The Reluctant Mullah

by Sagheer Afzal

  “Do you think that if there was a ladder which you could climb and see the heavens, would that make you pray five times a day and persuade you to remember Allah?” asked Musa.

  This time everyone raised their hands.

  “You’re wrong. It actually states in the Quran that even if you were to have such a ladder on which you could ascend to the heavens, ultimately you would still not believe.”

  “That’s rubbish! Everyone in this world, Muslim or non-Muslim, would believe if they saw something like that,” yelled a rude boy.

  “Not necessarily,” said Musa. “People of all ages have craved for the mysterious and the wonderful. They demanded from every prophet that these cravings be fulfilled in order for them to believe. But once they received fulfilment, they began to rationalise, to explain, and once you have an explanation for everything mysterious and wonderful, the inexplicable no longer has any hold over you. In faith there is no fantasy. When you believe in Allah, you have to undertake a responsibility. The mountains knew how grave that responsibility was and they refused it. We accepted it and failed. We may be smarter than a mountain but for some reason we’re all just as stubborn as rocks.”

  Musa was concerned that the groups making up his audience were becoming fractious. Each group seemed to pray on the insecurities of the other. No one, not even the suave coconuts appeared to be comfortable in their own skin. They either attacked or defended, and rarely did they seem comfortable with valid criticism. Perhaps the reason they all came back was that they were trying to find validation for their life choices and they wanted to be liked, even by the bullish rude boys. This need to be liked by those you spent most of your time attacking was so very strange.

  He gently knocked on the partially open office door for fear of startling Khadija who he guessed would already be there. Sure enough she was sitting at the desk making notes. The room was filled with a warm ambrosial smell of leather and incense which cheered Musa.

  “Assalaam-u-alaikum, Musa,” she said with her usual steady calm.

  “Sound travels in this building and I heard some of your talk. It was an interesting choice of topic. What made you think of it?” she asked.

  “The mystery of belief intrigues me. Why human beings do not live up to their potential? Why our descent into evil is no longer in doubt but a matter of fact? Do you never think about such things?”

  Khadija shrugged: “I liked what you said at the end.”

  “So what was your conclusion?”

  “The power of free will: you should have mentioned something about that. The fact that people are born with the power to decide their own path in life. They choose the path that is easiest for them and that always leads them astray. Like Adam and his wife in the Garden of Eden.”

  Khadija opened her Quran and read from Al Baqarah. “‘Adam, live with your wife in this garden. Both of you eat freely there as you will, but do not go near this tree, or you will both become wrongdoers.’ But Satan made them slip, and removed them from the state they were in. We said, ‘Get out, all of you! You are each other’s enemy.’

  “He was told to stay away from the tree. He disobeyed. Had he shown more firmness, the outcome for all of us might have been different. It’s easier to follow an impulse than to resist it. That’s why the vast majority of us are doomed.”

  “You can’t blame Adam,” said Musa. “I remember reading a story narrated by the Prophet – Peace be upon Him – in the Hadith, in which he recounts an argument between Moses and Adam. Moses said, ‘It was your lapse that caused us to leave the Garden of Eden,’ but Adam would have none of it and replied, ‘Why do you blame me for an act that was ordained forty years before I was created?’”

  “I’m not blaming Adam; I’m saying that disobedience is a path to destruction. It is better to be patient and obey and reap the rewards,” explained Khadija.

  The certainty in her voice troubled Musa. He was rarely obedient either at the Madrasah or at home.

  “Did I touch a raw nerve?” she asked.

  “Well…truth be told, I don’t obey people much. I get into a lot of trouble for it. But you know blind obedience is just as sure a path to ruin. If your intentions are right and if the cost of obedience is too high, then it is better to be disobedient.”

  “What cost are you talking about?”

  “Happiness. Everyone has the right to do whatever they can to be happy. Be they a Muslim man or a Muslim woman, be they a Pakistani man or a Pakistani woman. No one can take that right away from you. We only have one life to live and just because our focus is on the hereafter as Muslims, it doesn’t mean that we should spend our lives here in painful obedience. Are you happy, Khadija?”

  She remained silent.

  “You see, you’re not are you? If you were happy, you wouldn’t be able to hide it. Same way if you were unhappy.”

  Khadija looked at him with the ghost of a smile.

  “Were you always this passionate?”

  “Yes, always. Every time I set out to do something or prove something I can almost hear trumpets sounding in my head. There is fire in my belly and that is a great sensation. When you feel the dream becoming life and you know for sure that it’s because you’re trying, that’s what it’s all about. Doing something so that tomorrow is better than today. You don’t know what’s written for you, no one does, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t do your utmost to make sure that it’s just as good as the dream, if not better.”

  “Does it always work out that way for you?”

  “Very rarely. But I never mind that because life is always better and richer when you’re passionate. If you follow your heart and your heart is pure, then it doesn’t matter whether you’re being disobedient or rebellious. You may not know the ending but the journey is much better.”

  Khadija got up and started to pack her books away.

  “You’re leaving?” asked Musa, disappointed. “You always leave when it gets interesting.”

