no two ways about it

My Sharia professor lectured for about an hour on the impossibility of interchanging seemingly synonymous words in the Qur’an.

What I best remember, however, is his two-minute tangent. I’m not sure if it’s fact, fiction or some combination of both:

A prominent scholar of Sharia was asked where he acquired his knowledge. For reasons unmentioned by my professor, the scholar decided to credit his father as his teacher, even though his father’s Islamic knowledge was elementary at best. “If you think I’m brilliant,” the humble and truthful scholar said, “wait ’til you see my father. I could be a speck on his shoe.” Awed, his friends asked when oh when would they get to meet that fine old man. “Never, I’m afraid,” replied the son. “You see, he lives in Palestine.” And Palestine, in pre-aviation days, might as well have been the moon.

But one day, the humble and truthful scholar got a letter. It was from his dad.  It said he was due to visit. Soon. Hearing this, the friends exulted. The teacher’s teacher is coming to town!

When the father arrived, his son ‘fessed up to his lie. Instead of giving him a hearty whooping, the father simply asked: what now? The son whipped up a plan. “At the banquet in your honor, Dad, if they ask you any question — and there will be many — I need you to say, ‘The scholars have two opinions on that matter.’ Leave the rest to me.”

The banquet day came, and with it a barrage of questions. “What is the Islamic ruling on women’s wudu (ablution) when such and such?” Or “What should one do when he encounters this or that?”

Each time, the dad replied with, “Well, son, in that matter, the scholars have differed–” His son would interrupt, give the answer and append, “Isn’t that right, Dad?” And his father would reply grandly, “That’s right, son. You got that right.”

Now, one of the company hadn’t forgotten his brain at home, so he connected the dots. He decided to pose a question of his own.

“Hal fillahi shakkun? Is there any doubt about [the oneness] of God?”

To his son’s consternation, the gullible father answered with assurance, “Well, on that, the scholars were divided between two opinions.”

The rest is history.

the academic equivalent of a blonde joke

I had a creative writing professor who said that, years ago, he vowed not to tell the same story twice. The result? A single story — especially one pregnant with didactic potential — gave birth to a thousand permutations. His personal history became a coloring book of sorts, with fixed outlines and infinite possibilities. The narration varied from one telling to the next so much so that, he admit, he found it impossible to strip away the decorations without tearing at the Christmas tree. (Yeah. Pregnancy, coloring books and Christmas trees. It’s like metaphors on crack.)

Then I had a part-Irish professor who, I suspect, endlessly repeated his stories and never got caught. The trick was he’d tell it to you conspiratorially, like it was a state secret, but then go on to circulate it among the student body, like a bee among flowers. His anecdotes, for the most part, were meant to bring a moment’s cheer to our otherwise humdrum, caffeinated, midterm-infested college lives.

On one of many dreary Monday mornings, our paths crossed in the mail room and, as we sifted through our respective piles of college announcements and invitations, he shared with me this gem:

“So I see a young man at the library, a student from [insert one of Scripps' sister-colleges]. At the circulation desk he tells the librarian, ‘I need a play by Shakespeare.’ So she asks, ‘Which one?’ And the student answers [a dramatic pause, flipping through envelopes] ‘William.’”

The professor raises his eyebrows, as if reliving his astonishment. He is, after all, a British-accented Oxford-trained professor of linguistics. (The unlucky college kid didn’t know just how unlucky he was.)

Still, thanks to this tale of absentmindedness (or shall I say absent mindedness?), the careworn sleep-deprived mask cracked into little clay bits and fell from my face. And the English major in me started up her Monday smug as a bug. (The biology major in me, however, was still down in the dumps because, if there were a stupid-biology-student joke, the stupid biology student would be me.)

moors reign in spain again

For better or worse, a couple of my UJ professors have turned out to be what Baba calls as-hab nuktah (literally: friends of the joke).

—

It’s ten in the morning and my neck feels twisted out of place. (Thanks to some bedbugs, I’d slept on the couch.) I touch my head to my shoulder, hoping that it’ll crack or creak — anything. I’m in my Miracles of the Qur’an class and, since I’m not on the roll call and haven’t asked the professor permission to audit, I still look like a spy. I’m rigorously taking notes. I’m trying too hard to fit in and failing miserably at it. A spy.

