Dawn.com: by Nadeem F. Paracha.
In 1973, my paternal grandparents visited Makkah to perform the first of their two Hajj pilgrimages.
With them were two of my grandmother’s sisters and their respective husbands.
Upon reaching Jeddah, they hailed a taxi from the airport and headed for their designated hotel.
The driver of the taxi was a Sudanese man. As my grandparents and one of my grandmother’s sisters settled themselves in the taxi, the driver leisurely began driving towards the hotel and on the way inserted a cassette of Arabic songs into the car’s Japanese cassette-player.
My grandfather who was seated in the front seat beside the driver noticed that the man kept glancing at the rear view mirror, and every time he did that, one of his eyebrows would rise.
Curious, my grandfather turned his head to see exactly what was it about the women seated in the back seat that the taxi driver found so amusing.
This was what he discovered: As my grandmother was trying to take a quick nap, her sister too had her eyes closed, but her head was gently swinging from left to right to the beat of the music and she kept whispering (as if in quiet spiritual ecstasy) the Arabic expression Subhanallah, subhanallah …’
My grandfather knew enough Arabic to realise that the song to which my grandmother’s sister was swinging and praising the Almighty for was about an (Egyptian) Romeo who was lamenting his past as a heart-breaking flirt.