Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [49]
“But the Noble Quran is free!” Ammi said loudly. “Look, they even come in different colors. Red. Green. Blue. Gold.”
“I will use Yusuf Ali,” Pops said, his voice ringing with finality.
“If you use Yusuf Ali,” Auntie Fiza said, “you’ll always be on a different page than we are!”
“So be it. Better lost than Lost. May Allah guide the true Muslim.”
Over the many months that the QSC lasted, Pops was never on the same page as the rest of us; he often peeked over my shoulder to see where we were. He did, however, manage to get revenge: there were many instances when the group reached a complex passage of the Quran and couldn’t make sense of the hadiths cited in the Noble Quran’s footnotes. At such a point Pops would stand up and say, “Now let me read to you what a great scholar of Islam, Abdullah Yusuf Ali, has to say on this topic.” Then he would read the whole commentary, even if it was twenty pages long.
During the study circle I always kept quiet, except when it was my turn to read a few verses; I never asked questions or offered an opinion. I spent most of my time wishing I could go into the other room and turn on the TV to watch Boy Meets World’s Topanga—with her plump lips and thick hips. I desperately wanted to see her kiss somebody.
Flim shared my sentiment, though we generally kept quiet about it. On Friday nights, when the clock hit 8:00 p.m. he would poke me on the foot. “Right now Boy Meets World is on,” he’d say resignedly.
“Be quiet,” Pops would glare, squeezing his hand. “Don’t you see that we’re doing Boy Meets Islam?”
Through the QSC I became better acquainted with Saleem, the eldest son of a local family. He was my inverse, my antithesis, my doppelgnger. He had recently transferred to my high school but before that had spent ten years at a Catholic academy, an experience that had left him deeply scarred. “Ten years with the Nasara,” he said, using the Quranic term for Christians. “I couldn’t take it anymore. Couldn’t take Mass. Couldn’t take the nuns. Bunch of religious rednecks!”
Even though Saleem had gotten a 1560 out of 1600 on the SAT and a 35 out of 36 on the ACT, with a 4.0 GPA and guaranteed admission at Princeton—all honors that I didn’t have—he said he wasn’t cut out to study “all that secular garbage.” He wanted to go to the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia, where he would study his hero, Ibn Taymiya, a thirteenth-century thinker prominent among Salafis; he wanted to learn Arabic and study the Saudi hadith specialist Shaykh al-Albani; he wanted to master Islamic economics like the California convert Jamal Zarabozo; he hoped one day to run a correspondence course about Islamic theology like the Jamaican convert Abu Ameenah Bilal Phillips; and he wanted to travel the world debating Christians and showing the doctrine of the trinity to be utter foolishness like the South African polemicist Ahmed Deedat. His willingness to give up Princeton for the sake of studying Islam made me wonder if my own desire to get into a top college—where I would study secular subjects—was unworthy and un-Islamic.
In fact, I was doubly antagonized by Saleem: first for his being better than me in secular things, and then for his rejection of them.
Whenever the QSC descended into discussion, Saleem participated eagerly, and he always brought the conversation back to Christianity. He’d learned a lot during his days with the nuns.
“Did you know,” he offered one day, “that there were like three hundred different gospel versions set out on a table during the Council of Nicaea? Then everyone fell asleep, and when they woke up there were only four left. If that doesn’t prove tampering with the Bible, I don’t know what does. This is why mankind needed the Quran! Christianity needed a corrective: Islam!”
Pops appreciated Saleem’s zealous participation and was irritated by my silence. He often