What beauty! It has been a long winter this year, but spring is finally here. My front garden is suddenly blooming; flushes of new green leaves and splashes of colour everywhere. There are pinkish red flowers on the camelia, purble tulips, bright yellow cowslips, orange on our exotic oak, yellows, pinks, blues of primulars everywhere. The scent is splendid. It is a sight that makes me mutter Alhamdulilah over and over again. Here is our front garden from upstairs this evening:
And another view from the front door:
And a final view out the back:
Alhamdulilah. Alhamdulilah. Alhamdulilah.
In 2003 my mother wrote an essay entitled “Help, there’s a Muslim in my family!” for the interfaith module of her Masters degree in Theology. After reading the copy she sent me, I wrote the following essay, and sent it back in May of the same year. It was a useful exercise for us both, I think.
Introduction
Part of the title of my mother’s essay on my conversion to Islam read, ‘Help, there’s a Muslim in my family!’ Ironically that lamentation is not very different from the one which led to my renewed interest in ‘finding’ God some five years ago. Back then writing was my main hobby and, for a while, one theme predominated in the words I wrote: ‘Help, I don’t share my family’s belief.’ I rediscovered some of these articles recently while clearing old files off my computer. Here’s an extract from one dated December 1997 (I can’t now believe the bad language and anger I expressed in the rest of the piece):
‘You don’t want to reject their faith, you don’t want to be different, you don’t want to be an outcast; you just don’t have their faith, but at least you’re trying to find it. But it’s so hard to admit that. They prefer to hear that you’re lazy, because that’s not such a disgrace. You’re filled with fear, so you don’t admit openly that you’re completely lost. You’re hoping that someone will pick up on your blatant hints.’ (neurolie.doc)
During my second year at university there was this intense drive in me to ‘find my way,’ to be like the rest of my family, but not at the expense of sincerity before God. Again, from the same piece:
‘Your sister corners you with awkward questions at the dinner table. “Why don’t you come to church?” Her tone is accusing, she’s trying to humiliate you, but she doesn’t understand a single thing. She thinks you’re just a lazy —-. Your family looks at you and you look back. Well, you’re not exactly going to tell the truth, are you? “Well, it’s like this. Sis. Mum, dad, bro. I can listen to the readings, the gospel and a psalm. I can listen to the sermon and learn. But how do you think I feel when we all stand for the Nicene Creed, and all I can say is ‘I believe in one God the father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible’? You want me to say it all, but faith isn’t about you, it’s about God. Do you want me to be a hypocrite before God? Of course you don’t. I don’t go to church because I don’t have the strength or the knowledge to claim your faith and I refuse to lie in the Name of God.”’ (ibid. – Note: these harsh words reflect my feeling at the time and not my views today.)
On the occasion of my eldest brother’s wedding, I remember bemoaning within that I would never be able to get married, for to marry outside a church would be like publicising to all that I didn’t share my family’s faith. This of course is now another source of irony, for a year and a half ago I did marry outside a church, effectively publicising to all that I didn’t share my family’s faith. One thing had changed; back in 1997 I was lost, looking, unsure of faith, in 2001 believing in Islam; the certainty of believing, as opposed to the flux of disbelief, made the ‘I will never’ less easily done.
This year, as part of her Masters degree in Theology, my mother wrote an essay entitled, “Help, There’s A Muslim In My Family!”: A Personal And Theological Reflection On The Experience Of A Son’s Conversion To Islam. Although it was submitted as an academic assignment, it was a very personal insight into the effect my embrace of Islam has had on the family. In preparation for this essay, she sought my involvement by asking me to review a book on Christian-Muslim dialogue. Hoping to add some sort of Muslim perspective I, along with my wife, did this, finding it a fruitful endeavour. Some time after her conclusion of the essay, my mother sent a slightly edited version of it for us to read. Although it was at first uncomfortable reading, its title coming as a shock to say the least, I can only express appreciation to my mother for opening this discussion up. My hope is that this may lead us to establishing some kind of dialogue towards understanding, of the kind which is much talked about institutionally, but rarely carried down to the lay men and women on the ‘street’. This essay, then, is an attempt to carry the discussion forward, in part responding to my mother’s essay and in part covering new ground.
