Children of Dust

by Ali Eteraz

  It was during one of these excursions to the movies that I realized we all had a shared cinematic pedigree composed of three films with story lines about Islam: Executive Decision, Malcolm X, and The Message.

  Executive Decision, starring Kurt Russell and Steven Seagal, had come out in 1996, and we had all seen it because it depicted a Muslim hijacker. It was notorious among Muslims, not just because of its depiction of a Muslim villain, but because it showed the cold-blooded hijacker praying and invoking Allah during his rampage.

  We hated the film. The one thing that none of us could accept was that a pious Muslim was depicted as doing evil. After all, we were pious Muslims, and we weren’t evil.

  “That guy was a bastard,” Moosa said. “But they were showing him praying and prostrating as if he were a good Muslim! That’s not right.”

  “They always show Muslims negatively,” Aslam said. “I saw a book once about how Arab and Muslim characters have always been depicted negatively in Hollywood.”

  “Except in Malcolm X,” Moosa said. “That movie was tight!”

  “Except in Malcolm X,” Aslam agreed.

  “The best part in X was when Denzel Washington went to hajj and became an orthodox Muslim. They could have extended that part,” Moosa said. “Really let the people know what Islam is about.”

  “Denzel rules,” I said.

  “Man,” Aslam said. “I wish there were more good movies about Islam.”

  “Something like The Message, maybe,” Moosa said.

  The Message was a semifictional account of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, starring the late Anthony Quinn as the Prophet’s uncle. It was well loved among Muslims because it told—positively—the story of Muhammad’s rise to power and prominence without depicting his face or showing any of the Companions.

  “I loved that the whole story was told from Muhammad’s perspective so you never saw his face,” Aslam said. “That was brilliant. He didn’t even talk. Just shook his head.”

  “True, but Hollywood is anti-Islam today,” Moosa concluded. “They’ll never make films like that again.”

  Indeed, a few weeks later Hollywood hit us hard. A film called The Siege came out, and we threw a collective fit because Denzel Washington—Malcolm X himself!—was in a starring role and not one we were happy about.

  “Denzel betrayed us!” Moosa said. “The film is all about suicide bombers in Brooklyn, and I read that they’re shown purifying themselves before killing people, as if killing were the same as being pious!”

  “Denzel’s in it?” I asked, astonished.

  “So is that redneck Bruce Willis,” Aslam said. “Man, you know it was all his idea. But why would Denzel go along? Did he forget that he played Malcolm X?”

  We had a long argument about whether or not we should go see the movie. On one hand, we didn’t want to financially support something that we thought would make Islam look bad. On the other hand, we wouldn’t know how it made Islam look bad unless we actually watched it.

  We discussed our dilemma in the university’s prayer hall. The louder we argued, the more we became interested in the film. It was finally decided that all the MSA brothers would go to the cinema together; we’d sit in the back and jeer so that other people couldn’t enjoy the presumably tasteless film. Once the “thug brothers”—called that because they liked dressing in gangster clothing, though they were actually a group of rich kids from Strong Island—heard our plan, they eagerly joined us. We marched to the theater talking about all the comments we’d make.

  “Anytime Bruce Willis talks we should just start doing the call to prayer,” was the idea most often heard.

  Upon arriving in the hall everyone stopped talking tough and started munching on popcorn. As we watched the movie, I realized that I felt more conflicted than assaulted. I didn’t like how the suicide bombers were depicted as pious, God-fearing Muslims when everyone knew that if you blew people up you were a bad Muslim. But at the same time, the film—which showed New York going under martial law—served as a warning about military excess in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. There was ambiguity in the story that I had not expected.

  At the end of the movie I learned that the same confusion extended to the rest of the group. We’d gone in expecting to become angry—no, more angry—and we’d left not knowing what to say. Opting for the easy way out, we ignored the big issues and focused on minutiae: we called Tony Shalhoub a sellout for playing an FBI agent and mocked the way the film messed up little stylistic details. “Did you see how the guy doing ablution washed his arms before washing his face?” I said. “Hollywood sucks! Always demonizing Islam!”

