Greed always catches up with you

Salman Rushdie is a man who has nations hating him calling for his head, while the British have Knighted him for his writing. He has produced works that stirred up mobs of Muslims around the world in protest of his literature.  Although he has a mark on his head for the rest of his life, he continues to write fascinating stories that get down and gritty with subjects most people would rather avoid. In my English class we recently read one of his short story books ­East, West.

In this book, the short story ­The Prophet’s Hair revolves around a man whose actions end up costing the lives of his daughter and of his own.

Hashim’s decisions lead to consequences he would have never dreamed of. Hashim loans money to people who are in need of it. Unfortunately it seems that he loans money to those who he knows can’t pay in time. The greed of his occupation will soon lead to his demise. He comes upon a silver vial one day that has a hair believed to be that the great Prophet Muhammad. This vial has been in the care of the Hazratbal mosque as it is a sacred religious item the mosque worships.

As with any dumb criminal, those who get away eventually get caught by their own poor decisions by having to tell the story to someone. Hashim tells his son Atta of the vial he has found. As any young child would do, they will tell someone else of the secret. In this case, Atta told his sister Huma about their fathers’ newest find. Although Hashim thinks this vial is a great object to possess, his children do not agree. He believes that by keeping the vial himself and not returning it to the church where it will be worshiped; he is doing the church a favor in accordance with what he believes the Prophet Muhammad would teach. Muhammad would preach that worshipping an object is wrong.

Huma believes that she must do something about her fathers’ obsession with this vial and seeks to hire a thief to steal the vial from her father. Her fathers obsession has gone from caring about the object to loathing it and more importantly, not even loathing it because it is Muhammad’s hair, but because it silver and valuable. He says to himself, “Naturally, I don’t want it for its religious value . . . I’m a man of the world, of this world. I see it purely as a secular object of great rarity and blinding beauty. In short, it’s the silver vial I desire, more than the hair.” (p.44) Huma’s thief comes in one night in an attempt to steal the vial. Atta wakes up and screams that there is a thief in the house. In pure haste, Hashim awakens and goes down the hall with his sword stabbing the first thing that comes at him, Huma. He turns on the light and after realizing what he had done, he turns and falls on the sword ending his own life as well.

Greed often leads to the demise of those who act upon it. I believe everyone has the thought of greed that occasionally runs through their mind, after all who wouldn’t want to have all the money in the world; however, it is those who act upon such a poor characteristic that suffer from it.

This is a story that brings me back to my childhood learning all the Bible stories from Sunday school. It is great that we teach these stories to the youth; however I find it hard to believe that we actually take these stories seriously. Just look at the divorce rate these days, obviously some of the stories haven’t sunk into the minds of all people. Not to say I have never done anything wrong, but it is a story like this that makes me think of my own actions and if I have lived up to any of the life-lesson stories I have heard. I believe writers like this should be taken seriously, as they have a real message in their literature.

Maybe we should institute a class that reflects on subjects such as this if we want any change in the world.