about Sohrab Ahmari but about the work of divine grace in his soul disposed to hear God's voice calling him with immeasurable and enduring love. It is the story of the journey of faith in which it is always God Who first calls us to believe in Him and place all our trust in Him. The same humility before God, which disposed the author to respond to God's call, permits him to give a most compelling and indeed inspiring account of how he came to know God, to love Him and to serve Him with all his heart. The author's extraordinary gift for writing truly approaches, as best as one can at any given time, a true account of the incomparable beauty of the reality he recounts." — Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke "Relentlessly honest, deeply moving, Sohrab Ahmari's story of his intellectual and spiritual journey from dismissive disbelief to vibrant Catholic faith—a journey propelled by some intriguing companions, including Nietzsche, Camus, and Koestler—is food for both mind and soul and an important testimony to the invigorating power of truth."— George Weigel, Author, Witness to Hope and The End and the Beginning "This book is a testimony of Eucharistic triumph. God seeks us and will transform us if we let Him. Sohrab Ahmari's beautiful memoir will help all of us trust in God alone better." — Kathryn Jean Lopez, Editor-at-Large of National Review "Memoirs written by people who are still in their thirties are almost never of interest to anyone. Sohrab Ahmari's, however, is a grand exception. It's a gripping account of the fascinating life of someone who was born to a liberal family in post-revolutionary Iran, migrated to the United States where he and his mother lived among Mormons in Utah, made a series of bad choices, and found his way to political conservatism and a career in journalism, and wrestled with God—unsuccessfully—to stay out of the Catholic Church." — Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University "Lives — indeed, as I believe, eternal destinies — will be changed by this book. I wish every angry young man who hates God could read this moving, challenging personal confession of a still-young man who has been where they are, and who gained wisdom and release." — Rod Dreher, The American Conservative "Buy Sohrab's superb book for its story of personal faith but also its revelations of life under a farcical theocracy."— Tim Stanley, The Catholic Herald "Remarkable. . . . a book of many virtues, the most unexpected of which is Ahmari's subtle brand of comedy . . . . From Fire, by Water is a spiritual memoir perfectly suited to our time." — Jonathan V. Last, Commentary "Ahmari's memoir took me to places I have never been, and gave me a fresh look at people and places that seemed very familiar. Most especially, Ahmari's book explored a restless human heart, searching and seeking, until, quite unexpectedly, coming to rest in the Lord."— JD Flynn, Catholic News Agency "If you're going to write a book about your religious conversion it'd better be a great yarn. And if you're going to write a memoir while you're still in your early thirties you'd better be a great writer. In From Fire, by Water Sohrab Ahmari has both boxes checked. . . . Ahmari is a precise and evocative writer, which makes From Fire, by Water easy reading and good reading."— Matthew Hennessey, The University Bookman "A thought-provoking story . . . a breath of fresh air . . .The author is a gifted wordsmith, ably portraying a variety of colorful scenes and scenarios — physical and philosophical."— Lela Gilbert, Newsmax "[A] forthright and well-written spiritual memoir."— Hannah Niemeier, The New Criterion "His book offers a long, candid, and unsparing look at the young Ahmari, at the Shi'ite Muslim society into which he was born in Iran, and the secular America where he came into maturity."— Philip F. Lawler, author of Smoke of Satan; editor of Catholic World News "From Fire, By Water is a book that I would place in the hands of any young, over-confident, over-zealous skeptic. It's a book that college-age kids need to read as they flirt, perhaps for the first time, with new ideas that sound avant-garde and rebellious for rebellion's sake, but only end up disappointing." — Andrew Walker, The Public Discourse

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About the Author

Sohrab Ahmari is the op-ed editor of the New York Post and a contributing editor of the Catholic Herald. Previously, he served as a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London, and as senior writer at Commentary magazine. His work has also been published in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Weekly Standard, First Things, Dissent and America, among many other publications. Ahmari is also the author of The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts.

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Product details

Hardcover: 240 pages

Publisher: Ignatius Press (February 8, 2019)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 162164202X

ISBN-13: 978-1621642022

Product Dimensions:

5.6 x 1.1 x 8.1 inches

Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.8 out of 5 stars

31 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#3,231 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

I am a Catholic convert, who found my true spiritual home in this beautiful, complex Church in my late forties. The road back home was difficult, inspiring, scary and one of the most frightening things I have ever experienced. Mr. Ahmari’s journey therefore resonates with me on a very personal level. I have read quite a few books on conversion to Catholicism, and of course there are some very good ones out there, but this ... this is different. He tells a tale of bravery, of intellectual and spiritual hunger, of drive and an uncompromising honesty. You cannot but fall in love with the man and his journey.So, welcome home, Mr. Ahmari, we have been waiting for you for a long time.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in roots of Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian (especially Catholic) role therein. Fascinating written from the point of view of someone with an Iranian Muslim background and the deep spiritual and intellectual tradition therein

This is a gripping memoir, written by a fine writer. I devoured this tale. Mr. Ahmari's story takes us from his childhood in Iran, to his radical high school and college years in the US, and ultimately to a quest for meaning that finds him in the Catholic Church. Over and over I was reminded of Augustine's Confessions, with intellectual radicalism substituting for Augustine's nefarious peach tree. I can't praise highly enough the readable prose and compelling story told here. Great read.

