Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [138]
“Don’t patronize me.”
“You’re making a mockery of yourself,” I scoffed. “My covenant is ‘invalid’?”
“All covenants are invalid. Save one.”
“Oh really? Which one is that exactly?”
“It’s in the Quran. Chapter 7, verse 172. ‘Am I not your Lord?’ God asks humanity. ‘Yes!’ reply the children of Adam. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“No.”
Ziad dried his eyes with his arm. His black pupils were bright and shiny. He drew closer to me and spoke softly but with feeling.
“That verse refers to the Covenant of Alast. The primordial agreement. The one that established the idea of a human ‘We.’ God gathered us—all of us: you, me, your ancestors, your progeny, past, present, and future—and asked us a very simple question, and we all—together, in unison with one another, as the human race—made an affirmation. He said, Am I? We said, Yes you are. We affirmed God. We gave our consent, establishing that god was God. That affirmation also established that we were We.”
Ziad sat back down before continuing. “It took all of us becoming One for God to be affirmed,” he said. “Ek nuqte vich gul muqdi e. ‘It is all in One contained.’ We are the one that is God. That’s what Bulleh Shah was talking about. That’s why I cried that night when you translated the poem—because I’d never heard it so perfectly captured. In the literature of the mystics, the affirmation of the Covenant of Alast is called the First Witness. It’s primeval. It’s original. There’s a Second Witness too, but it occurs way later. That’s when each one of us, in our own individual lives, affirms our disparate religions or ideologies or philosophies. You, my friend, place the Second Witness over and above the First. That’s wrong. It’s wrong because the real covenant that guides your life, the one that you should be obsessed with, is in the service of all humanity. It’s for the ‘We.’ It’s for God. Yet you march around the world with your covenant—that false covenant—which is in the service of Muslims only, thinking yourself to be engaged in God’s work. You associate partners with God. Islam is your idol.”
I stood dumbstruck, then collapsed into the chair opposite him. I had read a thousand books and debated hundreds of believers and spent my whole life in Muslim households, yet I had never encountered such thoughts. “I don’t know what to say,” I admitted.
“I told you before that my orientation was too simple for a great intellectual like yourself,” Ziad replied.
Then, as he reached across the table and touched my hand reassuringly, Ziad started crying again. This time they were tears of reverence. I said nothing; I just looked at his dark brown face. The places where tears had run earlier had dried. New rivulets ran down his cheeks.
Bela, I thought to myself.
Epilogue
I’m sitting on a bench in Monterey, California, waiting for a bus I don’t intend to take. Route 3, Glenwood Circle West, means nothing to me except that it’s the location of an apartment complex where Ammi lives.
Set below me, in an artificially carved armpit of the hill, is the maroon and white track of Monterey Peninsula College. Sloping above it is the interior of the gray dome that is the sky. Here and there upon its surface, light blue streaks have been sponged. In some places an angel passing by has dragged his wings and smudged together the disparate shades of gray. There’s a big tree nearby around which a million moths are dancing, bursting out of the spherical clumps of leaves like laughter from little boys.
God, meanwhile, is seated beside me on the bench, today adopting the form of a lone bird, eyes cast downward. Stubborn little guy, He didn’t scoot an inch when I approached to sit down. No matter. I suppose this must be because He knows that, since He is everywhere, every time I sit, I sit upon Him. I guess He realizes the Problem of Omnipresence: you can never be alone.
Oh no, I think, I said too much—because with a soft whir of His wings, God flies away. Haha, but here He returns, the Ubiquitous One. Now He has lodged Himself