Children of Dust (12 page)

Even though Saleem had gotten a 1560 out of 1600 on the SAT and a 35 out of 36 on the ACT, with a 4.0 GPA and guaranteed admission at Princeton—all honors that I didn’t have—he said he wasn’t cut out to study “all that secular garbage.” He wanted to go to the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia, where he would study his hero, Ibn Taymiya, a thirteenth-century thinker prominent among Salafis; he wanted to learn Arabic and study the Saudi
hadith
specialist Shaykh al-Albani; he wanted to master Islamic economics like the California convert Jamal Zarabozo; he hoped one day to run a correspondence course about Islamic theology like the Jamaican convert Abu Ameenah Bilal Phillips; and he wanted to travel the world debating Christians
and showing the doctrine of the trinity to be utter foolishness like the South African polemicist Ahmed Deedat. His willingness to give up Princeton for the sake of studying Islam made me wonder if my own desire to get into a top college—where I would study secular subjects—was unworthy and un-Islamic.

In fact, I was doubly antagonized by Saleem: first for his being better than me in secular things, and then for his rejection of them.

Whenever the QSC descended into discussion, Saleem participated eagerly, and he always brought the conversation back to Christianity. He’d learned a lot during his days with the nuns.

“Did you know,” he offered one day, “that there were like three hundred different gospel versions set out on a table during the Council of Nicaea? Then everyone fell asleep, and when they woke up there were only four left. If
that
doesn’t prove tampering with the Bible, I don’t know what does. This is why mankind needed the Quran! Christianity needed a corrective: Islam!”

Pops appreciated Saleem’s zealous participation and was irritated by my silence. He often glared at me while Saleem was engaged in his long diatribes. Initially Pops made subtle comments to me that were meant to encourage me to participate more actively in the group. When that failed, he told me that I needed to be “more confident and more vocal, like Saleem.” I always wanted to explain to him—though I never did—that my reason for not participating had nothing to do with a lack of confidence; I simply didn’t like it when people spoke for the sake of hearing their own voice, as I often thought Saleem did.

Then one day several men in the QSC encouraged Saleem to lead
isha
, the night prayer. It was a great honor when older men, those who were generally expected to lead the prayer themselves, deferred prayer leadership to a youth. This upset Pops very much. He was annoyed that it was in
our
house that Saleem was being appointed
imam
. “They should be picking
you
, because you’re the eldest son in this house,” he said. “But they don’t, because you don’t give them a reason to respect you.” In other words, because Saleem was louder about Islam than I was, he was considered more of a man. Even by my own father.

A
s QSC grew in popularity, more people came, and when they did, they gave long introductory lectures about their Islamic worldview to prove that they too belonged.

One day Ammi announced that Brother Shuaib, who was a professor at the state university, would come for a session. This was considered a sign of the study circle’s expanding influence, because the professor was a well-regarded member of the community.

When it was Brother Shuaib’s turn to make an introductory spiel, he closed the Quran and set it on his knee. Then he launched into a diatribe against the fifth Caliph, Muawiya. After that he gave a tirade about Muawiya’s son Yazid, who killed Hussain, the beloved grandson of the Prophet, on the plains of Kerbala. “Muawiya the usurper and despot and dynastic tyrant produced a truly vile child!” he concluded with a flourish.

At first no one said anything. Never before had there been such an impassioned introduction by a member. As people thought about his words, they realized that Brother Shuaib must be a Shia, a member of Islam’s minority sect who, unlike the majority Sunnis, believed that leadership in Islam should have been based on biological connection to Muhammad. Shias considered Muawiya and Yazid particularly repellant for spilling the blood of the Prophet’s direct descendants; Salafis, meanwhile, considered Shias to be heretics.

Suddenly Ammi raised her voice from the women’s side. “This is not acceptable,” she said firmly. “You cannot come in here and curse a Companion of the Prophet!”

A surprised look passed over the professor’s face. He fidgeted a bit, wiggled his squarish toes in surprise, adjusted his legs, and then gulped at his hot
chai
. He had assumed that because the study circle occurred outside of the mosque—where the hard-line Salafis ruled—he would be free to proclaim his Shia opinions. Now, looking around at a room full of angry faces, he realized that he’d miscalculated, as these people were even more hardline. He quickly excused himself and hurried out the door.

As soon as the professor had left, everyone put aside their Qurans and began discussing the (il) legitimacy of the Shia position.

“A Shia isn’t even a Muslim,” one of the aunties thundered. “It’s part of Islam to respect the Companions. Muhammad personally promised Paradise to ten of them. Therefore, we can’t say anything bad about
any
of them!”

