Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [53]
The mosque smelled of clean sawdust. We prayed in the main room and then joined a class in one of the adjoining rooms. With the students, we took turns copying the Quranic verses that were written in calligraphic style on the board; then we listened to the instructor teach the four young students about the principle of tawhid, or the Oneness of God.
Then, suddenly, various members from the Jamaat took the kids aside, individually or in pairs, and began lecturing them about how to wash up in the bathroom and how to wash their feet during wazu. These were basic, elementary things that all Muslim children of school age knew. And the instruction was conducted, not in a subtle and conversational manner, but blatantly, with an air of supercilious authority, the targets held in place with a firm grip on their shoulders. The Tablighis I’d encountered had always treated me the same way. Now, though—when I could observe them from a third-person perspective—I realized how shameless was their coercion.
Even aside from the physical restraint, the lecturing upset me. I considered it a mark of arrogance to walk up to another Muslim, one whom you didn’t know and whose circumstances you weren’t familiar with, and sermonize to him. It seemed like an assertion of supremacy, a usurpation of the individual’s autonomy. It was rude and mannerless.
I didn’t want to make a scene in the classroom so I dashed out of the mosque to take a walk around the neighborhood and blow off my anger.
Crossing a few streets, I entered an adjoining neighborhood. It was one of those surreal places forgotten since the Civil War, where bleak houses rested ponderously on crumbling stilts, where aged men with shiny eyes and grizzled faces leaned against handrails, where spilled sewage and trash were ubiquitous—a place acknowledged by the government only when a highway bridge needed to be noosed around it. Walking around on that hot afternoon, I imagined the place a hundred years earlier. What would have been different then? Nighttime light would have come from cracked stars instead of fizzled-out halogen bulbs. That was about all. The rest was the same: dogs voiding bladders, men who were lonely, and the glare of a despotic sheriff.
The scene made me wonder if some people were simply destined to be servile. I asked myself if I was one of them.
4
Ammi cultivated a small following of troubled women for whom she served as therapist. When Pops was at work, the ladies came to our house for long conversations over chai and cookies.
One of the women who came was a middle-aged hijabi named Janice. She had an unusual problem.
A long time ago she had entered into a financial arrangement with an Egyptian man: he agreed to pay her a monthly sum, and she agreed to be his wife on paper so that he could get a coveted green card. Along the way she ended up converting to Islam, and they took their marriage seriously. Three children later, their marriage ran into trouble when husband and wife went in different theological directions—Janice became a fundamentalist and her husband stopped practicing. Now she wanted a divorce so that she could marry someone who wouldn’t reduce her chances to get to Paradise. However, the way her husband had been raised in an Egyptian village, women didn’t give divorces, men did—and no matter how much she agitated for divorce, he wasn’t going to give it to her. His refusal wouldn’t have been an issue if she could have gone to family court and filed a paper at her own initiative. Problem was, according to the scholars she followed in