Today we visited friends near Dorking in Surrey. The landscape out there is magnificent – forested rolling hills. Our hosts – an Englishman and his US Puerto Recon wife – have been friends of my wife ever since they worked together as Social Workers in west London some years back. We headed down the M25 late morning, arriving at their remote flat around lunchtime, and hour and a quarter after our departure. The greenbelt around the Capital is really amazing – amidst the cityscape you would never imagine that such beauty was so easily within reach – our Chiltern Hills and these Surrey Downs. Late afternoon our friends drove us up to Leith Hill, upon which sits an 18th century folly noted to be the highest point in southeast England. On clear days it apparently offers views as far as St. Paul’s Cathedral in London to the north and the English Channel to the south, but the sky was overcast and grey today so we could only see as far as the next hill. Still, the landscape was lovely. And the peace – that’s another thing; but for the call of pheasants, there was utter peace, alhamdulilah. The signs of Allah surround us. His creation truly is awe-inspiring, if only we would reflect.
Although Lesley White’s article focusing on the social life of the British Muslim community in this weekend’s Sunday Times was not particularly negative, it has irritated me. There seems to be an underlying assumption that the United Kingdom is defined by a monoculture, outside which lie the Muslims. It is not.
I am a native of these isles: my lineage on my father’s side is English through and through, while I am quarter Irish on my mother’s side, with roots tracing back to County Wexford in the south. Growing up, long before I embraced Islam, it was patently clear that there is no such thing as British culture. Our society has always been split along multi cultural lines – cultures of class, creed, political affiliation, dialect, region, social mobility, employment and so on.
My paternal grandfather was a strict Methodist who never drank alcohol, smoked or gambled. When he entered the army in the 1940s the Anglican chaplaincy looked down upon him as the follower of an inferior and erroneous creed. He often said he regretted not staying in the army, but my grandmother thought he might not have been happy in the long term. In the war years the other soldiers tolerated his abstention from mess culture – he would wander off on walks or go away to read as the card games, smoking and drinking commenced – but they may not have been as accommodating as the years passed by.
But these diverse cultures of creed have long existed within British society. My good neighbours belong to the Free Church and their culture too has its own particular mores – they are lovely people, extremely kind, very generous, living a good life, attending church twice every Sunday and once every Wednesday night. This little country town of mine has several Baptist churches, a number of Free churches, a Catholic church, a couple of Anglican churches, a Spiritualist church, a Quaker meeting house and several others of denominations I do not even know. The faithful of each of those churches are marked out by the nuances of their particular culture.
I am sure of this. I was brought up as an Anglican in the Church of England. Unlike my late grandfather, my parents and siblings all drink alcohol, but our culture was still distinct from that of many of my peers at school. Beyond our disinterest in football or regularly going to the pub – those musts of the mono-culturalists – there were the social links maintained predominantly on the basis of affiliation to a common denomination, the home group study circles held in each others’ homes, the regular attendance of church, Sunday school and the Christian youth group.
I was brought up in Hull in the north of England, which was traditionally a fishing economy and thus the culture of the town had its own flavour, dissimilar to that of the mill towns inland around Leeds and Bradford, and so people from Leeds used to look down on people from Hull, and vice versa. I think too of the strong cultural identities of members of the Conservative Party, The Salvation Army and the Socialist Workers.
I could go on, but I think you get my point. The idea that there is such a thing as a unitary British identity is a myth at best and an outright lie at worst. It is being used today as a weapon against the Muslim community – which itself is not clearly defined – by social commentators with other agendas. Lesley White writes:
“The unseen corners of British Muslim life have little to do with militant Islam, but they force an acknowledgment of how intrinsically different, how apart, this community is, and how doomed any demand for assimilation. Religion is not what they do on Sundays – easy to dismiss in our search for comforting common ground. It is a complete identity and a filter through which every relationship, every item of news, every bite of food, is mediated.”
My upbringing as an Englishman and an Anglican taught me that every sub-category of British society provides an identity – sometimes complete, sometime partial – that filters the very same things. My Methodist grandfather who was mocked at work for not drinking. My Anglican mother whose life revolves around her parish. My vegan friends. My football obsessed colleague. Still, the journalist ends:
“If we want to reach them, as Khalid Sharif suggests, we have to address them as a faith group rather than a recalcitrant ethnic subcategory.’ And if you don’t talk to them,’ he had added ominously, ‘someone else will.’ But I think we are allowed to request that they talk our language too.”
They? I invite Lesley White to Amersham, to climb this hill wee hill above my place of work. At the top there is a memorial to the Protestant martyrs, the inscription of which reads:
“In the shallow of depression at a spot 100 yards left of this monument seven Protestants, six men and one woman were burned to death at the stake. They died for the principles of religious liberty, for the right to read and interpret the Holy Scriptures and to worship God according to their consciences as revealed through God’s Holy Word. Their names shall live for ever.”
