Stranger to History (9 page)

Syria that winter, despite the threat of war, was full of foreigners. There were English, French, Danes, Norwegians, Indians, Pakistanis and even Americans. And their presence added to a general air of international intrigue. Syria was the first police state I had travelled in; a wrong step could see me escorted to the border. And so, wishing to stay away from the closely watched hotels and to learn the ropes at my own pace, I decided to rent a flat for two months.

In my early days, I met a particular kind of foreigner, namely the international students at Damascus University, wanting to learn Arabic in the post-9/11 era. Though many were toying with an interest in Islam, it was the language that had brought them to Syria, not the faith. I had difficulty in imagining a man like Butt, who wanted Arabic but also a kind of immersion in the culture of the faith, spending his time among this crowd of foreign students. With him and Abdullah in mind, I wanted to find out what men like these, from freer, more open, more prosperous countries, came to Syria in search of. In Britain, and in Turkey, it was difficult to see them as more than individual voices. But because Syria was where they came to develop their ideas, I hoped to see them in the context of a community and to gain a more real sense of what they asked of the world.

It was in the interest of discovering Butt’s milieu that I first asked Even, a handsome blond Norwegian, studying Arabic and considering conversion, where he thought a man like Butt would have gone in Damascus. Having listened closely to all I had to say about Butt, Even compressed his lips and emitted a sound that was at once a sigh of understanding and impatience; it must have been annoying for him to listen to my speculations about where Butt would enrol, knowing all the time about Abu Nour. And as he began to tell me, his elfin face brimming with excitement, of a great Islamic university and mosque, drawing students from Mali to Indonesia, words failed him. He knew what I was looking for and his response now became a faint, secretive smile.

A few days went by before we could arrange a time to go to Abu Nour. Even had Arabic classes in the morning at Damascus University and it was late afternoon when we set out from my flat. We walked up an inclined street in the direction of the biblical Mount Qassioun, a pale, treeless peak with a city of cement shacks climbing its base. We passed the famous Jisr Abyad Mosque, with its rose dome, and the French Embassy where we would find ourselves under very different circumstances in the weeks to come.

Just before the foot of the mountain, we went right. The walk so far had taken less than ten minutes, but within a few hundred metres the city was transformed. Its wide main roads, apartment buildings and embassies fell away, and a tight, congested neighbourhood took its place. The narrow, crowded streets in this part of town had an authenticity that even the old city lacked. There were no tourists or antiques shops here, and the retail did not seem as much of a performance as it sometimes did in the old city. It was a fully functioning traditional souk, alive with oddities. At a butcher’s shop, a whole camel’s head and shoulders hung from an iron hook. In one covered section, a man spent the whole day drying trotters with a blowtorch. Near him, scorched goats’ heads with gummy grins and little teeth were arranged on a wooden table, decorated with fresh parsley. A small blue lorry ploughed through the crowd, with a man sitting in the back on a heap of pomegranates. Dates, olives, cheese and blood oranges were crammed in next to electrical-repair shops, and perfume sellers promising to replicate any Western scent. Old women rested their heads against the cool stone entrances of the Mamluk mosques with hexagonal minarets and stalactites.

Dressed in a dark Arab robe, his long, blond hair held down by a woollen skullcap and a camera kept discreetly at his side, Even was of a piece with the souk. It didn’t matter that he was foreign; the souk was a place of curiosity. He prayed regularly in the souk’s mosques and, as a white man, his interest in the faith was met with awe and admiration. He also spoke
fusha
, the classical, literary Arabic, rather than the dialects of the Syrian street, and this, too, must have created an impression.

We continued; the souk narrowed and suddenly, well before the university itself, the characters in the orbit of Abu Nour appeared. A couple of South Asians, in white with small faces and thick, black beards, conspicuous and beady-eyed, scurried towards us. They were like a sort of herald before the full diversity of Abu Nour came into view. Then we saw short Indonesians, with conical hats and wispy beards, vast West African women in colourful veils and European Muslims with red facial hair. There were Ethiopian Africans, with high cheekbones and small mouths, more South Asians, this time with English accents, and South East Asian girls, with diaphanous, rectangular veils. Nationality and race were my markers, but for the people coming to Abu Nour, these differences were trumped by a greater sense of allegiance.

