t’s 1:30 a.m., less than twenty-four hours after the numbness in his limbs began, and Tarek Fatah is being wheeled into an operating room at St. Michael’s Hospital, in downtown Toronto. An anesthesiologist comes in. She looks Arabic, so he asks her what’s happening in Egypt, because President Hosni Mubarak has just stepped down. “I’m Iraqi,” she says. She tries several times to get an intravenous line into his arm. Blood is spurting out. She apologizes. “Coming from an Iraqi, bloodletting should be the least of your problems,” he says for a laugh. She looks offended. He continues: “Hey, for 1,000 years, you guys killed the clans of the Prophet, for crying out loud.” They’re both laughing when a doctor walks in wearing goggles and a headlamp. He’s part of the team that will remove the cancerous tumour discovered yesterday growing on Fatah’s upper spine, and he bends over and looks at his patient’s face. “What the Fatah have you done to yourself? ” This is what happens when doctors listen to talk radio.

“What the Fatah? ” has become the calling card for the Pakistani-Canadian author and jihadi hunter. He coined the phrase on Toronto’s popular nightly radio program Friendly Fire, where, from August until he got sick in February, he was the irreverent sidekick to Ryan Doyle, the show’s conservative, American-born host. But even if you don’t tune in, Tarek Fatah is hard to avoid. Since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon ten years ago, the sixty-one-year-old has become the face of progressive Islam — safe Islam — in Canada. He regularly appears on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin and CBC Radio and TV, and in the pages of the National Post and other dailies to denounce the creep into Canada of Islamism, the belief, held by extremist leaders in the Middle East and their minority followers around the world, that Islam is not just a religious path but an expansionist political ideology. Maclean’s once named Fatah one of Canada’s fifty best known and most respected personalities, and his first book, 2008’s Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, has garnered international attention. Saturday Night Live alumnus Dennis Miller, who has a syndicated radio show, interviewed Fatah a couple of times. “You are a piece of work, Tarek,” he told his guest last November. “It’s good to talk to cats like Tarek, because every time I see footage of somebody burning an effigy or going crazy, I always think, okay, let me talk to the cool Muslims.”

Those cats who don’t get interviewed by American celebrities use other words to describe Fatah: “egomaniac,” “pariah,” “fearmonger.” They say he feeds the ignorant a diet of bogus exaggerations and tenuous connections that fortify mainstream distrust of Muslims and conveniently perpetuate his status as a media maven. And then there are the outright haters who accuse him of apostasy. When he got sick, they rejoiced, calling it divine punishment. “T-Fat has cancer, and I’m loving it,” wrote a particularly malicious blogger. A Muslim Somali teenager even made an “open threat” to Fatah on Twitter while he was still in hospital, saying, “I know where you live and where your office is.” Toronto police officers who interviewed her found no evidence that a threat had been made. Outraged at the lack of charges, Fatah wrote in the National Post that it wasn’t the first time the Toronto Police Service had chosen to promote “an image of diversity and outreach” over protecting liberal Muslims against potential violence.

Even when faced with mortality, he doesn’t pull any punches, but nor does anyone else. The public debate among the country’s large and multifarious Muslim population over how to establish a normal, post 9/11 co-existence with secular, mainstream Canada — if it happens at all — is often sullied by fear and inaccuracy. With all the trash talk, it’s tough for outsiders to know who’s right. But maybe that’s beside the point, because away from the headlines something else is happening: a real conversation.

he first time I saw Fatah speak in public was at Ottawa’s Beth Shalom synagogue in January, a month before his hospitalization. Fans waiting outside the sanctuary carried copies of his award-winning second book, The Jew Is Not My Enemy, for him to sign. “He’s a voice of reason,” said congregant Shirley Geller. “We need more people like him.” Shortly before 7 p.m., Fatah appeared through a back door, dressed in his usual suit jacket and beige chinos, looking like a brown Henry Kissinger in dark, square-framed glasses. He delivered a rousing speech to the 200 or so attendees, mostly Jews, then answered questions for an hour, inserting comic relief like a pro between unsettling subjects — Palestine, for instance, a topic he touched on often. “If you are a Jew and you don’t support the Palestinian state, you don’t have a leg to stand on. That is your cross to bear,” he said, a smile creeping across his lips. “I don’t know — can Jews carry a cross?” The talk ended with a standing ovation.

