The Reluctant Mullah

by Sagheer Afzal

  Edwards pursed his lips and looked appraisingly at Musa. His fingers drummed on the table.

  “Are you a poet?” asked the detective inspector.

  “I do my best,” replied Musa modestly.

  “And you can turn it on any time any place. Is that so?”

  Musa nodded, not wanting pride to unmask his gender.

  “OK doll. This here is what we are gonna do!” said DI Edwards.

  He placed a sheet of paper on the table with a pen atop. Slowly he slid the paper across to Musa.

  “Write some poetry,” he ordered.

  The two policemen, Ali and Basto leaned forward expectantly. Musa picked up the pen, stopped, looked up, and then put the pen down again.

  “I can’t do it with everyone watching,” he said plaintively.

  Edwards nodded: “OK. You’ve got a point. We’ll be back in two.”

  After the pair had left Ali turned on Musa. “I can’t believe this is happening. We are in a detention room in Scotland Yard. Blue lights all the way down the M1. You are dressed as a woman and two fucking jerks think you’re Shakespeare!”

  “Cool it! Getting flustered will not help. We need to reason our way out of this.”

  “How’re you going to reason your way out of your clothes when we get back? If we ever get back, I mean. What were you thinking? They can lock you up for that, Musa! I bought that thing for my mother’s birthday. How can she wear it knowing a man has been inside it?” exclaimed Ali.

  “She won’t know,” said Musa dismissively.

  “Get your head out of your arse. We have been sweating like pigs. A sniffer dog would die from an overdose if he were to come near you right now.”

  “I hate to break up the party, but shouldn’t you start writing something? They’ll be back any second,” said Basto.

  “That’s right, Musa. You’d better get going! Make it nice and fancy, not like the crap that landed us in here!” said Ali.

  Musa thought hard and started to write rapidly. He was still writing when Dearden and Edwards returned.

  “OK. Time’s up. Let’s hear it,” said DI Edwards.

  Musa handed the sheet to Ali who first read the poem to himself. He groaned and cleared his throat.

  “‘I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived.’”

  Through his veil Musa saw only stupefaction on Edwards’ face. At length the detective inspector turned to Dearden and asked, “Whaddya think?” but before the junior officer could reply Edwards suddenly grabbed the sheet of paper from Ali.

  “See here, I’m no expert on poetry but I do know one thing: if it don’t rhyme it’s a crime.” He smiled, tickled by his own wordplay. Do you see what I’m saying? OK, strike two. C’mon Dearden.”

  As soon as the door closed, Ali said to Musa, an anguished look on his face,” What the fuck are you trying to do to us! I said to make it good and you start stringing together some crap about living in the woods. What do you think this is? A camping holiday?” said Ali.

  “But it was written by an American scholar. It’s a famous poem!” exclaimed Musa.

  “Who gives a shit who it was written by? Every poem you write ends the same way. Someone’s foot gets planted up our arse.”

  “Why don’t I have a go?” suggested Basto.

  Musa and Ali looked at Basto, their minds whirring with the same thoughts. He was not renowned for his literary ability nor indeed ability of any kind. Entrusting this task to him would be a monumentally hazardous thing to do. What choice did they have? Musa passed him the pen and paper.

  Basto began tapping the pen on the table, thinking hard. A couple of seconds later, he smiled and began to write. He finished just as the detectives came back into the room.

  “Shoot!” said Edwards.

  Ali took the paper from Basto and began to read in a monotone:

  This is a crock of shit.

  We didn’t do it.

  We have nothing to say.

  Please don’t send us to Guantanamo Bay.

  All neural activity in the room came to a grinding halt. Synaptic pulses flickered with poetical portent and came to a shuddering stop. In that primal hypnagogic state everyone’s consciousness hung like a guillotine frozen in mid-air.

