A TALE OF HEAVEN, MULLAHS AND IMAGINATION

I am going through (so far) the weirdest time of my life. It is partly because I just got back from America (naturally everything looks ten times worse) and partly because I have started thinking about my religious beliefs.

I am rethinking my relationship with God and God’s relationship with me. The option of not believing in God is also on the table. One can argue that people (like myself) often stop believing in God after visiting societies like America because they finally find out that not believing in God is also an option.

In America I started thinking about God. The main reason was my beloved adopted Grandma. She is a devout Christian. She is one of the greatest women I have met. As a Muslim I was lead to believe that only Muslims will go to heaven. Every time I would meet my Grandma I would think about it – heaven and her; they seemed inseparable.

My attention shifted from God to heaven. I started reading about heaven and hell. As a Pakistani my research material came from many teachings of many mullahs in Pakistan.

I came upon versions of heavens described by the famous or rather infamous Maulana Abdul Aziz of the Red Mosque and the mullahs of my neighborhood mosques. Their description of heaven were absurd and bizarre. But wait, I did believe in their version of heaven ever since I was child. This is an interesting story:

When I was growing up the mullahs of my neighborhood mosques and a bunch of religious aunties (female Islamic scholars) made me believe that the single most important place in the world was heaven. Hence one should always think about it, dream about it and do everything to be able to go there.

I must not be very smart when I was a child because I never asked if heaven was the most important place in the world then why it didn’t have an address so one could go and check if it was really there. Never mind.

I was told that the heaven will be a place filled with nice things. One of those nice things was milk. One of my earliest memories of childhood was snatching the feeder (milk bottle) from my baby sister and drinking it quickly before our mother showed up after hearing my sister cry.

I bought the idea of heaven the first time I heard about streams of milk; streams of honey, giant guavas and pomegranates seemed like added bonus. Then there was a cloud that was supposed to follow me everywhere, I found walking to the school in the sun really hard so heaven seemed worth the effort.

I dreamed about heaven all the time. I did everything to earn my way to heaven. I would go to all the mehfil-e-milad (gathering to praise the prophet Muhammad) and fill my ears with the sweet milky talk of heaven. I would copy my mother when she prayed and enthusiastically memorize all the verses without ever bothering to learn their meaning.

I followed all the rules to ensure my one-way ticket to heaven. For the longest time I let the idea of heaven dictate everything in my life, every single thing.

I wish the heaven had evolved with me but the mullahs kept selling milk, honey and clouds. Then they added houses of pearls, big trees, gems and laziness. I never liked the idea of a house made of pearls. It seems too round and shiny. And gems always remind me of a classmate from college who used to wear gems. She was drop-dead gorgeous and a bitch.

I still feel stupid about believing in the idea that in heaven everything happens just as and when you imagine/want it. That will be the ultimate level of laziness. It makes me shudder. I’d rather slave in hell.

For 27 years of my life I let the mullahs play with their (dull) imaginations. Then one fine day, after celebrating my 28^th birthday, I gave a thought to the subject and came to the conclusion that if Allah has created this world then he must be a very creative guy. And for such a creative guy the heaven of milk, honey and gems does not only sound dull but utterly disrespectful.

If Allah has created me and gave me curiosity, spirit of adventure and imagination than he must make my heaven to complement who I am rather than turning me into a walking-eating slab of meat and bones whose sense of adventure and joy is vanquished for eternity.

And of course, to qualify for being heaven it has to have my Grandma in it.