by Ali Eteraz
“Maybe you should ask someone who knows.”
I called Moosa at his work.
“Pakhtunkhwa is an honor code,” he informed me. “It basically means that you’re going to die. Who told you about it?”
“Some guy that’s been after Bilqis.”
“That sucks,” Moosa said. “Well, can I get your Quran MP3s before you’re killed?”
“This is serious,” I said, frustrated by a new obstacle between me and Islamically sanctioned sex. “Mother fuck me!”
“I don’t think Islam allows that,” Moosa quipped. “Although Khomeini said that if you were walking along your roof and fell down and your penis entered your mother, it wouldn’t be considered incest under Islam.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” I said. “But what if before pulling out you thrust a couple of times, because during the fall you became disoriented and thought you had entered your wife?”
“Good question. I’ll have to ask a scholar about this.”
“Anyway. Back to the important problem at hand,” I said.
“I think you should scare this chump away.”
“Threaten him?”
“Yeah.”
“With what? Punjabis aren’t warriors.”
“Tell him that you challenge him to a bhangra duel,” he suggested.
“What if he says that dancing is un-Islamic. Then he’s got another way to diss me.”
“Point taken.”
“God,” I said—almost a prayer. “I really don’t want to die yet. I’m still a virgin.”
“Look at the upside,” Moosa said cheerily. “In Islam a murdered man is a martyr. That means you’ll get seventy-two girls in Paradise.”
“But I don’t have any sexual experience. I wouldn’t be able to please them.”
“All right, then why don’t you tell this guy that his code of honor is haram because it’s rooted in un-Islamic tribalism.”
That seemed like an amazing idea. Declaring things un-Islamic was always the safest way of winning an argument.
“It’s not a permanent fix,” Moosa cautioned, “but it should put him on the defensive.”
“This whole Bilqis thing is getting out of hand,” I said. “You know that book by Kurban Said that we read?”
“Ali and Nino? The one about the Muslim guy and Christian girl in Azerbaijan?”
“Yeah. I should just kidnap Bilqis the way Ali did Nino.”
“You don’t have a horse, though. I think it’s tradition to use a horse.”
“We could rent a Mustang.”
“This is going to be so cool,” Moosa yelped. “Can I perform your service?”
“Definitely. But after my service, where will I go to get it on with my wife? Didn’t the Prophet say in a hadith that you have to play with your virgin?”
“He did. How about you rent one of those sleeping cars in an Amtrak train? That way if you get followed you can evade her family.”
“What if during wedding night she’s on her period?”
“I keep telling you to read Imam Ghazali. He says that if your virgin is periodic you should put a silk cloth on her privates and rub her until she orgasms. It’s an Islamic duty for a man to pleasure his wife.”
“Our scholars really knew their sex, didn’t they?”
“There’s a reason we should follow their precedence!”
“Yeah, man,” I said after some reflection. “I’m not going to abduct anyone. It’s illegal. Besides, I’ve got midterms coming up.”
“Me too.”
After hanging up, I turned back to the computer and started chatting with Yahya the way Moosa had suggested. I brought up all sorts of Islamic references and chose three of my favorite Islamic sayings. They would demonstrate that I was a scholar, not a fighter:
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.
Search for knowledge even if it takes you to China.
God loves nothing more than a pious youth.
Invoking Islam had the intended effect. Yahya became nervous. “Do you study Islam or something?” he asked.
“Yes,” I typed. “I’m becoming a scholar.”
“Damn. I had no idea! My bad, bro! I thought you were just some player going after Bilqis. I see that I was very wrong. I’m sorry for misjudging your character.”
“Not a problem,” I responded, smiling to myself, and then I proceeded to type out some pointers about better etiquette.
That night, buzzing on the power of Islam, I decided that I wasn’t going to wait three years before telling my parents. If Islam could defeat vengeful ex-boyfriends, it could definitely persuade my parents.
7
Guess what? I’ve found a wife.”
