The Road from Damascus (29 page)

Ammar seemed to Sami very much like the immigrant that he was. If he understood the social codes of the place better he wouldn’t make himself so ridiculous. And that was also why Sami went easy on Ammar’s accent issues. He’d seen other cases of the same syndrome. A Pakistani friend at the university, for instance, who’d arrived with an Oxbridge accent, and then met a girl with a Mancunian twang and switched overnight, apparently without being aware of it, to her flat vowels and clogged-up consonants. That’s the adaptive strength of the stranger. A strength in most of its manifestations. If you’re not stuck hard in your habits you easily pick up new ones.

But the lunacy went a little too far. Sami feared that Ammar would be hurt. He tried to explain.

‘We can call ourselves black politically speaking, in that we’re not white, and for solidarity, yeah, agreed. But ethnically, racially, I don’t think so. I mean look at my skin. It’s a lot more white than black. The Five Percenters is an ethnic movement. They’re blacks, meaning of African origin. They don’t much like whites. Believe me, you wouldn’t fit.’

‘It’s a movement for the original black Asiatic man.’ Ammar waved the argument off. ‘I’m an Arab, guy. You don’t get no more Afro-Asiatic than me.’

There was truth in this, but useless truth, because the black nationalist definition of Asiatic was a religious mythical definition. It was like the Rastafarians talking about Zion and the tribe of Judah. It didn’t mean they had common cause with the denizens of Golders Green.

‘Keep it simple,’ Ammar said, in speechmaking mode. ‘We’re black. We need to know who we are, and then we need to stand tall.’

Simplicity. A dangerous refuge.

‘It’s about power, bro. It’s about making knowledge the servant of power.’ He illustrated this with a rare reference to Marwan: ‘I mean, look at my father. Why he so hunched up, man? Why he so, like, fuckin’ defeated and shit? Reads his books and goes to the mosque, but how’s that ever going to give him any more power? He needs to know who the devil is, and who his allies are.’

To Sami, black nationalism smelled too much of blood and semen. And not his. It felt too much like rigid Black manhood. In its American context it was attached to claiming some land on which to establish a black state. Like Zionism, it was a perverse response to oppression. But he wasn’t going to get angry about it. The Five Percenters had no power to realize their ideas, which decontextualized in England meant very little anyway. In practice, it was no more than sexy identity-assertion, and Sami of the kuffiyeh and Intifada T-shirt could understand that well enough. Strange that Ammar wanted to be a black rather than Arab nationalist, but not that strange. Ammar’s Arab nationalist option had been shut down in his distant boyhood when people calling themselves Arabists shattered the al-Haj family. History had squashed the possibility of Arabism. Moreover, there was no hardcore Arabist rap.

So Sami, usually so intolerant of any shabby mysticism but his own, allowed Ammar’s rants. They didn’t trigger any of his taboos. They weren’t religion, at least not the religion he’d been trained to despise.

He also empathized with Ammar’s view of Marwan. It reminded Sami of his own childhood perspective on the Muslims. What the Muslims lacked was the power aphrodisiac. They lacked the superficial values of the street. There was nothing new or exciting about them. They didn’t look good. He could only be ashamed of them.

Then there was envy. Sami envied his brother-in-law’s capacity for self-definition. Another immigrant strength. When you’re uprooted you get to plant yourself in a new location. You have a kind of choice. And yes, you might choose shallow soil, if only it looks like the sun shines on it. How can you know how deep the soil is, anyway, until you grow roots?

Back to the future. Sami in 2001 was a fragile flower. Heavier, balder, and altogether less stable. He searched for Ammar’s mosque with a warm breeze playing cold around his temples, his sense of nakedness heightened by the fact that curls no longer kissed his ears. He was like a man accustomed to a hat suddenly unhatted, like a muhajjiba woman stripped of her scarf. Feeling old but new, weary but nervily awake. ‘Look out! Look out!’ jumbled up in his brain with old-school hip hop, and flash memories of mildewed prayer halls.

He was in the right sunlit-grey street. The paper in his hand said number 7a. Number seven was a house with its curtains drawn. There was an unsigned peel-paint door beside it. This? Sami knocked.

Following a pause, it opened a suspicious crack’s worth. Then it swung wide, and Ammar opened his arms, and his voice sang out. ‘Na’eeman!’ – referring to the haircut – the formula literally means comfort, tranquillity, softness. Sami was grateful for that old-country courtesy. Instead of returning the correct response, however, he started into what he’d come to say.

