Ibrahim & Reenie

by David Llewellyn

  Some Jihadi. That night, the first punch floored him, and from then on he had curled up in a ball and prayed – yes, prayed – that they would stop. But he was now more than seven years past the days of his schoolboy jihad, and the night when all those adolescent daydreams came crashing down around him like so much broken glass.

  17

  They had a full house that night, the first night of Eid. Both sides of the family gathered in their little house on Harold Road. His father and uncles talking about their businesses in the living room. His cousins in the dining room and hallway, the boys talking football, the girls talking clothes. The women, his mum and aunties, in the kitchen, listening to Ahmed Rushdi on a portable stereo so old it had not one but two cassette decks, while in the dining room the table practically creaked beneath the weight of bowls filled with pastries and sweets.

  It had always tickled Ibrahim and his sister. Aisha, watching his mother and their aunties compete with one another through the medium of food. Everyone brought what they thought of as their speciality; Bhua Yasmin with her balushahi, Tayee Samira with her sohan papdi, and their mother with her laddu, and of course they would all claim they’d simply rustled up ‘a little something’ the night before when days, and perhaps weeks had gone into their preparation.

  Even before the sound of the helicopter and police sirens, that night felt different to any other Eid. There seemed to be a silent realisation, among everyone there, that this could be the last time the whole family, on either side, would come together in one house. The cousins were growing up and moving away; Rashida to Canada, Iqbal to Dubai. Marriages would inflate the family further, and Ibrahim’s grandmother, his dadiji, joked that any future get-together would have to happen at the football stadium on Green Street.

  As such, the mood in their house that night was celebratory but seasoned with something wistful. Or perhaps that was how Ibrahim remembered it with hindsight. Perhaps everyone had been having a wonderful night until then, and it was only what happened next that changed everything.

  Hearing the noise and commotion from the street Ibrahim’s father, Nazir, rose from his chair and padded out into the hall, almost tripping over the piles of shoes on his way to the front door. For a moment he stood there, his short, thin frame silhouetted against the flashing blue lights. The sound of the helicopter grew louder, the downdraft from its blades rustling through the trees lining the street.

  ‘They’re outside number fifty-eight,’ his father said. ‘They’ve got guns.’

  Ibrahim was seventeen, and considered himself streetwise enough to be unimpressed by a few sirens and a helicopter, but with those words he felt a dropping sensation in his chest, as if his heart had fallen, followed by a wave of nausea.

  A brief silence fell over the party, then the chattering began again, but more excitedly, and Ibrahim was almost carried to their front door by the sudden surge of houseguests.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Elbowing her way past nieces and nephews, Ibrahim’s mother joined them on the doorstep, muttering something in Urdu; always her first language when shocked or surprised. Then came Aisha, standing on tiptoes to peer over their father’s shoulders and saying, ‘Who is it? Mum? Dad? What is it? Who is it?’ The aunts and uncles from Sparkhill, his mother’s family, were laughing and saying how this was why they lived in Birmingham, you never had this sort of thing happen in Birmingham, but Ibrahim’s parents were silent, expressionless.

  Three police cars and two vans sat on the junction of Harold Road and Thorngrove Road, and there were uniformed officers with machine guns, real machine guns, not the stuff of movies or TV shows, but real and potent and made out of the blackest metal, and a cordon of blue and white plastic tape drew a rough semicircle around number fifty-eight.

  The house where Jamal lived.

  Front doors the length of the street were opening, people stepping out and staring slack-jawed into the flashing blue lights, and now there were officers coming from number fifty-eight, and they were holding someone by the arms; a shoeless young man, dressed in a crisp white shirt and designer jeans. Jamal.

  Ibrahim waited for the awful moment when his friend would look at him, when that one glance, witnessed by his parents, by his whole family, would be enough to prove his guilt. He waited for it with his hands clenched into fists and his toes curled and his mouth dry and his heart beating faster than it ever had before, but that look never came. One of the officers put his hand on Jamal’s head and pushed him down and forward and into one of the vans, and on the doorstep of number fifty-eight Jamal’s mother was wailing, and his younger brothers were crying, and Jamal’s father and uncles and cousins were on the doorstep, shouting at the police, but there was nothing they could do. The van doors slammed shut, and the sound of that slam echoed down the street, for a fraction of a second drowning out even the helicopter’s drone and the chattering of their neighbours.‘Tonight, of all nights,’ said one of his cousins. ‘They’ve got no respect.’

  ‘That was Jamal,’ said Ibrahim’s mother. ‘Why have they taken Jamal?’

  And now all eyes were on Ibrahim, because if any of them should know it was him. He and Jamal had been friends for over a year, since he’d joined the sixth-form college. They studied together, attended Friday prayers together.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, his voice little louder than a whisper.

  ‘Let’s go back inside,’ said his father. ‘No point in standing around gawping at them all night.’

  Nazir turned and with a sweeping gesture of his arms ushered everyone back into the house, closing the door behind him. The helicopter was flying away now, and they heard the police cars and vans heading toward Stopford Road. As the convoy passed their house, Ibrahim shuddered, half expecting them to stop outside, for armed officers to come crashing in through their windows, but they didn’t.