  Then an extraordinary thing happened. DI Edwards started to rap. He moved his neck backwards and forwards, his cheeks swelled as he expelled a tu-tu-too noise and with his head still rocking, he moved his hands up and down on the table and began to intone: “We have nothing to say. Please don’t send us to Guan-TANAMO Bay. B-b-b-bay. B-b-b-bay, B-b-b-bay, B-b-b-bay.” Dearden couldn’t believe his eyes and wondered what the hell Edwards got up to when he was off duty. Musa, Ali and Basto felt nothing but relief.

  “This is real good. Real g-g-g-good. G-g-g-good. This is street poetry Dearden. You know Ice-T and Ice Cube and Eminem and all that! She ain’t no more a terrorist than I am. This here has been a huge misunderstanding.”

  He smiled benevolently at three exhausted Holy men.

  “OK then. I’ll drop you off at the Madrasah. Fixing on Musa he said,” Don’t you fret, I’ll make sure nothing bad happens to you. I’ll have a word with your boss.”

  “No!” cried out Musa, Ali and Basto in unison.

  2

  Mufti Bashir, the chief elder of the Madrasah, readied himself for the dreadful explosion of noise that signalled the time for prayer. These days it seemed everything was said with too much exuberance, too much excitement, and too much disrespect. This he was told was the way it was now: the tide of change was a part of revolution, and revolution was needed to rekindle the ashes of the faith that made Islam so great.

  Sure enough it came, the young muezzin mindful only of the need to impress upon everyone with the sonorous timbre of his voice, desecrating the rhythm of the call to prayer by compressing its syllables into a throaty screech. Mufti Bashir sighed and became aware of how slowly that reflex act of irritation occurred now. And how alien the breath his chest expelled seemed to him, like a stranger’s cargo. He stared sadly at a large frame on the wall, which contained the oft-repeated phrase from Surah Rahman: Which of your Lord’s favours do you deny? Now that phrase seemed to have a heavy inverse meaning to him.

  Mufti Bashir spent much of his time in the Madrasah in a large attic room dominated by an oval window that stretched from wall to wall. The glass panels of the spotlessly clean window shone from above the thick alabaster wedges. As he looked around the room he noticed nothing. The distinctions between old and new, dust and dirt were gone. He was aware of objects and possessions as perhaps they truly were – inanimate and impersonal. The lacklustre light from a bulb that hung from the high ceiling illuminated the shiny gold and red stripes on the spines of shelves full of well-thumbed leather-bound books. He spent a great deal of his time poring over these tomes, not for the sake of acquiring knowledge but for that sense of connecting with something familiar. This vestige of reality had for him become very faint now. Even the air he breathed seemed like spoonfuls of a once familiar fluid.

  He knew his time was approaching. This did not trouble him for he was by now a soul encased in a feeble infirm frame. The reverberations of his soul were the only pulses of life he felt. He heard a person’s voice and knew what sort of a person they were and how deeply their shadow would cut. But voices very quickly faded away, he heard emotions more keenly, and this further increased his distance from others. That did not bother him. He no longer had any real interest in people and their companionship. Even when his five sons came to visit him with their terrified children, he was always glad when they left. Had his wife been alive, this might have been different but then he would have been different. She had died twenty-three years ago and it was her death and the subsequent renunciation of physical pleasure that had led to him being concerned only with the soul.

  He
had come to England grudgingly and at the insistent wish of his wife who like so many women was only preoccupied with the vanities and baubles of this world. He remembered with a faint smile what she had said when she first arrived,” Is it always this dark and cold?”

  He too had felt the cold and darkness, not in the weather but in the slim young fellow Pakistanis who had come with him and who were lazy about calling their wives over. They were all like that then. Rakish in their cheap suits and slick with their shiny hair and boots, they were all fascinated by the white flesh and confident smiles of English women. He used to see some of them at weekends standing like guilty, excited children in a single line outside an empty house occupied by a busy woman who needed only one room.

  In those early days, British Islam was still in its infancy. Mosques were few and far between and the attention span of those attending was minimal. They were more interested in worldly matters; working hard, making money, and sending money back home. On occasion, he would be invited to their houses where there would be as many as fifteen men, huddled together and stoking their companionship with debate and banal banter. He liked to sit with them in those days although he seldom spoke but they never seemed to mind that. A brown face was all the entry needed into their hearts. They were all so warm and friendly back then; their talk was alive with dreams and longing and their eyes were lit with greed as their wiry frames twitched at every window of opportunity. Some talked big and dreamed much but made little. Some were just content to live under the sway of events and let be what was meant to be. Destiny was a dark ocean which they all tried hard to conquer.