‘Your father, ammu Marwan. I’m sorry… you know… allah yerhamu…’ The religious phrases always stuck in his throat.

Ammar repeated it. Allah yerhamu. God have mercy on him. Then he turned and led Sami down a dark stairwell. Down into a long flat room hazed in artificial light. The neon echoed between bare plaster walls. There were curls of plaster and cracks on the ceiling. A smell of paint but no visible sign of it. Plastic mats imitating straw on the floor. A concrete floor. Hidden, windowless and unaesthetic, the room was an ideal location for Ammar’s pared-down protestant faith. Six other men occupied the space, separated: two at prayer, three intensely whispering, and one cross-legged, bobbing over a text.

Ammar took Sami’s hand again, intent on his eyes.

‘Tell me. Something going on with you and Muntaha?’

‘You know,’ Sami mumbled. ‘Some thinking time. I’ve stopped the doctorate. We’ll see what happens. I need time to think at the moment. Get a job and so on.’

Ammar nodded. ‘Learn to drive and there’s a job waiting for you.’

‘Well, thanks,’ Sami said. ‘But I don’t know if I approve.’

‘What?’

‘Messing up the environment. Exhaust fumes. Global warming. Driving a car, you’re contributing to that.’

Ammar’s cheeks rose by force of habit to exclaim ‘cha!’ –but he transformed it to an emphatic ‘masha’allah!’ He was clearly as amused by Sami as Sami was by him. He tugged on Sami’s hand.

‘Come meet my brother Mujahid.’

Mujahid sat directly under one of the neon strips. Seeing them coming he closed his book quickly, stood up and smoothed down his clothes. He said, ‘As-salaamu alaikum, brother.’ An Irishman, by his accent. Greenish skin. A blood-red beard. A shalwar kameez.

Sami, in concert with Ammar, replied, ‘Wa-alaikum as-salaam.’

They shook hands. Mujahid had fingers like spider’s legs.

It seemed that the house upstairs was inhabited. They heard the scrape of shifting furniture, something being dropped. Ammar and Mujahid exchanged glances.

‘We have trouble with the neighbours,’ Ammar told Sami.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘They don’t want us here.’

‘They call us Pakis,’ said Mujahid. ‘They even call me Paki.’

‘There’ve been incidents,’ said Ammar.

Mujahid explained, ‘Brothers have been punched. They spit on us from upstairs when we’re coming in. They throw beer cans at us sometimes.’

‘We haven’t responded to it,’ said Ammar.

Sami couldn’t think of a useful comment. He searched for something. The book enclosed in Mujahid’s hand was not the Qur’an.

‘What are you reading, Mujahid?’

‘Teach yourself Arabic
.’ Rolling a thin eyebrow between fingertips. ‘Brother Ammar is giving me conversation lessons also. It is my knee-yeh, you see, to perform heej-rah to a pure land.’

I beg your pardon. Sami stared in bewilderment at this strange foreign gentleman.

‘His “niyah”, his intention,’ Ammar translated, ‘is to migrate to a Muslim country.’

Back before the millennium turned Ammar had actually gone to a Five Percenter meeting, and he had come back subdued. They are misguided, yes, he admitted, and said nothing more. But it was obvious that he’d reached a turning point. His accent calmed down immediately. His hip hop fixation waned. Farrakhan and Mr Yaqoob departed his conversation, and Malcolm X entered. Malcolm had worked out that the Nation of Islam’s leadership was fraudulent. Disillusioned, he’d travelled to Mecca for Haj, where he performed the same rituals and ate from the same plate as white Muslims. ‘The “white” attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam,’ Malcolm wrote. The story of Malcolm’s conversion to orthodox Sunni Islam was a story that Ammar told again and again.

Now Ammar and Mujahid were describing the benefits of Muslim lands, tossing the ball of idealism between them. A sustained volley: hospitality, sexual morality, social responsibility, racial equality, honesty, piety, peace.

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Sami. ‘You might be disappointed when you get there. I’m not an expert. I’m not… a conventional believer.’ He was floundering. He knew that the converts (Ammar was surely a convert too, an ideologically displaced person, a changeling) were projecting their dreams on to countries they were ignorant of, but wasn’t it his own habit to do the same? He was cramped by self-doubt. ‘I mean, I don’t suppose I’m the man to comment, but I expect Islam is something you find inside yourself rather than in any specific country.’

