The Road from Damascus (8 page)

Sami heard different mythology from his mother. When Mustafa was out of the house they curled up together and she told him the adventures of God’s messengers. Of Khidr the Green Man. The tales of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. And as well as the history of the past she told him the history of the not-yet-happened. The signs of the end of the world, the Day of Standing, the final judgment.

Sami learnt early on to separate these two narratives. If, for example, his father was talking about Egyptian gods and Sami brought up the story of Pharaoh and Moses, Mustafa would turn to his wife with darkened face.

‘What’s this you’re telling the boy? I want an educated son. Leave him alone with your superstition.’

And he would calm himself, pacing between chairs and coffee tables, by reciting Qabbani. Usually ‘Bread, Hashish and Moon’, which railed against Arab backwardness.

Sami’s mother’s name is Nur Kallas. She sells halal meat on the Harrow Road, wears patterned hijabs, prays five times a day. She dared do none of these things when her husband was alive. In those days all she had was a copy of the Qur’an, which she hid on the top bookshelf behind other volumes. She would kiss it and press it to her forehead before reading. Holding Sami to her breast at bedtime she would quickly mutter its protective verses. If Mustafa caught her reciting, he declaimed more Qabbani, stamping and tutting with the rhythm:

Worse still, Nur told stories about the jinn. First- and second-hand anecdotes of how they inhabited Damascene houses, and their good or evil interactions with the human occupants. She strayed into supernatural territory absent-mindedly, forgetting her husband’s sensitivities. Mustafa tolerated ghouls (an Arabic word), plus sprites, leprechauns, dryads and goblins. Also dwarves, elves and hobbits. He read Tolkien to Sami. But he drew the line at jinn, because these were mentioned in the Qur’an.

‘But everybody believes in the jinn. Even party members. Even Christians.’

‘Show me a jinn. Measure me a jinn. Weigh one. Can you? We want logic in this house. Two plus two equals four. It can never equal five. That’s how we talk here.’

Then he would quote Qabbani’s ‘Stupid Woman’:

The poem’s intention was to protect women from the mockery of men, but Mustafa felt his use of these lines against Nur was somehow appropriate. Wasn’t belief in the jinn part of the whole repressive package? Didn’t his raillery therefore contribute to liberation?

Even as a young child Sami wondered what had brought his parents together. He knew they’d met at university. Nur had also studied literature, and had planned to be a teacher, but she’d accompanied her more successful husband to London instead. Photographs of the early years showed her as an impressive extension to Mustafa’s cosmopolitan intellectual, with her bouncing brown hair cut short, her eyes shining with energy, her body bursting from low-cut dresses. Strange, unreal depictions. In his memory Sami saw her wearing her hair long and lank in protest against the lack of hijab. Her face closed. Her eyes directing their light inward.

At some point she’d become more religious. At first she’d innocently mixed Islamic language with that of nationalism and modernity, not understanding how they could exclude each other. When she did belatedly understand, she chose Islam. In silence. With immovable determination.

By the time Sami entered high school Mustafa had grudgingly accepted that the boy needed to know something of the patriarchs. For the sake of Sami’s secular education he gulped back his discomfort. These Semitic myths, after all, were essential to the literary traditions Sami would study. So Mustafa delivered his interpretation of religious pre-history. He explained that, as with Oedipus or Achilles, there was psychopathic drama in the lives of the heroes, a drama in its essence no different from that of today’s Speakers’ Corner soapbox types, or of the schizophrenics following mysterious itineraries through the city’s streets. The scriptural heroes heard the same internal mumblings and insinuations, but as they belonged to an epic age, with epic genres, these were granted mythic status. It was pre-psychological, pre-ironic. There was high seriousness everywhere, blowing out of the desert and rolling up from the sea. There was prophetic articulation of destiny. There was the terror of God’s voice.

