‘I wonder why this should be!’ shrieked Robert. ‘What is it makes them so amazingly wonderful? Is it that they don’t drink except behind closed doors? Is it halal meat – is that it? Is it that they have devised an unusually energetic form of prayer?’
Mr Malik, his eyes big with grief, was still holding out his hands to Maisie. ‘Maisie,’ he said, ‘come to me! And, Wilson, go! Go in peace. Without curses or recrimination.’ He put his head to one side. ‘If you have been foolish,’ he said, ‘God will forgive you. He forgives the ignorant.’
Maisie started towards the stage. As she walked, women touched her dress, murmuring words of encouragement, and men, with wistful smiles on their faces, stepped back to let her pass.
‘I suppose,’ yelled Robert, ‘it’s their role model! I suppose it’s because Muhammad was such a terrific guy! Is that it?’
No one answered this question, but there was suddenly a dangerous silence in the room.
‘I mean,’ went on Robert, shaking his long, lank, blond hair across his face, ‘it may just be that I’m an ignorant Brit and don’t know anything about anything, but the thing that really puzzles me about your religion is the endless respect you’re supposed to pay to this guy. What is it all in aid of, may I ask? I mean, who was he? What makes him such a big cheese?’
Mr Malik glanced down at the audience. He looked worried. ‘Please, Wilson,’ he said, ‘go now. Go back into Wimbledon, and we will forget that we ever met. Do not—’
‘I’m only asking,’ said Robert, ‘because I have picked up a little gen about Islam over the course of the last year and I have formulated my view of your top man which, if you like, I will be happy to give to you!’
Mr Malik, and several others in the audience, winced visibly. ‘I really would not do that if I was you, Wilson!’ said the headmaster. But Robert did it.
He went on to give detailed, and not always accurate, criticisms of the hadiths of the Prophet. He questioned their relevance to modern society, their internal logic, and their implications for women, infidels and anyone not prepared to accept the central tenets of Islam. He quoted several at length, and laughed, mockingly, during his rendition of them.
After he had questioned the Prophet’s reported views, he went on to denigrate his character in sometimes offensive terms. He went on to criticize, in an uninformed way, the Prophet’s skill as a military tactician, and made several spectacularly ill-informed remarks about the history of Islam.
At this point, Mr Malik, who like almost everyone else in the room had his hands over his ears, begged him to stop. He explained that one of the missions of the Wimbledon Islamic Independent Boys’ Day School was to make peace between religions and communities, and that he, personally, along with the Wimbledon Dharjee businessman Mr Shah, had worked hard over the last year to create an institution that would ‘build bridges’ between Muslims and Christians and, indeed, any other decent, civilized individuals who were prepared to let others live with their faith without insult or abuse. He wept at this point.
He explained how Mr Shah’s rival, the restaurant owning Mr Khan, had been trying to destroy the unity of the Muslim community, and said that their unity was only an aspect of the wider union that peace loving and civilized Muslim men and women sought with the country to which they had come.
He went on to beg Robert not to say any more. He said that, unlike certain people he could mention in the hall – here he looked narrowly at Rafiq and Dr Ali – he was a reasonable man, and that some in his community had said he was ‘a hypocrite’ because he went too far in accommodating others’ beliefs and opinions. He said he was not a hypocrite. He repeated that he was a sincere, if not always scrupulous, Muslim, and he repeated several hadiths of the Prophet – to whom, in this context, he gave the traditional blessing – to support his view that Islam was a tolerant, generous and beautifully constructed faith.
But, he said, there was a limit. Many people in the hall agreed, and said, loudly, that Robert Wilson had already passed it. Dr Ali made reference to his earlier sentence on the reception class teacher, and several parents said that this was ‘too good’ for the young man who was now standing by the door, open to the summer day, waving a plastic sword and cardboard armour decorated with a crucifix at pupils, teachers and parents associated with the Wimbledon Islamic Independent Boys’ Day School.
‘Why do you all think you’re right?’ Robert was yelling. ‘What makes you so certain?’
Mr Malik begged for silence, and got it. He appealed to Robert Wilson as an English gentleman. He appealed to his sense of honour and fair play. He mentioned the British royal family and the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, to which, he reminded him, he belonged, and he spoke, movingly, of the game of cricket. ‘Try and play a straight bat, Wilson!’ he said.