  After a few days no one even mentioned The Siege.

  The only time I heard about it again was when someone told me that the guy who’d produced the film had gotten in a car accident and a stop sign had impaled him through the skull.

  Moosa called that getting “God-smacked.”

  2

  Moosa Farid often told me that his entire family, as far back as he knew, were Islamic scholars, and before that they were all Muslim kings. Aslam told me that his family were Seyyids, meaning that he was a direct descendant of the Holy Prophet. I felt like a loser compared to them, so I called Ammi to find out whether I had any glorious Islamic lineage.

  “Can you tell me about my ancestors?” I asked.

  Ammi was washing dishes and the pots clattered down the phone line as she spoke. “Sure,” she said. “My family descended from Mongols. They were Genghis Khan’s children.”

  “So they weren’t always Muslim?”

  “No.”

  “That sucks,” I said despondently. “Well, what about the fact that the Mongols converted to Islam?”

  “Not my family,” she said. “We converted to Islam after becoming Sikh. Before that we were Hindu.”

  “Hindu?” I exclaimed.

  Ammi picked up the accusation in my voice and became defensive. “Initially Hindu, yes. But my family has served Islam well. I told you about Beyji and my great-grandfather. What about him? He built a mosque and converted jinns to Islam.”

  “Yes,” I said, with barely contained antagonism. “But they don’t count.” I was irritated by all these people descending from Sikhs and Hindus. “Listen. Can you just not tell people that you come from Hindu stock?”

  I could tell by the lack of background noise that she’d quit doing dishes and was concentrating on our conversation. “Why?” she asked cautiously.

  “It sounds bad.”

  “No thanks,” she said. “I am Rajput Bhatti,” she added, affirming her Hindu heritage with pride.

  “Astaghfirullah!” I exclaimed (having stopped saying “Jesus Christ!” to express frustration). I seethed on the phone. I didn’t want to be associated with Ammi’s side of the family anymore, so I looked for ways to diminish them.

  “Isn’t it true that your family didn’t support the creation of Pakistan?” I asked angrily. “How shameful! All those Muslims that died for Islam—and your family opposed them!” I knew it was a cheap shot since just as many Muslims had stayed in India as had gone to Pakistan, but I felt resentful and wanted to let her know.

  “You’re right,” she admitted. “My father didn’t want Punjab to be split up. He felt that during the Partition of 1947 all the Muslims of India should stay in one united country.”

  “Let’s forget about your family,” I said, trying a different tack. “Isn’t it true that in Islam we follow the father’s side of the biology?”

  “True.”

  “So tell me about them.”

  “Hold on,” she said. “You do realize that on the Day of Judgment everyone will be raised under their mother’s name?”

  “Yes, but we’re talking about this life,” I countered. “In this kind of stuff, this life is more important than the afterlife.”

  Ammi began with stories of Pops’s family from the time of the Partition of India and Pakistan. She reminded me about the aunts that jumped into the we
ll. The story of the buried treasure. The nights in the open grave. The way Dada Abu had lost Dadi Ma during the transfer and then found her in a refugee camp. This was much better, I thought. People who had died for Islam; who had showed how much they loved the religion by giving up their most valuable possession. I wanted to belong to this group.

  “So what about before the Partition? Where were Pops’s ancestors from?”

  Ammi excused herself for a moment and went to ask Pops. I could hear them consulting for several minutes. Finally she returned.

  “You guys are Siddiquis,” she said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s like a family name, but it’s also a caste. It comes down from Hazrat Abu Bakr Siddiq.”

  My hands began shaking, and my pulse picked up.

  “You mean the Abu Bakr Siddiq?” I asked. “The first convert to Islam?”

  “Who else?”

