Heartbreaker: Love, secrets and terror

by Nick Louth

  The air of comedy and lampooning lasted through much of the meeting, but then almost without warning, Irfan Tiwana stopped still. He gradually lowered himself to his knees spread his arms wide, and tossed the microphone aside. He then roared out two words: ‘Allahu Akhbar!’

  The shock of it, the full-throated power and vibrating enunciation which he held for many seconds filled the auditorium made the hairs stand on the back of Cantara’s neck. In unison, every single person there roared back: ALLAHU AKHBAR.

  God is greatest. She could feel it. She really could feel it, like nothing else she had ever felt before. Like an ocean wave rolling through her, moving her and everyone else together. The shock of it left her out of breath, an effect and an excitement she also saw in the eyes of others. She was stunned.

  After the meeting she and Rifat queued down the stairs to get close to where the preacher was sitting on the edge of the stage, holding forth to a large group of admirers. Cantara could see the sweat pouring down Tiwana’s face, despite his frequent attempts to mop it up with a handkerchief. Within the group a couple of young stewards were collecting contributions in buckets. Rifat contributed sixty pounds, and Cantara, who had hoped to escape with just a pound or two, confronted the reality of what the preacher had referred to as a ‘silent collection’ – no coins. When she looked into the bucket her five pound note, an amount she couldn’t really afford to give, was the only one in a sea of tens and twenties. A young woman was soliciting contact details for Tiwana’s e-mail newsletter, and offering cards with his website address. Cantara signed up, and took a fistful of cards.

  She and Rifat were still in the glow of elation as they tumbled out into the street. She suddenly felt hungry, and saw that there were numerous kebab houses, Chinese restaurants and fish and chip shops open.

  ‘Do you like Chinese?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve never had it,’ Rifat said. ‘Isn’t it full of pork?’

  ‘No, you can choose dishes with chicken or beef, and the vegetables are delicious. There are Chinese restaurants in Lebanon, but the ones here are better.’

  They went into the nearest restaurant and, it being a Monday evening, were the only guests. They sat next to the fish tank, which at least made the place look more alive. Rifat ordered six or seven dishes, until Cantara said that it would be too much. When the food arrived, she showed him how she had learned to use chopsticks.

  ‘How did you learn such a thing?’ Rifat laughed, as he watched her struggle with the implements, giggling as a mushroom shot across the room and bean sprouts were scattered across the tablecloth.

  ‘A man taught me. A British man, from the BBC.’ It was the first time for weeks she had been able to think of him without feeling acute pain. The memory, of a night at a restaurant in Wardour Street with Chris from when their friendship was just that, was as sweet and sour as the food. It made her feel wistful.

  At one level she felt ready to start talking, to let someone know just what had happened to her, and to share the guilt she now suffered. For all the brutality of the assault she had suffered, she recognised that she had snared Chris into taking her innocence, had blackmailed him emotionally to stay with her that night. But she couldn’t broach this subject to any man, certainly not an Islamic traditionalist like Rifat. He would not look beyond the stigma of lost honour, the stain on her family – however theoretical a concept that was. In his eyes, the blame would be hers entirely, she was sure of that. Yet in her own heart, she knew that could not be right. She had followed her feelings, her love. How could that be wrong?

  What she needed was a woman who she could talk to. In the days after the event, she had been invited down for a coffee with Tina, and her twin toddlers, but she couldn’t really get a straight answer from the worldly London girl on whether the sex act was always meant to be brutal and painful like that. Tina had been sympathetic, but had sniggered when Cantara disclosed that she had been a virgin.

  ‘I gave birth at fourteen,’ Tina said, savouring the horror that crossed Cantara’s face. She lit a cigarette, and exhaled a mouthful of smoke. ‘I wasn’t sure who the father was. Three or four possibilities. I was a bad girl back then.’

  Cantara was almost too dumbfounded to speak, so Tina continued. ‘Virginity ain’t treasured here. Not like your lot. Not having it stuffs you up for marrying another Arab, dunnit?’ she observed. ‘Still there’s always British blokes. They don’t care.’

