Free Children of Dust by Ali Eteraz Page A

began running as well. One of the boys next to me was plucked by his shirt collar and yanked back. I had no way of checking whether Tariq and Muaz made it or not. I was concerned only with my own escape. I grabbed my shoes as I ran past the shelf, threw them down, and stepped into them while running toward home. I didn’t stop until I got there.
    When I told Ammi and Pops about the anarchy at the madrassa , they said that they were going to look into private tutoring.
     
    P ops thought it would be better if I received religious instruction at home. He arranged that an educated man named Qari Adil would make regular house visits. Since he would be coming to our home and we would pay him a lot, Pops asked him to teach me about Islam beyond just memorizing the Quran.
    Qari Adil was a dark, squat man with a silver beard tinged with henna. He had a gleaming smile and wore nothing but immaculate white clothes, with matching white turban. He was articulate and cheerful, and to my vast relief he didn’t believe in punishment. He was the head of a popular mosque attended by many important men.
    The first day that Qari Adil came to tutor, the atmosphere in the house was expectant and serious. Ammi made the sitting room spotless and the house smelled good. Food— paratha s and eggs for the qari , along with a glass of milk—was set forth. A brand new Quran sat on a new wooden holder, and there were Arabic textbooks and two copies of Abu Ala al-Mawdudi’s exegesis. Normally one didn’t study exegesis at a madrassa , but normally a madrassa didn’t have teachers like this one.
    Qari Adil rang the bell on his bike as he arrived, and I went to greet him. It was a gleaming silver Sohrab.
    His comportment was unlike that of any other religious figure I’d seen in Sehra Kush. He was graceful, sparkling clean, and had an obvious sense of fashion. Riding in the sun made him sweat profusely, so that droplets fell from his forehead. When he arrived, he dabbed the end of his turban against his face and shook his shirt. Even with me—a kid—he had a nervousness that made me like him. When he finally sat down each day, he began by making small talk with me in a gregarious manner.
    On most days, after I read the Quran with him we would read Mawdudi’s tafsir , starting from the first surah , “The Opening,” and move quickly into the dense material of the longest chapters in the Quran: “The Cow” and “The Family of Imran.”
    We talked about Jews a lot, because the story of Moses and his people takes up a large part of the two longest chapters of the Quran. The reference to the cow in the chapter by that name comes from a story involving a special cow that the Jews were asked by God to slaughter, but which they refused to kill on account of its lactic productivity. Qari Adil told me many stories about the Jews, such as the one about Jewish fishermen who were told to stop fishing on Saturday but wouldn’t, because on Saturday, to test them, God would fill the lakes with fish, “and greedy people would become tempted to disobey God.” He told me of the way the Jewish people compelled Moses to tell God how to show Himself on Sinai—and then refused to accept Moses’s recounting of the event. He told me how the Jews in exile had started to starve, so Moses had God bring huge, heaping plates of mann-o-salwa from Paradise. After a period of eating such rich heavenly food, the Jews demanded lean legumes and shrubs and vegetables instead.
    All of these stories of Jewish “disobedience and decadence” finally reached a climax when Qari Adil announced that the Jews had been turned into apes. In a gleeful narration he described in careful detail—a mixture of his own speculation and Mawdudi’s imagination—how the actual transformation of a man into a monkey occurred.
    Allah turning people into monkeys bothered me. If I were turned into a monkey, I’d eat lice and be unable to fly kites or spin tops. Being able to flip myself from