Amusement From Insipid Places

June 18, 2008 – 10:47 am

When I was younger I would ask people the following question: If you could be immortal and all you had to do was chop off the head of the person you most love, would you do it?

Most people would look aghast look and scream: No!

I, however, would laugh at them and tell them that I would happily take off my beloved’s head in exchange for immortality. My reasoning would be that my beloved would love me so much that she’d want me to live forever and give myself to every generation after hers.

I stopped asking this question when I grew older. I realized that no one would love me that much.

I’m kidding. That’s not why.

I stopped asking this question because as each day I grew closer to death, I was less inclined to desire immortality.

This can only mean that while I fear death, I fear life more.

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When I say to the world that men and women are the same, I do not understand why everyone points to their private parts.

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Around the time that Muhammad was singing the praises of Allah, there was Muzahim al-Uqaili, singing lamentations to Allah. He wrote about love. Says the poet: Read More »

By Ali Eteraz | Posted in Arts & Literature, Entertainment, essays, love, poetry | Comments (7)

Two Thoughts in the Prado Museum, Madrid

May 9, 2008 – 8:36 am

I. Guards, sentries, guides, they stalk the halls like silent wraiths clad in their dead blue blazers and knee length skirts. To speak to them is to encounter monotony made woman: instructions enunciated with the indifference usually associated with divorcees.

The majority of them are aged, infirm, with bloated ankles, using the numerous rocking chairs provided to them out of the kindness of the administration. The presence of these women, if they can really be called this, in this palace of art, is anomalous. Their presence does not give affirmation to the things they so jealously guard.

They represent change, age, wrinkles, flaws, sweat, and disfiguration – imperfection. Some are, undoubtedly, beautiful – with fine Castillian features, small angular noses one would pay to trace with his tongue, the pert neck of a swan, curly hair springing with life. Still, their staid standoffish conservatism weighs against the dance, the mirth, the laughter, the flowers, the cherubs, the saints, lechery, hedonism, and lust on display in so many paintings.

In a place where so much is given over to celebrating the glorious sacrifice of Christ, the desensitized omniscience, the ossified haughtiness, the indolent emptiness of these women is a slap in the face. In comparison to the affirmation around them, their lifelessness gives the impression that beauty doesn’t exist today; that it is only a purview of bygone times.

I would like a museum to be dedicated to nurturing every kind of beauty; a place where the mix of divine and human perfection is not just on display upon walls – but found in a more perfect, timeless, eternal form among the living. Why does immortality only belong to the dead? Read More »

By Ali Eteraz | Posted in Arts & Literature, Columnist, Religion, beauty, christianity, creative nonfiction, islam, painting, women | Comments (42)

A Warning To Writers: Post-Colonialism As Opium

April 11, 2008 – 4:45 am

Writers, when they come to teach you the humanities, run away.

The divorce of dignity and method afflicts and impairs every system of thought. Law, for example, ceases to serve the ends of providing for human dignity if it restricts itself to a blind allegiance of rules, or to a rigorous imposition of doctrine. Dignity is the first victim of such tyranny.

The incapability of contemporary Islamic Legal Theory to attend to today’s problems is a consequence of the enthronement of particular methodologies to a level of authoritativeness simply due to said methodologies’ old age. What has happened, in time, is that today’s Muslim can find no feasible “Islamic” way of inserting the ideas of human decency into the status quo because the emphasis is on rules, not people.

Old rules, however, don’t give a cruel world a conscience. The result, today, is that there is only one Islamic culture - that of helplessness. Man suffers for the sake of adherence to words that have become sacrosanct because of how much dust has collected on them.

Apathy is the opposite of helplessness but is the child of the same father - stasis. Instead of emerging from a lack of things, as helplessness does, it occurs despite overabundance and luxury. Whereas the Muslim world’s inability to emphasize the value of a person leads it into a spiral of sadness and grief, modern American culture suffers from a similar disease which leads to a culture of apathy.

Consider this:

The pet-theories of the most prestigious scholars, are, on the whole, methodological masturbation. Read More »

By Ali Eteraz | Posted in Arts & Literature, Columnist, Religion, academia | Comments (12)

The Polygamist

March 16, 2008 – 2:52 am

Imam Idris Sultan was unmarried, and for this reason he approved of polygamy.

He was a religious figure in “this irreligious society” where polygamy was looked down upon. His open advocacy of the practice allowed the impious to label him “a pervert just like us” — a fact that caused him great agitation. He did not think polygamy was a mark of perversion and therefore tried to set forth various arguments as to the benefits of the practice.

