The Hair of Destruction

Every Wednesday night at ten o’clock my roommates and I gather around the television to watch one of the most popular satires of today’s modern society.  There is no subject that they won’t touch, be it religion, politics, or just the nuances of the present day world.  One episode touches on how the internet has become such a large part of our lives, another on the smug demeanor of hybrid car owners, and yet another on the Mormon Church.  But at the end of every episode, after ripping a new one to whatever subject they have chosen for the week, there is always an underlying moral to the story, something that wraps up and makes sense of the satire that had unfurled for the past half hour.  It is this combination of satire and a moral that makes South Park one of the greatest shows on television.  It is that same combination of satire and parable that make “The Prophet’s Hair” by Salmon Rushdie the story that it is.

The short story “The Prophet’s Hair” by Salmon Rushdie follows a vile with the hair of the Prophet Muhammad through two households and shows the impact that it has on both.  It is first found by a moneylender named Hashim.  Until the finding of the hair, Hashim was not a religious man, but instead took pride in “living honorable in the world” (Rushdie, p.41).  With the finding of the vial of hair however, things in his life changed.  In a day he went from his normal self to exclaiming at the dinner table that the family needed “’An end to politeness!’…’An end to hypocrisy!’”(Rushdie, p.45).  This change sent the family into a state of shock.  It eventually leads to the death of his daughter and son, and to his wife going insane.  The irony in this is that the possession of such an influential religious relic brought the family misfortune and tore them apart.  It shows that the faith on material objects can sometimes be misguided, and that faith in one’s self, rather than a relic, is much more important.

The second household that the hair reeks havoc on is that of the thief, Sheikh, that was hired to steal it from Hashim.  He had been hired by the daughter of Hashim, Huma, to steal the hair so that order could be restored in the house.  After he steals it, he keeps it in his house for a night.  The house of the thief wasn’t one of great fortune.  His four sons were all crippled.  This had actually been done by Sheikh when they were born so that they would be able to make a good living as beggars in the streets.  His wife was also blind.  However, in the night that the hair spent under their roof, the four son’s maladies were cured and his wife’s sight was restored.  At the surface, this may seem to be a miracle, but in reality, it was a horrible thing for the family.  His four sons wouldn’t be able to make a living as beggars anymore, basically killing their primary income.  And as for Sheikh’s wife “it was possible for her to spend her last days gazing one more upon the beauties of the valley of Kashmir,” (Rushdie, p.58).  The ironic thing is that the area in which they lived was the lowest of the slums, and instead of beauties for her to gaze upon she was now able to see the despair that surrounded her.

So one can see how this supposed piece of religious significance actually brought destruction to the houses that it visited.  This gives the message that one cannot rely upon things of this nature, and that they are not always the great things that they were meant to be.

So it can be seen in “The Prophets Hair” that the genre of satire can be mixed with that of parable.  The satire makes an affective took to get the moral across without seeming overly serious.  It is the same with “South Park.”  They are both able to deliver a positive and valuable message without being overly serious in tone, and therefore they are able to reach a much broader spectrum of people than if they were to take a heave demeanor on the subject.