Back in Alabama for spring break that freshman year, I told Ammi and Pops the news over dinner. We were having qeema with roti and a side dish of curried zucchini.
“Excuse me?” said Ammi.
“He thinks someone actually wants to marry him,” Flim said, ever the younger brother.
“There’s a girl named Bilqis that I met. I want to marry her.”
Pops cleared his throat ominously. “How old is this lady?” he asked, unwilling to attach a name to her.
“Eighteen—and I’d prefer it if you’d use her name: Bilqis.”
“I see. Is this lady older than you?”
“A little, yes.”
“This isn’t a good idea,” he said.
“Why?”
“Where we come from, men are five years less mature than women.”
I couldn’t accept such a trivial rebuke. I looked toward Ammi for support, but she didn’t say anything.
“How old are you again?” Pops asked me.
“Seventeen.”
“The thing about marrying young,” continued Pops, “is that it takes away your ambition. Better to become someone before you marry.”
This was the moment: I knew I had to invoke Islam in order to acquire mastery of the situation. “You people are aware that in Islam marriage is considered half the faith, right? There’s a hadith about that point. I can show it to you in the books.”
“Islam is between you and God,” Pops said. “Why are you involving us?”
I was surprised by this statement. Until now Islam had been between all of us.
“Because I need your help. You’re my parents. It’s your Islamic duty to help me out. Bilqis’s parents require that you call them to make arrangements and do everything in the Islamic way.”
“I don’t agree with that approach,” Pops said, pushing food around on his plate. “I think they should call us.”
“They won’t, though. Bilqis said her family doesn’t like Punjabis.”
Pops scoffed loudly. Then Ammi scoffed. They were both insulted.
“You say you want us to abide by Islam,” Ammi said, “but they aren’t being very decent, are they?”
“Don’t want Punjabis? We don’t want them!” Pops thundered.
I stood up. “But I want her!”
“Forget it. We have dignity.”
“Do this for my Islam. If I don’t marry, I’ll end up fornicating!” I stomped to my bedroom, convinced that my parents weren’t taking me seriously.
I could hear Ammi and Pops arguing loudly in the kitchen, blaming each other for my hasty—and clearly faulty—choice in a potential mate. When they started blaming Bilqis for trying to steal their son, I was so upset at hearing my beloved’s name besmirched that I stormed back into the kitchen and upturned the dinner trays. I flipped one tray too hard and everything splattered on my chest. My dignity shot, I retreated back to my room.
For a couple of hours the house was almost silent. Occasionally Flim could be heard walking up and down the hall, but that was it. Eventually Ammi and Pops must have reconciled, because they came to my room together and knocked quietly.
“This Bilqis must be very pretty,” Pops said once they were in and seated on the narrow bed.
“She is.”
“You know who else is pretty?” Ammi asked. “Mountain girls. From Kashmir. Your father has a friend who has a daughter. Such rosy cheeks.”
“I don’t want a Kashmiri girl. I want Bilqis.”
“This Kashmiri girl I’m telling you about looks like that actress—the one with the rosy cheeks.”
“I prefer Bilqis.”
“Son, let me tell you a story about mountain girls,” Pops said, taking over. “I had this uncle. Big guy. He died before you were born. He was scary. One time he threatened to beat up a guy and the guy defecated in his own clothes. Anyway, this uncle’s first wife died, so he went to Peshawar and he paid a Pathan and bought a young wife. Do you remember the stone-faced widow that lived near Dada Abu?”
“Are you suggesting that we buy Bilqis?”
“No. I’m suggesting that we buy a mountain girl that looks better because the dollar-rupee exchange is pretty good these days!” Pops said with a wink.
I realized that I was being mocked. My love trivialized. My feelings stomped upon. I actually began crying. Then I pulled myself together and made one final appeal to Islam. “Why can’t you do things properly? Just call her parents, please. Where is your Islam?”
“So you want to do things the Islamic way?” Pops asked.
