Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [55]
Amina, who was now crying, pulled herself together and agreed. I was summoned and instructed to find an online fatwa service from which we could solicit an Islamic opinion. We then composed an e-mail to a group of scholars in South Africa.
It took the online scholars only three days to reply. Their verdict: Amina had been divorced sixteen years ago, and if she didn’t want to continue living like an adulteress, she needed to leave her husband immediately. They also implied that she was hell-bound, but there was a chance that with just enough penance Allah might show mercy. They didn’t say anything about stoning.
Amina wasn’t with us when I read the verdict to Ammi.
“That Amina isn’t as stupid as she pretends,” Ammi said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think that for twenty years she wanted to get out of the marriage but didn’t have the courage to leave. Now, with this story about getting divorced sixteen years ago, she’s got influential Islamic scholars telling her that she needs to leave; otherwise, she’s an adulteress. Now no one can stop her.”
Ammi was right. When Amina found out about the fatwa, she was visibly elated. She left her husband within a week and moved to another state, where she got a job in human resources.
Of all the people I came across in adolescence, I identified with Amina Alam the most. She just wanted to be free.
5
I was prohibited everything related to the opposite sex.
Ammi had a pair of mantras that impressed on me the immorality of interacting with females. The first was based on a hadith. “When a woman and a man are alone,” she said often, “the devil is the third.” It meant that every single moment spent in the company of a girl was tantamount to Satanism.
Her other refrain, “A man is like butter and a woman is like a hot stove, and fire always melts the butter,” had uncertain origins and equally uncertain meaning. However, it evoked in my head images of the various tortures in hell—which had been clearly described by the imam at the mosque and involved getting broiled in a cauldron full of pus—and was therefore effective despite its apparent absurdity.
Every time I felt an iota of arousal I was struck by fear. Then, trying to preempt the punishment that Allah and the angels were undoubtedly preparing for me in the afterlife, I tried to figure out a way to make myself suffer in this life. My behavior made Islamic sense: an imam back in Pakistan had once said that the reason Islamic authorities punished so harshly in this life was so that we wouldn’t have to be punished for the same sin in the afterlife. I figured that since I lived in America now, and there were no Islamic authorities to give me penance through flogging, I might as well do their work for them.
Thus, when I went to a sleepover and ended up getting turned on while watching a soft-porn film called Threesome, I went back home and prayed for Allah to give me AIDS, the disease by which I believed Allah killed all orgiastic people. (Later, however, I prayed to Allah to veto my earlier request of death-by-AIDS, because I was concerned that if people learned I had the virus they would think I was gay, which all Muslims considered reprehensible.)
My general reaction to developing feelings toward girls at school was denial and avoidance. When a pretty, usually shy girl named Becky wrote me a love letter during film-hour in science class—it was stamped with a big, glossy kiss that smelled of bubble gum—I told myself that she was only joking; then, making certain that she could see what I was doing, I threw it in the trash can. Another time, when I developed a proper crush on a girl named Rachelle—a crush that I couldn’t shake no matter how hard I tried—I convinced a friend of mine to ask her out and made a long list of all the other guys that I could potentially set her up with. It was easier to run away from girls I liked if they happened to be attractive: I simply told myself that I was too