The whole scene culminated in a little square, with an internet café, an Islamic bookstore, a gym and a store called Shukr, which specialised in stylish Islamic clothes for Western markets. Even had bought his robe there. The ingredients were the same as they had been in Manchester’s Curry Mile where I met Butt, and on the radical hilltop in Istanbul: the ideological bookshop; the gym, as a social centre, when girls and bars are off bounds; and the internet café, to communicate with Muslims worldwide and to browse Islamic websites. From the little square, the white marble minarets of Abu Nour were clearly visible.

Abu Nour had started as a small mosque seventy years ago, but in the last three decades, under the late Grand Mufti, Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, it grew to dominate the small, traditional souk. Three Islamic colleges were added, two Shariah schools and nine floors. Courses were offered in Arabic and religion, and more than twelve thousand students from fifty-five countries attended the university. Abu Nour was the pet project of the highest religious leader in the land; its remarkable growth spoke of the growing role of religion in the old Ba’athist dictatorship, and the importance of Syria as a destination for international Islam. The late Grand Mufti was known for his tolerance and for reaching out to other religious groups; Abu Nour prided itself on teaching the ‘correct face of Islam’. On Fridays, its vast chambers, and specialised annexes for foreigners and women, were full. Syrians and foreigners alike came to the mosque, but in the non-Arab Muslim’s journey in search of the faith and its language, Abu Nour held a special place.

We were looking for Tariq, a fix-it man known to all new arrivals at the university. Even was asking for him in one of the shops when he appeared on a corner of the square, a big, meaty figure with a friendly manner. Though his face had a dark stubble, it was shaved clean just under the chin, an Islamic fashion. He greeted Even warmly. Then, taking one look at me, said, with his Arab deafness to the letter
p
, ‘Are you Indian or Bakistani, brother?’

‘Pakistani,’ I said, hedging my bets.

‘We welcome
beebal
from every country, brother, because everyone was very nice to me when I was in Europe. I can help you here, brother, and unlike a lot of guides I don’t want any money.’ This turned out to be true and made me even more nervous. In a country where 10 per cent of the population were intelligence informants, including taxi-drivers and waiters, I was worried that Tariq was making his money elsewhere.

I asked him about enrolling at Abu Nour, and he said, ‘Yes, yes, brother, I can help you. What do you want? Arabic? Islamic classes? A lot of
beebal
come here from all over the world, Norway, England, Africa, Bakistan, to learn about Islam.’ He warned us that we couldn’t trust others and told us a story from the Traditions about the second caliph, Omar. ‘He was with someone who saw another man braying,’ Tariq said, ‘and the man said, “He is a good man.” “How do you know he is a good man?” Omar asked. “Have you done business with him? Have you travelled with him? Until you do these things, you don’t know if he is a good man.”’

Tariq was a talker and I felt that if we didn’t extricate ourselves we would be listening to him for a long time. He promised to help me the next day at twelve thirty ‘before Friday brayers’. His mention of the prayers produced panic in me. What if he asked me to pray with him and he saw I didn’t know how?

‘Tariq, I need to learn how to pray,’ I blurted.

‘Don’t worry, brother,’ he said, in his unhesitating way. ‘We will teach you how to bray.’

The next day, I waited for Tariq in the internet café on the little Islamic square. He was late and I was worried that, for all his talk, he wouldn’t show up. Next to me, a pale European with patches of a curly brown beard surfed a Chechen Liberation website while speaking through headphones and a mic to someone on Skype. I went in and out of the café a few times and was beginning to worry about the time when I caught sight of Tariq. The call to prayer had sounded and Tariq now looked at me in the way that an Olympic coach might look at a substitute just seconds after his star player has been injured. He took my arm and, moving fast for a man of his size, marched me in the direction of Abu Nour. I reminded him that I didn’t know how to pray.

