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CNN Live Sunday
Pakistani Man Devotes Life to Saving Discarded Korans
Aired October 28, 2001 - 15:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DONNA KELLEY, CNN ANCHOR: In the United States, there are specific rules about what to do with worn flags, but in Pakistan, one man found that there were no such rules regarding the treatment of the Koran.
As CNN's Amanda Kibel reports, he's made it his life's work to guard the worn and discarded pages of Islam's holiest book.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
AMANDA KIBEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): For Hajji Walli Mohammed, it all began with the burning of the books.
"Somebody burnt four Korans," he explains. "When I saw these burnt Korans, I felt very bad."
A few days later, Hajji Mohammed had a dream.
"I dreamt," he says, "that I went to the mullas, and I got 53 edicts from them, all of them directing me to begin collecting discarded Korans, or pages of Korans, that had been thrown away. When I woke up," says Hajji Mohammed, "I prayed to God that until my death I would do this, collect old and unwanted Korans and keep them safe."
Hajji Mohammed has been doing exactly this for 25 years now. When he was younger he would travel all over the southwestern Pakistan province of Baluchistan on his bicycle, picking up unwanted Korans wherever he found them. Whether a single page scattered in a graveyard or thrown in the gutter, or an old, unwanted Koran from the madrassa, Hajji Mohammed took them all home.
"These are the words of God," he says, "and they are great because they are the words of God. If people walk on them, or they are in the gutter, it is not good."
When Hajji Mohammed ran out of space for his collection at home, he went looking for a bigger place to store his Korans. And what he found was this mountain. A local businessman agreed to lease this land from the government and excavate a series of tunnels here to store Hajji's collection.
That was 10 years ago. Since then the tunnels in Quetta's Chiltan Mountains have become the only official storage space for old and unwanted Koran pages from all over Pakistan. Korans which come here and are salvageable are repaired and sent back to mosques. There are now some 65,000 bags of pages here, lining the walls of 12,000 feet of tunnels.
(on camera): The curators of these tunnels say they have been very careful not to allow this site to be infused with any religious or spiritual significance. They say it is simply a storage place for religious relics; a place for them to stay in safety and dignity until time turns them to dust.
(voice-over): Muzafar is one of those curators. He says, in Islam, a Koran should never simply be thrown away like common garbage, and that is what the work here is all about.
MUZAFAR, CURATOR: Don't have any concern with the politics, with the religious leaders, with the other things. It is only for our hearts' satisfaction. There is nothing else.
KIBEL: But wandering around these tunnels, the question comes to mind: If one were to read all the Koranic scriptures in all of these bags, would one find anywhere the Islamic teachings in whose name the attacks of September 11 were allegedly carried out?
Moderate Islamic leaders say no. The word "Islam," they point out, comes from the word "salaam," meaning peace. Refer first, they say, to the Koran, which specifically says: "If anyone murders an innocent person, it will be as if he has murdered the whole of humanity. And if anyone saves a person, it will be as if he has saved the whole of humanity."
Hajji Mohammed says he doesn't know the details of Koranic teachings. He only cares that Korans should have a suitable resting place. Though he loves the Koran with all his heart, he has never studied it because he has never learned to read.
Amanda Kibel, CNN, Quetta, Pakistan.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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