  “I have responsibilities. Not all of us have the privilege of being passionate dreamers.”

  “Were you ever young, Khadija?” he asked as she left the room.

  21

  Khadija let herself in. Upstairs a TV was blasting out the angry rhetoric of an impassioned speaker. Abdel, her brother, was obviously home and that was unusual. Normally he spent his evenings at a mosque in Manchester, returning in the early hours of the morning.

  She took off her veil, leaving only her hair covered. A large mirror stood in the hallway but she never checked the way she looked. Her interest in her appearance had died soon after she took to wearing a veil. As always she welcomed the feeling of air on her face and she ran her knuckles uneasily across her jaw as she entered the living room, keeping her head down.

  One side of the wall was the colour of olives and the evening sunlight gave the room the sickly sheen of a dying field. A fireplace flickered illusory flames of cobalt blue across the walnut-coloured vinyl floor. Her father sat in a white leather armchair resting his thick feet on a coffee table and, as ever, she tried to gauge his mood.

  “Shall I bring you your food?” she asked in a voice just loud enough to be audible and low enough to conceal feeling.

  He grunted, his customary way of expressing assent.

  Khadija, with her head still down, quickly left the room. As soon as she walked into the kitchen she could smell drink. Abdel drank furtively and when drunk he exploded with rage against the Great Satan and his many disciples, and the fawning Muslims who were Muslims in name only, who paid mortgages and acted like they were English, in a voice so raw with anger that the slurring was hardly noticeable. It was ironic that in the midst of these tirades he forgot that their mother was also English.

  Her father, however, was not given to covering shame with outrage and when he drank his stupor was more deadly than her brother’s. He was mean and sullen and his tongue could lacerate more keenly than a surgeon’s knife. It was strange, perhaps even laughably strange, that her br
other and father both dipped into the same intoxicant to drown a hatred that was so similar yet so different.

  Khadija opened the fridge. On the uppermost shelf lay a wrapped plate of rice. She placed it by the microwave and began to prepare the curry as her father liked it – too hot for most.

  He never made any demands about food. He would eat a few mouthfuls and leave the rest unfinished, never noticing that it was recycled from yesterday’s meal. She suspected that dinner for him and the manner in which it was served was a symbol, a way of connecting to a time long ago when he was a merry tyrant basking in the achievements of his educated wife, scarcely registering the tiny tots that were his children.

  She opened a packet of cumin and sprinkled two generous teaspoonfuls into a stainless steel pan. She pressed a button on the cooker and a yellow flame hissed. As the cumin began to brown she added some butter to the pan along with a teaspoon of coriander. By now the kitchen had filled with an aroma that was the signature of an Asian family. Carefully she tipped the rice into the pan and stirred it, adding a teaspoon of ground ginger and chilli.

  Always, no matter what the day was or how full or empty it seemed, she would think of her mother when preparing food. A reel of memories ran through her mind and lingered and faded away: infants too young to understand and, a little later, young children trying so hard to find their bearings. Her absence eclipsed them all, and ugliness had grown. Her father’s gradual withdrawal into himself and Abdel’s emergence as a fanatic were rooted in her mother’s betrayal.

  She remembered her mother as an energetic, tall figure with a warm smile. She remembered hearing bitter arguments between her parents and her mother’s spiral into depression. Then time played a subtle trick and she was gone and the memory of her departure was gone. It could not be recalled, so smooth had been the transition, so clean the excision. When Khadija’s father had told his children that their mother had left the family and that they must forget her and move on, she knew that she must assume part of her mother’s duties. Only later did she realise that children who take on the burden of a responsibility they do not understand become entombed by sobriety. That was her mother’s real crime: the theft of that certainty children have that life is carefree. Yet still her mother lived on in Khadija’s heart.

  The food was now ready and she carried it to the living room. Her father had taken his feet off the table and, as she bent down and placed the tray in front of him, he glanced at her, his face livid with rage.

  Khadija walked upstairs to her brother’s room. The door was open. The floor was a mess of unwashed clothes but in contrast stacks of anti-western videos lay in neat piles by the TV. Abdel sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the screen. Sensing her presence he turned down the volume and stood up. The urgency of his movements betrayed a need.

  “Do you have any money?” she asked softly. He glared at her but quickly looked away. At that moment his resemblance to their father had never been stronger. But what a state he was in: his long hair had not been washed and smelt bad and his beard was unkempt.

  Khadija reached into her abaya and pulled out a handful of twenty-pound notes, her accumulated salary from Babarr, and placed the money on top of the TV to spare him the embarrassment of stretching out his hand.

  “Aren’t you still signing on?”

  Abdel shook his head.

  She had guessed as much. Her brother had been out of work for a while now and the benefits people would have been pestering him about finding a job or going on a training course. Proud young men like him were known to tell such well-wishers to go to hell.

  “You’re going to have to do something.”

  “Allah provides sustenance to whomsoever he pleases.”

  “How can you be so sure that includes people who do nothing for themselves?” she asked as she left him.

