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Before I jump to the main dish of today’s menu, here are a few hors d'oeuvres that provide food for thought on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and its consequences for Muslims in America. Most of you know the past decade to be a dreadful time for them. As traumatic as the one Americans faced. For all, the world changed forever. While I lived in America and reported the tragedy, deportations, heartbreaks, incarcerations, FBI grilling of Pakistanis, I also followed the overnight change that savaged Pakistan, brutalising it forever.
Names like Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, Tora Bora, Mulla Omar, Islamophobia and Taliban became proper nouns and immediately got added to our mental dictionary for usage every day. Common nouns, hitherto innocuous, like hijab, madressah, jihadi, religious extremist, Islamic terrorist, and suicide bomber assumed the role of riotous words, seizing power from the crusty old English grammar, a domain possessively guarded by the British since the days of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Seven centuries earlier when Chaucer related tales by people of all classes and professions going on a pilgrimage, the tales of today sound no different. People of various faiths, colour, class and creed continue to fight each other. One such example is of a police attack on a Muslim event organised at a fun park in New York to celebrate Eid. Cops, 100-strong, got called out when a family of hijab wearing women refused to remove their head dress despite a ban stating that on some rides, no headwear was to be worn. It was made law after a man was decapitated a while ago when he reached out to catch his baseball cap which had flown off while he rode the roller coaster.
“They (police) treated us like animals, like we were nothing,” Alrabah (one of the women refusing to remove her hijab) said. “They came with their dogs and sticks. We came to have fun.” The police said they were ensuring compliance of the law to avoid risk of personal injury.
When the news of the fight was posted on Yahoo’s main page, more than 45,000 responses poured in from incensed readers, telling Muslims to scoot off. Most of them scornful of the hijabis who caused the fracas forcing the amusement park to be shut down for hours. Here’s a taste of what people wrote: “Hey! rules is rules! hats, scarves, sunglasses or whatever you have is not allowed in the parks rides. Christian or Muslim or whoever you are you need to follow the rules and regulation or don't go to the park and ride. If you can't follow the American rules go back where you came from.”
Wrote another: “Muslims don't want to abide by any rules in our country. They are always looking for litigation and easy money. Americans are getting sick of their "poor pitiful me" attitude. They are here to cause trouble and incite riots. If they don't want to conform to our nation's rules, DEPORT THEM!”
But Muslims clash with Muslims too! At our local Islamic Centre in Boonton on Jumatulwida the police had to be called when a muckraker picked up a quarrel with the imam. But things were peaceful for Eid prayers where Pakistanis of all ages, men and women, assembled to exchange Eid greetings. The sermon by a young Palestinian imam was inspiring and so down to earth.
Now moving on to the main dish and that (be warned opens with as strange a word as Muslim terrorist) used by the heart surgeon Dr Mehmet Oz, a Muslim American of Turkish origin. The word he uses is “waxy goo,” which he discovers while opening up the chest cavity of an obese patient getting a bypass. Yuck!
Writing in the latest cover story of Time Magazine, the Wizard Oz (I call him the wizard because he’s the best informed doctor with his own TV show) with 5,000 heart surgeries under his belt, he explains that heart attacks can be absolutely avoided if we eat the right kind of food. What he writes can blow us away because we have been indoctrinated by just the opposite of what he suggests we eat: “Want to get healthy? Then forget about diet soda and low-fat foods. Instead, tuck into some eggs, whole milk, salt, fat, nuts, wine, chocolate and coffee.”
But before you make a beeline for one of the above ‘naughty foods’ banned by the high priests of health sternly forbidding us to lay hands on any, take a step back, breathe in and out, then with dainty fingers go for them, messaging your brain and salivary glands to take it easy and stop salivating. The bottom line: don’t go for an overkill.
Dr Oz gives you the green light on canola oil, olive oil, one egg with yolk (for your daily intake of protein) salt in moderation (without going crazy with the saltshaker!) dark chocolate and nuts (excellent antioxidants –kill toxins in the body). Coffee is good too! Because it keeps dementia away. Hear, hear! Wait, there’s more…you are now allowed to drink a glass of whole milk. It’s perfectly safe, says the good doctor.
And do go out and shake a leg, say the health experts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that you pack in 150 minutes a week of “moderate aerobic activity” like brisk walking. In other words you can walk 20 minutes a day to meet the recommended workout. Or you can exercise 75 minutes a week if you opt for jogging. Dr Oz rounds up his column by a gentle warning: “A 160 lb (73 kg) person who puts in a full hour of low-impact aerobics burns 365 calories, which is not bad, but all that work is entirely erased if you reward yourself with a muffin instead of an apple.”
Another health guru Dr Sanjay Gupta of the CNN who has spent one year researching the benefits of plant foods instead of consuming animal meat has this to say: “It's simply not true that you can't get enough protein on a plant-based diet. If you do even a little research you find out that broccoli has more protein per gram than most meat. Spinach has the same amount. And of course there's tofu. People who do this diet feel good and have a lot more energy.”
As one ages, eating vegetables is far healthier than consuming red meat. The famous criminal attorney of India, Ram Jethmalani, currently a BJP member of the Rajya Sabha and a former Indian law minister, asked me when I sat at his table for dinner three years ago in New Delhi: “Why do you eat meat? Do you realise your stomach acts as the graveyard for these dead animals!” This sentence from my host killed my appetite for aloo gosht, prepared by his chef of 40 years. Jethmalani celebrates his 88th birthday three days from today!
