by Ali Eteraz
Squatting down again, I rocked in the dark and told myself that I should have expected being entombed like this. Hadn’t I read the story of the Prophet Yunus in The Lives of the Prophets? He had been a Prophet of God, but when he told the Almighty that he wasn’t going to spread the Word anymore—that he was giving up, quitting, that he was “not going to do it anymore” just as I had said—God caused Yunus to be cast overboard during a storm. As further punishment, Yunus was then swallowed up by a whale, and he had to live in the belly of that beast in complete darkness, in utter and desolate darkness—a darkness that was probably considerably worse than the darkness of this room. If God could punish his chosen—a Prophet!—for his rebellion, why wouldn’t he punish me? In fact, my punishment would have to be worse, as my sin had been.
I leaned back against the wall and sighed. Then I traced back through my thoughts to determine where my mischief had started. The answer was easy: it had all begun when I started getting beaten. That was when I had first strayed from the path of obedience. As I thought it over now, getting beaten seemed like such a silly thing to have risked Allah’s displeasure over. Rooster, donkey, tied; stick, slap, kicks. I could take it in all the positions, in all the variations. Ultimately the body wasn’t mine. Main hoon Allah Mian ka. I belonged to Allah.
How could I have been so foolish? I wasn’t beaten because it was bad for me. I was beaten now because I was meant to serve Allah in a greater capacity later. That was the same reason that the angels Jibrail and Mikail had visited me. They had prepared me for the pain I would feel later in life. This was the same thing the qari was doing with his various punishments.
The fact that I was Abir ul Islam—chest rubbed upon the walls of the Ka’ba, promised to God before I was born, delivered to Muslims with the express purpose of serving Islam—only meant that God demanded more from me, just as he had from his Prophets. Every ordeal was a stepping stone in the service of Islam.
All these thoughts—my transition from terror to acceptance—had passed through my mind in mere seconds. As I stood up in the darkness, I heard footsteps. It was Qari Jamil, on his way to lead the congregation in prayer. Entering the room, he had me stick out my hands, and laced my palms with a few powerful shots. Lines of ice went to my shoulder. The base of my hands turned blue. I accepted the punishment without flinching. Then he let me go.
Once I was let out of jail I went and joined the prayer, thanking God for keeping me on the straight path, the sirat ul mustaqim, the way of obedience, the way of His servants.
BOOK II
The American—Amir
In which the author leaves Pakistan and arrives in the United States, where, living in the Bible Belt, he attempts to navigate life in high school while dealing with his parents, who are now fundamentalists
1
By 1991, when I was ten years old, we left Sehra Kush and moved to an agrarian town in Eastern Punjab. It was a place where pushing heroin addicts off porches was considered a form of entertainment, and planting rice and raising cattle were the primary means of livelihood. Pops was able to establish a successful clinic there, and we were even able to purchase a car, one of the few in the area. One day my family received a letter that prompted much jubilation. It was from the U.S. consulate in Lahore. The immigration application that Ammi and Pops had filed for us many years earlier had finally come through. We could become legal residents of the United States. We immediately sold all of our possessions for cash and bought plane tickets that would take us to JFK International Airport. Pops, Ammi, Flim, and I arrived in the States with three thousand dollars; eight suitcases of clothes, dishes, and valuables; and a steel trunk full of brass Buddhas and Santas—which Pops planned to use to start an import-export business.
When we landed there was no one in the five boroughs that we could call. Joining the bustling throngs, we stepped out into the smoggy air of New York City, wondering what to do. Out of desperation Pops approached a small man that he correctly identified as Pakistani, who was standing beside a hotel shuttle curbside. The two men engaged in a game of “Where are you from and who do you know?” In a few minutes Pops had learned that an acquaintance of his from med school in the Dominican Republic was living in Brooklyn—and conveniently his wife was out of town, which meant that his apartment potentially had space to host guests. We gave the old friend a call—an hour-long process that involved finding U.S. coins and mastering a foreign pay phone—and were rewarded: he came to our hotel to pick us up in a blue Chevy, hosted us for a few days, and helped us find an apartment in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood where bearded men in big black hats and women in long skirts stoically walked to the synagogue on Saturdays.