When we meet for coffee the next morning, he complains about his sore back, attributing the pain to a bulky sleep apnea machine he lugs around when travelling. That was before he knew about the cancer. He gets a coffee refill and is quickly distracted by his favourite subject: the politics of extremism, in this case as it refers both to Jews who deny the rights of Palestinians and to Muslims who want to destroy Israel. It’s ridiculous, he says; you have to warn people about the results of religious fanaticism. Because it comes from a Muslim source, his warning resonates with those already suspicious of the Muslim Other. But Fatah also wants to deliver that message to his own people. In a few weeks, he is scheduled to debate the merits of secular Islam with Sheharyar Shaikh, a conservative imam from Scarborough’s North American Muslim Foundation (NAMF) and its affiliated mosque — the result of an open challenge Fatah issued on The Agenda last November. Toward the end of our meeting, his iPhone chimes its Big Ben ring tone. After a clipped conversation, he hangs up. “That was the Ontario Provincial Police,” he says, dumbfounded. They’re warning him not to attend the debate because it might not be safe. He tries to shrug it off. “I can’t back out,” he says. “They would use that to say, ‘We scared him.’ They can’t get that from me.”

As my mother used to say, attitude doesn’t come from a hole in the ground. Tarek Subhan Fatah was born on November 20, 1949, which he likes to point out was twenty-four years to the day after Robert Kennedy’s birth. More importantly, it was two years after the partition of India and the birth of Pakistan, a complicated and bloody untangling of peoples and cultures. Raised in a liberal Sunni home where the family regularly read the Koran, Tarek (Arabic for “he who pounds on the door”) and his siblings initially enjoyed comfort in a sprawling Karachi mansion, thanks to a fortune inherited from Fatah’s Punjabi paternal grandfather, Ahmad, a French officer and later French consul and industrialist. Fatah’s father, Subhan, was a handsome, charming musician and actor. He could sing like Bing Crosby one minute and recite Urdu poetry the next, all while hosting Bollywood actors at the family estate. He could also drink and gamble to excess: by the time Fatah was eight, Subhan had squandered the inheritance and rendered the family penniless, a reversal of fortune from which Fatah’s mother, Jamila, never recovered.

Fatah went through grade school as a threadbare, myopic boy who taped razor blades to his desk and flicked them with his finger to aggravate the teacher. Twang, twang, twang. Despite the class clowning, he was actually a bright kid and eventually won a scholarship to study biochemisty at the University of Karachi. It was the ’60s, and university was about much more than books, so he lingered there for nearly a decade, taking classes part time while agitating for social justice through a popular Marxist student movement. A Shia classmate named Nargis Tapal saw him speak at a rally and was smitten. They were married four years later and now have two daughters, whom they wryly describe as “Su-shi,” for half Sunni, half Shia. “I was lucky I met her,” Fatah says. “I would go days without eating regular meals. She saved me.” Tapal’s account is a little different. “I would have been a lake: calm, quiet,” she says. “With him, I am the sea, with waves crashing this way and that. On the sea, there is always a roar. That’s my life with him: a constant roar.”

In 1970, while still taking the odd university course, Fatah landed a job at the upstart Sun in Karachi and, later, with Pakistan Television Corporation. He was taught, by some of the best reporters of the day, to speak the truth and be fearless of repercussions — not easy in Pakistan. “He never joined a bandwagon,” says long-time friend Najmul Hasan, a former correspondent with Pakistan Press International who now lives in Etobicoke. “He didn’t care if people didn’t like him.” And some of them didn’t, including high-ranking government officials and the police. “Had we stayed in Pakistan, we would have long ago buried him. In Pakistan, they don’t tolerate people like him, but this is Canada. He can speak his mind.”

By the time Fatah fled his increasingly militarized homeland in 1978, he’d lived through two wars, two coups, and two incarcerations for anti-government activities. “Life is so complicated in our countries,” Tapal says, and by that she means public and private life; for example, Fatah’s family scorned their marriage because she was Shia. “People like you who have not lived there, it’s hard for you to understand.” That’s also true of other countries, such as Iran and Afghanistan, from which an increasing number of new Canadians are arriving. Aside from the FLQ crisis, perhaps, big, dull Canada has always enjoyed relative peace and stability, and Fatah, like many local Muslims who fled persecution or repression, wants it to stay that way.

But if he knows what it’s like to live in fear, Fatah also knows what it’s like to nearly die of boredom. After working as an advertising executive in Saudi Arabia for ten years, he decided he couldn’t raise his daughters in an Islamic country, so he moved to Canada and settled in Ajax, a bedroom community forty kilometres east of Toronto. “What a sad place. It was almost like a prison,” he says, sighing repeatedly in front of the Coffee Time doughnut shop at Clover Ridge Plaza in “old Ajax,” south of Highway 401, where he and Tapal ran a Sketchley dry cleaners. A man exiting the doughnut shop calls out, “Tarek Fatah! I love your show!” Fatah smiles and waves. Radio celebrity is worlds away from his early experience here, surrounded by a United Nations of lonely new Canadians whose only interactions involved swearing at each other in multiple languages while learning to drive in winter.