Stranger to History Read online

  The whole scene culminated in a little square, with an internet café, an Islamic bookstore, a gym and a store called Shukr, which specialised in stylish Islamic clothes for Western markets. Even had bought his robe there. The ingredients were the same as they had been in Manchester’s Curry Mile where I met Butt, and on the radical hilltop in Istanbul: the ideological bookshop; the gym, as a social centre, when girls and bars are off bounds; and the internet café, to communicate with Muslims worldwide and to browse Islamic websites. From the little square, the white marble minarets of Abu Nour were clearly visible.

  Abu Nour had started as a small mosque seventy years ago, but in the last three decades, under the late Grand Mufti, Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, it grew to dominate the small, traditional souk. Three Islamic colleges were added, two Shariah schools and nine floors. Courses were offered in Arabic and religion, and more than twelve thousand students from fifty-five countries attended the university. Abu Nour was the pet project of the highest religious leader in the land; its remarkable growth spoke of the growing role of religion in the old Ba’athist dictatorship, and the importance of Syria as a destination for international Islam. The late Grand Mufti was known for his tolerance and for reaching out to other religious groups; Abu Nour prided itself on teaching the ‘correct face of Islam’. On Fridays, its vast chambers, and specialised annexes for foreigners and women, were full. Syrians and foreigners alike came to the mosque, but in the non-Arab Muslim’s journey in search of the faith and its language, Abu Nour held a special place.

  We were looking for Tariq, a fix-it man known to all new arrivals at the university. Even was asking for him in one of the shops when he appeared on a corner of the square, a big, meaty figure with a friendly manner. Though his face had a dark stubble, it was shaved clean just under the chin, an Islamic fashion. He greeted Even warmly. Then, taking one look at me, said, with his Arab deafness to the letter p, ‘Are you Indian or Bakistani, brother?’

  ‘Pakistani,’ I said, hedging my bets.

  ‘We welcome beebal from every country, brother, because everyone was very nice to me when I was in Europe. I can help you here, brother, and unlike a lot of guides I don’t want any money.’ This turned out to be true and made me even more nervous. In a country where 10 per cent of the population were intelligence informants, including taxi-drivers and waiters, I was worried that Tariq was making his money elsewhere.

  I asked him about enrolling at Abu Nour, and he said, ‘Yes, yes, brother, I can help you. What do you want? Arabic? Islamic classes? A lot of beebal come here from all over the world, Norway, England, Africa, Bakistan, to learn about Islam.’ He warned us that we couldn’t trust others and told us a story from the Traditions about the second caliph, Omar. ‘He was with someone who saw another man braying,’ Tariq said, ‘and the man said, “He is a good man.” “How do you know he is a good man?” Omar asked. “Have you done business with him? Have you travelled with him? Until you do these things, you don’t know if he is a good man.”’

  Tariq was a talker and I felt that if we didn’t extricate ourselves we would be listening to him for a long time. He promised to help me the next day at twelve thirty ‘before Friday brayers’. His mention of the prayers produced panic in me. What if he asked me to pray with him and he saw I didn’t know how?

  ‘Tariq, I need to learn how to pray,’ I blurted.

  ‘Don’t worry, brother,’ he said, in his unhesitating way. ‘We will teach you how to bray.’

  The next day, I waited for Tariq in the internet café on the little Islamic square. He was late and I was worried that, for all his talk, he wouldn’t show up. Next to me, a pale European with patches of a curly brown beard surfed a Chechen Liberation website while speaking through headphones and a mic to someone on Skype. I went in and out of the café a few times and was beginning to worry about the time when I caught sight of Tariq. The call to prayer had sounded and Tariq now looked at me in the way that an Olympic coach might look at a substitute just seconds after his star player has been injured. He took my arm and, moving fast for a man of his size, marched me in the direction of Abu Nour. I reminded him that I didn’t know how to pray.

  ‘No broblem, brother,’ he said, as we approached the doors of the multi-storeyed marble edifice. ‘We will teach you everything.’ Hundreds of people of all races were filing into the building and depositing their shoes in little cubbyholes near the entrance.

