Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis
Chapter 3: In the Names of the Prophet…
The majority of Ayad’s family members have names that are taken from the Prophet or from those in his circle. One of his uncles, Muzzammil, was named after the seventy-third surah (or chapter) of the Quran. Muzzamil’s wife, Safiya, was named for the Prophet’s eleventh wife, who was supposedly beautiful. Their child, Mustafa, was named using one of the Prophet’s epithets. In fact, the name Mustafa was common in Ayad’s family, being shared by two cousins and an uncle. The influence of Muslim culture has affected Ayad’s family in varied ways.
One rather sensitive subject involves the betrothal of the Prophet to his wife, Ayesha, when she was only six years old. The consummation of this marriage was postponed until she reached puberty at age nine; the Prophet was fifty-three at this time. Ayesha is revered as the Mother of the Believers and is much loved for her heart and intellect. Ayad has two cousins named Ayesha. The younger Ayesha ended up marrying a physically abusive man whom Ayad’s father eventually convinced to part ways with his niece; his tactics were “true Punjabi style,” according to Ayad. He sent a cousin to pay the man a visit “that wouldn’t easily be forgotten.” Yet Ayad remembers Ayesha’s speech at her rehearsal dinner, when she recalled that as a child, she was convinced that she would meet her husband at age nine. Indeed, that was the year Farooq, who would become her abusive husband, and his family sat beside her family at a Fuddruckers. Ayad became convinced that Ayesha stayed in a relationship that was not healthy because she felt that the marriage of the Prophet to his child bride “legitimized” her own marriage to Farooq.
Ayad’s great-aunt Asma, named for one of the Prophet’s half-sisters, taught literature and critical theory. Ayad met with her in 1994, just before he graduated from Brown. After promising not to tell his parents, Asma treated him to a bottle of wine. She gifted him a diverse set of books, ranging from Pride and Prejudice to The Muqaddimah, before asking him what he was reading. When he told her that he was reading The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, she coughed and gulped water. Their opinions on Rushdie were deeply divided; Ayad believed that this book was one of the most significant in his life, whereas his aunt believed the book was a malicious attack on the Prophet. In fact, this work proved divisive throughout the entire Muslim community, though the author insisted that he was not Muslim himself. Ayad views the work as central to his own journey from childhood faith to the adult realization that there is a “very human contingency at the heart of Islam’s central narratives.”
Ayad and his father visited Sikander’s sister Ruxana in Abbottabad in 2008, and Ayad found many parallels between that environment and the one surrounding the Trump election in the United States in 2016. A love for America was replaced by a gripping paranoia. The people no longer trusted their own news sources. The people teemed with anger and were openly hostile to anyone perceived as an outsider. Those who had great wealth continued to gain more at the expense of poorer citizens. Ayad had long heard conspiracy theories from his relatives on everything from the “real” source of the September 11 bombings to the “true” source of the 2005 earthquake in Swat, but on this trip, he committed himself to refusing to argue with them. By really listening, Ayad heard their fear for the first time. They...
(This entire section contains 1296 words.)
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realized that the bloodshed in Pakistan was nowhere near finished, and they feared that they would suffer in this “new era of unending American vengeance.”
At this family dinner, Ayad’s relatives discussed the history of Pakistan’s foreign policy. They analyzed the American war tactics which had been employed in Central America and which the Pakistanis had unsuccessfully tried to emulate. They recognized the “genius” in the military tactics of the September 11 attacks, believing that it would forever change the way wars were fought. Sikander did not agree with this analysis, believing instead that the attacks had simply created chaos. Later, Sikander would privately chastise this anti-American sentiment, pointing out that the same man who praised the genius of the September 11 attacks also came to America for his own heart problems and ordered American medicines for his daughter’s multiple sclerosis. Ayad pointed out that his uncle—the man in question—had not condemned America itself; he had simply acknowledged that the strike was a brilliant military move.
This didn’t satisfy Sikander, who accused his son of being as unhappy as his own wife. He insisted that Ayad had bought into his mother’s nostalgia for a Pakistan which no longer existed. He also pointed out that Ayad could not even make a living as a writer in Pakistan, where his cousin Yasmin worked as a nurse so that she could relinquish her entire paycheck to her father. During their conversation, they overheard their driver’s phone conversation; his son was sick at home, and the doctor had failed to show. Sikander insisted on seeing the child himself, and after an initial protest, the driver agreed.
In all his visits to Pakistan, Ayad had never seen poverty like that which he witnessed en route to the driver’s home. Human feces flowed over the meager road. Makeshift living structures were constructed using cardboard, rusting tin, and plastic sheets. Children played in mounds of trash, their faces dirty and their hair unkempt.
As his father went in to examine the child, Ayad began talking to the driver. Deeply religious, the man wanted to share with him a story of the Prophet’s son Osama, whom he had named his son after. When the Prophet’s son was ten, he wanted to join the war. The Prophet refused to allow it, so Osama begged his father yearly for the privilege of standing against the enemies of their Lord. When he was seventeen, the Prophet allowed it, and Osama became an incredible fighter. Ayad carefully phrased his next question and asked the father if he, too, hoped that his own Osama would one day become a great fighter. The man replied, “If he can give his life to make the world a better place . . . what more blessing could a father ask for?”
Analysis
In this chapter, Ayad clarifies how the United States was involved in the transformation of Pakistan. The Bush administration had insisted on fighting terrorism following the attacks of September 11, and the citizens of Pakistan had therefore endured years of military efforts to eliminate any perceived threat against the United States. This directly affected people like Ayad’s family, who were not involved in any terrorist plans. The ongoing slaughter created a deep distrust of America; they found themselves victims of America’s arm of vengeance, which transformed them from intellectual and otherwise rational people into people filled with “infuriating stupidity,” as Ayad describes them. On some level, they are able to appreciate the damage inflicted upon America, if only because their own country has suffered greatly due to America’s political maneuverings.
Ayad also establishes an unlikely connection between Pakistani and American cultures. While most Americans would consider themselves entirely separate from the political and social structures of Pakistan, Ayad draws strong parallels between the culture embraced by ordinary—albeit fearful—Pakistani citizens around this time and the sentiments which many Americans succumbed to during Trump’s presidential campaign. These similarities help to narrow the perceived divide between the two cultures, illustrating that fear and paranoia can create devastating consequences in any context.