Numerous anti-Shia comments rang out. Prominent among these was the claim that a Jew had founded the Shia sect to divide Muslims. Someone else suggested that Hussain had brought the massacre at Kerbala upon himself because he should have known that fighting a tyrant was hopeless. The evils of colonialism were blamed upon the Shia as well: “Because of the Shia Safavids in Iran,” began one of the younger uncles, who considered himself an expert in Islamic history, “the Sunni Ottomans in Turkey weren’t able to unite with the Sunni Mughals dynasty in India, and this allowed the British to destroy Islam. Blame the Shia for the success of the British ‘divide and conquer’ strategy.”

That night, as the study circle became chaotic and splintered, Flim and I were able to sneak downstairs to a broken but functional TV in the garage and catch our sitcoms.

“We should invite Shias more often,” Flim noted.

O
ne of the ways Ammi kept Flim and me in line was by threatening to send us back to Pakistan. If Flim watched too much TV or I failed to do my homework, Ammi sat us down while she made a fake international call to an obscure relative and loudly discussed what kind of child labor Flim would be best at, or how fat was the Punjabi girl with whom my marriage was being arranged.

Pops’s preferred means of regulation was to keep me busy with the Tablighi Jamaat, the merry band of missionaries from Pakistan who sent sorties to the West to make certain that Muslims in America didn’t give in to hedonism.

I disliked being sent to hang out with them, but I had no choice. What Pops said, I did.

M
y first American experience with the Jamaat was in the Pacific Northwest. A Tablighi delegation composed of bearded and turbaned Punjabi villagers, most of them middle-aged men who didn’t speak any English, wearing rolled-up pants and Velcro-closed sneakers, came to visit our mosque. It was an ambulatory group: they had walked
all the way from Kansas, seeing a considerable part of America along the way. They held the state of Washington in considerable esteem, because “we have heard there is a city here called Walla Walla”—which they thought stood for “W
allah
W
allah
.”

They spent three nights and three long days at the local mosque. Over my staunch objections, Pops commanded me to keep them company. With a long face I showed up at the mosque the first day. The Tablighis were delighted to meet me.

“
Mashallah!
Our friend! Where are you from? Do you speak Punjabi? Tell us about America! Come, come. Sit here and talk to us!” Like a celebrity I was led through the mosque’s basement, where they were sitting on their sleeping mats, flipping
tasbih
beads or reading from the Quran while the designated
chai
server for the night wandered through ladling a stiff brown brew into their Styrofoam cups. I was passed from youngest to oldest—a toothless elder who put his arm around me and gave me an hour-long presentation on the
bismillah
verse. My celebrity, it occurred to me after a while, was of criminality. In their eyes I was an immoral, westoxified, and fallen entity who required their spiritual ministration to “be better.” They compared life in the West with an illness and made me feel diseased.

In the morning, after a breakfast of
paratha
s and fried eggs, I was plopped into a rental car with three of the Tablighis and a driver they had hired, and we headed out to make
gasht
, or mission, in the local community. Since they didn’t know anything about local neighborhoods, nor did they know a single Muslim in the city, they asked me where they should begin their proselytizing.

We ended up at the house of a computer scientist named Dr. Hameed, who used to be a member of the Tablighi Jamaat. Because he observed strict
purdah
, the inside of his house was split in two—a men’s and women’s section—by a curtain. After we sat down, Dr. Hameed praised the elders of the Tablighi Jamaat for finding him a good wife who practiced Islam absolutely.

There was a feminine cough from other side of the curtain, followed by the slight clinking of a tea tray. Dr. Hameed stuck his head through the perforation, whispered to his wife, and then pulled out the tray. I tried
to see the other side through the fluttering curtain, figuring that his wife must be very frightening or very beautiful to be so protected.

We ate biscuits and sipped tea companionably. The silence was broken only occasionally, when one of the delegates lobbed Dr. Hameed a softball question about how computers could be used in the service of Islam. The Tablighis wanted to get out of there; they had nothing to add to the Islam of a man who kept his wife behind a curtain: he was already perfect.

For our next stop I took the delegates to an apartment complex at the edge of the river. We punched our way through the security system’s electronic address book in search of Muslim names. I knew that the complex was full of twenty-somethings from Muslim countries who lived together in large groups and didn’t pay much attention to Islam. Prime hunting ground.

We would knock at an apartment door, catching the oblivious Muslim students off guard, and let ourselves in while invoking “Islamic hospitality.” At one place, as we sat across from four students—all men—our appointed spokesman talked in broken English about the virtues of being humble, the necessity of following the example of the Prophet, the need for rejecting corruption, and the importance of turning away from the three Ws.

“Are you referring to the World Wide Web?” asked one of the students. “I assure you, we don’t surf the Internet that much.”

“What is this undernet that you are talking?” asked our confused spokesman.

“What are the three Ws that
you’re
talking about?” countered the now-confused student.