I remind you, Lesley, of The Toleration Act of 1689. I remind you that we are not living in those days when men and women were burned at the stake because they were non-conformists. We are where we are today because the British gradually learnt to accept that ours is a diverse society. We are Anglicans, Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, Adventists, Witnesses, Muslims, Jews, Humanists, agnostics… and this list goes on, and on.
We speak the British language. We are teachers, doctors, administrators, software developers, lawyers, factory workers, shop owners, street cleaners, social workers and students. We speak the British language, but like the Methodists and the Protestants before us we consider our faith a precious gem. It is you, Lesley, who must speak the language: assimilation is not the British way.
You can read her article here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2155558.html
There was a time, back perhaps twelve years ago, when I would say, “I can’t live without music.” It is interesting how times change. After eight years as a Muslim, during which time I have more or less abstained from listening to song, I find there is not much I treasure more than peace. Sitting here now, writing this down, there are only three sounds I am aware of: the humming of the refrigerator, the ticking of the wall clock and the heartening bird song outside. Oh, and a plane is just flying over.
The peace is a joy.
I find this different kind of living also affects what my ears will now tolerate. I split my entire CD collection between one of my brothers and my sister after I became Muslim eight years ago, but I recently received some of them back when my brother sold his English flat. I put a few of them on one evening, but I soon discovered that the only one which still sat well with me was Tracy Chapman’s New Beginning.
I used to have a very eclectic taste in the olden days. I was a fan of the South African reggae artist Lucky Dube, the Benin Afro-Pop performer Angelique Kidjo and the great musicians of Mali, but I was also into Irish rock. I would listen to the hip-hop of Spearhead, The Fugees, Arrested Development, Coolio and Rappin 4-Tay, but also the soulful notes of Erica Badu and Casandra Wilson. I listened to The Beautiful South and REM, but also to Sinead O’Connor and Nina Simone. There were many more in fact, the names of which I have long fogotten. Strangely I cannot sit and listen to them now as once I could. Lucky Dube no longer pleases me and The Fugees no longer entertain.
They disrupt the serenity. The bird song outside is a much greater delight.
Recently my eldest brother gave me Corinne Bailey Rae’s CD as a gift. I cannot listen to it though. Nine years ago I would have enjoyed that kind of thing – the couple of tracks I played for a few seconds reminded me of what I recall of Erica Badu in some respects. But my tastes have completely altered – that album must be to me what the hard Mos Def rap album was to him when I bought it on recommendation seven years ago. Each seems light years away from where we are now. I have walked this far along another path. My view of life is different. What appeals to me now is the more gentle, the more raw, the more pure. That which is closer to the human heart, or at least to my heart as it is today.
A lot of what I once considered beautiful music – that without which I believed I could not live – now seems like nothing but noise. I want the peace instead. It is interesting: one of the last songs I was listening to before I became Muslim is one of few that relaxes me to today. It is Tracy Chapman’s At This Point In My Life. Funny, because that title probably says it all.
What on earth have the Israelis been fighting for? I have just had the misfortune to encounter a three metre high Think Israel tourism promotion on an advertising board whilst returning from Jummah this afternoon, which features an up-close image of a virtually naked woman. So there we have it: a nation apparently founded on ethno-religious principles believes this is the way forward. Forget about Tzeniut in modern Israel – the Torah is clearly old hat for God’s chosen people in His promised land.
It is interesting where my frequent digressions lead me. I have a tendency to see in other people’s writing what they did not intend, or never could have intended: the little snippet, the sentence or the word, which leads me off in an altogether new direction.
Late last night I was thinking about that article on nasheed pop-culture which led me off on another irrelevant foray two days ago. I had considered it rather harsh at the time, but it has got me thinking. This journalist was not alone in expressing her concerns; indeed in this month’s Q-News, Suma Din reports on the growing concern that the nasheed business has lost its bearings as it becomes increasingly efficient and corporate. All across blogistan and cyberspace, fingers are tapping out thoughts on the subject.
That something is efficient, or corporate, or well organised does not have to be a bad thing. It would be wonderful if the teachers in Muslim schools received a decent wage, for example, the management respecting their teachers’ efforts. But I do appreciate the concern: there is that fear that we might just be diving head first down a lizard hole.
As I pondered the whole topic late last night – initiating thoughts that led me to search out some ahadith about the signs of the hour – it occurred to me that this concern could equally be applied to any media we are engaged with today. Muslims have sought a voice over recent years in print, through the internet and now satellite TV, primarily as a means of countering the representations made by what we commonly call the “mainstream media”. Just as we may have legitimate concerns about where a culture of nasheed performance may take us, it is reasonable to ask whether everything is sound in these other media.