  In her own room, Khadija switched on the lights. The walls were painted yellow and the carpet was a bright red. Everything was in perfect order. Her prayer mat lay diagonally to her bed, the corners neatly folded. Against one wall was a white desk on which lay her rosary and her Quran and above that was a bookshelf. From the window she had a view of the garden.

  Khadija picked up her Quran and sat down on a chair by the window. Nowadays she rarely read a chapter from start to finish but preferred instead to browse through the surahs and focus on verses which would give her insight and comfort.

  She flicked through the Quran randomly until a verse caught her eye. It was from Surah Fussilat:

  “Good and evil cannot be equal. Repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend, but only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness.”

  Repelling evil with goodness seemed to be a trait that had become extinct in the modern world. It was like Jesus instructing his followers to turn the other cheek or walking two miles if someone forced you to walk a mile. But in that instruction was all that was hateful to people with pride and self-respect, because everyone around her, especially her father and brother, had grown up with the idea that their worth as a man was judged by their strength in defending themselves, to answer with a brick anyone who pelted you with a stone. A person’s capacity for exaggerating their sense of self was truly remarkable, she thought. Perhaps that was only natural though, because everyone craved glory in the silence of their hearts. She had seen brash vanity multiply in the worthless, those poor people wretched in the need for accolades in a world that spurned them of the sunshine, moments that came as easily as breathing to others. People like her brother, whose self-belief began to mutate as the instinct for self-preservation began to tick like a time-bomb. Pride and anger converged to give birth to a polluted ego. Goodness sacrificed at the altar of self-respect and dignity, mused Khadija, a strange bargain.

  She frowned in annoyance; her brother had turned up the volume again. He did this whenever he heard something that incited him.

  “Imagine you have a small knife and a monster is in front of you. The monster keeps sniffing you and turning away as if he can’t stand the smell of you. But all you have to do is stab him in the neck until he bleeds to death. That is the first step: destruction of the enemies of Allah.”

  Telling him to turn the TV down would be futile; she could only try to block it out. She read the next verse in the Holy Quran.

  “If a prompting from Satan should stir you, seek refuge with God: He is the All Hearing and the All Knowing.”

  She wondered anew at this verse. She had once discussed it with some of her friends who took it to mean that if ever you got an instinct to kill someone or steal something then it was most definitely from Satan and naturally should be resisted. But that was too simplistic. It posed that disturbing question, how could any person know whether or not the instinct to stick up for yourself and fight for your self-respect was a whisper of evil? It was easier to be angry. Anger gave you that feeling of power. With self-restraint there were no such illusions. But people who had been treated badly by others, near and afar, what were they supposed to do? You could say that their justice lay in revenge but their reward most definitely lay in patience.

  The angry voice on the DVD next door blasted on.

  “We have been forced to live inside a toilet and there are some who think they can shit on us and order us around in that toilet. And guess what? They are right! Because we are all under the boots of the non-believers. And that’s where we are going to stay until we start fighting for ourselves. Because Allah created this world for the believers for us and us only!”

  Khadija flicked through the pages of the Quran again, until she came to the last verse of Surah Imran.

  “You who believe, be steadfast, more steadfast than others; be ready; always be mindful of God, so that you may prosper.”

  It always came back to that, the need to be patient and constant. The two opposing foes of intolerance and haste. But patience was not inborn. You had
to reason it into existence and once there it was frail. But where was its reward? she mused. Would every long suffering soul be rewarded only in paradise? Were you meant to view this world with the eyes of an ascetic? Just renounce your earthly wishes and desires and keep your gaze firmly fixed on the hereafter. So what if the good things of life passed you by, you would find your treasure in paradise.

  She frowned, annoyed with herself for letting bitterness creep into her thoughts. She looked at the title of another Surah – Al-Anfal, or Battle Gains.

  Telepathically the angry voice next door roused itself again.

  “If a non-believer comes into your land unless there is no peace treaty then he is booty. You take him to the market place and sell him. That is your right…’

  She read the opening verse of the Surah.

  “They ask you about the battle gains. Say, that is a matter for God and His Messenger, so be mindful of God and make things right between you. Obey God and His Messenger if you are true believers.”

  Khadija wondered at the raging speaker on the other side of the wall. Her brother was probably oblivious to everything except his message. And he was not alone; she had begun to realise that only recently. Young men, disillusioned and bitter, who ten years ago might have taken to vandalising cars, were now finding deadlier outlets for their seething rage. She had often spoken to the mothers of such men and they all assured her that it was just a passing phase, a transitional period of upheaval in a young man’s life. Once they got married and had a bit of responsibility it would all fly out of the window, they said.

  She turned several pages and found in Surah Ankabut, The Spider, a familiar verse steeped in personal meaning.

  “Can they not see that We have made [them] a secure sanctuary though all around them people are snatched away?”

  A secure sanctuary…Khadija had read this verse a thousand times, from childhood to adulthood. As a child she had envisaged the sanctuary as a physical place made of bricks and mortar, the holy city of Mecca, perhaps. Then, when she was a teenager and started to wear the nikab, she saw the sanctuary as a veil that guarded her from the insanity of male desire, a fortress through which she could view people unseen and a place of comfort where she could seek solace.