‘No broblem, brother,’ he said, as we approached the doors of the multi-storeyed marble edifice. ‘We will teach you everything.’ Hundreds of people of all races were filing into the building and depositing their shoes in little cubbyholes near the entrance.

Inside, I saw that Abu Nour was a multi-dimensional maze of doors, corridors and stairways. I stayed close to Tariq and followed him up two flights of stairs as he wove his way through the closely packed crowd. At the top, we took off our shoes and came into a carpeted gallery. Through a glass partition, I could see hundreds of people arranged in neat rows below. They sat in an enormous white room around which there were two floors of galleries behind glass. Chandeliers and ceiling fans, attached respectively to long chains and thin white poles, reached down from the high ceiling, to a pointillist sea of white skullcaps.

At the end of the gallery, there was a corner room with wall-to-wall carpeting, a window at one end and a view of the action below. Young men of various ages and ethnicities sat around with black headphones, some in armchairs, others on the floor, watching a filmed sermon on a television screen. This was the translation room, Tariq informed me. He seemed to know everyone and, having scanned the room, touched one man in cream robes on the shoulder. He looked up and Tariq said, ‘Muhammad, will you blease take care of this brother from Bakistan and teach him to bray.’

Muhammad, small and dark, looked to me like a south Indian. He nodded slowly and said something softly. Tariq thanked him, and flashing a supportive look, he disappeared.

Muhammad offered me a pair of headphones and I sat down next to him. The translation booth asked me if I wanted English (apparently they could do eight other languages). I said, ‘Yes,’ and a slow voice, with evangelical vocal range, translated the words of the wizened, white-bearded preacher on the screen. He was emphasising the importance of giving alms to the poor, beyond the 2 per cent required of the believer, as a way to show your love for God and His prophet. I didn’t know it then, but the preacher was dead; he was Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, the late Grand Mufti of Syria and the founder of Abu Nour.

‘Should we wash?’ Muhammad said, in his soft voice and imperceptible accent, after we had listened for a while.

‘OK.’

He rose slowly and I followed him out of the translation room. Round the corner, there was a bathroom with cold marble floors and a washing area with several metal taps arranged in a row. Muhammad instructed me that I had to wash my face first, then my hands and arms up to my elbows, a portion of my scalp and my feet up to my ankles. ‘Make sure the water touches every place,’ he said. He began to wash and I, watching him, followed. He washed carefully, prising apart his toes so that the water touched the lighter skin between them. He seemed to notice that I had washed my face only once because he said quietly, ‘The Prophet used to wash three times.’ I washed some more. ‘The reason we wash these parts of the body,’ he added, ‘is because they are the parts that are exposed, and washing them also keeps the entire body cool.’ My body was cooler than cool; it was cold. The marble floors and sharp edges of the washing area made me pick my way out carefully.

I came back into the translation room with wet hands, feet and hair. The video of the late Grand Mufti had finished and there was a break of a few minutes. I took the opportunity to ask Muhammad about himself. He was in Syria, studying Islamic law, he said. He had grown up in Australia. His parents and grandparents had moved there from India to spread Islam.

‘Do you like it there?’

‘It’s very nice,’ he said, ‘the best country I know.’ His dark features were almost African or Aboriginal, and the stillness of his manner allowed them little expression. He asked me why I was in Syria. I said it was out of curiosity for my father’s religion, which I hadn’t known growing up. ‘Islam is needed in societies all over the world in need of peace,’ he said, his expression unchanged. ‘All religions preach peace, but Islam offers the widest kind of peace.’ Before I could ask why, our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a few figures in the main room below. Their appearance brought many more people into the translation room.

‘It’s the Grand Mufti of Bosnia,’ Muhammad whispered, with excitement.

Because I was new to Abu Nour, I didn’t realise what a lucky first visit this was. The university often invited important Islamic leaders to speak from its pulpit but this was, even by its own standards, an august gathering. The men below, three in robes and turbans, were the Grand Muftis of Syria and Bosnia and Salah Kuftaro, the director of the university and the son of the late Grand Mufti. The unbearded man standing next to them in a brown suit was the minister of culture. These attractions were part of the draw of Abu Nour and the little translation room could hardly contain its excitement.