Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [67]
“Denzel rules,” I said.
“Man,” Aslam said. “I wish there were more good movies about Islam.”
“Something like The Message, maybe,” Moosa said.
The Message was a semifictional account of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, starring the late Anthony Quinn as the Prophet’s uncle. It was well loved among Muslims because it told—positively—the story of Muhammad’s rise to power and prominence without depicting his face or showing any of the Companions.
“I loved that the whole story was told from Muhammad’s perspective so you never saw his face,” Aslam said. “That was brilliant. He didn’t even talk. Just shook his head.”
“True, but Hollywood is anti-Islam today,” Moosa concluded. “They’ll never make films like that again.”
Indeed, a few weeks later Hollywood hit us hard. A film called The Siege came out, and we threw a collective fit because Denzel Washington—Malcolm X himself!—was in a starring role and not one we were happy about.
“Denzel betrayed us!” Moosa said. “The film is all about suicide bombers in Brooklyn, and I read that they’re shown purifying themselves before killing people, as if killing were the same as being pious!”
“Denzel’s in it?” I asked, astonished.
“So is that redneck Bruce Willis,” Aslam said. “Man, you know it was all his idea. But why would Denzel go along? Did he forget that he played Malcolm X?”
We had a long argument about whether or not we should go see the movie. On one hand, we didn’t want to financially support something that we thought would make Islam look bad. On the other hand, we wouldn’t know how it made Islam look bad unless we actually watched it.
We discussed our dilemma in the university’s prayer hall. The louder we argued, the more we became interested in the film. It was finally decided that all the MSA brothers would go to the cinema together; we’d sit in the back and jeer so that other people couldn’t enjoy the presumably tasteless film. Once the “thug brothers”—called that because they liked dressing in gangster clothing, though they were actually a group of rich kids from Strong Island—heard our plan, they eagerly joined us. We marched to the theater talking about all the comments we’d make.
“Anytime Bruce Willis talks we should just start doing the call to prayer,” was the idea most often heard.
Upon arriving in the hall everyone stopped talking tough and started munching on popcorn. As we watched the movie, I realized that I felt more conflicted than assaulted. I didn’t like how the suicide bombers were depicted as pious, God-fearing Muslims when everyone knew that if you blew people up you were a bad Muslim. But at the same time, the film—which showed New York going under martial law—served as a warning about military excess in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. There was ambiguity in the story that I had not expected.
At the end of the movie I learned that the same confusion extended to the rest of the group. We’d gone in expecting to become angry—no, more angry—and we’d left not knowing what to say. Opting for the easy way out, we ignored the big issues and focused on minutiae: we called Tony Shalhoub a sellout for playing an FBI agent and mocked the way the film messed up little stylistic details. “Did you see how the guy doing ablution washed his arms before washing his face?” I said. “Hollywood sucks! Always demonizing Islam!”
After a few days no one even mentioned The Siege.
The only time I heard about it again was when someone told me that the guy who’d produced the film had gotten in a car accident and a stop sign had impaled him through the skull.
Moosa called that getting “God-smacked.”
2
Moosa Farid often told me that his entire family, as far back as he knew, were Islamic scholars, and before that they were all Muslim kings. Aslam told me that his family were Seyyids, meaning that he was a direct descendant of the Holy Prophet. I felt like a loser compared to them, so I called Ammi to find out whether