Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [78]
“Oh, he cares. He says that the only people who are allowed to oppress one another are pure races, and Punjabis aren’t pure.”
“But no one is racially pure anymore!”
“Maybe not, but he particularly dislikes Punjabis. He says they’re cowards for not using the nuke on Islam’s enemies.”
“What are you talking about? We produced Zia ul Haq and Nawaz Sharif. They imposed Islam on everyone.”
“Won’t work.”
“So that’s it? We’re screwed?”
She sighed. “We could have hidden and hoodwinked everything, but ethnicity…”
I could see our marriage slipping from my fingers. I could see myself calling Kara and having intercourse with her.
“There are powers greater than ethnicity,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Love!” I declared. “I’ll tell your father I love you!”
“There is no love,” she said. “Love is just when you pick one person and don’t pick anybody else afterwards.”
“What if we eloped?”
“I would be disowned,” she replied, shaking her head dismissively. “My family would refuse to acknowledge me in the community.”
“We could emotionally blackmail them—have a child as soon as possible and show up at their door with our little bundle of joy.”
“That would work only on my mother. My dad would refuse to greet the child.”
We sat in silence, hoping for inspiration. “What now?” I asked finally.
“We go our separate ways and hope that our parents will run into one another someday.”
“How can you be so callous?” I asked, offended by her suggestion. “Don’t you know that you’re my soulmate!”
“I’m not callous,” she said. “I’m hurting.”
“No. I can’t accept this,” I concluded. “There actually is something higher than love.”
“What’s that?”
“Islam! The Prophet said that Islam stands above and beyond ethnicity. I heard it from Moosa Farid. I think there’s even a verse about it in the Quran. About how God made us into tribes and stuff only for the sake of diversity.”
“So?”
I explained that I would go to Moosa and ask him to help me make a long list of scholars and citations affirming Islamic universalism. With his help, I would show that Islam was beyond race. I would raise myself to such levels of Islamic piety and leadership that Bilqis’s father would be hard-pressed to reject me. I’d become friends with all the main scholars of American Islam—Mukhtar Maghraoui, Hamza Yusuf, and Zaid Shakir—if that’s what it took. I’d take all three of them with me to talk to her father directly. “In short,” I said. “I’ll show him that xenophobia is un-Islamic.”
Bilqis smiled. She knew the persuasive power of religion. “Fine. So we are going to do things the Islamic way?”
“That’s right,” I said, puffing out my chest.
“Then that means we have to start behaving Islamically.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it means that we can’t touch one another.”
“I don’t think you’ve noticed,” I said, “but we already don’t touch.”
“I know. But that’s because we’re reluctant and shy. Now we have to not touch for the sake of Islam. Our intentions have to be Islamic.”
“Can do.”
“Wait,” she added. “It’s going to be hard to stick to this rule if we keep meeting.”
“Fine. We’ll keep in touch via phone and e-mail.”
“Thing is, if we keep hearing each other’s voice—”
“—right, we’ll become tempted to melt, like butter melts on a fire.”
“So let’s just talk on AOL.”
“All right. Just that.”
“Finally we’re doing things properly,” my soulmate said, exhaling loudly as if for emphasis. “By not staying in touch we have a shot at getting married.”
In order to find Islamic scholars that might vouch for me with Bilqis’s father, I started attending lectures around New York. One day Moosa and I went to see a prominent African teacher who was giving a lecture near Harlem titled “The Conditions of Jihad.” He was considered very pious, and I really wanted to get him on my side.
The lecture was given in an old cathedral that was full of college students and young professionals. The seats were split down the center, as you’d expect for this speaker: women on one side and men on the other. The talk itself wasn’t what I expected, though. No geopolitical jargon.