  I almost dropped the phone. Abu Bakr? He was one of the most celebrated personalities of Islam. He accompanied Muhammad on the migration to Medina, and the two men hid together in a cave when their enemies from the Quraysh tribe came looking for them. It was across the mouth of that cave that a spider commanded by Allah wove a web, to make it appear that no one was inside. Abu Bakr was the man who affirmed Muhammad’s story about the ascension to heaven to the skeptics in Mecca (which earned him the nickname “the Truthteller”). Abu Bakr was also very generous with his money, purchasing many slaves from oppressive holders and setting them free. Before his death, Muhammad appointed Abu Bakr to lead the Muslims in prayer, and this position led to his becoming the first Caliph after Muhammad’s death.

  “I need you to be absolutely certain about this,” I said. “Confirm again. This could be a game-changer. Being a descendant of the first Caliph would be the most important thing to ever happen to me.”

  Ammi went to Pops and came back with the same story. “Pops thinks that his Pakistani birth certificate identifies his last name as Siddiqui. He dropped that name while growing up.”

  “So it really is true!” I hopped around my dorm room as Moosa looked on in amazement.

  “Hazrat Abu Bakr’s children moved from Mecca to Medina and then to Baghdad,” Ammi said, repeating what Pops had told her. “Then in the thirteenth century, when the Mongols were destroying the caliphate in Baghdad, they went to India. They settled down in Punjab.”

  I imagined dark-skinned Arabs with hook noses like mine, dressed in flowing white robes, packing hefty camels and horses on a majestic avenue in Baghdad during its melancholy decline. I pictured them leaving for Basra in the middle of the night, crossing into Persia, and then traversing the Khorasan region toward India, where they must have crossed the five rivers and settled on farmland in Punjab, off the foothills of Kashmir. My imagination still soaring, I could see them settled in their new area: they converted beautiful Hindu girls, married them, and had many children. Hundreds of years later came the Partition, during which their descendants lost everything and then, in the name of Islam, migrated to Pakistan. Now here I was, a member of that clan, child of the first Caliph, all the way in America. The vastness of the story filled me with romance.

  “Do we have a family tree?” I asked, returning to the present.

  “Pops hasn’t seen it, but he thinks his older brother in Pakistan has one that goes all the way back.”

  Triumphantly I began envisioning future encounters with Moosa and the guys. I imagined how, surrounded by a group of brothers, I would casually drop reference to the fact that I was a Siddiqui, a descendant of the first Caliph, and everyone would say, “Really? From the line of the first Caliph?” and I’d say “Yeah, bro!”—all in a very humble way, of course, because when you were an important Muslim, the best bragging was to pretend to be humble.

  When I hung up the phone I lay back in bed, jubilant. I was a Siddiqui, from the tribe of Taym, the Truthteller’s tribe, from the loins of the man whose intuition was so great that he used to decipher the dreams of the Prophet, from the family of that magnanimous merchant who freed the black slave Bilal, and thus a precursor to the Malcolm Xs of the world. My pedigree was steeped in Islam. Now it made perfect sense why Pops had made a mannat for me and why Ammi had rubbed me against the walls of the Ka’ba. I recalled that in 1258, even as the Mongols killed the last Abbasid Caliph, they wrapped his body in a carpet because spilling caliphal blood was forbidden even in the religion of savages. That was my blood.

  All of a sudden my life had meaning. Responsibility coursed through me. Having the blood of a Caliph meant, very simply, that I had to make certain I was a perfect Muslim. More than that, I had to accept that Islam was the perfect way of life. To do otherwise would be to demean my ancestors.

  In honor of my revered ancestor I dubbed myself Abu Bakr Ramaq. The name Ramaq, which meant “spark of light,” represented the passion I felt for Islam.

  3

  There were tangible steps a man took to express his love for his religion.

  I grew facial hair so that everyone would know up front that I cared about Islam. I began folding up my pants above my ankles so that everyone could see I practiced Islamic humility. I began inserting an alhamdulillah and subhanallah in almost every sentence. I spoke English with a slight Arab accent that I cultivated, believing that Arabs were the best of Muslims. I let everyone know that I was getting rid of my music collection and replacing it with tapes of Quranic recitation. I often quoted Ibn Taymiya’s proverb, “A thousand days of despotism are better than a single day of anarchy,” when some Muslim around me agitated for change.