“I’m talking about Women, West, and Wideos,” replied the spokesman. “If you are doing any of these things…”

The four students, sitting compressed on a loveseat, with a huge stack of lusty Indian films behind them, looked to one another and then stood up to try to block the Tablighis’ line of sight.

“No, no, no! We don’t do any of those things! How can you even suggest that? You might as well accuse us of murder! We are modest Muslim men from Pakistan! We are just students. We are here to study.”

The magnitude of the lie embarrassed the Tablighi brothers and they excused themselves. They felt as if they had failed in their mission. Calling it a day, they dropped me off at home. I was thankful for the party-loving college guys.

O
nce we moved to Alabama another Tablighi delegation came for a visit, and once again, despite my repeated objection, Pops dropped me off to spend time with them. I was to make myself useful the first day and then accompany them on their mission work, via their automobile, the next.

This group was led by a young South African brother named Adil, who spoke fluent English with an accent that I thought sounded sophisticated. He said he was very happy to be in the blessed state of “
Allah
bama” and his final destination was the holy city of “T-
allah-
assee.”

I put my head in my hands at the prospect of the long drive, listening to Quranic recitation and discussing various passages from holy texts.

Adil had picked up a bunch of young Muslims—most of them my age—from around the country. I was shocked to find that, rather than being pressed into service by parents, as I had been, they’d actually volunteered to travel with him. They talked eagerly about the American version of the Tablighi convention, or
ijtema
, where they had purchased Medinan musk and well-crafted skullcaps, had collected tapes of Quranic exegesis produced by the wizened Israr Ahmed and his Tanzeem group, and had consulted with the elders about what qualities they should look for in future spouses. I didn’t feel a part of the group and wanted to get out.

My dissatisfaction increased when I learned that one of the teenagers was the son of a doctor we knew in the Northwest. I recalled that Ammi had been keeping an eye on his sister as a potential wife for me and wondered whether he knew about it. I considered arranged marriages an embarrassing and backward practice and stayed far away from him, just in case he was conspiring with my parents.

That evening, as the missionaries played ping-pong, drank big pots of
chai
, ordered and devoured a pizza, and then listened to Adil give a sermon from his sleeping mat, I stayed in the mosque library, biding my time, praying for a miracle that would get me out. Nothing.

In the morning, as the group planned their missionary activity, Adil decided that he wanted to visit the Blackamerican mosque that Pops frequented.

The mosque was a small, newly constructed house on stilts across from a cemetery in a blighted neighborhood near the football stadium. Most houses in that neighborhood had been reconstructed by the Muslims who bought them, after pushing out the squatters and the crack dealers. The entire length of the journey there Adil and his cohorts talked about how wondrous were these Muslims for improving their surroundings and their society like this. I wanted to ask why, if the Blackamericans were so wonderful, the Tablighi Jamaat—an organization aimed at castigating inadequate Muslims—needed to pay them a visit.

The mosque smelled of clean sawdust. We prayed in the main room and then joined a class in one of the adjoining rooms. With the students, we took turns copying the Quranic verses that were written in calligraphic style on the board; then we listened to the instructor teach the four young students about the principle of
tawhid
, or the Oneness of God.

Then, suddenly, various members from the Jamaat took the kids aside, individually or in pairs, and began lecturing them about how to wash up in the bathroom and how to wash their feet during
wazu
. These were basic, elementary things that all Muslim children of school age knew. And the instruction was conducted, not in a subtle and conversational manner, but blatantly, with an air of supercilious authority, the targets held in place with a firm grip on their shoulders. The Tablighis I’d encountered had always treated me the same way. Now, though—when I could observe them from a third-person perspective—I realized how shameless was their coercion.

Even aside from the physical restraint, the lecturing upset me. I considered it a mark of arrogance to walk up to another Muslim, one whom
you didn’t know and whose circumstances you weren’t familiar with, and sermonize to him. It seemed like an assertion of supremacy, a usurpation of the individual’s autonomy. It was rude and mannerless.

I didn’t want to make a scene in the classroom so I dashed out of the mosque to take a walk around the neighborhood and blow off my anger.

Crossing a few streets, I entered an adjoining neighborhood. It was one of those surreal places forgotten since the Civil War, where bleak houses rested ponderously on crumbling stilts, where aged men with shiny eyes and grizzled faces leaned against handrails, where spilled sewage and trash were ubiquitous—a place acknowledged by the government only when a highway bridge needed to be noosed around it. Walking around on that hot afternoon, I imagined the place a hundred years earlier. What would have been different then? Nighttime light would have come from cracked stars instead of fizzled-out halogen bulbs. That was about all. The rest was the same: dogs voiding bladders, men who were lonely, and the glare of a despotic sheriff.

The scene made me wonder if some people were simply destined to be servile. I asked myself if I was one of them.