  When their wives joined them the season of their lives changed. No longer was their laughter carefree. When their children were born they harried them with their ambition and rivalry. When their children grew older the season of their lives changed again and with that change came the unmasking of a harsh reality. Some tried to summon the ways of their forefathers and ripped apart the very fabric of their lives. Some were just content not to push against the prevailing norms. Then his mosque became full and his gathering listened as they never did before and they started to pray as they should have prayed. Long, long before. And they came to him with hearts like beggars’ bowls and children like sacrificial lambs to be admitted into his flock, to atone for the sins he watched them commit when they were young, brash and so very bold.

  Mufti Bashir gradually became aware of an insistent knocking at the door. He blinked and was annoyed to discover that they were moist.

  “Yes,” he replied querulously.

  Hafiz Aleem entered the room and moved his hand to his temple by way of respect. Mufti Bashir watched him, feeling his arrogance, aware that the students had given Hafiz Aleem the nickname Adolf – the result of his relishing his primary role of reporting their misdemeanours.

  “What is it?”

  “There was a disturbance today at the Madrasah. Two policemen came and took two of our students and a girl with them, sir.”

  “Were they arrested?” inquired Mufti Bashir.

  “No sir. Just escorted away. They told us they just wanted to question them.”

  “Who was the girl?” asked Mufti Bashir.

  “We don’t know,” answered Hafiz Aleem nervously.

  “Well, who were the boys?”

  “Ali Akbar and Bastayazid Bihari.”

  Mufti Bashir considered this. Ali and Bastayazid were never noticeable but for their association with a third, Musa. A familiar topic for conversation among the other elders. At times, when he finished leading the prayer and turned to face the gathering, he would see him in the front row. Always searching with his eyes and wandering away with his mind but he searched too deeply and thought too little.

  “There is no great riddle to solve. The girl was Musa,” snorted Mufti Bashir.

  “Musa? Are you sure sir?” asked Hafiz Aleem, momentarily stunned.

  “Of course I’m sure! Have him brought to me when he gets back,” said Mufti Bashir, already turning away.

  He slipped into another reverie. Of a time before time, when he was young and supple and had shiny shoes to go with a suit chosen by a woman who was earthy and loud. Still suspended in his musing, he slowly moved over to his books and picked out an album. On the last page was a photograph which he told himself he must not see too often and he had kept this promise to himself. His eyes became moist but this he did not notice, not even when a teardrop fell into the fold of a day a dreamy aeon ago.

  Musa, Ali and Basto got out of the car, spent and weary beyond belief after another three-hour race north along the motorway. Inside the Madrasah once more they were told by one of the two boys on the reception desk that they were to go to the waiting area overlooking the foyer.

  “What do you think they’ll say?” asked Ali.

  “What can they say? They might even think of us as heroes. How many people get taken to Scotland Yard and then escorted back! We could be on the cover of Eastern Eye!” said Basto enthusiastically.

  “What about you Musa? What are you gonna say when they ask you why you are dressed as a woman?” asked Ali in the tone of someone making small talk.

  Musa looked thoughtful. It was all so very embarrassing.

  “Stand up straight, guys. It’s Adolf!” said Ali urgently.

  An intense, emaciated-looking Holy man with a perpetual scowl snarled,” You three have some explaining to do!”

  “Easy Adolf, we’ve had a rough day,” said Ali condescendingly.

  Aleem’s face reddened. He drew himself up as if his outrage was somehow able to elongate his scrawny body.

  “You two,” he pointed at Ali and Basto, “go to your rooms and you, Musa, are to come with me to Mufti Bashir.”

