Stranger to History (10 page)
Kuftaro, a corpulent man with a neat salt-and-pepper beard and a prominent nose, spoke first. After Islamic salutations and bearing witness that there was no God but God, and Muhammad, His Prophet, Kuftaro asserted that Islam was a religion of love and tolerance. He mentioned that Abu Nour had never produced a terrorist. But it was outside enemies that Kuftaro had in mind when he introduced the Grand Mufti of Bosnia. He spoke of the terrible and ‘arrogant’ injustices and atrocities suffered by the Bosnian people. The Prophet had said that Islam would spread from east to west, and so it had, but in Bosnia they had tried to wipe it out. The Bosnian people, though, had remained steadfast: they had kept the faith. Syria, he said, was now facing a similar threat from a foreign enemy and, under the leadership of Bashar al-Assad, she, too, was steadfast.
This was the first time I had heard a
khutba
or Friday sermon and I was surprised by how openly political it was. My few weeks in Syria had been marked by silence when it came to politics. My Syrian friends only ever discussed it in the privacy of their cars, and even mentioning the leader’s name publicly was seen as a transgression. And yet here, it seemed, the faith was being used not only to discuss politics but to conflate the enemies of the Syrian government with the enemies of Islam.
The next speaker was the Grand Mufti of Syria, a young, ferocious man with thick lips, a powerful face and build. His short, black beard, along with the gleam in his eyes, made him seem like an old-fashioned grease wrestler coming into the ring. He went over the same formula: foreign enemies of Islam; the great Islamic past; the sense of grievance; praise of the Assads.
Then the Grand Mufti of Bosnia took the stage. He began with a story of an Andalucían princess in the last years of Islamic rule in Spain. During the battle, she was taken captive and was sold as a slave to a Christian family. Her father, in the meantime, fled to Morocco. As the girl grew up, the son of her owners fell in love with her and wanted to marry her even though she was a slave. She had held her tongue until then, but was now forced to speak: ‘I am not a slave. I am a princess. I have a father and mother in Morocco. I cannot marry you without their permission.’
‘What has the story of the Andalucían princess got to do with Bosnia?’ the Grand Mufti asked the congregation. After a pause, he said, ‘That princess is Bosnia. One hundred years ago, in Berlin, she was sold as a slave. But when the time came and someone tried to take her for free, she said, “I am not a slave. I have a father in Istanbul, I have a mother in Damascus, I cannot be taken for free.”’
I felt unsettled as I heard the Grand Mufti speak. This man of faith, with a measure of dignity and wisdom about him, distorted the history he spoke of. He knew its aims beforehand; the history was merely slotted in. The event in Berlin to which he referred was the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, when the Ottoman Empire had lost a good part of the Balkans. He connected it falsely to the loss of Andalucía several hundred years before. And in the same vein, he went on to join that history to the Bosnian massacres of the twentieth century. The details hardly mattered: it was a long story of aggression and attack from the Christian West, beginning as early as the loss of Andalucía and continuing till the present, in which the sides, as far as he was concerned, were always the same.
It was encased history; I was reminded of Abdullah, in Istanbul, saying that to be a Muslim is to be above history. Nothing in this fixed narrative could be moved or rearranged or made to say something different. Its goal was to forward the idea of the great Islamic past, solidify the difference between Muslim and non-Muslim, and mourn the loss of a great time when Muslims had ruled the world. In the Grand Mufti’s account now, the people committing the Bosnian massacres were hardly different from the Americans who allowed them to happen, the Europeans who sold Bosnia as ‘a slave’ in 1878 and the Spaniards who had pushed out the Moors four hundred years before.
That morning President Ahmadinejad of Iran was in Damascus. The Syrians and the Iranians, both facing pressure abroad, shared a new closeness. The minister of culture had been with him at the Umayyad Mosque before coming to Abu Nour. ‘He was on his first state visit,’ the minister said, ‘and I told him that from this pulpit Islam had spread from China to Andalucía.’
‘And so it will again,’ Ahmadinejad had assured him.
Kuftaro wrapped up: ‘It is easy to get depressed in these times, to see the forces against Islam. The Islamic world, too, is fragmented and divided. It is divided because of the West and the influence of its ideas. First, they rob us economically, then they rob our land, and once they have achieved these objectives, they rob us culturally. They spread their ideas in our society to keep it divided and fragmented.