Flim and I attended public school. Before sending us off, Pops made it very clear that we could eat only halal, which meant no pork or meat of any kind that wasn’t prepared in the Islamic way. In addition to many yarmulke-wearing Jewish children at school, there were thugged-out black kids wearing jeans backwards like Kris Kross, and fake-thug Italians with Vanilla Ice haircuts. The school also served numerous Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean children, as well as Lithuanians, Russians, and Ukrainians. Finally, there was also a large contingent of Albanians, with whom I started hanging out because they were Muslim—but whom I abandoned after I learned that they ate pork, which was haram, forbidden.
It wasn’t long before Ammi found a local Bangladeshi woman who held Islamic classes at her apartment every summer. Many other immigrant kids—Arabs, Indians, and Pakistanis—also attended. Girls in hijab and boys with baby beards trudged over to the building, jointly took an elevator to the apartment, jointly walked up the hallway, and then split up in two different rooms because Islam said it was immodest for boys and girls to do things jointly.
Prayers were conducted in the boiler room in the basement of our building, with quite a few other Muslim families in attendance. We even had an imam—an old man who lived down the hall from us and led prayers as if he were in the grandest of mosques. The paint in the basement was peeling, and on cold days the wind howled menacingly through cracked windows. On humid days the entire place smelled of feet. However, as much as I disliked our makeshift masjid, when I went down the elevator, my hands and feet dripping with water from the ablution, if old Jewish and Irish and Italian ladies sent derisive glances in my direction, I softened my face and appeared as serene as I could, pretending that I was on my way toward Paradise so that I could show the non-Muslims how lovely and empowered my religion made me feel. Such little lies were necessary to be a good Muslim in America, because here Islam was all about perception in the eyes of the non-Muslim majority (and that perception always had to be positive).
When Pops was unable to find a job and our funds ran down to a single subway token—this was several months into our stay—he took out some of the brass statues, polished them up, and went to Times Square, where he sold a few of so we could buy groceries.
It took a few years and many jobs before Pops gained admission to a medical residency in the United States. The journey took us to all four corners of America: Brooklyn to Nevada, back to Brooklyn, to Arizona, to Washington state, and eventually, by the time I was in high school, to Alabama. Whenever I left a city and complained about losing my friends, Ammi quoted the Quran and told me to “hold onto the rope of God.”
She meant Islam.
2
By the time we settled in Alabama, in a town in the heart of the Bible Belt, Ammi considered herself a Salafi—an adherent of a conservative strain of Islam promoted by Arab missionaries situated at various mosques around the United States. In Salafi Islam believers had to emulate the Muslims of the seventh century as closely as possible. To learn more about Salafism, Ammi purchased volumes of hadiths, bought and devoured literature written by Abu Ameena Bilaal Phillips, and signed up for the magazine al-Jumuah.
Salafism also brought a revolution in her dress. When we had lived in Pakistan she had used to wear the niqab—not from choice, but necessity. When she first ar
rived in America and could actually choose what she wanted to wear she adopted Western dress and left her hair uncovered. However, after becoming a Salafi she began wearing the hijab and declared that “women who don’t wear the scarf are not true Muslims.”
Ammi also rejected the mysticism that Beyji had taught her. “All that Sufi stuff,” she said, referring to spiritual exercises and the veneration for saints and holy people, “is an abomination and an innovation. Innovation leads to misguidance, and misguidance leads to the Fire.”
Also, since Salafis believed that all graven images were a form of shirk, or disbelief, Ammi took down paintings from our walls and blackened the faces of the people appearing in calendars. Even our family portraits were done away with. “If you keep a picture of a person on your wall,” she said, “on the Day of Judgment Allah will challenge you to bring it to life. When you aren’t able to do it, He will throw you into hell.” Just to be theologically safe, she extended the pictorial ban to all organic things—pictures of plants and fruits included. For some time she shut down the TV as well, since Allah could potentially ask her to animate the cartoons Flim and I loved to watch.
