(studiostoks/Shutterstock)
The moneylender, Hashim, is a collector of various objects as a hobby, he also collects unique and different objects indiscriminately which also come from various areas. Unlike most collectors who specialize in one area of items collected his tastes seem to vary with no clear sense of genre of items collected. The passage illustrates this clearly by giving examples of the items he collected. Hashim instead is a collector of all things that he perceives to be valuable.
In an earlier paragraph of the passage the writer described Hashim as not being a godly man, however, this is later qualified in paragraph 11 where Hashim indicated “I’m a man of the world, of this world”. Although going to such great lengths to help the reader understand the religious character of Hashim, one with no connection whatsoever to the religion of the spiritual world (Islamic world), this particular characteristic is however contrasted with his intimate knowledge of the prophet and his feelings towards that of deity. This could be an attempt by the author to show the lengths to which Hashim was going to justify his decision of to make the reader aware of a man who inherently was lying even to himself about his beliefs.
In addition, Hashim uses the word “rotting” to describe the prophet’s hair which shows no respect to the prophet’s persona, yet he again shows value to the secular object , through declaring the hair a secular object, he stripped the hair from its religious value. This would indicate an attempt to disassociate himself with the religious aspect of what he found. Hashim continues to claim that he actually is not keeping the phial for the hair, he keeps it for the beauty of the phial. So Hashim moves slowly towards ridding himself of association of religion, through first, claiming that the hair is of value to other people, thus taking this value away from them would be the right thing to do as they would not have given it the treatment the prophet would want, then to claim that this hair is a secular object, then, finally! – he claims that the hair is pretty much void of value, where he doesn’t acknowledge the hair, he acknowledges the value and beauty of the phial. He follows this justification through logical sense associated with the ideology of this world “American millionaires” who simply buy stolen items with no attention to morality. Where it becomes acceptable for him to keep something that he knows he shouldn’t keep; Which ultimately allows him to be released of the consequences of doing the right thing according to Islam.