‘But we have our Book,’ he added, the message at last uplifting in its own way: it was a long narrative of former greatness and defeat, reversible not through education, new ideas or progress but through closer attention to the letter of the Book.
Then it was time to pray. Quickly, Muhammad described to me what was to be done. We rose. I followed the others, the first part moving quickly, almost like a military formation, putting my hands behind my ears, then across my chest, then on my haunches. And now, the movement seemed to slow, a heightened feeling of privacy crept in and, with it, my own sense of fraudulence. I struggled to keep in time and feared I would fall out of synch. I was up again, then on my haunches, said, ‘
Amin
,’ when the others did, and at last we went down on our knees and submitted. The bowing and touching my forehead to the floor was my favourite part; I enjoyed the privacy it allowed. But there was also a powerful humility in the gesture, which was easily apprehended. After the submission, I sat up with my legs under me, a difficult position that those who prayed regularly took pleasure in prolonging. Through the whole experience, I watched a small boy, sitting at my feet in a white skullcap. He fiddled, then fell occasionally into the prayer position, then got up and looked around. He had beautiful light-coloured eyes. Seeing him near his father, in the all-male environment, it was possible to see how visiting the mosque could become a special rite between father and son.
When the prayers were over, many stayed in the translation room to talk for a while. As if some unspoken connection had formed between us, Muhammad now treated me as a friend and took me round the room, introducing me to the others. I met Fuad, a British Pakistani in his mid-twenties from Birmingham with a serene expression and a thick black beard.
‘That’s a confusing identity,’ he said, his soft mouth and eyes lighting up in a smile when I told him I was half-Indian, half-Pakistani. ‘Like us too. When we were growing up we suffered racial abuse. People told us we weren’t English. We grew up when racism was still fashionable. I remember Bernard Manning [the comedian], who was very popular when I was growing up, saying about Pakistanis claiming to be British because they were born in Britain: “If a dog’s born in a stable that doesn’t make him a horse.” The choice of dog was not accidental.’ Fuad stopped, and as if it had just occurred to him, added, ‘He was saying we were dogs.
‘Now the home secretary says we’re not British enough. We have to be more British.’ Fuad worked hard to realise his parents’ dream that he enter the corporate world, but he hated it. ‘It was so grey,’ he said, ‘the drive to work every morning, operating on mechanised time, arriving to find you have two hundred emails to answer, no grand narrative. To succeed in that world, you have to serve the corporation. And for what? For money? I decided I wanted to submit to something that was true, something with meaning.’
I asked him where he felt he belonged now: to Britain or to Pakistan?
‘I’m both,’ he said. ‘The ones I pity are my kids. They have a Puerto Rican mother!’ He smiled as he said this, an odd, painful smile.
Muhammad was speaking to someone else so Fuad took me up to meet Rafik, a black ‘brother’ from Connecticut. He was older, perhaps in his early forties, large and jovial. He had moved to Syria with his wife and children after converting to Islam in Florida. He was working as a teacher, married too young and gave me a few tips on how to learn Arabic quickly. I told him about my trip. ‘You have to follow the ringing inside you that is Islam,’ he said, ‘the ringing of what is right and what is wrong. In the West, we learn to question everything. In Islam, we question too, but not just to say, “Ha, ha, you’re wrong.” You can’t prove Allah wrong.’
I took my leave of Rafik and found Muhammad again. He said he would walk out with me. In the gallery outside the translation room, a Koran class had started up and we went through rows of young boys learning the verses. I said goodbye to Muhammad, the man who had taught me to pray. He took my number and said he’d give me a call later. He and a few friends were going over to KFC; maybe I’d like to join them.
I had come to Syria searching for the world of men like Butt and Abdullah and I had found it, but I had also found something else: confirmation of what about them had interested me in the first place: only thinly hidden behind the curtain of faith were the problems of the real world. The issues raised at Abu Nour were modern, directly related to what Abdullah described as the ‘world system’. Kuftaro spoke of feeling robbed culturally and coming under the influence of foreign ideas; the Grand Mufti, of modern genocide seen on television sets; Fuad, of racism, of the clutter of modernity – being bombarded by emails and adhering to drab routines – of children from mixed marriages, and of loss of identity, resulting from the large-scale migrations of the last fifty years, in his case from Pakistan to Britain. They were scenarios the entire world faced, that I faced; they defined the modern experience; there was nothing about them that was particular to Islam, and they made the Book seem like an unrelated solution.