He invoked altruism. He identified the vast number of women in the world that were orphaned and suffering and homeless. He thought to himself that if such women could, three or four at a time, be matched up with healthy middle-class males (such as himself), then the world would be a much better place for all.

However, this welfare oriented argument always floundered when he remembered that he lived in a so called “welfare state.”

If he really wanted to help women in trouble, the more appropriate thing to do in such a society wasn’t to marry multiple times, but to become involved in politics, assist in the passage of helpful legislation, or volunteer at the women’s shelter and write grants — in other words, engage in ventures that benefitted all the women, and not just the troubled ones that he was attracted to (which would be very selfish and not at all altruist).

Unable to devise a convincing argument as to the merits of polygamy caused Imam Idris a great deal of despair. If he could not even convince himself about the viability of Islamic polygamy in this day and age, how would he influence his congregants about the more complex things of the faith?

They would turn soft in their practice, and slowly drift towards apostasy, and then he would have to imagine stoning them in his head while publicly assuring them that “in this pluralist age you are free to leave the faith as you please.” Read More »

By Ali Eteraz | Posted in Arts & Literature, Columnist, Religion, fiction, islam | Comments (4)

Who’s Yo Savior, Biatch!

February 8, 2008 – 1:52 am

A few months ago I was standing in line at the post office talking to someone on the cell and every now and then I used an Urdu word.

Sometimes when I speak Urdu, I say an English word with a FOB accent, especially if the conversation is funny. At the post office I was having most of my conversation in Urdu (a rarity), and then I pronounced the English word “Actually” as “Eckchully” because that is how South Asians speak English.

The guy in front of me was a Hispanic guy with three kids. He started talking to his kids, and they started snickering. I didn’t strive to hear what they were talking about, but they didn’t try to hide it.

I heard the words “Saddam Hussein” and “Al-Qaeda” and “Osama bin Laden.” Then the guy made some comment about Africa.

Great, I thought, a geography-challenged bigot.

My first thought, I kid you not, was this: that is not a white person, so it doesn’t matter. There is a reason why I hold white people to a higher standard.

Through most of my life, its been white people who’ve enacted most of acts of ignorance upon me, whether it was throwing molotov cocktails at mosques while we played outside, or calling me and my boys sand-niggers, or shooting at my family members after 9/11. So when a dude who was darker than me displayed the same kind of ignorance, and did so openly to his kids, I was a little confused, and wanted to let it slide.

But then he made the Africa comment. Read More »

By Ali Eteraz | Posted in Columnist, Society, north america, racism, south asia | Comments (12)

Politics and Tragedy

January 13, 2008 – 11:28 am

Wherein lies the tragedy of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination?

Common wisdom holds that the implications surrounding the demise of one of Pakistan’s major democratic leaders are tragic. Others hold that her killing reveals the sinister confluence of wicked forces at work in Pakistan.

Others hold that that the tragedy lies in the fact that she comes from a family that has lost far too many of its sons and daughters. Others hold that the tragedy lies in the loss that will be felt by her young children.

But what if we simply refused to assign any form of tragedy to Bhutto’s killing? What if we said: it is tragic that another human being has been killed, and that is all I have to say.

Why should I exalt the tragedy of Bhutto’s death, when I rarely exalt the tragedy of anyone else’s death? Why does she get this preferential treatment? Simply because she was involved in politics?

Nietzsche said that most ancient Greeks didn’t care about politics. They believed that they were utterly incapable of affecting the decision-making in which the powerful engaged, opting, therefore, to busy themselves with other things: things upon which they could have direct influence, namely art.

Why do we modern people think that politics have changed? Read More »

By Ali Eteraz | Posted in Columnist, Current Affairs, south asia, terrorism | Comments (3)

Living Las Vegas

November 17, 2007 – 8:19 am

Las Vegas only makes an impression if you don’t look past the illusion. Peek beyond the veil that the corporations have cast and its nothing more than a series of asphalt lanes and bus routes. For a tourist it bears the promise of endless pleasure, salivating strippers, heaving hedonism.

For a resident, on the other hand, Las Vegas is the fat black guy with dreads who spends his day time in the bookstore discussing politics (with a guy carrying a briefcase too big for his body) and at night moves to the 24 hour café; playing chess against the bespectacled white guy called “The Tutor” who makes his living hanging out in the university library, getting hired by students to do their homework.

The real Las Vegas is the stripper named “Ana” who came from Texas three years ago because her parents are dead and she is putting her sister through college.

Read More »

By Ali Eteraz | Posted in Columnist, creative nonfiction, north america, sex, travel, women | Comments (12)