Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [84]
This wasn’t the way that an Islamic country was supposed to work.
Uncle Saad lived with his family in one of the designated military suburbs. It was a colony unto itself, with its own mosque, school, water treatment facility, market, and tandoor, and even the donkey carts that brought the vegetables served only the military. Uncle Saad and his wife were both educated and looked to Pops as a role model, because he had been able to get to America and was having his children educated there. When they saw me taking my books out of my bag the first afternoon we were there, they harangued me with questions about my “estudies.”
I was perplexed by the zeal with which they wanted to emulate academics in the West. I wanted to ask them if they knew that a secular education was corrosive and corrupting to Islam.
The house was approximately a hundred yards from the mosque, where the azan was sung five times a day to announce the time for prayer. Yet I noticed that no one in the colony went to make regular prayers. The mosque seemed to be little more than a decoration that no one had much interest in.
At the house the TV stayed on most of the day. Every channel was from either mainland India or Dubai. Many stations featured music videos with scantily clad girls or songs full of innuendo. The VJs were all Western in behavior and clothing, and everyone was trying to out-MTV one another.
One day Uncle Saad took us for a tour of the colony and then to his base, where he put special emphasis on showing us the Officers’ Mess—a sparse, English-style dining hall with antique tables, solid chairs, and finely engraved china with insignias etched into the bottom. I saw a table of wine glasses in a corner and asked him what it was for.
“Lots of the people on base drink,” he said.
“Is it just the high-ranking people who drink?” I asked, “or does everyone?”
He thought for a moment. “Mostly it’s just the top officers.”
The notion that the foot soldiers and lower-level officers didn’t drink gave me a modicum of comfort—it was nice that they weren’t getting westernized. I resolved to talk with some of the lower-level officers and ask them how they allowed themselves to serve Muslims who drank.
One evening a military van with two machine-gun-bearing Pathan soldiers in the backseat picked us up and took us all to the commercial area, to go to an open-air restaurant on top of a ten-story hotel that seemed to cater to upper-middle-class families. When the restaurant attendant realized that we were from America, he started throwing in English words, and everything became “simply the…” The daal was “simply the best.” The naan was “simply the fluffiest.” The biryani was “simply the tastiest.” His colonialized mentality disgusted me. He should have demanded that we speak his language, not the other way around. Muslims had to be proud of who they were.
As he led us to our seat, I saw massive piles of red tandoori chicken, and kharay masalay ka gosht, and chicken jalfrezi. At least the food is native, I thought.
We were seated across from a musical ensemble featuring a middle-aged guy with oily hair who took requests from the diners. He belted out old-school ghazals as well as songs made popular by Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra. I felt angry with him for bringing these Western songs into Pakistani society. Music itself was haram, and good Muslims ought not listen to it at all. But if people were indeed going to listen to music, then they should listen to their own and not try to copy the West.
I felt increasingly uncomfortable. Why was this establishment ignoring Islam? Wasn’t Islam why this nation had been created? Yet people’s attitudes, their definition of fun, the mix-gendered seating, the complete absence of Islamic rituals—all this