Robert said he was not an English gentleman and he was incapable of playing a straight bat. He said that he had only played cricket once or twice, and that throughout his schooldays he had persuaded his mother to ‘write him a note’. He said he had lied about a great deal more than being or not being a Muslim. He told Mr Chaudhry, whom he referred to as ‘the Nabob’, that he had never been to Oxford or Cambridge, that he had no academic qualifications whatsoever apart from a GCE in woodwork, and that if Mr Malik had not been such a ‘gullible idiot’ he would never have employed someone so obviously fraudulent as he, Robert Wilson. He maintained, also, that he felt no loyalty to his family, describing his father as ‘the kind of guy you would not want to get stuck in a lift with’ and his mother as ‘Wimbledon’s answer to Jackie Onassis’.
He went on to talk about Wimbledon. He put forward the view that almost everyone in Wimbledon was, like him, completely lacking in convictions, principles or indeed anything that makes human beings tolerable. He said Wimbledon was ‘an armpit’. ‘Why did the Bhajjis, or whatever they call themselves, bother to cross the world to Wimbledon?’ he asked. He foamed at the mouth at this point, and started to bang his plastic sword on the front door.
He then went on to make several spectacularly insulting, ill-thought-out remarks about the Koran. He added that Morals and Manners in Islam by Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi was the most boring book he had ever read.
At this point he returned, once again, to the subject of Muhammad, saying that he had ‘one or two home truths to put across’. He began, once again, to make wildly inaccurate and distorted remarks about the Prophet. It was at this point – and it is not necessary here to mention even the general drift of his remarks, except to say that they were offensive in the extreme – that several members of the school, both parents and staff, started towards him in an urgent and often openly angry manner. They pulled at his clothes, and he responded by beating them around the head with his plastic sword.
The headmaster appealed for calm. He did not get it. Robert ran for the street.
He was followed by Mr Mafouz, Mr and Mrs Akhtar, Mr and Mrs Mahmud, Mr Sheikh, Mr Shah, running side by side with the restaurant owning Mr Khan, Mr and Mrs Husayn, Fatimah Bankhead, the parents of the Bosnian refugee (whose name no one could pronounce), Mr and Mrs Khan, Mr Malik, Dr Ali, Rafiq (who was now wearing two left-footed wellington boots) and Maisie. Behind them came other parents and every single child in the school – people united not only by a common faith and a common confidence and belief in their school but also by a deep desire to beat Robert Wilson to a pulp.
He ran fast. People who saw him pass – and there were people in the High Street on that summer afternoon who had known him since he was a boy – agreed that he had never run so fast in his life. His lank, blond hair bounced off his temples, and his long, thin legs pounded the pavement as, behind him, over a hundred very angry British Muslims screamed, shook their fists, and spat at his heels.
They did not catch him. Robert ran down the High Street towards Wimbledon Hill. By the time he reached the roundabout at the top of the hill and swerved right along the Ridgeway, they were spread out in a long line behind him. But none
of them gave up the pursuit. Several women, who joined in enthusiastically, were in tears. The men at the head of the chase – Mr Mafouz and Mr Sheikh – were starting to gain on him as he panted his way past trim suburban houses, his face purple with effort, his neck damp with sweat.
Only one person did not seek to follow Robert Wilson, ‘the fraudulent Muslim, the apostate and the blasphemer’, as he later became known inside the community. He was left behind on the stairs above the makeshift stage in the Great Hall. Hasan tilted his fragile little face up at the lights as the crowd screamed and jostled out of the school, but he made no sound himself. He put his big, ungainly head to one side, like a bird listening for worms.
He gave no sign of hearing the commotion. Or of the lorry that roared past the school, turned right at the roundabout, and thundered down the Ridgeway. Or of the wild squeal of its brakes as Robert, too frightened and exhausted to look, darted out into its path. Or of the noise of the ambulance siren, wailing like a call to prayer, as it sped up the hill to take Robert away. The only thing to which Hasan seemed to be listening was silence. The silence that had been there before all these little, local noises. The silence that he had seemed to hear behind the cries and shouts in the hall and that was there, once more, stretching endlessly away, after they, like the ambulance, had departed.
24
The Wimbledon Islamic Independent Day School for Boys is still there. And, in case there should be any doubt about the word order of the title, Mr Malik has erected a large, handsome notice-board in the front garden. You may see the buildings as you pass down the High Street going south. The school has now bought two buildings on either side and is negotiating for a large playing field in Raynes Park.
Maisie and Mr Malik were married in the autumn term that followed Robert’s accident. They started to have children almost immediately. Maisie gave the headmaster two boys – Yusuf and Ahmed – causing several people to remark, openly, that he ‘had very strong seed’ – and, subsequently, a girl whom Maisie insisted on calling Roberta. The children are all polite, hard-working and well-behaved Muslims.