  Within minutes he received the first of that night’s many text messages, and before reading it thought it might tell him what he already knew – that Jamal had been arrested. Instead, this message – written in the urgent, garbled argot of textspeak – told him there’d been two more arrests, the first in Beckton, the second Upton Park, and he knew the names of those arrested: Ismail and Yusuf. Whatever moment of relief he felt when the police vans and cars drove past his house and didn’t stop, came to an abrupt end.

  The police were coming back. They would take Jamal and Ismail and Yusuf to the police station, to Paddington Green, lock them in cells, and come back for him. The blue and white tape would be torn away from the lampposts and trees holding it in place around number fifty-eight, and another cordon made around his parents’ house. The police would beat their fists on the door and order them to ‘Open up!’ and his mother would start crying and yelling at him in a language he barely understood, and his father would look at him in horror and – worst of all – shame.

  When he opened his eyes Ibrahim realised he wouldn’t have to wait for the police to come back, for them to beat on their door and drag him away, as they had Jamal, for him to see that expression, because he was looking at it already.

  ‘Ibrahim,’ said his father. ‘I think we need to talk.’

  Ibrahim. He’d called him Ibrahim. Not Prakash. Not Sunshine.

  Ibrahim nodded nervously and followed his father to the kitchen. After protests from his mother and the aunties, who saw the kitchen as their domain, they were alone.

  ‘Do you know anything about this?’ His father asked, his voice hushed. Ibrahim pictured his cousins pressed up against the door, listening in on their conversation.

  Ibrahim shook his head. He hadn’t had enough time to think of anything to say; some convincing excuse or lie, some way to sidestep any questions.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Ibrahim. You and Jamal are best friends. You’re at that bloody mosque every single day. We hardly ever see you.’

  ‘Honest, Dad,’ he said, unable to look h
is father in the eye. ‘I don’t know why he’s been arrested.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘No, Dad. Seriously. I’m not.’

  ‘I can tell when you’re lying, and you’re lying now. Don’t think I don’t know what goes on in that place, the kind of bloody rubbish they fill your heads with. I’ve heard all about it. And when I go to Friday prayers now, there are no young people there. There are…’

  ‘When was the last time you went to prayers?’ Ibrahim snapped, the question erupting out of him, but the moment he said it he stepped back, half expecting his father to strike him across the face.

  Instead, dazed by his son’s insolence, Nazir asked, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You hardly ever go to prayers,’ said Ibrahim, with greater confidence. ‘So what do you mean, “When I go to prayers”?’

  ‘I go when I can. And there are no young people there, because they’re all in that mosque of yours, and we know what they’re telling you.’

  ‘What? What are they telling us, Dad? Go on. If you’re the expert. Tell me.’

  His father raised his hand, about to hit him, and there was something almost comical about it; such a short man, small-framed all his life, standing up to his taller son. He’d have to go on tiptoes or, funnier still, leap off the ground to reach his son now. Even so, they’d never come this close to blows, and so Ibrahim flinched, and he didn’t laugh.

  ‘You ungrateful little bastard,’ his father said, through clenched teeth, and his emphasis on that last word stung Ibrahim more than any slap. ‘Do you know how hard we’ve worked – me, your mata, your grandparents – just so you and Aisha could enjoy the life you have? Do you know how much they sacrificed? And your Dada. He served in the British Army. In the war. And now you and your friends, you sit there and you listen to that shit, and why? Why? So you can play at Mujahideen in your bedrooms. Oh yes. Big men. Brave men. Because that’s what this is about, isn’t it? That’s why they took Jamal tonight, isn’t it?’

  Ibrahim’s puffed up bravado withered, and he felt his spirit deflating by the second. They’d been prepared for these arguments by their mentors, in those post-prayer discussions. They’d been taught to cut off apostate families as they would gangrenous limbs, to face up to them when challenged, to offer Da’wah, the chance to submit themselves to the will of Allah, and if they refused to cast them out. They were told that when they turned away from their families, their brothers, their real brothers, their ikhwan, would be waiting for them and would look after them.

  Where were all those arguments now, now that his father was peering up at him, scowling at him, his hand at his side but his fingers still splayed as if ready to strike? Where were the pious sermons he’d rehearsed so many times in his head? Where was the triumphant declaration of his jihad? Though he towered over his father, Ibrahim had never felt quite so small.

  ‘Will this come back to us?’ his father asked, after a caustic silence. ‘Can we expect the police tonight? Tomorrow?’

  He shook his head, hoping he was right. His father’s expression of disapproval and shame was now refracted through Ibrahim’s tears, and he had to swallow hard to stop himself from sobbing. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t know?’ The question was asked quietly, his father more worried than angry. ‘You don’t know?’

  Again, Ibrahim shook his head.

  ‘Ibrahim. Tell me the truth. Is there anything here that could get you in trouble? Any books, anything on your computer, anything that would bring them here?’

  ‘No, Dad,’ he said, honestly. ‘There’s nothing.’