"From Fire, by Water" was a complete surprise and joy for me on various levels. First of all, one appreciates a real craftsman and his choice of words and images. Mr. Ahmari has many descriptions that evoke other senses and make me thrill to underline and remember them. I never expected such a rich life from someone under 40 years of age. I am glad he chose journalism over law; his gifts of writing must not be kept hidden. When he enters a chapel and experiences the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, that's when I'm trying to read through my tears. When he's describing some clandestine human smuggling caper in which he is participating, I'm biting my nails with worry. I'm glad that Sohrab Ahmari is in our world sharing his newfound faith and worldview. Saint Augustine and Thomas Merton would be very proud of Mr. Ahmari.

Yes, I have to say I consider Ahmari a brother of sorts. I’ll confess I laughed aloud more than a few times while reading his youthful memoir FROM FIRE, BY WATER. Part of it was that Ahmari is in ways a laughable sort. Doubtless we’d all be laughable if we dared undertake such brutal self-revelation as he does. But even more than laughing at Ahmari, I laughed because his zigzagging intellectual youth traces my own nearly to a tee. Ahmari’s brave self-interrogation in this book is a mirror in which I was forced to revisit the stages I myself went through. It made me laugh at my younger self.This coincidence is odd, given the stark difference in our backgrounds. Cultural/geographical: Ahmari’s Tehran childhood vs. my suburban Wisconsin childhood. Generational: Ahmari is a young man, in his 30s; I’m in my 50s.In common we have the fact that we both became Catholic in the middle of the current decade (2015 for me, 2016 for him). But there’s much more commonality, as you’ll see.Ahmari’s tale begins with his childhood in the Ayatollah’s Iran. Raised in a middle-class Tehran household by liberal-minded parents who kept their real lives hidden from the regime, Ahmari learned English young as was infected by an admiration for all things Western, especially American. His portrait of the double lives of those around him is sketched with a swift, light touch. Still, the memory of regime menace, always present in the form of school officials and morality police, and his sense of Iran as a land stuck in fatalistic nostalgia, burning with ideological rage, a land “[smelling] of dust mingled with stale rose-water”, clearly mark off the Iran chapters of his book from the intellectually madcap American chapters to follow.At age 14, Ahmari immigrates with his mother to the US and starts a new life near an uncle in small-town Utah. In a narrative turn that will disappoint many an American patriot (and many a Mormon besides) the young Iranian is horrified by the cultural wasteland he finds himself in. His youthful dreams of the US as intellectually advanced, and deeply secular, are dashed. He’s repulsed by the numbingly shallow conversations Americans engage in when together (cars, sports, bargains, weather); he’s indifferent to his high school’s sports rituals; he’s amazed that his neighbors actually believe the Mormon scriptures; American girls his age are aggressively physical in ways he can’t process. These pages remind me of my own teenage years in Wisconsin. I never could grasp, and still can’t, Americans enthusiasm for sports. (A confession, of which I’m secretly proud: I have yet to watch a full game of American football from start to finish. Ever. To me “Super Bowl” refers to a vast toilet fixture, one large enough to flush the whole NFL and NBA simultaneously.)But just when the disillusioned young Ahmari feels himself going irreversibly sour on America, he one day comes across a copy of Nietzsche’s THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA in a book store. He buys it, takes it home, devours it on his bed, and is reborn. Never a pious Muslim, still disappointed that Americans themselves are so religious, Ahmari declares himself a Nietzschean.It’s here where I begin to laugh at myself. At age 16, in a Milwaukee book store, hardly knowing their content, I also picked up the hammer of Nietzsche in the form of two slim paperback volumes: THE ANTICHRIST and TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS. I took them home and was likewise electrified by what I found. Ahmari’s difference from me here is that he, as an Iranian from the capital, at least had some notion of what an intellectual was. My own milquetoast Midwest education hadn’t even hinted at the existence of such a class of being. My discovery of Nietzsche was thus a double revelation: 1) God was dead, as I’d already suspected; 2) one could use writing, and this thing called “philosophy”, to seize upon the world and maybe even wrench it into different forms.I followed my purchase of the Nietzsche volumes by building up much the same small library of “existentialist” writers Ahmari did (Camus, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard) though in my case Colin Wilson’s dour book THE OUTSIDER proved key in terms of suggesting new titles and deepening my sense of the crisis. Like Ahmari, as I gather from his hints, I became a brooding verbal scourge at my high school.Ahmari’s Nietzschean awakening soon gave way, via the “existentialists”, to political engagement and Marxism. For me a similar phase began when I entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study Comparative Literature. In 1987, I was sent for a month to Gorbachev’s USSR as a citizen diplomat of sorts. Ahmari ended up studying philosophy and getting involved with a Trotskyite cell. We both at this stage became enamored of the Beats, especially William S. Burroughs.These parallels may not be very interesting to readers of this review, who may find such an intellectual trajectory a bit banal, or common. If so, sorry to bore. But the pace, the concerns, the motives—to go by Ahmari’s memoir, they were nearly identical for the two of us. And what seems odd is that I went through the trajectory starting around 1983, whereas he began his more than a decade later.Further, some may find this range of philosophical and literary obsessions (Nietzsche, Marxism, William S. Burroughs) bizarre for two men who were to end up Catholic. But I don't find it odd in the least. As book of Revelation has it: “And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: … ‘I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am going to spit you out of my mouth.’” (Rev. 3:14-5)One kernel of truth in this verse is the following: those who burn most feverishly against God, who struggle heroically to reject God’s knocking, often only manage to mark themselves out as future faithful. Ahmari was such. His memoir demonstrates that his halting steps toward faith were nearly all made possible by his keen intellectual honesty and the fact that grace reached him.Ahmari’s conversion story is the heart of the book: those pages where cracks appear in the confident secularism to which he’d committed himself. He has finished university, begun work as a teacher. From one especially dedicated colleague, whose comportment in life contrasts painfully with his own often hungover self, he learns the worth of honesty and resolve. He is nagged more and more by the sense that academic leftist or left-liberal explanations for evil in the world are incoherent, just as he realizes that the identify categories of SJW politics don’t even half explain the dynamics of victim and oppressor in the real world.He reads more widely, and is impressed by the horrendous failure of all the grand modern projects (particularly Marxism) predicated on the notion that man can be remade according to ideology—and that such remaking can be a recipe for progress. He begins to realize that it is rather the conservative vision, grounded in religious tradition, that makes sense of the arc of history. In fact, contrary to what Marx and Sartre might argue, human nature is both unchangeable and shot through with sin, and will remain so regardless of political revolutions or any new economic dispensation that might be effected. There are, instead, two things necessary. First: attending to human nature as it really is; accepting and understanding it with all its fatal flaws. Second: listening to that internal voice that calls in all of us, namely *conscience*, a voice that insistently prods us whenever we begin to move toward evil or injustice—that even prods us when the injustice we are about to commit has been justified by some utopian political program.Basic experiential recognitions like these, which come like epiphanies to Ahmari as he continues his work as a teacher, join up with his keen understanding of the centrality of sacrifice in the human condition, and together prepare the way for his recognition of the central Gospel truth re-enacted in the Mass.I won’t try to describe Ahmari’s pages on what actually happened to him, how he was finally shaken to his depths while attending a Mass in New York. His depiction of his doubts, his telling of how the stages each gave way to the next, his final decision to become Catholic and the process of joining the Church—it is all narrated with a compelling honestly that evidences no designs on the reader. One has rather the impression of a very careful observer of self doing his best to explain what that self has lived and seen in the world.FROM FIRE, BY WATER is a brave book and, for all its intellectual twists and turns, surprisingly readable. I’ve often read and been impressed by Ahmari’s articles in recent years, but this book stands out as a real gem. I’d highly recommend it to anyone engaged with current left-wing politics in the US. It will challenge you. Also, of course, Catholics, especially those who’ve been educated in the humanities in recent decades, will get much from the book—perhaps, like me, more than a few laughs.But before closing, I’ll mention one more parallel between my brother and I. Ahmari married an Asian American architect from Xi’an, China. Myself, I married a Taiwanese poet and literary scholar from Taiwan. Unless I’m mistaken, Mandarin Chinese is also now on Ahmari’s plate, as it’s been part of my diet for many years.