“Nothing more.”
“There’s a verse in the Quran which says that if your parents punish you, accept it, without so much as saying ‘Uff.’”
“I know it,” I said.
“Good. Because your punishment for getting into this stupid relationship is that you’re going to transfer out of your college in Manhattan for a college in the South.”
“No!” I exclaimed, horrified.
“You’ll do it this summer,” he said firmly. “I don’t want to hear the slightest rebellion from you. The Quran prohibits you from disobeying your parents—and remember, you claim to be very Islamic.”
“How can you do this?” I pleaded. “Please. This is despotism!”
Pops didn’t waver. “What did your Ibn Taymiya say? A thousand days of despotism are better than one day of anarchy? Don’t be an anarchist. Listen to your despotic father. That is Islam, after all.”
That night was torture. I felt stars crashing around my head, and the sliver of the moon sliced my arteries open. I opened a copy of the Quran and cried into it. Bilqis was to have been my wall between the secularity outside and the Islam within. She was supposed to be my protection. I felt vulnerable.
As I lay weeping, there was a soft knock and Ammi came inside. She took my hand and brushed my face. “Don’t worry about marriage. We’ll visit Pakistan for the summer and see if we can find you a nice wife there.” Then she kissed me and left.
When I returned to Manhattan I was terribly upset at having to give up Bilqis, though I did as my father ordered and called her to break things off. A day or two later it occurred to me that if I went to an Islamic country to find a wife, as Ammi had suggested, the girl wouldn’t need to be convinced to wear hijab as Bilqis had to be. In fact, I might even find someone who wore the full niqab.
The possibility of upgrading from Bilqis filled me with excitement. If I had a niqabi wife, my piety quotient would be off the charts—I could even take multiple wives without anyone batting an eye.
Another advantage in going to Pakistan was that I could take some time to investigate my lineage to the first Caliph.
Suddenly the world was conspiring on behalf of my Islam.
8
Pops had to work so it was just me, Ammi, and Flim on the trip. We argued a lot during the planning stage about which airline to take. The clearest sign that a Pakistani immigrant had made it in America was when he returned in a foreign air carrier, but since we hadn’t, we ended up taking Pakistan International Airlines to Karachi.
As I looked around me on the plane, I saw that the greater part of the passengers were working-class—rugged and worn from driving cabs and filling tanks on turnpikes, serving as cooks in desi restaurants named Shalimar. They laughed and joked the whole way because they were going home. For them America was simply a work station. It could just as easily be Dubai, Australia, or England. They were going back with paychecks that were meager in America but in Pakistan ballooned from the exchange rate. They looked forward to giving their families a chance to buy nice things. Maybe an AC for an aged mother. Maybe wedding clothes for a niece.
Others in the plane were like us. The quiet and morose bunch. We were the ones that had gone to the United States in order to make money and make a home—and had found that getting a paycheck in America was far easier than feeling a part of the country. Now, neither fully American nor fully Pakistani, we called ourselves Muslims and hoped that religion was enough to identify us in a world full of nations.
I didn’t like where I was sitting. There were three college-aged girls in front of me. They wore jeans and short T-shirts, and each time they reached for something, I could see a span of waist and bare back. Immodest sluts, I thought. Why couldn’t they be more like the girl sitting to my right? She was a pretty girl wrapped fully in a black chador. I wondered why the brazen types couldn’t see how much more grace the girl in the chador had. I almost nudged Ammi, seated to my left, and pointed at the modest girl as a potential wife.
My proximity to the slutty girls caused piety to bubble up protectively inside me. I went off to join the Islamic mile-high club and prayed in the corridor near the kitchenette.
When I returned to my seat, I pulled my book from my carry-on: The Life of Muhammad, by Martin Lings. I had read it many times before, but this time I was focused on trying to memorize the names of the forgotten companions—men like Najiyyah the camel driver and Abu Dujanah, who wore a red hat during battle.
