Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [27]
which enflames the heart
which enlivens the soul!
Ammi also held Iqbal in great esteem, but for different reasons. She was impressed by his piety. “Iqbal recited zikr thirty million times in his life. You can’t go wrong if you do the same.”
“What invocation did he recite?”
“The durood.”
“All of it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Allahumma sallay ala Muhammad wa ala aal-e-Muhammad kma sallayta wa ala aal-e-Ibrahim innaka hameedun majeed.”
“That’s long!”
“Read that thirty million times and you can become the next Iqbal, the founder of a Muslim nation. Don’t you remember how you were taken to Mecca and had your heart rubbed upon the Ka’ba?”
“How could I forget?” I’d heard that story a hundred times.
The other household book was one I read was in English; it was called The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, by Michael Hart. We owned it for one simple reason: the Holy Prophet was number one.
Hart explained his reasoning as follows: “My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world’s most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular levels.”
I took great pride in the fact that someone from the West—a leader of science and education—recognized the Prophet Muhammad’s influence.
The third book we had was a children’s book in Urdu called Lives of the Prophets. This book explained that while every messenger of God before Muhammad had brought earlier versions of Islam, with Muhammad that religion reached its culmination. Lives of the Prophets contained the story of Adam and Havva’s fall from the Garden; the story of Nuh’s wife seeing the water in her oven and warning Nuh about the Flood so he could launch his ark; the story of Ibrahim destroying the town’s idols when he was just a child; the story of Musa challenging the Pharaoh’s wizards by casting his staff on the ground and having it turn into a cobra; the story of Yunus, who was eaten by a whale; Yusuf, who rose from a prisoner of the Pharaoh to one of his officials; and Isa, born to a virgin mother. I liked reading this book before I went to sleep.
One night the stars were out as we prepared to sleep on the roof. I had forgotten Lives downstairs. I couldn’t get to sleep without it, but I was too scared to go get it in the dark. So I turned to Ammi.
“Tell me a story,” I pleaded.
“About what?”
“Tell me a Prophet story.”
“Pick a Prophet.”
“All 124,000 of them,” I suggested, smiling in the dark.
“How about just one?” she countered, fluffing her pillow and putting her glasses under it.
There were just too many options. “You pick,” I said.
“All right,” she agreed. “I will tell you about Yusuf. Did you know that when he was a little boy he had a dream in which the sun and the moon and the twelve stars were bowing to him?”
“Why did they bow to him?” I asked.
“Because Yusuf was so beautiful. Out of the ten parts of beauty in the universe, Allah gave nine to Yusuf.”
“That doesn’t leave a lot for the rest of us.”
“Don’t talk like that,” she chided. “His beauty was a burden upon him. Women schemed and connived in order to try to seduce him. Things are always difficult for people who serve God. Take our Holy Prophet, for example. He had to struggle.”
“Like how?”
“The people of Taif threw stones at him until his shoes were filled with blood. He was insulted and attacked in Mecca. Instead of calling him Muhammad, they called him Mudhammam, which was a bad insult. A woman used to throw garbage on his head every day that he passed by her house. The Quraysh—the tribe from which he came—tried to kill him, so he had to flee for Medina. Even then they didn’t leave him alone; they sent armies after him so that he had to fight in battles and lose many of his friends.”
“Why did God allow such things to happen?” I asked.
“God didn’t allow them. God commanded them. He did it so that Muhammad would be prepared to deal with even greater challenges. Do you remember all the suffering Muhammad went through when he was a child?