  Further, what would be my love for Islam, the religion of mercy, the final message of God, the testament of total truth, if I didn’t guide the non-Muslims of the world toward its blessed shade? I felt an overwhelming need to invite people to Islam—to do da’wa.

  My first target was a Pentecostal girl named Rita, a fellow student at the university. She was a South Indian, and because her parents had already converted once—from Hinduism to Christianity—I figured she would be predisposed toward switching religions. Another thing that made her a good target was that she was willing to spend many hours talking to me. This was because she secretly liked Moosa, who refused to talk to women because they tempted him; by talking to me, she was at least able to remain in his vicinity.

  I was confident that by the end of the academic year she would be a Muslim and God would reward me by cleansing all my sins. It was important for me to be as innocent as possible, given my lineage.

  I started the conversion effort by trying to persuade Rita that Islam was the natural evolutionary advance from Christianity. I explained that the doctrine of the Trinity was illogical, pointing out that the idea of a single, monotheistic deity made much more sense. I told her that God and Jesus were separate entities, with God being divine and Jesus being just a prophet—a man carrying God’s message, similar to Muhammad. I pointed out that, in fact, according to the lost Gospel of Barnabas, Jesus had prophesied the arrival of a man named Ahmed—which was Muhammad’s alternative name—who would bring salvation to the world.

  Rita always listened to me, then—promising to “think things over”—called it a night. The next night, though, we’d be back at square one.

  I couldn’t understand why someone whose faith was so weak that she needed to “think things over” after hearing about an alternative path wasn’t able to see how secure I was in my faith—and from my confidence infer that I was on the true path, a path she should join.

  After a week of this, her reluctance to become Muslim infuriated me. Our friendship was saved when, the very next day, Rita told me that she wanted to learn about Muslim history, not theology. Considering this a sign of progress, I promised that I’d give her a comprehensive lesson. I put it off for a few days so that I could prep.

  The next morning I set about putting together a list of various facts in history that cast Islam in a positive light. But that wouldn’t be enough, I realized. To convert Rita
I’d have to do more than simply make Islam look good; I’d have to make it responsible for every good thing in the world. I decided that the best way to demonstrate superiority to Rita, who was majoring in engineering, was to show her that long before Western civilization attained technical proficiency, the Islamic civilization had been at the vanguard of science. I was certain this would convince her that Islam was the best religion.

  Hitting the books, I discovered that Muslims had a long-standing fascination with flying. (I figured this was because of the story of Muhammad’s ascension to heaven on a horse.) Armen Firman, a ninth-century Spanish Muslim, had tried to fly from a tower in Cordoba with a wing-shaped cloak; and even though he failed, he survived the crash because air became trapped in his cloak and slowed his descent (which made him the inventor of the parachute—sort of). In similar fashion, his compatriot Abbas Ibn Firnas tried to fly from a mountain with a glider, and though he ended up breaking his back in the landing, he lived as well. Later, Hezarfen Ahmed Celebi, a seventeenth-century Turkish scientist, became the founder of modern aviation when, long before the Wright brothers, he used a winglike glider and flew a distance of about one mile in front of Ottoman Sultan Murat IV—from the gigantic Galata Tower on one side of the Bosporus Strait to Uskudar on the other. He landed successfully as well.

  Then there were the scientists and thinkers: al-Khwarizmi, the eighth-century inventor of algebra and quadratic equations; al-Hay-tham, the tenth-century optician who devised a version of the scientific method; Ibn Sina, the eleventh-century physician; Ibn Tufayl, the twelfth-century philosopher who anticipated the moral questions later evaluated by Defoe and Rousseau; Ibn Rushd, the twelfth-century jurist who gave Aristotle to Europe; Ibn Khaldun, the fifteenth-century Algerian who was the father of sociology; Iqbal, the early-twentieth-century thinker who said that the theory of relativity was wrong because it overlooked the spiritual power in the universe.