After some memory work in that book, I also pulled out Muhammad Asad’s memoir, The Road to Mecca. It told the story of how Leopold Weiss, an Austrian Jew, converted to Islam after living with Saudi Bedouins and King Abdul Aziz at the beginning of the century. As I ruminated on the book, I recalled that Asad had eventually left Arabia and moved to Pakistan, where he became its first ambassador to the United Nations. Asad believed that Islam was the greatest force mankind had ever experienced. He thought that if Muslims could live their life guided by the “spark of flame which burned in the Companions of the Prophet,” they would always be successful.
Getting up again to stretch, I walked up and down the aisles and thought about the idea of Pakistan. There was something empowering about it. In a world where there were so few examples of Muslims making anything, the creation of a nation-state, yanked from the smoldering ruins of colonialism and two world wars, snatched from the British Empire and the Hindu majority of India, established in the name of Islam and then sanctified by a migration that was comparable to the Prophet Muhammad’s flight to Medina, seemed like a massive accomplishment. Pakistan was an act of sovereignty carried out so that Muslims could pursue the purpose of life: worshipping God. Suddenly I felt honored to be a Muslim and honored to be going to Pakistan.
As the plane approached Karachi’s Jinnah Airport, I hurried toward to my seat to buckle up. As I zoomed past the bathroom, I met up with the gaggle of immodest girls that had been sitting in front of me, recognizing them by their giggles. I instinctively drew away from them—even the slightest touch against them would have to be burned off by hellfire—before noticing that they’d switched into modest shalwar kameezes with full dupattas covering their chests.
I was pleased by their change. It was a testament to the positive influence that an Islamic state had upon misguided believers.
We stepped onto the tarmac and wilted in the heat. Karachi’s brownish pollution was palpable against my face. It singed the nose hair when inhaled and left an unpleasant taste on the back of the tongue. Despite the smog, old men—home at last!—puffed out their chests and inhaled deeply as they tumbled down the steps.
Inside the terminal we were greeted by my paternal Uncle Saad. He was a high-ranking officer in the military,
which meant that he had an army of pages, servants, butlers, bodyguards, and drivers. At the airport he was able to press every porter, customs agent, visa inspection officer, and street urchin into service.
“Give your passports to me,” he said to Ammi. Then he turned to one of his servants: “Get these stamped! Hurry up, you slow sonofabitch!” He ordered another servant to intercept our luggage before it made its way to the baggage carts. As the servant ran off, one of the bodyguards made a backhand and pretended to slap him. Uncle Saad saw the soldier’s gesture and lashed out. “You fool! You think you’re big time? Go bring drinks. Pepsi. Don’t bring uncapped bottles like you did last time.”
Uncle Saad led us past long lines winding into the customs office and herded us toward a special corridor for families with “connections.” As we passed the people we’d flown in with, now pushing against each other in congested lines, cursing and swearing, or sweet-talking the self-important officers, I felt a sense of superiority. I didn’t have to go through all that headache because I was connected to the military.
As I thought about it, though, that privilege made me uneasy; it filled me with guilt. Privilege was un-Islamic. I had read that the great Caliphs Umar al-Khattab and Harun al-Rashid used to dress up as common people and go through the city streets to feel part of the crowd. Similarly, one of the Companions of the Prophet used to put his servant on his camel and walk him through the streets. I’d read that Abu Bakr Siddiq had been so humble that he slept on the floor. The privilege and the hierarchy that the military imposed in Karachi seemed to contradict these stories from Islamic history.
This wasn’t the way that an Islamic country was supposed to work.
Uncle Saad lived with his family in one of the designated military suburbs. It was a colony unto itself, with its own mosque, school, water treatment facility, market, and tandoor, and even the donkey carts that brought the vegetables served only the military. Uncle Saad and his wife were both educated and looked to Pops as a role model, because he had been able to get to America and was having his children educated there. When they saw me taking my books out of my bag the first afternoon we were there, they harangued me with questions about my “estudies.”