The Parable of The Prophet's Hair

A parable is a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. There are many parables found in the Bible that are used for exactly this purpose. It is like a fable except a fable uses animals, plants, and forces of nature as characters to act out the story while parables generally use human actors and are more often used as spiritual lessons. Parables are how Jesus did much of his teaching. I think one of the most well-known parables is the parable of the mustard seed in the Bible. In this parable, Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed. He says that while the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds, when it is planted in good soil, it becomes a large plant and the birds can rest in it.

It can be argued that The Prophet’s Hair, written by Salman Rushdie and published in a book of his short stories called East, West, was written as a parable. The story is about the misfortune that comes upon a family after the father, Hashim, finds and becomes obsessed with a sacred object. The object is a beautiful silver vial holding a strand of the prophets Muhammad’s hair. The father knows that it had been stolen from its shrine and was being searched for. He knows he should return it but decides to keep it because he is a collector of all types of different objects, some useless like many collectors items are. In the end of the story the family is torn apart from the effect that the object has.

While I do not think that the vile holds any sort of power to pull the family apart, a great amount of misfortune still comes upon the family. I think this misfortune is a result of how the father is so obsessed with the object. The father, "was fond of pointing out that while he was not a godly man he set great store by ‘living honourably in the world’" (Pg. 41). Yet he doesn’t return the object to the mosque as an honorable person would do. He also allows the object to change his life. He began forcing his wife and children to live a strict Muslim life, as they had never done before, and even said hurtful things to them and didn’t hesitate to beat them. While the family believes that the hair was "persecuting them" (Pg. 50), I think this story is just an example of what can happen when greed and obsession over an object overtake a persons life.

The moral of this story is that people should not worship objects, because the greed will tear their life apart. Worshiping an object can only ruin a good life. People should worship something that is worthy of being worshiped, not something that is made on Earth and can be destroyed by man. Things worthy of being worshiped are a God, family, friends, and noble causes and ideas. It goes along with one of my favorite quotes, which says that people are meant to be loved and things are meant to be used, not the other way around. An object should never be worshiped, since it is not something that can last forever.