  Until that moment, Cantara hadn’t even thought about marriage. The idea of a western husband seemed alien. She was beginning to feel the ebbing of the West in all other aspects of her life. Underneath, a new woman was beginning to form. She wouldn’t let herself be forced into anything she didn’t want. She and no one else would shape her future.

  * * *

  February 2010

  The first invitation to an Islamic film evening arrived in Cantara’s e-mail inbox a few weeks after they had seen Irfan Tiwana. She ignored it for a while, but eventually clicked on the link and saw that it was an evening arranged by Tiwana’s Islamic Light group. Hoping to see Tiwana, she arranged with Rifat to go. Islam was opening other new areas in her life. She was now in e-mail contact with a group of other Muslims she had found through Tiwana’s website. Still, she found some of the conversations in the chatrooms quite unnerving, with much talk of jihad and vengeance for what was now happening in Afghanistan, and the enduring chaos in Iraq. She knew about vengeance, about violence. She knew what anguish it caused. How it never solved anything.

  The Islamic film event, in a shabby room over a downmarket hair salon in Bayswater was on a much smaller scale that she expected. She was disappointed that there was no sign of the preacher. Instead, there were a lot of student-age males, almost all with beards, and some deadly earnest. They showed a couple of films, mostly documentary about the carnage caused by American airstrikes in Afghanistan. They included far more horrifying images of the dead and mutilated than she had ever seen, even on Lebanese TV.

  Afterwards, there was a group discussion led by a handsome young man named Bram Malik. He had bewitching grey-green eyes, designer stubble instead of a full beard, and leather jacket and jeans instead of the taqiyah cap and shalwar kameez that most wore. He smiled a lot at Cantara, and tried to include her in the discussion. The main topic was whether jihad in Islam was a physical conflict, or a spiritual campaign.

  ‘It’s both’, said one young man in full Pakistani dress, with a heavy peasant brow and deep-set eyes. ‘Like in Afghanistan, you fight with weapons. Everyone has to choose which side they are on. This makes society more devout.’

  ‘But brother, what role can jihad play when your enemy strikes from the air? How do you fight?’ asked Bram.

  ‘Then you take the fight to their cities, as they have taken it to ours,’ he said. ‘Just like 9/11. We must take our fight to New York and Tel Aviv.’

  ‘And London?’ asked Cantara, too angry to remain silent. ‘Do you know how many people demonstrated against the Iraq war from Britain? Would you kill innocents and allies, civilians, children. Like the 7/7 bombers did?’

  ‘Be quiet sister,’ the young man said, smiling at one of his colleagues. ‘Jihad is for men. Women cannot understand…’

  ‘Mohammed, that was uncalled for,’ interrupted Bram Malik. ‘Women are half the population and half the army of our faith, in jihad or in peace, our sisters need respect.’

  ‘Let her speak,’ Rifat said to Mohammed. It was the first words he had uttered all evening.

  Cantara tried to remain calm as she directed her response to Mohammed. ‘You speak of jihad and of killing. Shall we talk of specifics? Do you know what a phosphorus bomb does to the human body?’ The question electrified the room. She had all their attention. Mohammed didn’t respond, but looked at her.

  ‘Phosphorus burns everything it touches,’ she said. ‘It sticks to the skin, and burns right through, even bone. It cannot be extinguished even under water. I have seen this with my own eyes. A little girl I used
to play with had discovered an unexploded Israeli flare in her father’s olive grove. She touched it, and it detonated. I saw her die, screaming in agony, despite the attempts of a dozen people to help her. I was eight years old. There are more horrors. I have seen a child of five with his throat slit because he was from the wrong camp, his father in the wrong faction. I have seen a mortar bomb destroy the house next door. My mother’s best friend lost both her children and both her legs in one hundredth of a second. I grew up in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, and I am only here to speak to you because my mother, nine months pregnant with my brother, managed to crawl through a sewer to escape the horrors of Shatila, only to give birth at an Israeli checkpoint. You talk about jihad, but real war isn’t holy. It doesn’t start so, and it never becomes so,’ she said.

  The room was silent, until Bram blew a sigh and said: ‘That was a very moving account, sister. I think everyone is impressed and sympathetic to your experiences.’