  ‘And your friends? Will they give the police your name?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  For the first time since closing the kitchen door behind them, Nazir Siddique laughed. ‘You don’t know, you don’t know. That’s the trouble, Ibrahim. You think you have all the answers, you and your friends, but when I ask you any question you don’t know. I thought you were meant to be bright. Well… Chiragh taley undhera. Let’s just hope they won’t give them your name, shall we? But if you’re lying to me…’

  ‘Dad. I’m not.’

  ‘But if you are. Son. I don’t know what I’ll do. I have worked so hard. I run a business, and that means something. It actually means something. And now this. If they come for you, and they find anything. I don’t know what I’ll do.’

  But the police didn’t come for him; not the next day, or the day after that. Nothing was said to the rest of the family, not even his mother or sister, at least not while he was present, though his mother must have known. Instead, the subject was preserved in the silences and simmering looks between father and son.

  Once they were charged, the faces of Jamal, Ismail and Yusuf were shown in newspapers and on television, and Ibrahim noticed that they used only mugshots, photographs that looked nothing like his friends. In these, they looked tired and sullen, every bit the crazed terrorists demanded by the story.

  He was forbidden from going back to their mosque, from going anywhere near it. Instead, the following Friday, he was taken to his father’s mosque, named after a Sufi saint, the mosque he’d gone to almost every Friday before meeting his ‘new friends’. There, the older men looked at him askance, but nothing was said. Everyone knew, it seemed, that he was the unmentioned fourth man; that he’d escaped arrest either through slippery self-preservation or unimaginable good luck.

  He wanted to write to the newspapers and news channels and tell them they’d got it all wrong, that they were blowing the story out of all proportion, but he knew it would achieve little more than his own arrest. Besides, a part of him still wanted to believe they’d been right, he and his friends, that they could have achieved something, that they could have made a statement and forced the world to sit up and take notice. He wanted to believe that, and whenever the story was mentioned in the papers thought he could believe it, but a horrible truth had begun to eat away at this conviction; a truth grown from just a single thing his father had said, the night Jamal and the others were arrested.

  ‘So you can play at Mujahideen in your bedrooms.’

  That one sentence stripped away all their talk of jihad and the fourteen hundred years of shared history that justified it, and revealed it for what it was: a game. When the case went to court, the newspapers’ tone soon became mocking and snide. His friends were made to sound like pathetic daydreamers, schoolboys hatching plots and schemes doomed to failure. By the time of their sentencing, the judge seemed duty bound to describe those plots as ‘sinister and threatening’, as if both the jury and the audience at home might have forgotten the seriousness of it all. There were no bombs, no weapons of any kind, just books and websites and plenty of big talk, and the sentences reflected this. Had the police linked Ibrahim and his friends to the only thing they ever actually did – as opposed to all the things they talked of doing – it might have given a greater, darker weight to the story. As it was, not one of them was jailed for more than two years.

  It was his mother’s illness that finally drew a line under the matter. The diagnosis, and the tearful but restrained way in which the news was broken to Ibrahim and Aisha, became the narrative of their family; the focus shifting from wayward son to unwell mother. She downplayed it at first, relegating a malignant tumour to a minor inconvenience. When her doctors told her to rest, she worked twice as hard, as if her defiance could cure anything. On losing her hair, she simply took to wearing the kind of headscarf so many other women in the community already wore. It became easy for him, for all of them to underestimate the damage the illness was doing to her. If she refused to have her life shaped by it, dictated by it, why should they?

  After the arrests and the trial and his wife’s diagnosis, Nazir Siddique began attending Friday prayers every week, taking his son with him. In time it seemed that Ibrahim had been forgiven by most, if not all, of the other men there, and after one sermon he was taken to one side by the Pir; a grey-bearded old ma
n who looked – at least, to Ibrahim’s teenaged eyes – a hundred years old, and who even smelled ancient and exotic, like heavily spiced cigar smoke and old books.

  ‘Better here, yes?’ said the Pir, and Ibrahim nodded. ‘Yes. Better here. Tell me, Ibrahim, have you read the works of Rumi?’

  Ibrahim shook his head. ‘I don’t know who that is.’

  A disappointed frown. ‘Jalalludin Rumi,’ said the Pir. ‘A great mystic. He wrote, ‘Men do not praise that which is not worthy, they only err in mistaking another for Him. Just as when moonlight falls on a wall, it seems they forget the moon and worship the wall.’ He wrote, ‘Because of such idols, mankind is confused, and driven by vain desires they reap sorrow.’ Do you understand?’

  He nodded again, though he wasn’t sure he did.

  ‘You have been worshipping the wall, Ibrahim. But that is over now, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. That is good. You should read Rumi. And Basri. And Attar. “The Conference of the Birds”. “All things are possible, and you may meet / Despair, forgiveness, certainty, deceit. / The Self ignores the secrets of the Way, / The mysteries no mortal speech can say.” Read them all. I have copies, but they are in Arabic, many of them, or Farsi. But find copies. Read them. Better than these other things you were reading. Your Pita tells me you are studying history.’