I remember seeing Mr. Ahmari's tweet a few years ago announcing his conversion and had the exact misconceptions that he writes about in the intro to this book. I had thought he was a Muslim converting to Catholicism which as readers will discover, is not quite the case. The writing is excellent, conjuring up vivid imagery of everything from post-revolutionary Iran to a trailer park in Utah to the busy streets of New York City. I'm a sucker for conversion stories but this one was above and beyond. Many prayers for his ongoing journey in the faith!

Thus far, this is my favorite book of 2019! Sohrad Ahmari, op-ed editor of the New York Post and contributing editor of the Catholic Harold, previously a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal, tells a riveting story of a childhood that began in Shi'ite Muslin society in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini. By the age of 13 Sohrad was an outspoken atheist, and later, after moving to the United States, a huge fan of Nietzsche and Marx, before finally coming to Christ through the Catholic Church. The author shows how God seemed to have used many factors to lead him to the faith. The Islamic ideal of Martyrdom as exemplified in the life of a historical Shi'ite leader; the strident voice of Nietzsche's Zarathrustra; the messianic thrust of Marx's communism; the moral example of a couple of Mormon roommates and of a Jewish friend; a morose sense of guilt caused by a life of partying; and finally the beauty traditional Catholic liturgy - all played their part. A great story! I could not put it down!

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