Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [46]
When Pops was unable to find a job and our funds ran down to a single subway token—this was several months into our stay—he took out some of the brass statues, polished them up, and went to Times Square, where he sold a few of so we could buy groceries.
It took a few years and many jobs before Pops gained admission to a medical residency in the United States. The journey took us to all four corners of America: Brooklyn to Nevada, back to Brooklyn, to Arizona, to Washington state, and eventually, by the time I was in high school, to Alabama. Whenever I left a city and complained about losing my friends, Ammi quoted the Quran and told me to “hold onto the rope of God.”
She meant Islam.
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By the time we settled in Alabama, in a town in the heart of the Bible Belt, Ammi considered herself a Salafi—an adherent of a conservative strain of Islam promoted by Arab missionaries situated at various mosques around the United States. In Salafi Islam believers had to emulate the Muslims of the seventh century as closely as possible. To learn more about Salafism, Ammi purchased volumes of hadiths, bought and devoured literature written by Abu Ameena Bilaal Phillips, and signed up for the magazine al-Jumuah.
Salafism also brought a revolution in her dress. When we had lived in Pakistan she had used to wear the niqab—not from choice, but necessity. When she first arrived in America and could actually choose what she wanted to wear she adopted Western dress and left her hair uncovered. However, after becoming a Salafi she began wearing the hijab and declared that “women who don’t wear the scarf are not true Muslims.”
Ammi also rejected the mysticism that Beyji had taught her. “All that Sufi stuff,” she said, referring to spiritual exercises and the veneration for saints and holy people, “is an abomination and an innovation. Innovation leads to misguidance, and misguidance leads to the Fire.”
Also, since Salafis believed that all graven images were a form of shirk, or disbelief, Ammi took down paintings from our walls and blackened the faces of the people appearing in calendars. Even our family portraits were done away with. “If you keep a picture of a person on your wall,” she said, “on the Day of Judgment Allah will challenge you to bring it to life. When you aren’t able to do it, He will throw you into hell.” Just to be theologically safe, she extended the pictorial ban to all organic things—pictures of plants and fruits included. For some time she shut down the TV as well, since Allah could potentially ask her to animate the cartoons Flim and I loved to watch.
In the most dramatic affirmation of Salafism, which shunned song and dance as immoral, Ammi turned our garage shelves into a graveyard of cassettes. She went into her drawers and boxes and spent hours finding her old Pakistani and Bollywood songs. All the artists that she loved to listen to—Muhammad Rafi, Lata, Abida Parveen, Iqbal Bano—were put in little shoeboxes and consigned to the darkest part of the house. The stereo was kept in use, but now the tapes were of religious sermons.
There were two people responsible for Ammi’s Salafi turn.
Indirectly: Pops. Ammi saw him talking to the attractive young nurses at the hospital—he was a medical resident by this time—and tried to shame him for his flirtation by putting on the hijab and adopting the most blunt kind of religiosity she could find. Her Salafism was supposed to remind him that he was a Muslim upon whom extramarital relations were forbidden. It was also supposed to curb his spending, because Pops kept piling on credit card debt, leaving Ammi—who did the family’s accounts—to deal with