Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [23]
“Stick it in there, will you?” I pleaded.
He sighed, flattened the dough further, and stuck it into the oven. Within moments a little piece of piping hot bread was ready—just for me. I took it in my hands, marveling over its thick edge, its crispy center, and then nibbled on it all the way back home.
A couple of months later, after Ammi had made many prayers for his return, Pops came back safe and sound, dejectedly explaining that there were no jobs to be had in Iran. He would reopen his clinic in Sehra Kush and hope for the best.
Instead of a flute that would summon a jinn, he brought me back a jacket.
12
As Pops began looking for a place to send me to school, people wondered why I wasn’t becoming a hafiz-e-Quran—someone who memorized the Holy Book.
“It’s the highest form of learning,” Dadi Ma declared.
“First you memorize the Quran,” said Tau, whose two sons, Tariq and Muaz, were enrolled in the madrassa. “Then comes everything else.”
Being a hafiz was considered the apex of knowledge because of the revered status of the Quran—a status reflected in the names we gave it: the Lawhul Mahfuz, or Preserved Tablet, and the Uncreated Word of Allah. The Quran existed jointly with God. Timeless, immutable, perfect, the Quran was all Allah (though not all of Allah was the Quran). Allah had poured it through the mouth of Muhammad, and as it existed on paper now was how Allah intended for the Quran to look, taste, and sound. The Quran was the Islamic equivalent of Christ. The act of repeating the Arabic words, as they passed through the mouth and throat and echoed in the chest, was a form of transubstantiation: a way of making what was divine enter the human body. Christians took a piece of bread and a touch of wine and thought that they had taken of the body of their God; Muslims passed God in textual form in and out of their larynxes.
Most important, when Allah chose to impart his final, clearest message, he chose to convey it in the literary language of the Bedouin poets. Human translations of that message were not considered to be the Quran because they were not in Arabic, and thus not in the language of God. In fact, a Quran that was not in Arabic couldn’t even be referred to as a Quran. The language of Arabic had a divinity of its own: the simple act of opening one’s mouth and spouting Quranic Arabic was enough to endow the speaker with blessings. It was for this reason that a Muslim didn’t really care whether or not he understood the Quran. It mattered only that he could pronounce the Arabic words situated between the covers—or, as Ammi put it in easy-to-understand theological economics, “Each Arabic letter in the Quran is worth ten blessings. Just saying three letters—alif lam, mim—that’s thirty blessings, creditable on the Day of Judgment!” In other words, the Quran was code, a sequence of 77,701 Arabic words, composed of 323,671 letters, which, at ten a pop, amounted to more than three million blessings. This is why rote memorization of the entire Quran was such big business. With the gazillions of blessings that a hafiz racked up in his life, he would be assured of entrance to Paradise. And that was the point: the afterlife was the most important thing in life.
Beyond being guaranteed heaven, there was another benefit to being a hafiz, one that extended to everyone around the Quran memorizer. On the Day of Judgment a hafiz would be allowed to save seventy-two people from hellfire in Dozakh. By having a few hafizes in every generation, entire families would be spared that suffering. The only other type of person that Allah would allow to intercede on behalf of seventy-two people was a martyr; but obviously to become that one had to die, a far more painful task. Since many boys in Sehra Kush were studying