Bombers, virgins, masturbation and confessions (Part II)

For a thirteen year old I was a precocious kid. Given to day-dreaming and imagining fantastic scenarios where I would endeavour to rescue the whole planet from the clutches of an alien empire hell bent on turning people into slaves. I still do fantasise like this; especially when I’m on the top deck of a London bus. The fantasy usually involves a ruse; such as a beautiful girl, that I have to rescue from the ‘Big Boss Alien’ and also involves the people I hate dying horribly gory deaths. I often wonder whether other people do this, you know fantasise, or whether they grew out of this childish habit when they turned into ‘adults’. I don’t think I ever turned into an adult, not yet. Not adult in the usual sense of the word anyway. I shun responsibility and I am way too selfish with my time.

Anyway, back as a thirteen year old I was also a bit of a sadist. The type that takes sweet guilty pleasure in watching his mosque teacher squirm and squeal after asking him difficult questions. A barrage of questions like machine gun fire that a mosque teacher would be hopelessly ill equipped to ward off: Questions like:

‘How old is the world? Is it really only five thousand years old? And what about those fossils and dinosaurs why haven’t they been mentioned in any of the holy books and what about aliens – what do they believe?’

These questions no doubt embarrassed my teacher. He knew nothing about fossils and aliens and dinosaurs and he couldn’t answer them to my satisfaction – and nor did I flinch in letting my indignation with him show. So much so, that he conspired with my parents, to have me surreptitiously shipped off to a school in Pakistan. So on the pretext of us going on a family shopping trip we boarded a flight to start a new life in Pakistan when I was thirteen. I’ve never entirely forgiven my parents for the deception they wrought me. Its aftertaste is still etched on my tongue. Nonetheless, things eventually didn’t work out as my parents, in their infinite sagaciousness, had planned and three years later we were on a flight back to England. Woohoo! But I did spend three years in Pakistan. Three whole fucking years. Those three years were, as they say, a revelation and a crucial pit stop on the road to my development into the healthy, intelligent, open-minded, infidel, devil-sperm, nonbeliever that I am today. So thank you mum and dad. Look what you have wrought! But it would be unfair to blame my parents for the way I turned out. It was Charles Darwin and Douglas Adam’s that did it. And Richard Dawkins who put the final nail in the coffin!

But just imagine my shock and horror, please. Please try and empathise with me here. How do you think I felt when I learnt after arriving in Pakistan, that I would not be going on a shopping spree after all, but alas to school instead? But no ordinary school. This was a private and expensive and strict-cane-if-naughty kinda school. Burgeoning with spoilt brats of moneyed mums and dads. These were pretentious parents who boosted their social credentials by boasting how much it cost them to pay for private home tuition for their kids. My parents, not intent on being left behind, decided that I too should receive extra home tuition. So everyday, to my consternation, between the hours of 6 and 7 in the evening, my private home tutor Mr knowfuckall, would come round to ostensibly give me lessons in science, mathematics and Islamic Studies. I say ostensibly because these were lessons I didn’t need: science I already knew more of then him, maths was sorted and as for religion - I’d already sorted out all that mumbo-jumbo in the park when I was ten. And what an ignorant-fool-of-a-teacher he was too.

The tuition fee he was receiving from my parents was twice what he was earning from the school. I knew the moment I’d laid eyes on him that I was cleverer then him. His eyes were way too close together so I never trusted him. And he had a shifty bearing and his body language told me that he thought my parents were mugs for paying him so much. He knew that I knew that he knew that my parents were mugs for paying him so much; so we reached a sort of unspoken agreement: he could teach me science but he was not to shove religion down my throat. It worked. I was spared the horrors of religious indoctrination. Though he did insist that we start lessons by saying ‘God is great’

The ritual humiliation didn’t stop there though. Back at school my biology teacher Mr Khan Sahib, a chubby bearded roly-poly of a man, once told our class, which was mixed with girls on one side and boys on the other, that masturbation would make you blind. I’m not sure whether this was aimed at the boys or the girls nor whether it was part of the curriculum but I do remember having nightmares that night; waking up sweating and grappling in the dark. My chemistry teacher Miss Shazia (bless her) credulously believed that dinosaurs roamed on Jupiter. I did try to explain to her that Jupiter is a gaseous planet so there would be no solid ground for them to walk on but she just shrugged me off (like one shrugs off a petulant fly) by claiming that they were in fact flying dinosaurs. Ah, I see flying dinosaurs. Yes, that solves the problem don't it? Before you start laughing I just want to say that the idea of flying dinosaurs might seem silly at first, but palaeontologists’ now believe that birds are actually dinosaurs. But I still don’t believe there are dinosaurs on Jupiter; flying or otherwise. It’s not really a case of belief though is it? More a case of sanity. Was Miss Shazia sane? Perhaps to her own children she was but then kids are stupid and what do they know?