It sounded like a metal ball bounced on the upstairs floor. Mujahid’s head flicked up nervously.

‘But you don’t get those people in Muslim countries,’ he said. ‘That’s something.’

‘But Sami’s right,’ said Ammar. ‘It’s all “dunya”. The world is godless matter. It’s all the realm of annihilation. Without Islam there’s no meaning in it, not in the east and not in the west.’

The world means nothing. It was easy for Sami, in his new father-free state, to agree. The stars are merely rock and fire. Nations are dreams, or perhaps nightmares. None of it has any importance.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I agree with you.’

‘Brother, I tell you.’ Ammar spoke with glinting eyes. ‘It does me good to hear you speak like this.’

Then Ammar checked his watch and pointed at Mujahid. ‘It’s time,’ he said. Mujahid turned his head and walked forward to where an arch had been pencilled on the wall. He cupped his palms around his ears and tunelessly called the believers to the Asr prayer.

They came at a frantic pace, springing athletically to their feet and into place. To quote Public Enemy, the posse got velocity. Ammar moved into imam position. The others lined behind. The white convert in Pakistani gear. The two subcontinentals dressed like Arabs, in white gellabiyas. The Arabs and the Somali (Sami guessed) in tracksuits, like Ammar. What they had in common was that their garments were all hoisted above the ankle. Only Ammar bucked the trend. In his case, a vestigial natty dress sense overruled prophetic tradition.

After a pause, Sami found himself going along. He joined the right end of the line. He had no opinions to prevent him from doing so. He’d renounced them.

He touched thumbs to ears and folded his hands on his chest. Each body was in the same position. He anticipated the coming movements, and his self subsided. But the prayer’s calming discipline was offset by Ammar’s military delivery: a long sura barked fast.

In any case, Sami hardly heard it. He had entered Ibrahim’s world – the world of sacrifice. On his inner screen he saw glimmering images of himself with the knife at his throat. No, to be clear about it, with a razor slashing at his ears, and feet kicking at his testicles. Being whipped, tied by his feet to the ceiling. He kept his eyes resolutely open and focused on the earth-coloured plastic mat. And he kept on with the prayer despite his confusion, as if to do so was to win some sort of victory. Over Ibrahim. Practising Ibrahim’s religion in order to defeat Ibrahim: what misty and knotted logic was this?

There was vibration like dub sound between his ears. Like the ‘look out! look out! look out!’ of the barber’s, or was it the absent-hair sensation he’d brought away from there? A headache announcing itself, wordless but full of sound. He could hear or feel the grinding and gnawing of Ammar’s metabolism in front of him and to the left. And the noise of the others on occult frequencies. He heard or felt their amplified whispering to God, and also amplified anger, desire and anguish. He was in the crossfire, in the centre point of their reverberating unanswered passions. Volume rising.

He tried to tell himself he was observing only what he was observing, only the concrete floor beneath plastic, and the back of Ammar’s legs, only some unsettled young men gathered in a shallow basement to try to concretize things, but he couldn’t prevent the process of fusion whereby memories and dreams adhered to the moment like flies to fly paper. The mosques of his childhood stretched out beyond this one like a hall of mirrors diminishing into the infinite. And the screams of Syrian detention chambers, for reasons he couldn’t quite pin down, not yet, echoed around the basement walls. The histories of these others too weighed down the present. The Arabs, the Indo-Pakistanis, the Irishman, the African. From what tortures had their fathers fled? Over which jagged topographies of pain? Arrived like far-flung stumps of desert trees following explosions and a long stretch of failed rains. Most of each structure dead, the trunk dead, root and branch dead, only one green shoot twisting from the dead wood sideways and up.

The prayer finished, heads turning right and left to salute the recording angels. While the men counted praise on their fingers and then prayed further raka’as individually, Sami rubbed his scalp, trying to breathe the phantoms away.

‘I should go,’ he said when Ammar faced him. Tm getting a headache.’

‘No, stay. We’ll talk a little bit.’

The men had adjusted themselves into a seated circle. Ammar introduced them and Sami leaned forward to shake. Shafeeq and Abdullah (gellabiyas). Sulaiman, Tariq and Abd ur-Rahman (tracksuits). Brother, they called him. They were willing to make him their brother.

‘Brothers,’ said Ammar. ‘One of the reasons we are here is to gain knowledge. To gain and share knowledge.’

Some of the brothers said yes. Others gestured their agreement.