Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [105]
When I made plans to attend a birthday party at a club, I was given naseeha, or confidential religious counsel, by a brother who felt that this would reflect badly upon my office; and when I objected that I wasn’t planning on drinking or dancing, and that in fact many of the MSA members themselves were going, I was told that most people would think I was there solely to monitor their morality and would therefore likely be viewed as the religious police.
In short, there was a downside to being “Muhammad to the MSA”: I now bore the expectation of infallibility and heightened purity. A Muslim leader couldn’t be just an average guy undergoing the same tribulations, committing the same mistakes, and liking the same things as everyone else. On the contrary, a Muslim leader had to be an ideal that other, less religious people looked toward as a way to motivate themselves to be more pious. A Muslim leader, rather than being himself, had to be what others thought a perfect Muslim should be. The trouble, of course, was that I was far removed from piety—postmodernism and my own nature had assured that—and therefore the only solutions were to genuinely achieve perfect piety or to fake it.
As a true postmodernist I opted for the latter and called it art. It was as Nietzsche had said: “giving style to one’s character.” I styled myself a slave of Islam.
My plan to depict myself as Islamically submissive had three elements: wardrobe, conventions, and public rituals.
First the wardrobe. Adopting the Islamic “look” was easy. It required mixing and matching the following clothes and accessories:
Chinstrap beard
Palestinian-style checkered kafiyas (2)
Multicolored West African kufi, a rounded, brimless cap (1)
Elegant white, crocheted kufi (1)
Green cargo pants and green dress shirts (2)—green being the color of Islam
Official MSA T-shirts (2) with Quranic verses from beloved chapters—Surah Baqarah and Surah Nur—imprinted on the back (maroon and blue respectively)
Long-sleeved pride shirt in white with “Muslim” written in gold lettering across the front
Pakistani shalwar kameezes (2), to be seen in, particularly in the student center
Gray Iraqi robe-style thowb (1), to be worn during Friday sermon Tasbih beads (2 strings)—one string hanging teasingly out of a bag, the other hanging in the car
Islam ring for ring finger to symbolize “marriage” to the faith (sterling silver with star and crescent) (1)
Crescent necklace (sterling silver) (1)
Sterling silver wristband with Quranic verse etched inside (1)
The second component of my plan involved showing off my new wardrobe at the Islamic conventions that were a big part of my job as president. The best place to show off the fashions of the faith was the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA.
Every Labor Day the ISNA held a convention in Chicago. It was the biggest gathering of Muslims in the Western hemisphere. Believers came from everywhere, filling Chicago’s hotels. College MSAs used funds they’d collected over the year to subsidize the trip for at least some of their members. People went to listen to lectures by superstar evangelists like Hamza Yusuf and Siraj Wahaj and to go to the massive bazar, where everything from Medinan miswaks—teeth-cleaning sticks—to Indonesian devotional music was available. There were workshops and seminars and networking events for young professionals, where they discussed such things as how to tap the market of rich Muslim doctors. For the bachelors and bachelorettes in their mid-twenties—clearly past marital age—there were expensive matchmaking banquets at which prospective spouses wore color-coded name tags corresponding with their age. (Some of the parents, many of whom accompanied even their middle-aged children, complained that the colors ought to correspond to degrees or income, since those were