The school has prospered too. It now has a total staff of twelve, including Dr Ali, who has not sentenced anyone to death for years, and Rafiq, who has sworn eternal allegiance to Mr Malik and frequently describes him as ‘a genius’. Mr Malik himself has not touched alcohol for four years, and, while observing his duties as a Muslim most carefully, is still fond of quoting hadiths that emphasize the Prophet’s tolerance and good sense.
The pupils, too, are doing well (although Anwar Mafouz failed all his GCSEs and now works with his father in the travel agency). Sheikh took up his Oxford place at the age of fifteen, and one of the Husayn twins, to the surprise of his father, gained a place at Exeter University (although his brother is now serving a short sentence at an open prison near Winchester). The school is often spoken of as a model for others in the neighbourhood, and last year it defeated Cranborne at cricket, rugby, cross-country running and chess. There is even talk of admitting some non-Muslim children and for them to be allowed to form a Christian Circle when the others are at daily prayers.
Hasan was sent back to live with Mr Shah. He is a big boy now and helps out at the school. Mr Malik has taught him Braille, and he compiles mailing lists of prospective parents. He never mentions his Occultation, although once or twice he has been heard telling the school cat that he is someone rather important.
Aziz, too, is a reformed character. He cleans the whole school, from top to bottom, three times a week. ‘Say what you like,’ he can be heard to say with a grin – ‘Dharjee, Ismaili, we are all Muslim and we all must be brothers and not surrender or oppress!’
Robert Wilson recovered from his encounter with the lorry; it was generally agreed he got off more lightly than he would have done had he fallen into the hands of the local Muslim population. He has never really been the same since, although his mother told a neighbour recently that ‘he was always as hopeless as this really’. He has a set of symptoms – listlessness, lack of interest in the world, and a tendency to sleep more than twelve to fifteen hours out of the twenty-four – that make him unfit for any kind of regular employment, but at least now he has a doctor’s note to explain the fact to the authorities.
He still lives at home. He spends most of his days walking Badger across the Common. He always takes the same route. He follows the golf course, past Caesar’s Camp, up to the Windmill and then returns to Wimbledon Park Road via one of the streets that slope down from Parkside, past quiet, ordered suburban houses, protected by English trees and English lawns. He never walks on the same side of the road as the Wimbledon Islamic Independent Day School for Boys, and if he happens to pass the place he turns his eyes away.
As he walks, he mutters to himself, though no one has ever heard what he is saying or understood why he sometimes gets angry or agitated. If a passer-by stops to talk to him – which few do, since his moods can be unpredictable – he will stand and chat for hours. Sometimes he is to be found in the Frog and Ferret, with the dog by his side, and there he usually spends hours talking to Mr Purkiss of the Wimbledon Interplanetary Society. People keep away from them. Unlike Mr Shah, who has opened two new shops in the High Street, or plump Mr Kureishi, who gives recitals in the public library, they are not really part of the community of Wimbledon.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Wimbledon Dharjees are, of course, an entirely fictitious Islamic sect, but the group from which they are alleged to come, the Nizari Ismailis, are a real and well-documented group of Shiite Muslims. A full account of the true, and incredible, story of Hasan the Second, the Twenty-third Imam of the Nizari Ismailis, is to be found in Bernard Lewis’s The Assassins (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967). Robert’s one guide to his assumed religion, Morals and Manners in Islam, a Guide to Islamic Adab, by Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi, was published by the Islamic Foundation in 1986.
Unfaithfully Yours
Nigel Williams
ISBN: 978-1-47210-674-2 (HB) £18.99
ISBN: 978-1-47210-683-4 (Ebook) £12.99
When Elizabeth Price engages a private detective to investigate her husband’s suspected infidelity, she unwittingly sets off a chain of correspondence that will reunite four formerly close-knit couples. They all live just a few streets away from each other; they are all still married; so how – and why – did they become so estranged? In a series of painfully and often hilariously revealing letters, from love notes to condolence messages, all becomes clear.
Unfaithfully Yours is an uproarious and poignant portrait of four marriages; a tale of late-flowering love and suburban intrigue. It heralds the return of one of our finest comic writers, in peak condition: all hail Nigel Williams, chronicler of England’s sleepy suburbs, where all is not quite as cricket as it seems . . .
‘A brilliantly witty writer.’ Sunday Times
East of Wimbledon Page 21
