Greed>>

Religion is world renown. One can either believes in its faith and trust in the miracles that it creates or choose not to. Religion has many different stems and influences on people, from these stems comes beliefs each individual religion creates. These beliefs can have a huge impact on ones life. These spiritual influences that stem from the beliefs can affect a person in the flesh and even completely control a person’s life and actions.

In Salman Rushdie’s short story, “The Prophet’s Hair”, the reader is introduced to this same type of spiritual influence. This influence is greed. “Greed is the selfish desire for or pursuit of money, wealth, food, or other possessions, especially when this denies the same goods to others. In Rushdie’s story we see this through the character of Hashim, who is a husband, father of two, and a moneylender as a profession.

Hashim, a wealthy man comes across a vial containing the hair of a sacred prophet from within their culture that has become a symbol of religion and is believed to have spiritual influence. After finding this hair, Hashim trusting no one tells only his son Atta of what he has found. But soon the hatred in the house begins to come out, the brother and sister Huma plot of a way to get rid of the vial in order to return to the life they had lived before.

The brother and sister take it upon themselves to go out and find a thief to break into their home and steal the vial containing the hair. However, the power of this religious symbol ends up taking the lives of Atta, Huma, and Hashim as the thief comes into the home and Hashim ends up mistaking his daughter for the thief, stabs her in the chest with his sword, then falls on it impaling himself, and taking his own life.

The Sheikh then returns home to find out that a miracle has been impaled on him; he is now in possession of the sacred hair. His wife would regain her sight and sons would be exiled from there jobs as beggars because of broken legs. Soon after the greed (vial) would come back to haunt him as he is shot by Atta and Huma’s uncle.

The moral of the story here is do not let material objects take control of your life and make you greedy. Greed is dangerous is can easily absorb your life and leave you to drown in it. As in this story holding sacred religious artifacts or any material object that have some sort of power, is not worth the consequences it can bring.