This raged, for instance, in the ears of Ibrahim. Where monotheism started: in the ears of Ibrahim and at the neck of Ismail. Mustafa told the story as he thought it deserved to be told, at hysterical speed. Ibrahim and Ismail. Another father and son duo. The old man despite his barren dotage begging God for a child, and the Voice after the passage of tears and time saying Yes, and the man bringing the boy up as the apple of his glinting eye, his only heir, only to hear the same Voice ringing in his raddled brain, telling him the unsayable, the obscene. Commanding him to cross dust fields and lakes of rock to a certain craggy mountain top, there to bind the perfect child, to sharpen the stone, to cut the slim throat. To wet the rock with his son’s lifeblood.

The Voice relented, but the man had been ready to do its murderous bidding, that was the point. The boy too. The boy who, against both instinct and logic, helped prepare the place of slaughter.

The foundational event of three religions. Attempted murder. A proud-humble refusal of logic. It filled Mustafa with righteous anger.

‘The voice in my head is God, especially when it urges me to perversity. Especially when it asks me to kill what I love. From now on I will ignore human law. From here henceforward I will fuck up the world for the sake of the unseen.’

He raised his voice when Nur was near. Let her hear! Let her learn!

Sami heard of the prophets from this voice that vanquished them. He learnt religion through the prism of civil war. Qabbani versus Qur’an. Mustafa’s bookish noise, and the unspoken but resistant verses of the Book. These were the opposing camps of Sami’s childhood.

It didn’t take long for him to choose his side. He couldn’t accept a supernatural truth. If he had chosen one, his mother’s for example, he’d have had to deny all the others. And there were so many others. Just on his bus route to school there were as many one-and-only truths jostling for attention as there were fast food outlets. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists. The Nation of Islam in natty suits and carved hair. Rastafarians, both black and (absurdly) white. Anglicans, sagely complacent despite the colonization of their churches. Hare Krishnas singing while lapsed Catholics wolfed their free curry. Sikhs with daggers and briefcases. Freemasons with briefcases only. A Hindu incarnated as the bus conductor bowing inwardly to the elephant god. Scientologists offering personality tests. Grinning Discordians. A Sufi roadworker at his drill, pruning the rose garden within. Rebirthers. Crystal healers. Buddhists of the latest version. To name but some. All of whom had found the exclusive answer.

Sami smiled from the rocking top-deck seat. All these people had to do was to stop and talk to each other and listen carefully and reflect for a moment. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to realize that they couldn’t all be right. In fact, that none of them could be.

Belief X cancels belief Y. Leaving zero belief. Religion can’t last much longer. It had developed in deserts and villages. Here it’s an immigrant thing. It can’t survive the cosmopolitan city.

Things looked like that then.

Of course there were times when, because of his name, because of the expectations of neighbours and acquaintances, it became necessary to visit mosques. London mosques. This usually meant the suffocating lethargy of suburban living rooms, or maybe the neon vacancy of a disused warehouse. There were calligraphic plates on the walls instead of triple ducks in flying formation, but behind them there was mildewed wallpaper or damp pocked plaster. Instead of dry air swirled by ceiling fans, the stagnant soupy stuff of central heating. The odour of besocked feet instead of frankincense. It didn’t work. It didn’t fit.

The mosques smelled of feet and mist and moss and wood. Wheezes and groans invited the faithful and atheists alike to prayer. Sami yawned back tears, shivering from his teeth to his anus, and settled and rocked on thin folded legs. An old man croaked the Qur’an in an Arabic deprived of a third of its consonants. Someone half coughed, like an engine failing on a frosty morning. And among the nostril noises, palate clicks and throat-clearings of older, heavier bodies, Sami in his isolation did in fact pray, blowing the time faster through a tiny hole in his puckered lips, but only for the prayer to end.

How long it took. And Islam taking its time to die, oozing like blood in a geriatric’s hardened veins, sluggishly, soporifically, dripping and dropping away from an unseen wound.

