DOUBLE FACE ISLAM (how I learned to stop worrying about one-bad-story and love the nice stories)

Many things have a double face. Coins, politics and –especially- every thing too beautiful to be real. And cities like Dhaka, have a double face. In just two hours of traffic, you can switch from smelly slums around Kamalapur where the crockroachs are as big as your ince and rats kill cicks (M: ”Why do you keep a little cick insiede the dresser?” Old-woman:-Because, if I leave it free on the floor the rats will eat it-) to elegant rooftops around Gulshan where the alcohol flows as easly as cha* and the moonlight reflected on the pounds makea Dhaka a fake-Manhatthan.  Also my personal experience in Dhaka has a double face, switching every day from slums to rooftops: but I am lucky, I know how to keep the remembers about  the firsts, and forget the second ones.

But stronger than the last gap, there is the double face, a real face, of Shamalia (or something that sounds similar to this spelling). Shamailia is one of the Assistant Managers of the MicroCredit staff of HITAISHI, she is less than 30 years old, -like every Bangladeshi female- she has very long and very dark hair, -like half of Bangladeshi females- she is a bit overweight but –like most of Bangaldeshi females- she is really pretty. Usually her eyes show a smart lights, like something that she wants say to me but she cannot, because of the English – but we know, a couple of eyes are stronger than every Babel tower- thus, she has always communicated me more than cold financial figures.

 But today, no. Today, she was not around the office like every day when I come back from the slum. She seated herself in the darkness of the power-cut and only the natural light of the sun showed me the wrong side of the Islam.  The left eye was a mix of blue, violet and black, and –believe me- there were no reasonable interpretations to think about a downfall, a door or a car-crash. The sad-dew around her eye, a mixed result of tears and cream, told me the story. Maybe not, but why not, it was the hand of her husband, her father or her brother.  Okkey, it could be a Spoon River’s game, guessing stories that I could not know, but she was sad, upset and tumefied. I spent one hour more in the office, that after finding the left eye, become dark and dirty and guilty, because –fuck!- she works for one NGO that works to alleviate poverty, aids and domestic violence! Is there a future for defenceless people helped by people that -in turn- are the victim of the same things they are fighting against?! Anyway, I was powerless, I am a bangla-less boy, I could not help her, no words, no hugs. Thus, I took one of my chocolate coins for the slums-children,  I gave her, no words, no chocolates for the others. It was my way to be woman with her.

Anyway the slogan "dark side of the Islam" presents a mistake. Because I used Islam that –here- counts 90% of the population: ignorant, unknowing and illiterate population. The violence doesn’t come from the religion, Islam doesn’t make violence. Ignorance produces violence, Islam is only a great world that allows everyone to find a personal interpretation of the things. And when there is ignorance, this interpretation could become a wrong way to accept the Islam. In poor words, Islam is the fuel that you should use properly and do not mix with the fire of your ignorance.

I have the proof, making a regression with all the experience getting in touch with muslim people, a hundred micro-stories could live down the sad-dewy eye. Only one, just today, after finding the dark side of the Islam. There was this old man in the office, repaying a loan for a poultry-business, who was so surprised to listen my few-bangla-words (assalamalekkum, kamonachen, amarnam teo, amardesh itali) that started to touch me. I was on a chair, he came, he put his hands on my shoulders, he fixed my eyes with his dark and deep ones and –dipping his fingers into my hair- he started to sing a mantra (every two words, there was an “allah”). Only after I discovered that he blessed me, in the name of Allah. The same name that ten minutes before I had just cursed.