Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [66]
When any of the brothers rattled off their list of sins, the rest of us shook our heads judgmentally. Each swivel of the neck condemned the brother who had just finished speaking. Each turn of the neck pulsed disapproval. Our sardonic smiles sizzled with chastisement. “Damn, you were wack,” we said. “You’d lost your sense of righteousness,” we stressed. “You’d left the sirat ul mustaqim.” We were like children learning a new language, one organized around accusation and excoriation.
We behaved like this because we all knew the prophetic hadith about the adulterer:
Once an adulterer went to the Prophet and confessed his sin before him and the glorious Companions. Then he pleaded to be stoned to death. The Prophet heard him out and then turned away, saying, “Don’t tell me any more.” The man ran around and faced the Prophet and again confessed his adultery. Yet again the Prophet turned away from him and said, “Don’t tell me.” The man moved to face the Prophet yet again and confessed for a third time. The Prophet then told the adulterer to go home and repent to Allah and never commit adultery again.
The actual moral of the hadith was that if a sinful Muslim sincerely repented, then the earthly punishment for his sin—even if it was something as grievous as adultery, which was theoretically deserving of stoning—could be waived by the authority responsible for carrying out the law.
However, the lesson that we drew was that in order to really repent for our sins, we had to prosecute and convict ourselves in front of others, as the adulterer had in front of the Prophet and the Companions.
Besides, since we were all brothers in Islam, we had an obligation to assist one another in our psychological flagellation. That would help keep us from repeating our sins in the future.
In short: it was out of concern for our friends that we had to berate them publicly.
Briefer: humiliation was kindness.
We didn’t go to bars; we didn’t date; we didn’t hit strip clubs; we didn’t do weed; we didn’t go to parties. We all upheld the Islamic rules that our parents had had such a difficult time enforcing against us when we were younger.
What we did do was watch movies.
Every Friday and Saturday night—and sometimes even Friday afternoons—we rushed to the one of the city’s many movie theaters and watched whatever was showing. Since films were the only form of entertainment we had, we had reached an unstated agreement that we wouldn’t make reference to the ratings. After all, if we couldn’t watch R-rated films, there really wouldn’t be much to do. We normally took turns paying for one another, but when we watched an R-rated film we bought our tickets individually, to compensate for knowingly sinning. This was based on the Quranic verse that says, “None shall bear the burden of another.”
It was during one of these excursions to the movies that I realized we all had a shared cinematic pedigree composed of three films with story lines about Islam: Executive Decision, Malcolm X, and The Message.
Executive Decision, starring Kurt Russell and Steven Seagal, had come out in 1996, and we had all seen it because it depicted a Muslim hijacker. It was notorious among Muslims, not just because of its depiction of a Muslim villain, but because it showed the cold-blooded hijacker praying and invoking Allah during his rampage.
We hated the film. The one thing that none of us could accept was that a pious Muslim was depicted as doing evil. After all, we were pious Muslims, and we weren’t evil.
“That guy was a bastard,” Moosa said. “But they were showing him praying and prostrating as if he were a good Muslim! That’s not right.”
“They always show Muslims negatively,” Aslam said. “I saw a book once about how Arab and Muslim characters have always been depicted negatively in Hollywood.”
“Except in Malcolm X,” Moosa said. “That movie was tight!”
“Except in Malcolm X,” Aslam agreed.
“The best part in X was when Denzel Washington