In the most dramatic affirmation of Salafism, which shunned song and dance as immoral, Ammi turned our garage shelves into a graveyard of cassettes. She went into her drawers and boxes and spent hours finding her old Pakistani and Bollywood songs. All the artists that she loved to listen to—Muhammad Rafi, Lata, Abida Parveen, Iqbal Bano—were put in little shoeboxes and consigned to the darkest part of the house. The stereo was kept in use, but now the tapes were of religious sermons.
There were two people responsible for Ammi’s Salafi turn.
Indirectly: Pops. Ammi saw him talking to the attractive young nurses at the hospital—he was a medical resident by this time—and tried to shame him for his flirtation by putting on the hijab and adopting the most blunt kind of religiosity she could find. Her Salafism was supposed to remind him that he was a Muslim upon whom extramarital relations were forbidden. It was also supposed to curb his spending, because Pops kept piling on credit card debt, leaving Ammi—who did the family’s accounts—to deal with the outrageous interest rates, and she took full advantage of the gruesome imagery that Salafism used to frighten people away from usury.
Directly: it was Mrs. Rahman’s doing, a woman Ammi became friends with during our stint in Washington state. Long before we knew her, Mrs. Rahman used to be very secular, but when her oldest daughter went and married a Hindu, Mrs. Rahman blamed her own lackluster secular values for her child’s pluralist leanings. She turned to Salafism and started wearing the abaya—a long robe—as well as the hijab. She also made it her life’s mission to warn other women with children that the best way to protect the integrity of the family was with Islam. She took Ammi and a few other younger mothers for regular “fitness walks” at the mall, during which the indoctrination took place. Within a few months of their acquaintance, Ammi had stopped wearing the tight leggings she wore to blend in when we first arrived in America and, like her mentor, adopted the abaya and the hijab. Mrs. Rahman, who also wanted to assure the marital integrity of all the attractive younger wives, encouraged them to cease wearing makeup or perfume, “because as long as the scent of a woman stays with a stranger, she is accumulating sin.”
Ammi and Mrs. Rahman used to have two pet projects. One involved giving hidaya, or religious guidance, to an irreligious nouveau riche Punjabi couple with two young daughters. The co-conspirators set up barbecues and dinner parties involving the couple, hoping to turn them religious. When food didn’t work, Mrs. Rahman took a more direct approach: she picked up one of the girls, smoothed her hair, pointed her toward her father, and reminded him that “on the Day of Judgment you will be held responsible for her honor.” The family never did turn religious.
Their other project involved a pair of middle-aged hippies next door, American to the core, who had adopted two girls from Kashmir, ages three and five. Ammi and Mrs. Rahman had concluded that since Kashmir was a Muslim-majority area, the girls, had they not been adopted, would have grown up Muslim, and therefore it was their obligation, as pious Muslims in the West, to reintroduce the girls to their birth religion. Ammi offered to babysit the girls and tried to teach them how to put on the hijab and recite Islamic phrases. When our neighbors found out what was happening, they promptly moved away. Meanwhile, Ammi and Mrs. Rahman fumed and cursed the biological parents in Kashmir.
Ammi’s belief that she knew what was best for other Muslims was shared by Pops. Most of his targets, however, were Arab Salafis at the mosque in Alabama.
One day Pops went to the mosque for one of their free dinners, taking Flim and me with him. It happened that a Salafi brother named Yusuf was giving a lecture about how lucky everyone was to be Muslim. Before the meal, Yusuf asked Allah to bless the grocery store where the meat had been purchased. He then asked everyone to be certain to recite bismillah over their meat in order to render it halal. Pops immediately stood up to warn his fellow believers.