  ‘I believe that jihad should be in the heart, perhaps converting, but not by force,’ Cantara continued. ‘It doesn’t have to be literal. Remember the scholar who said that jihad entailed the community as a whole making valid protest, to solve problems of religion, to have knowledge of divine law, to command what is right and forbid wrong.’

  Rifat was looking at her with amazement. After the meeting finished, Bram took them both aside and said to Cantara: ‘I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine. He would be as impressed by your experiences as I was. Thank you for sharing it.’ He then asked about her nationality and immigration status. She thought that peculiar, particularly as she was just starting to get worried about it herself.

  The Fouad Adwan Foundation had in January written to her asking for the return of the balance of her grant. She had received a letter from the UK Border Agency too. It asked her to confirm whether she had now started work, in contravention of the terms of her student visa, and warning her in bold type that she could be deported if so. Presumably it was because the BBC had her name in its payroll system. She told Bram about this. He said he might be able to help. The most important thing, he said, was to find her new accommodation. He could do that if she was willing to become a part-time fundraiser for some Islamic charities.

  ‘What sort of charities?’

  ‘They are mainly those linked to Imam Tiwana’s Islamic Light Group. There is one raising money to build new homes for those still homeless after the Pakistan earthquake, and one to promote education for women.’

  ‘I could support both those,’ Cantara said. She was delighted to hear that the imam was not only a great speaker, but supported progressive-sounding charities.

  ‘If we do give you a new home, you’ll have to make us a few promises,’ he said. ‘First, you can’t let anyone know where you are living. Not college friends, not family. Nobody. At least not for a few months, until I tell you. Tell them you are on the move, and don’t mention our names, or even the district of London where you are staying. You see, if the UK Border Agency finds out where you are, everything we do would have been a waste of time. They’re getting tougher on visa breaches now. You could be back to Lebanon on the next plane.’

  ‘It’s taken me all my life to escape. I really don’t want to go back,’ Cantara said.

  ‘We think you should change your mobile too, for the same reason. If they wanted to repatriate you, and rang that number, they can identify approximately where you are. So here’s an old pay-as-you-go,’ he said, passing across a scratched Nokia. ‘You can use it at our expense for now. Be very careful who you let have the number, okay?’

  ‘Finally, you cannot continue to use your bank cards,’ he said. ‘Your movements can be traced from them. Every ATM you use, every credit card transaction, can be traced and will narrow down where you are.’

  ‘But how am I supposed to live?’

  ‘Simple. Ignore the foundation letter asking for the grant back. Withdraw your remaining cash. Bring it to us for safe keeping, then bring me the cards. You have a credit card too, don’t you? Okay, then we’ll look after it. The imam will put them in his safe. You’ll get a daily allowance, so long as you are fundraising. From now on, you are one of our sisters. You can leave the worrying to us.’

  Cantara beamed. Maybe now she was safe and secure, somewhere people cared about her. Bram was as good as his word. A week later, after she withdrew her last £708.42, she moved from Mile End Road to a room in Acton, in a rundown part of West London. The room was in a large Victorian student house with a shared kitchen and bathroom. Behind the house was a two-storey crumbling extension, long and narrow. This had originally been Victorian workshops, but was now an informal mosque, a musallah with a series of Portakabins that were used as an Islamic school, a madrassah. In recent years further extensions had been added, with what had been the back garden paved over to provide a small car park.

  Cantara’s room was spacious, right at the top of the house under the gabled roof, with two large dormer windows. A huge old radiator pumped out plenty of heat, and there was a new single bed and a small sink with a mirror above. The rent was just fifty pounds a week, including heat. She was told that she needn’t pay anything for the first three months, but was expected to do some light cleaning duties around the musallah as well as the fundraising. However, having put her own cash for safe-keeping with the musallah, she found she had to go to the office, which was only open for half an hour a day, and fill out a form. Ten pounds was the most she could withdraw, and to do so she had to give a reason that was acceptable to Mrs Ghat, the tiny but ferocious Bangladeshi grandmother who ran it.

