Do the Right Thing

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Growing up as children we all heard of the classic story of the ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf”, in which the character of the fable cried ‘WOLF’ many times, each time the people of the town came running out to help the boy protect his heard of sheep. Thinking this was hilarious he continued to do this over and over until the townspeople got fed up and when a wolf really did come and slaughtered all of his sheep and none of the townspeople came to help the boy out. With this classic fable there is a parable, which Wikipedia defines as “is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse that illustrates a moral or religious lesson”. The moral of this story is that you should not take for granite the generosity of the people, and if you call on them too much as a joke they will learn and not help when you are in need of help. This story can be related to the short story by Salman Rushdie called ‘the Prophets Hair’              

In the short story ‘the Prophets Hair’ by Salman Rushdie, our main character Hamish is a moneylender that loans money to individuals at an astonishing seventy percent interest rate, which violates many Islamic usury laws. One day he finds a small silver lined vial floating in the water, in the vial he discovers is the coveted single hair of the Prophet Muhammad. This vial of hair was recently stolen from its shrine, but he ignored his duty as a citizen to return the coveted vial and instead he kept the vial for himself. He justified his actions by the Prophets own words:

“the Prophet would have disapproved mightily of this relic-worship. He abhorred the idea of being deified! So, by keeping this hair from its distracted devotees, I perform – do I not? – a finer service than I would by returning it!”

Hashim was mystified by the beauty and the power the he felt from the presence of the sacred object, yet it was just that an object.

                Soon Hashim took to madness, beating and berating his children and wife on a daily basis. Coming to realization that he will divorce his wife because of a mistress and his visitations to several paid women. He soon took to beating and horrifying clients that came to him claiming that they could not pay their most current interest payments.  Mortified by all these recent actions his daughter, Huma and his son Atta, distracted their father while he was away trying to beat the money out of a client who could not pay.  Atta was able to get the vial from the safe, put it in his pocket and they went to return the vial to the shrine. But, to their dismay they found that he had a whole in his pocket and the vial had dropped out, for an instance they have relief that it would all end. Yet when they returned their mother and other sisters were laying beaten from their fathers wrath. He had found the vial floating in the water again.

                 Huma, mortified by everything that had occurred went to the backstreets and alley’s to find the most despicable and gut wrenching thief that she could find in order to steal the vial from under her father’s pillow. The thief comes in the middle of the night on ‘a thief’s night’ and takes the vial from under the pillow. Suddenly, Atta, yells out ‘THIEF, THEIF, THIEF’ and lays back down and dies. Awakened, Hashim grabbed his sword, and ended up killing his own daughter in the struggle. Grief stricken, Hashim took the sword to himself and took his life, and their mother was later committed to a mental institution.

                The ‘moral’ or ‘hidden passage’ to this story is that greed can corrupt and influence all people, even the most honest and good people can be changed. We should learn from this story that if we come across come great fortune and we have the opportunity to share it with others that we should, and if we know that the item itself is stolen , then we have the moral obligation to return the item to its rightful owner. The greed from Hashim took over his whole life, where all he cared about was the vial of hair and he beat his children and wife because of some rage that he had felt. We may think that if we are presented with great wealth then our lives will be better off, but think of the lottery. Many of the individuals whom win the lottery, thought that it would make their lives better, but it has been shown that most people who do win, are worse off after they win then before.