The
Golden Legend by Nadeem Aslam:
Book Note
A couple of weeks ago (mid-Dec 2017) I read The Golden Legend, a novel by the British-Pakistani
writer Nadeem Aslam. According to his Wikipedia biography, Aslam has lived in
the UK since he was 14, when his father, a communist, fled the regime of
President Zia.
 |
| Nadeem Aslam |
This is a good novel for anyone not familiar with
life in Pakistan in the era of militant Islamists, US drone strikes, and police
and military corruption. The main interest of the novel, though, is the
difficulty of being Christian in Pakistan. The story recounts the trials of
three Christian Pakistanis. Christians are a minority in Pakistan, about 1 per
cent of the population.
The central figure in the novel, Nargis, is a Christian
masquerading as a Muslim. Raised in the relative security of the home of her
uncle, a Christian bishop, she decides at college to pretend she is a Muslim. It
seems much easier than constantly enduring ostracism and persecution because
she is Christian. She marries Massud, a Muslim man, without telling him the
truth. They both become architects, living a tranquil life until Massud is
killed in a shoot-out between a couple of Islamists and an American
diplomat/CIA agent. At the same time, she and Massud have been acting as
patrons of a young woman named Helen, the daughter of the Christian couple who
are their servants. Helen’s father, a rickshaw driver, is in love with a Muslim
widow whose husband was killed and son severely injured by an American attack. Without
giving away the story, a military official pressures Nargis to forgive the
American in return for a million dollars in blood money. Meantime, Helen is
endangered as well. They both flee the city with the help of a young Muslim man
who is in love with Helen.
Aslam's depiction of his fictional Christians is not
an exaggeration, according to an article in Foreign Policy (May 16, 2016) by
Usman Ahmad entitled “Is Pakistan Safe for Christians?” http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/16/is-pakistan-safe-for-christians/ Ahmad explains that many Christians are converts
from lower-caste Hindus and are commonly known as “sweepers” (a low-caste
occupation). This term is used in Aslam’s novel. Sometimes Pakistani employers
looking for sanitation workers deliberately advertise for non-Muslims; that is,
Christians. In recent years there have been several attacks on Christian
churches and schools in Pakistan, in part because Christians are identified
with the West: that is, with the United States and its campaign of bombing and
drone attacks against perceived Islamist militants in Afghanistan and parts of
Pakistan. At Easter 2016 more than 70 Christians were killed by a Taliban
bombing in Lahore. Forced marriages and conversions of Christian girls to
Muslim men are common, and the girls are afraid to testify in court because they
are in the custody of the families that kidnapped them.
Blasphemy against Islam is a crime in Pakistan, and
Christians have been severely punished for it. Somewhere in the novel a
character mentions that it’s easy to accuse a Christian neighbor of blasphemy. The
payoff is high; if your neighbor is jailed for blasphemy, you may be able to
acquire his house or property. This kind of thing also goes on in Iran, when
people denounce members of the Baha’i faith, just as it did in Germany and Eastern
Europe under the Nazis, when you could acquire really good houses and
apartments by denouncing Jews.
At the moment, Christians are under attack in
several countries in the Middle East and Asia.
Coptic Christians, about 10 per cent of the Egyptian population, have
endured several violent attacks on their churches. Coptic Christianity predates
Islam; Copts are among the very earliest converts to Christianity.
One can assume that since his father was a
communist, secularism was not a dirty word in Nadeem Aslam’s household when he
was growing up. Now secularism appears
to be something that is considered dangerous even in the West. I have written
about this before in an entry to this blog called “I Am an Atheist Blogger” http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2015/11/
, where I mentioned that many Americans consider atheists to be worse than
Muslims. It is important that we should protect everyone who is persecutes for
their faith, wherever the country. But
we should also be protecting the principle of secularism, the rights of individuals
to marry whomever they want regardless of their religion, and the rights of
individuals to be non-believers.