“My dear Muslims,” he interrupted. “This man is misguiding you. Is he not aware that in Islam it is not enough simply to say the name of Allah over our meat? Rather, we have to say the name of Allah over our meat in the act of cutting it, which is something grocery meat doesn’t offer. Also, grocery meat has not been cut in the Islamic way. They shock the animals to death here. Muslims have to bleed the animals to death. Cut the carotid artery and let all the blood drain out. I spit this meat. It is not halal.”
Brother Yusuf, still holding the microphone, tried to defend himself, but his English began to fail him. “I am simply a-sharing what Allah—”
“You lie in the name of Allah!” Pops shouted.
“Please, doctor, enjoy your meal and we can discuss in the privates.”
“I will not.”
A wave of commentary ran through the mosque, part bewilderment and part anger. Yusuf looked for a way to check the consternation. His anxiety caused his accent to worsen. “Brothers! I have estudied zees issue very close. Why I mislead?”
“Will you stand in front of Allah on the Day of Judgment,” Pops cross-examined, “and testify?”
“I—”
“You cannot!” Pops interrupted again. “You are a man and not a Prophet. You cannot do intercession. Not for me. Not for my children. Not for the rest of this congregation. You are a liar. O Muslims! This man is taking all of us to hell!”
With that he handed Flim and me our coats and told us we were going home.
That was the first of many heated encounters Pops would have with the Salafis. When the Arabs at the mosque insisted on following the Saudi calculation of the lunar calendar in order to celebrate Ramadan, Pops told them that he was “an American and not a Saudi” and intended to sight the moon with his own eyes. When mosque elections took place, which essentially involved one Salafi appointing another one to the presidency—Salafis considered voting un-Islamic—Pops went and made a big hoopla about democracy, transparency, and determining membership by establishing a dues-paying system, “which was how true Muslims were supposed to run an organization.” Eventually, Pops defected from the mosque and joined the nascent Blackamerican mosque downtown. They were Salafis too, but because they were shunned by the Arabs that Pops disliked, he overlooked their theology.
Ultimately it became clear to Ammi and Pops that although their methods were a little different, they were both driven by a desire to help other Muslims gain Paradise, so they joined forces and created the QSC: Quran Study Circle.
The main purpose of the QSC was to get together local families that had children and read the Quran in English. Friday evening was chosen as the official night, which Flim and I objected to vehemently, because that was when the two-hour block of TGIF sitcoms—including our favorite show, Boy Meets World—came on ABC.
The introductory meeting was held in our living room. Ammi moved all the furniture out and spread white sheets topped with cushions around the periphery. In the middl
e there was a small tray of almonds and some cans of Sunkist orange soda. (Dark colas were disallowed, because one of the chemicals in them was not halal). Males and females, in a wide span of ages, sat on opposite sides from one another.
A problem presented itself as soon as the meeting began. “We have twenty people, but only eight copies of the Quran,” Pops noted.
“Also,” said Auntie Fiza, a doctor at the local hospital (and no relation) who had a number of sons my age, “all our translations are different.”
This caused a small debate to break out, which was resolved when Ammi said that she would order a standardized translation the next morning and QSC would reconvene in two weeks.
Two weeks later twenty copies of the Noble Quran translation arrived from the Saudi Embassy, and the Quran Study Circle was recalled. Ammi and Pops were as excited as Flim and I were irritated.
As soon as the meeting began, however, the group’s theological differences came out in the open.
“This Quran isn’t right,” Pops said, flipping through the Noble Quran translation.
“You can’t say that about the Quran!” Auntie Fiza retorted.
Pops ignored her. “What are these brackets?” he demanded, pointing to the editorial comments inserted into the translation. “These brackets are not part of the Quran.”
“Forget the brackets,” Ammi said, pointing to the footnotes. “It’s a good Quran. Look, there, at the bottom of the page! It even has hadiths to explain the verses!”
“I don’t accept that either,” Pops said. “Hadiths aren’t for explaining the Quran.”
“Then what are they for?” Auntie Fiza said.