  Inside, I saw that Abu Nour was a multi-dimensional maze of doors, corridors and stairways. I stayed close to Tariq and followed him up two flights of stairs as he wove his way through the closely packed crowd. At the top, we took off our shoes and came into a carpeted gallery. Through a glass partition, I could see hundreds of people arranged in neat rows below. They sat in an enormous white room around which there were two floors of galleries behind glass. Chandeliers and ceiling fans, attached respectively to long chains and thin white poles, reached down from the high ceiling, to a pointillist sea of white skullcaps.

  At the end of the gallery, there was a corner room with wall-to-wall carpeting, a window at one end and a view of the action below. Young men of various ages and ethnicities sat around with black headphones, some in armchairs, others on the floor, watching a filmed sermon on a television screen. This was the translation room, Tariq informed me. He seemed to know everyone and, having scanned the room, touched one man in cream robes on the shoulder. He looked up and Tariq said, ‘Muhammad, will you blease take care of this brother from Bakistan and teach him to bray.’

  Muhammad, small and dark, looked to me like a south Indian. He nodded slowly and said something softly. Tariq thanked him, and flashing a supportive look, he disappeared.

  Muhammad offered me a pair of headphones and I sat down next to him. The translation booth asked me if I wanted English (apparently they could do eight other languages). I said, ‘Yes,’ and a slow voice, with evangelical vocal range, translated the words of the wizened, white-bearded preacher on the screen. He was emphasising the importance of giving alms to the poor, beyond the 2 per cent required of the believer, as a way to show your love for God and His prophet. I didn’t know it then, but the preacher was dead; he was Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, the late Grand Mufti of Syria and the founder of Abu Nour.

  ‘Should we wash?’ Muhammad said, in his soft voice and imperceptible accent, after we had listened for a while.

  ‘OK.’

  He rose slowly and I followed him out of the translation room. Round the corner, there was a bathroom with cold marble floors and a washing area with several metal taps arranged in a row. Muhammad instructed me that I had to wash my face first, then my hands and arms up to my elbows, a portion of my scalp and my feet up to my ankles. ‘Make sure the water touches every place,’ he said. He began to wash and I, watching him, followed. He washed carefully, prising apart his toes so that the water touched the lighter skin between them. He seemed to notice that I had washed my face only once because he said quietly, ‘The Prophet used to wash three times.’ I washed some more. ‘The reason we wash these parts of the body,’ he added, ‘is because they are the parts that are exposed, and washing them also keeps the entire body cool.’ My body was cooler than cool; it was cold. The marble floors and sharp edges of the washing area made me pick my way out carefully.

  I came back into the translation room with wet hands, feet and hair. The video of the late Grand Mufti had finished and there was a break of a few minutes. I took the opportunity to ask Muhammad about himself. He was in Syria, studying Islamic law, he said. He had grown up in Australia. His parents and grandparents had moved there from India to spread Islam.

  ‘Do you like it there?’

  ‘It’s very nice,’ he said, ‘the best country I know.’ His dark features were almost African or Aboriginal, and the stillness of his manner allowed them little expression. He asked me why I was in Syria. I said it was out of curiosity for my father’s religion, which I hadn’t known growing up. ‘Islam is needed in societies all over the wo
rld in need of peace,’ he said, his expression unchanged. ‘All religions preach peace, but Islam offers the widest kind of peace.’ Before I could ask why, our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a few figures in the main room below. Their appearance brought many more people into the translation room.

  ‘It’s the Grand Mufti of Bosnia,’ Muhammad whispered, with excitement.

  Because I was new to Abu Nour, I didn’t realise what a lucky first visit this was. The university often invited important Islamic leaders to speak from its pulpit but this was, even by its own standards, an august gathering. The men below, three in robes and turbans, were the Grand Muftis of Syria and Bosnia and Salah Kuftaro, the director of the university and the son of the late Grand Mufti. The unbearded man standing next to them in a brown suit was the minister of culture. These attractions were part of the draw of Abu Nour and the little translation room could hardly contain its excitement.

  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.