Before I get down to the nitty-gritty of this blog, I want to make a disclaimer. There are good and bad people everywhere in the world, and it is not my intention to discredit or insult Pakistani Muslims. Though Pakistan may be a country of Muslims, Muslims (unfortunately) do not represent Islam, and the fact that there are hyprocrites and losers here doesn’t mean that there aren’t any good Muslims or that there isn’t any benefit in living in a Muslim society. But that’s another blog. Now on with the show.

Right, so today another restaurant opened up next to my father’s restaurant. We’ll call that place Café X. So Café X had their grand opening today. They put up a tent, invited a district Nazim (local council member) and the Nazim gave a nice speech about running an honorable business that’s good for both the owners and community. Then there was a recitation of the Qur’an, and then the owners of the place thanked Allah, without whose help none of this would be possible, etc etc. Then there was free food, and then the restaurant was officially opened, and everything was well and good. Then the guests went home and the owners and the restaurant staff went into the restaurant.

A note about this restaurant, the front of it is all glass, from the ceiling to the floor. It’s brightly lit too, so you can see who’s eating there from a hundred feet away. You can also see who’s drinking there, especially when they break out dozens of huge bottles of liquor and get raging drunk, everyone, all the way from the owner down to the waiters, and during business hours. At eleven o’clock, which is roughly dinner-time in a Pakistani restaurant, they were all sloshed and making quite a fuss. They were also feeling generous, so they invited my father (and anyone who came to the restaurant door) in for drinks. My father gave them an earful of vitriol (tsssss) and then went back to Chez Daddy.

Then, at closing time, midnight, my father passed by Café X again and was nearly shocked out of his socks. The big screen TV that they have in the dining hall (the one that you can see from such and such a distance through that great glass window) was on, and they were watching porn. And of course, they were all still drinking and having a lovely time with their chairs pulled straight up and around the TV set.

So what do you do when you live in Pakistan and the people next door are getting drunk and publicly showing pornography? Do you call the police? No, the police come to the plaza every weekend and get drunk, and they bring their prostitutes too. Do you tell the superintendent of police? No, because he’s the one who throws the parties they’re attending. Who do you tell? The higher up you go, the lower you find people on the scale of morality. Could you even take it to the President? No, because he likes his Johnny Walker, and he doesn’t mind saying so.

So who do you tell? Your daughters. You come home and fume and rage because the country you love, the people that you want to call your own brothers are betraying their religion and their selves. They’re spreading the disease, the internal rot that’s causing our Muslim communities to collapse on themselves in a festering heap of corruption and depravity, in love of sin and weakness of Iman.

And right now, as I’m typing this blog, the guys at Café X are still drinking and still watching filth and they’re still inviting anyone who passes by the restaurant to come in and join them. They’re not just being corrupt &^#%$#’s in private, they’re getting other people to join them, people who might never have drunk before or might never had head their minds polluted with hard-core pornography. Those guys are hurting this community, my community, the people I live with in the place I live in, and there’s nothing I can do about it. The police are useless in this matter, and we’re powerless to do anything to stop them.

I know that there’s no compulsion in religion, but there sure as heck is accountability, and justice, and both are in short order at Café X. People complain about guys with sticks- moral police or militant mullahs or something like that. But you know what? Right now, I’m starting to wonder why we don’t have any.

Labels: Islam

posted by Abez @ 12/18/2003 12:08:00 AM