Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [26]
Qari Adil rang the bell on his bike as he arrived, and I went to greet him. It was a gleaming silver Sohrab.
His comportment was unlike that of any other religious figure I’d seen in Sehra Kush. He was graceful, sparkling clean, and had an obvious sense of fashion. Riding in the sun made him sweat profusely, so that droplets fell from his forehead. When he arrived, he dabbed the end of his turban against his face and shook his shirt. Even with me—a kid—he had a nervousness that made me like him. When he finally sat down each day, he began by making small talk with me in a gregarious manner.
On most days, after I read the Quran with him we would read Mawdudi’s tafsir, starting from the first surah, “The Opening,” and move quickly into the dense material of the longest chapters in the Quran: “The Cow” and “The Family of Imran.”
We talked about Jews a lot, because the story of Moses and his people takes up a large part of the two longest chapters of the Quran. The reference to the cow in the chapter by that name comes from a story involving a special cow that the Jews were asked by God to slaughter, but which they refused to kill on account of its lactic productivity. Qari Adil told me many stories about the Jews, such as the one about Jewish fishermen who were told to stop fishing on Saturday but wouldn’t, because on Saturday, to test them, God would fill the lakes with fish, “and greedy people would become tempted to disobey God.” He told me of the way the Jewish people compelled Moses to tell God how to show Himself on Sinai—and then refused to accept Moses’s recounting of the event. He told me how the Jews in exile had started to starve, so Moses had God bring huge, heaping plates of mann-o-salwa from Paradise. After a period of eating such rich heavenly food, the Jews demanded lean legumes and shrubs and vegetables instead.
All of these stories of Jewish “disobedience and decadence” finally reached a climax when Qari Adil announced that the Jews had been turned into apes. In a gleeful narration he described in careful detail—a mixture of his own speculation and Mawdudi’s imagination—how the actual transformation of a man into a monkey occurred.
Allah turning people into monkeys bothered me. If I were turned into a monkey, I’d eat lice and be unable to fly kites or spin tops. Being able to flip myself from branch to branch using just my tail wouldn’t make up for the fact that I would be ugly, hairy, and loud. Besides, there was something strange about the punishment. It wasn’t like the other divine punishments: floods, storms of sulfur, civilizations flipped upside down. Monkey-making seemed to be designed solely for amusement and mockery, things I hadn’t associated with Allah. The possibility that Allah was a naughty boy in heaven who rolled around in the clouds making people into animals made me nervous. I came to fear God, but not just that: I became wary of Him as one does of a bully.
Only a few weeks into our study, it was revealed that Qari Adil was using the lessons as an occasion to flirt with Ammi, by writing love letters to her. When Ammi told Pops, the house visits stopped and Mawdudi’s books were put away.
There were a few other books besides the Quran that evoked respect in my household. The foremost among these was an old leather-bound volume of Muhammad Iqbal’s collection of poems, called Baang-e-Dra (“Call of the Caravan”). Pops often sat around on the veranda bellowing the first verse from the most famous poem:
Ya rabb dil e Muslim ko
woh zinda tamanna de
jo qalb ko garma de
jo ruh ko tarpa de!
O Almighty, give to the Muslim
that spark