The short and sturdy, black-haired, black-bearded professor is discussing canonical Qur’anic analyses. He mentions one by Sheikh al-Sha’rawi. “When you read this one,” he warns his Sharia majors, “you grow bored. He’s just so verbose. You read and read and read and buried in these heaps of words are a few pearls. I did a critical review of the work when I was earning my bachelor’s degree. It wore me out. If you notice I’m thin, it’s because of this book.” He’s not especially thin, of course.

Minutes later, the professor is reviewing the content of an upcoming exam. All the students — and their pens — perk up. Except me and mine; we take a sabbatical.

Amid the exam-centric discussion, a student suggests that one of the texts is especially inaccessible. “It’s hard to understand,” she complains. She’s indirectly asking to have it jettisoned. The professor, who’s already dispensed royal pardons on several other texts, retorts, “It should be comprehensible. Either you have a problem or the book has a problem. I mean, we’re sure you have a problem, and the book might.” I’m a little awed at his bluntness. Isn’t she offended? Nop3, she’s smiling as if he’d thrown daisies at her. Or as if he’d eliminated a detested text from a forthcoming exam. Oh, wait. That’s just what he did.

—

For the first time, I get to my next class without having to ask directions of strangers. I peer inside at the greasy whitewashed room. Sure enough, there are students seated. Only they’re not my classmates. My classmates line the corridor outside, and murmurs circulate among us that the Spanish class has invaded our turf. The professor had warned us of this. He had given us strict orders to repel them, to fight to the death, to protect what is ours. We had failed him.

When he finally arrives — a tall man who walks as if he couldn’t bend his joints; so stiffly, in fact, that it seems as if he has yet to be thawed — the ocean of students parts to make way. The two or three young men expected to mount a defense against the Spaniards — these he regards with undisguised disgust. They flock behind him anyway, like goslings who have no pluck except under their father’s wing.

Judging by the buzz in the hallway and the faces of our action-hungry neighbors, this appears to be the seminal event of the year, and the young men aren’t going to miss it for anything. Never mind that several of them are deserters.

Inside the classroom, a heated exchange ensues between our Arabic professor and the Spanish professor. Like a cloud of neutrons around a positive- and negative-charged nucleus, the young men hover about the man and woman with PhD’s to their names. The Arab towers over the Spaniard and, after a quarter hour, it is clear to all that the Arabs have prevailed. Our professor declares his sovereignty and the Spanish troops withdraw, broken. Class, for them, is cancelled. Meanwhile, ours is called to order. The professor, having settled on his throne, turns to those who absconded. “You should be ashamed. The girls displayed more courage than you.” (I’m not sure how we non-combative, chatty girls exhibited any courage at all in this episode, but maybe that’s just his point.)

“We were grossly outnumbered!” A young man protests. “We told the girls come in, but they stayed in the hallway. They were uncooperative. How were we expected to–”

“Enough. Next time you don’t give in.”

I wonder at the permanently stamped frown on his face. He looks dead serious. If I were a bit more gullible than I am (which is really difficult to accomplish), I’d never guess that his sullen countenance masks a playful disposition.

A few paragraphs into a literary analysis of Surat Yusuf (the Qur’anic chapter named for Prophet Joseph), we hear a ruckus outside. Since the demagogues pose a threat to the quietude of his domain, the professor sends a youth to silence them. “Box his ears. And don’t tell them I sent you.”

Outside, the noise is stilled. The boy returns with a report: No more enemies will near our borders. ID’s will be checked from here on out, to verify allegiance to the Arabic class. The professor hardly acknowledges the comment. He calls on a student to read aloud.

Then, in the middle of a discussion about the applicability of Prophet Yusuf’s tribulations to Prophet Muhammad’s during the Meccan period, our aged professor suddenly revisits the fracas. “Listen, next time the Spaniards come near this room, you don’t let them have it, you hear?”

“Oh you bet,” a valiant young man answers, “Next time they won’t stand a chance. We’ll bring our kalashnikovs.”