Alice’s shriek of terror surprised every one. It rose from the depths of her soul and escaped her throat with a gut-wrenching force. Everyone froze while it echoed eerily in the cave bouncing from wall to wall.
Taking advantage of this brief moment of paralysis, Alice bolted towards the nearest cave opening. But before she could get out of the room, she found herself falling yet again straight down another hole. The fear, the fall and the dangerous uncertainty of her situation overwhelmed her and she lost consciousness. Her last memory was that of the Talib gesticulating wildly to the Taliban group and their long knives flashing in the dim light.
When she came to, she found a kind faced Talib observing her keenly from a distance. Alice abruptly sat upright and looked around in alarm.
“Relax”, said the kind faced Talib. “That was Mad Hater that you met up there. You were supposed to have met me first. Somehow that did not happen. You see Mad Hater cannot stay normal for a very long time. You also didn’t help by your probing questions. The script went horribly wrong actually. It won’t happen now. From now on you are going to be chaperoned by me.”
Alice nodded uncertainly. She didn’t have much choice, she thought.
“You may continue asking your questions. I hope I will give you better answers than Mad Hater did. But first tell me why do you ask all these questions?” asked the kind faced Talib.
“Oh, you see my parents brought me up without a religion. All my friends follow one or the other religion. I felt I was the only odd girl out. So I thought I will choose one for myself too but only after someone answered all my queries about religion”, said Alice.
“Then you have come to the right people girl; ask.”
“Ok,” Alice took a deep breath before starting her questioning again. “Please tell me what is faith?” she asked.
“Faith is the belief in the unseen, the unprovable, the unreachable, the ununderstandable. The faithful are God’s chosen people”, replied the Talib.
“Urrr, I am not sure I follow you.”
“It’s simple. Let me put it this way. When you don’t understand how something works, there’s no use trying. Just say God did it and be done with it. Actually you should not be even thinking about such issues. The effort is useless. While if you leave it to God, not only you will become faithful yourself, we will have a generation of faithful coming up after you.”
“But,” said Alice, “we will get nowhere by ascribing our ignorance to “God”.”
Very patiently the kind faced Talib explained to her, “Curiosity is a disease girl. It is this which impels us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and the knowledge of which brings only further misery to us. That is exactly why learned people are always ill at ease with themselves and others. Why would you willingly bring yourself to such pain? It is such bliss to be faithful.”
But Alice wasn’t giving up that easily. “Why is God considered an explanation for anything? Is this failure to explain not really an admission of ignorance? When someone says, ‘only God knows’, is that not saying that he hasn’t a clue, so he’s attributing it to someone that cannot be approached for an answer, the unreachable, as you just called him?”
“I have nothing more to say on the subject”, said the Talib with a flicker of doubt appearing on his kind face.
“Oh, but I am not finished. Not just yet. I think in essence what you are implying is that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding. What is worse you are even implying that the greater the depth of my ignorance, the stronger is my faith,” said Alice, a little haughtily.
The Talib looked at her with what looked like pity in his eyes. Then after a long pause he said, “Yes that is exactly what I meant. I mean look at some really learned people and look at the condition of their faith. According to one survey only six out of hundreds of Nobel Prize winning scientists believed in God. If this is what learning does to one’s faith, give me death any day. I would rather stay ignorant.”
“But….” Alice wanted to say something before she was cut short abruptly by the Talib. “No ifs and buts in matters of faith”, retorted the Talib.
“Let ME ask YOU something for a change,” the Talib continued without pausing. “Why don’t you believe in God? Even if you are skeptical about the idea of God, what’s the harm in believing? If it turned out there indeed is a God, you reap the bounty by being blessed forever, if not you lose nothing for that’s what you always believed. I find it really hard to understand the logic of doubting people like you.”
“The reason is really very simple, sir”, Alice said perkily, forgetting all about riling up the Mad Hater a little while ago and getting animated once again. “If I pretend belief in God, surely he will see through my charade. Not only will it be belief as a matter of policy, it will be cheating. Why will God ever bless a cheater? I don’t think faith can be adapted as a tactic or strategy. No sir.”
The Talib looked at her with the eyes of a dead fish. He remained silent for an inordinately long time. Then he broke out of his mental paralysis with an aggressive shrug of his head.
“All I can tell you is this,” the Talib said with a solemn conviction after breaking out of his mental reverie, “belief in God is a supreme virtue. If you find disbelief creeping in, work hard at restoring your faith, and beg God to help your unbelief.”
“But”, countered Alice doggedly, “is faith not basically belief without evidence? How can it be virtuous then? And if it is, then you in turn mean that the more my beliefs defy the evidence, the more virtuous I would be. Is that not so? I find that not only hard to believe but totally illogical too.”
“That is because you were born and raised in a faithless family. I would say the blame of your muddled thinking lies squarely at the feet of your parents,” replied the Talib.
“Enough of that now.” The Talib continued, “let me show you what we do to the faithless infidels. Only yesterday we caught a couple of spies who worked for America. They have been duly tried by our Qazi courts, found guilty and are to be beheaded today. You should witness this event. It may revive your faith if you have some shreds of it somewhere in you.”
Before Alice could refuse or protest, she found her self in a big hall. In the middle of a large circle of bearded men, two young men were sitting on the ground, all trussed up and blindfolded. The younger of the two, who was barely into his teens, was crying uncontrollably, saliva dribbling out of his mouth onto his chin.
The Talib looked at Alice with some concern and explained, “You will see that we follow divine guidance even in this ritual. You will notice that the knife is long enough so that the end of the knife remains outside the neck as it is being run through. Plus, it has been ensured that the knife is sharp enough to cut clean through the bone and gristle, though I admit that occasionally it does get stuck. It is therefore essential that the wound is held open during the cut. Also, if the wound closes over the knife during the cut, the man will struggle. Struggling is definitely an indicator of pain and we don’t want to cause pain. You know that of course.”
As they picked out the crying teenager for the first slaughter, Alice felt faint. The more the kid struggled, the more Alice felt she was losing her mind. She desperately wished to stop this barbarity. All of a sudden, she broke through the circle of onlookers and jumped up onto the altar stone beside the kid in the middle of the hall. The crowd went still.
Even in this moment of madness she remembered having read somewhere the words of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg. She shouted those out at the top of her voice, “Your religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without a religion, I have seen good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But….”, then she motioned towards the spreadeagled kid and said, “but for good people to do evil things, it takes your kind of religion. I want no part of it.”
With that she just slumped onto the altar stone beside the kid. From the corners of her eyes she saw the crowd closing in on them both.
That was the moment her sister woke her up.
The nightmare was over.
For Alice, at least.
[Anwaar Hussein - Paktribune]