  Before they parted company Ali, unusually solemn, said to Musa,” Be careful in front of Mufti Bashir. Speak from your heart but don’t shoot from the lip. And don’t be thinking he’s senile because he doesn’t forget what he’s seen and he’s seen a lot.”

  Ali walked away with Basto in tow. Hafiz Aleem watched Musa with an uncertain expression in his eyes.

  “Ready?”

  “Yes, let’s go,” said Musa.

  They walked towards a winding wooden staircase. The stairs creaked and the banister moved as he placed his hand on it. As they began to climb Musa gathered his thoughts on Mufti Bashir. For a start he did not seem to like people. He kept his distance from every other living being in the Madrasah and his reluctant conversation was gnomic and terse. His main contribution to communal life in the Madrasah was the leading of the prayer, a duty which he had fulfilled every day, five times a day, for the past forty years. Sometimes Musa would catch Mufti Bashir studying him during the Friday sermon. The look in his eyes always troubled Musa for it was as though he was watching his life unfold and there was something in that trajectory that filled him with sadness.

  They were now on the top floor and Musa’s legs were beginning to ache. The pipes running above the skirting board were rusty and to Musa’s surprise there was a proliferation of cobwebs.

  “He’s in there. Watch yourself when you speak to him,” said Hafiz Aleem, pushing past Musa and making his way back down the stairs.

  Musa knocked on the door. There was no response so he tentatively stepped inside. An odour emanating from the leather-bound tomes greeted him as he squinted in the gloom. Facing the window stood Mufti Bashir, a photograph in his hand, seemingly in a world of his own.

  “Who are you?” he asked without turning around.

  “Musa…sir.”

  “Take off the veil,” commanded Mufti Bashir, still with his face to the window.

  Musa did as he was told. He rubbed a gloved hand over his sweat-streaked face, glad that it was all over.

  “Who are you?” asked Mufti Bashir again.

  “Musa,” replied Musa nervously.

  Mufti Bashir beckoned him to his side and Musa, his head bowed down, walked with small, hesitant steps until they were face to face. Slowly Musa look
ed up and met Mufti Bashir’s eyes. One was light blue and the other dark grey. He had noticed this on the first day he arrived at the Madrasah when Mufti Bashir had placed his hands on his shoulders and gazed at him. Musa had stared back in wonder and he remembered seeing a ghost of a smile flicker across Mufti Bashir’s face. Mufti Bashir had chuckled then, a wheezy, crackling sound. “Heterochromia, an abnormality inherited from my forefathers. It has stunned many people into silence.”

  He motioned to a chair. Musa sat down and Mufti Bashir also seated himself. Musa looked carefully at the chief elder of the Madrasah. What surprised him were his fresh even features, untouched by age or concern. Only his hands and feet were wrinkled and gnarled. And the eyes, they did indeed have a mesmeric effect. When looking at the blue eye it seemed that the thoughts of Mufti Bashir were hopeful and merry. When looking at the darker eye it was as if sorrow and regret were all that reigned in his heart.

  “I have watched you for a long time now. You are eager to confront and question and less eager to listen and obey. I have seen you when you daydream and I have felt the flight of your dreams. You are drawn to the glitter of the outside world, are you not?”

  “I don’t know,” said Musa, warily.

  “You do know, but your heart is telling you to be careful. That is another trait you have, always following your heart, even if it leads you to ruin.”

  Musa sat silent, fighting the inclination to relax and talk.

  “Tell me, why you are dressed in the clothes of a woman?” asked Mufti Bashir, without irony.

  “Well sir, it all started like this. Ali had bought this outfit for his mum, and it was just lying there on the bed. And I suddenly started thinking about the Sisters. Not that I’ve got anything against them, because I don’t know them and they don’t know me. But it’s like whenever they look at you it’s like they know you and I’ve always wondered why that is. So when I saw the outfit, I thought the best way to find the answer to that question was to try it on. And you know when you get an idea in your head and it just doesn’t go away, you’ve just got to do it! No matter what! So I put it on to see if I felt any different, if you know what I mean. It was like a sociology experiment, but then those blasted policemen came barging through the door, and everything went a bit crazy.”