Walking back through the souk, I felt a flatness that was like frustration. It arose from a stifled desire to express myself, from the mosque raising important issues and smothering them with prayer. I’m sure there were spheres of faith in which people find refuge from the troubles of the material world, but Abu Nour was not that. Abu Nour was political. It fanned a sense of grievance and, as it could only ever do, offered retreat as the answer. But, unlike other religions, the retreat on offer was not that of the hermitage or the ashram; it was of the physical completeness of the faith, an alternative world on earth, equipped with sanctified history, politics and culture: ‘the widest kind of peace.’ It sought to restore believers to a pure historical and political world-order, free of incursions from the modern world. Syria was seen as a good place to begin because it was closed and depressed, with an autocratic ruler who allowed neither a free economic nor a free political life; it was much easier to shut out the world here than it was in Britain or Turkey. But many of the international Muslims I knew in Syria didn’t find it pure enough and drifted south to the lawless wilderness of Yemen in search of greater purities and an Islam closer to that of the Prophet’s.
In the meantime, the mosque, in its effort to engage the real world, to re-create the time when temporal and religious power were one, dirtied its hands in dealing with bad regimes and cosying up to dictators. Because the faith was such a negative force, because it didn’t matter what kind of Muslim you were, just that you were Muslim, because there was never any plan to offer real solutions, only to harness grievance, and because its sense of outrage had much more to do with the loss of political power than divine injunction, it could even find room, as certain decayed ideologies can, for men like my father, who were ready to participate in its grievances but who were also professed disbelievers. It was in the mosque’s use of grievance, the way it could make Assad’s problems seem like Islam’s, but more importantly, the way it could use modern problems to reignite the faith that its great violence was to be found.
And at the end of that cold, tense winter, filled with international fears, what could be easier than to inflame a country in need of release?
I
t was a misunderstanding of giant proportions. I first heard of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad over lunch with my Norwegian friend, Even. They had been published in Denmark, and then republished in Norway. We hadn’t seen them, but they were said to be generating great anger across the Muslim world. Syria and Saudi Arabia had recalled their ambassadors to Denmark. Religious leaders called for a boycott of Danish products. Within days a painful cycle had begun in which every republication of the cartoons elicited more anger, which in turn made the story bigger and forced republication, if for no other reason than to explain what the fuss was about. Rights and, more importantly, the separation of press from government, unknown or hazy to most of the Muslim world, made the offence seem as if it came from the entire country rather than from a single newspaper, an individual cartoonist or editor.
Damascus that Friday morning was like a city under curfew. There were hardly any cars in the street, the shops were closed and the busy road that ran parallel to mine was so empty it could be crossed at an absent-minded stroll. The rain, which began the day before, had stopped but dark, wandering clouds drifted over the city. Their deep colour and low, predatory movement over Mount Qassioun made the mountain seem bigger and paler than I had seen it before. The hoary, Biblical mountain, with its petticoat of shanties, seemed that morning to have regained some of the grit and thunder of old days.
Even had mentioned he wanted to come with me to Abu Nour so I stopped at his flat on the way. We walked there through a souk that was much emptier than normal. We arrived at the translation room to find it full, and as I had come regularly over the past few weeks, I now recognised many faces. We had come quite late and the sermon had begun. Kuftaro stood alone at the pulpit.
‘Believers, we are living in total darkness,’ I heard, as I put on my headphones. ‘The enemies of Islam have been conspiring against the Islamic nation. They are trying to suppress the values of our nation. With the beginning of this century, the enemies of Islam have occupied Iraq . . . and now we have the blasphemous drawings. It is war against all Muslim people! They want to destroy our nation and our faith with all the weapons they have.’ Even and I glanced nervously at each other. ‘Under the pretext of democracy and freedom, they are spreading such blasphemous drawings! Our Lord demands that we be strong, and our strength comes from our love for our faith and for Prophet Muhammad. We call for good speech, but when our sanctity is oppressed, we are all sacrificing our spirits for your sake, O Prophet. We will sacrifice our souls, spirits and bodies for you, O Prophet!’