The Pickup

Minaret vs Internet

A posting from the vacationing Lance!

Ibrahim’s Uncle believes he has found the best of both worlds--a balance between his traditional beliefs--a good life in the Faith--and the modest luxuries of the modern world.  He views Ibrahim and his friends as selfish, lazy, and politically naïve.  He asks them: “Isn’t it enough to have your car and cellphone and TV.  What else is really worth having out there in the world of false gods.” (p. 189)

But the answer to this question came thirteen pages earlier. “These young men want change, not the rewards of Heaven.” (p. 176) Ibrahim and his coffee shop friends want to “bring the modern world to Islam” (p. 176) and to “cross-fertilize Islam with the world” (p. 177)  Here are the voices of the Islamic moderates that we and our government so desperately want to hear in Iraq and Gaza and elsewhere. Here are young men who are not satisfied with the status quo. Young men dissatisfied with their economic and political status--the inequalities of the world--and young men who reject the fundamentalist message of jihad.

Ibrahim’s Uncle lumps him in with these malcontents, but Ibrahim’s rejection is much more personal:  “this place the world tried to confine him to was not his place in that world.” (p. 179)

Perhaps we should be discussing the Minaret AND the Internet, because cross-cultural understanding is a work in progress and an ongoing process.  Listen to the NPR review of a Venice exhibit that traces the migration of culture or read this week’s New York Times article on the library in the desert at Timbuktu to get a sense of how much our different cultures have to learn from one another.

The Book within the book

In the middle of The Pickup (p. 143) we find Julie reading passages from a copy of The Koran that she had asked her distant mother to send to her. They are verses that Ibrahim's mother knows by heart. With these gestures Julie has moved closer to both her mother and her mother-in-law.

What are we to make of these quotations that Gordimer has placed at the very center of her story? They are from the sacred writings of Islam, but they are versions of the Biblical stories of Job and the Annunciation of the birth of Jesus. Julie wonders what they "might mean to the one who still could recite [them]." And we wonder what do they mean to Julie?

The third quotation states:  "The God of Mercy hath taught the Koran." (p. 146)  Julie is using the Koran to both learn about her new family and to teach them about her and her language. Later Ibrahim's father gives the couple a  "beautiful old Koran...for the education of [their] children and [their] children's children." (p. 240)

Julie is changed by reading from this book, The Book. It is not a spiritual conversion, but it is profound.  She is reaching out to Ibrahim and his family and their culture. Yet she leaves the book open to these verses from The Prophets:

"...He hath let loose the two seas which meet each other: Yet between them is a barrier which they overpass not."