  Her first experience in fundraising wasn’t at all what she had imagined. Instead of phoning around potential donors, Bram asked her to be in the musallah’s car park by seven the next morning, with weatherproof clothing. When Cantara arrived, there was already a small knot of day students from the musallah, sheltering from the drizzle under the porch. Soon after, Bram arrived in a battered minibus, and everybody piled in. They were off to Hounslow, and then Kingston-upon-Thames, they were told. The others, who had clearly done this before, passed around white plastic fundraising buckets with various labels on them, and some brochures on the charities they were raising money for. The journey through London’s traffic-knotted suburbs passed easily in laughter and conversation, as the students got to know each other. The windows steamed up, and there was a delicious feeling of camaraderie. There was a middle-aged woman called Soraya, who wore a full niqab and had a strong Birmingham accent, a tall West Indian convert called Richard, who had dreadlocks and sunglasses, and a fat Pakistani man in full traditional dress, who spoke no English. Cantara sat next a vivacious convert to Islam, Zainab Picho. Zainab had a pale freckled face and alarmingly lurid corkscrews of dyed green hair that were always escaping from her hijab. She was brought up in Bradford and had a three-year-old son. They were soon deep in conversation. Zainab described how to raise money by appealing to people’s pity, guilt and sense of religious duty. Though they were primarily there to persuade other Muslims, Zainab said it was often fun to tackle non-believers, especially young men.

  ‘Stick with me. I’ll show you how it’s done,’ she said, as the bus arrived outside a rather grand mosque in Hounslow. There was a full dome and minaret, and parking for a hundred cars. Zainab gave Cantara a plastic armband which had been roughly filled out with an unfamiliar name and address. ‘This is your local authority licence, but they never get checked. This is a spare one. We’ll get you your own soon.’

  Zainab got to work on those crossing the car park, and buttonholed a couple of young Asian men in suits, who had just emerged from a BMW. She apologised for detaining them on this wet morning but asked them to imagine that they were child victims of an earthquake in Pakistan, unable to take cover, and stuck in such weather all day and night, for months on end. Even the smallest contribution would make a child somewhere happy, she said. One man put his hand in his pocket, and jangled coins, which he then produced.
His first attempt at putting in a fifty pence piece didn’t work. The coin stuck in the slot. Zainab laughed and said. ‘This bucket has a bit of character. It does tend to jam, but if you push the coin in with a twenty, it usually works.’ She showed how a folded piece of paper would allow the coin to enter.

  The men laughed at being so good-naturedly rooked, and one handed a five pound note straight to Zainab. ‘Thank you for the entertainment, sister,’ he said. Zainab then showed Cantara how to squeeze the bucket lid so that the coin slot wasn’t straight, and would jam. ‘It works every time,’ she said. ‘However, the best are those who we can get to fill out a direct debit, so the money comes out of their bank account every month. Even a pound a month is really good.’

  After less than half an hour, the minibus came back. Cantara’s bucket just had loose change in, having concentrated on women, most of who just brushed past her. The minibus then took them off to a busy street of shops, outside a small Tesco supermarket. Cantara tried Zainab’s suggestion, and walked straight up to a pleasant-looking middle-aged man with spectacles, a classic Englishman. She tried Zainab’s line exactly, but soon realised that he was looking her over, rather than listening to what she said. Yet, even as her confidence ebbed under this embarrassing gaze, he pulled out a handful of change and was just about to give it to her when a woman, evidently his wife, walked up. She admonished him for even thinking of giving to what she termed street beggars.

  ‘But it’s a good cause!’ Cantara said.

  ‘It would be if it got you deported back to wherever you came from,’ the woman snapped, and led her husband away.

  The rest of the rain-sodden day they moved frenetically from one shopping street to another, from one cultural centre or mosque to another, standing outside tube stations and busy car parks, rarely staying longer than half an hour, and enduring an emotional roller-coaster of reactions. One elderly Chinese man filled out a direct debit form for five pounds a month, saying how his parents had come from an earthquake-prone village in Yunnan province. An official from one mosque had come out to shoo them all away, saying, ‘We’ve told your lot before. You get us all a bad name.’