My Islamic Studies teacher Mr Rasool-ur-Rehman, a kindly fellow who was also my favourite teacher because he was so funny – unintentionally funny, once pontificated (to a mix class remember of boys and girls) that martyrs (men who die in war) get given a first class ticket to heaven and, when they arrive in heaven, they are greeted by sixty smiling virgins. Sixty virgins! You can imagine me sitting there literally lapping it up. It was a boys wet dream. The boy sitting next to me, who had no doubt lived a sheltered and clostered life, asked me what a virgin was. The girls in Mr Rasools’ class didn’t even blink. Nor did they raise objections to this sycophantic fantasy of the deluded. I raised my hand:

‘Sir, but what about the girls’ I asked. ‘Surely these virgins are like real people so what about them?

‘What do you mean?’ said Mr Rasool

‘Well these girls are like sisters and daughters. One must ask what they want. They must have brains so would they be content in being one of sixty virgins? What if they want to be something else like teachers or doctors as opposed to a part of a man’s fantasy?’

Someone sniggered in the class. There was silence. I felt a glimmer of intelligence flower in the classroom; a realisation of what my point was. I could feel the class thinking: ‘why that’s a very good question actually. Mmm. Why didn’t I think of that’’

The question annoyed Mr Rasool. It caused the sweat in his back come out in puddles and made him uncomfortable. He shifted his weight around on either foot but it made no difference. ‘Heaven is not earth’ he said ingeniously. ‘Things are different in heaven’ and then he mumbled something about ‘womanly duty’ to which the girls and boys (grinning now) nodded in chaste agreement. I sighed. Probably a little too loud: 'The poverty of the indoctrinated mind'. I was eventually reported to the headmaster for my ‘disobedience’ and for my ‘daring to ask the teacher a question’. Yes, I know. Stupid, huh?

Sex is important. So important that all religions try and suppress it. Don’t believe me? Look through the barbaric texts of the Old Testament and Talmud and you will see verses commenting on the ‘filthy and defiling nature of the female’. Menstruation is dirty; and women who menstruate are dirty and they defile everything they touch. The Holy text writers seem to exhibit an unhealthy prurience with sexual matters. The Jewish Holy Book, the Talmud, commands the observant one to thank the lord that he was not born a woman. Women are cloned from a man’s rib, and only then when Adam complained that he was bored! Talk about being confined to the scrap heap.

Throughout all religious texts there is a primitive fear that half the human race is defiled and unclean and yet a temptation to sin that is almost impossible for men to resist. That is why the Taleban so hate women – because they are a temptation to sin. And how do you remove this temptation? Yes, you cover it up; in long chadors and narrow slits for the eyes and you punish those women who show their flesh – for they are a temptation to sin. It’s not the men who are punished for rape in some parts of Pakistan. It is the women. I know. I have seen it. It is they who led the men ashtray, corrupted their weak feeble minds, tempted them to sin – how dare they show themselves in public! Such utter nonsense. As I write this girls are being shot at in Northern Pakistan for going to school. For wanting an education. What are the men afraid of?

But here’s a thought. For something like sex that is so forbidden and so repressed by religion, isn’t it rather ironic that the reward for martyrdom, the reward for the faithful, the reward for controlling and keeping under a leash your sexual desires on earth, is a heaven full of virgins! Yes, the reward is an orgy of sex! How ironic. But how telling it is too! The poverty of the religious mind.

I never shared my deepest darkest thoughts with my teachers. They, to put it mildly, would not have approved. Especially Mr Rasool, no doubt dreaming of himself cavorting in a lurid pornographic heaven populated with nympho virgins. Nor would they have understood. The punishment for apostasy is death and I didn’t want to die – not yet. But just imagine being in that stuffy classroom, the baking heat, the heavy oppressive air, the astringent teachers with their sweaty wooden canes. Imagine the inability to discuss openly, imagine the fear of saying something wrong or offensive, imagine the desire to run away, imagine the loneliness, of being… well of being me. A non-believer in a sea of believers all destined for a pornographic heavenly future.

N.B: Academic Textual studies

Christoph Luxenburg has been conducting textual studies of the holy texts in the Koran. As a result of his studies he published: ‘The Syriac-Aramaic Version of the Koran’ in 2000. Luxenburg coolly proposes that, far from being a monoglot screed (single language text in Arabic), the Koran is far better understood once it is conceded that many of its words are Syriac-Aramaic rather then Arabic. His best example concerns the reward of the martyr in paradise: when retranslated from Arabic to Syriac-Aramaic the heavenly reward consists of sweet white raisins rather than virgins.

So there you have it. There are no virgins in paradise after all…