Accompanied by Mustafa, however, these mosque visits were also a kind of tourism, a glimpse into other people’s slightly sad, slightly exotic lives, a glimpse which reinforced the stable comforts of his own. Crouching at the back of a wintry English mosque, touching his forehead to the musty colour–bled thread of carpet, was for Sami what a stroll through dusty farmland might have been for a gentleman of the Raj, what a visit to a refugee camp would be for a portly American journalist. He was slumming it, in among cringing Old World reptiles, and Mustafa snorting quietly at his side, making him snigger, a wink and a ludic nudge after the prayers as they sat down to eat. The irony was delicious. The storing up of joke details for later in the car. The unsuspecting earnestness of the godbothered. They were – Traifi senior and junior – disguised by curling hair and thick eyebrows, by black eyes, wrapped in the mufti of their own faces. They had superior knowledge, so it seemed.

It was an entirely different matter when the mosque invaded his home. When his mother had visitors and dared to roll out her prayer mat with them. Mustafa slammed doors and played Egyptian dance music as loud as the stereo would allow, screamed ‘For God’s Sake!’ – in English, so that it wasn’t an invocation of the supernatural but an entirely realist expression of bad humour. Sami, swirling in a vertigo of shame and self-loathing, observed his mother from the height of his disdain. The worst of it was, he felt an urge to jump.

There was certainly something attractive about the ritual movements Nur made, standing, bowing, crouching and kneeling according to an invisible logic. Despite Mustafa, and in contrast to her usual flustered manner, she performed each section of the prayer at a leisurely pace. Bangs and crashes failed to make her flinch. It was as if she was deaf. To Sami’s eyes – sickened, fascinated –a halo of peace and slowness surrounded her. It was with incomprehension he turned from her to the window, and saw rain, cars, people scowling under umbrellas. His father’s noise, the TV, and then back to his mother looking intently in front of her, moving her lips, her back straight, her fingers outstretched. There were conflicting worlds in this scene, worlds which could never be reconciled.

Even as he frowned he felt a breath of wonder. Nur repeated holy words whispered or sung by hundreds of millions, their prayers rippling over the earth at times determined by the sun, as shadows progressed and dawn advanced behind. It was, despite the coughs and splutters that defined it locally, a chorus he would have liked to join. Part of him. In a way. Beyond the chorus there was a – he thought the word quietly – a civilization. A civilization made of sound instead of pictures. The names of its centres – Lahore, Samara, Isfahan, Timbuktu – resonating like the ancient desert poetry his father recited and which he couldn’t understand.

Were the world’s objects and his inner feelings signs of something greater? Was another reality glimmering through the surfaces of things? Should living be a struggle to read the universe like a book? If he fell into his mother’s way of seeing, this is what he would believe. He had the sensation of knowing something but not remembering it. And the visible became transfigured. Almost.

His mother had taught him this:

Which meant:
We shall show them Our signs on the horizons and in themselves until it becomes clear to them that It is Reality.

He would catch himself humming it in incantation. Even that. In dark moments, the darkest, he asked himself why Mustafa was so determined not to appreciate the poetry. Everyone recognized the Qur’an as the peak and glory of Arabic poetry, even if it wasn’t the word of God. Everyone except Mustafa Traifi, Professor of Arabic Literature. What was he so scared of?

Here Sami stopped himself. Stepped back from the abyss. Was he not a proper man? Was he not prepared for the twentieth century? Some adolescent males worry about homosexuality. Sami worried about religion, about being religious. No, he needed another identity.

He sided with Mustafa. Religion was the long childhood of a people. If an ancient people still had the habit, it was no longer childishness but senility. When that people lived in London, among the healthy, among the sane, religion was humiliation.

It made him bow his head, not before God but before man.

‘Syria’s a Muslim country, isn’t it?’ asked his teachers, or his friends’ parents.

And he would answer, ‘It’s a Mediterranean country. Would you call the Mediterranean Muslim?’ or ‘It’s a mixture of everything, really,’ or better still, ‘I don’t know. I don’t have a clue.’