Personally I find that I am caught between two poles. On the one hand I am anticipating an Islamic renaissance in the West – our Cordoba moment when our community will flourish in culture, art and literature as a light to humanity. On the other hand, considering the realisation of many of the signs of the Hour which Muhammad – peace be upon him – announced for us, there is a sense that this dream of regeneration is mere delusion.
Many engaged with the various communication media available to us today have high hopes about the former. There are growing numbers of glossy magazines and weekly newspapers circulating today. Thousands of us maintain weblogs and take pride in our contribution to… what? To the Muslim community? To literature? To humanity? To ourselves? We maintain them for some reason anyway. There are also thousands of traditional websites. There is the growth of Muslim publishing. And of satellite TV. I have been trying to look on the bright side too.
But the journalist’s contribution has left me thinking. When we write, do we do so with the proper adab? And do we respect knowledge as we should? Do we say we do not know when we do not know? Do we write about that about which we have knowledge? And when saying nothing will do, do we feel we must write something just to fill up the column inches? The journalist asked us not to listen to what is haram: similar could be said of our engagement with writing. Do we lay people have the ability or capacity to write about that which we are writing about, and if we do not, is it halal to continue doing so? I do not know the answer.
The signs of the Hour are in many minds these days. The violence, brutality and widespread killing remind us of our blessed Prophet’s warnings about the latter days. The once barefooted Bedouin are now racing one another to construct the highest building, just as he – peace be upon him – said they would. All of us are touched by the dust of usury, even as we try our best to avoid it, just as he foretold. We know that every word that our blessed Prophet Muhammad spoke was truthful. As Ibn Majah, Bukhrai and Muslim all reported, “The Prophet said, ‘Just before the Hour, there will be
days in which knowledge will disappear and ignorance will appear, and there will be much killing.'” As I witness the fulfilment of many a prophesy, I feel quite afraid of others.
Our noble Messenger Muhammad, peace be upon him, told us of the days when ignorance would increase, when an opinion would be sought from the most worthless of us, when writing would be widespread, when the matters of public life would be discussed by ignorant people, when the leader of a people is the worst of them. All of these have implications for those of us involved in one medium or another. So how are we to conduct ourselves if we are to engage at all? If we see an evil action, we have been commanded to fight it with our hands, but if we cannot do that we should fight it with our tongues, and if we cannot do this we should hate it in our hearts – and that is the weakest of faith. So we know there is a role for us – but how we conduct ourselves is the question.
I know that we should not read ahadith in isolation and we should really study under a teacher, for we are not qualified to interpret knowledge for ourselves. Still, I gave myself such a fright last night as I sat reading before my Isha prayer. To turn in repentance was the only response I considered appropriate. The Prophet’s words reminded me that even if Allah t’ala has granted me a vocation, He requires me to act within the framework of the Shariah with wisdom. When I do not know, I should be silent. If I am asked for my opinion on something about that which I have no knowledge, I should say I do not know. If news reaches me, I should endeavour to verify it. And if I see an evil, I should uphold Allah’s law above all, being a witness to the Truth and not a slave to the latest trend.
So for this weblog journey of a self-centred soul, it may mean some re-evaluation of my direction. Perhaps a return to those idealistic postings of early 2001 which were more dawah focussed. I’m not sure yet. I may just post less frequently – but then I have said that before. Whatever I decide to do, I pray that Allah t’ala grants me wisdom and protects me from those whispers that lead us astray so quickly. We all should, for the consequences do not bare thinking of.
I woke up late this morning, but now I’m up it seems like one of those Stupid News days. There was one of those debates about Islamic extremism and the moderates on the Radio 4’s Today programme on my way into work. Yahya Birt made a useful contribution, but the same could not be said of the author of a book on Immigration and Multiculturalism. He went off on the predictable “what do we mean by moderates” tangent – 40% of British Muslims believe in Shariah Law, he said, so when we’re talking about extremism it is a much bigger problem than we think.
He didn’t want to discuss the question of how we tackle those who think it’s a good idea to blow up innocents on the public transport system; he wanted to broaden out the discussion to cover anyone who thinks drinking alcohol is foolish and consuming interest is abhorrent. Well how is that going to help you prevent people from engaging in acts of mass murder? How does insisting that I am an extremist help you? I abhor wanton violence (I won’t even watch Hollywood shoot-em-ups), I pay my taxes, I don’t drop litter, I work in the public services, I try to be nice to those around me and helpful too, and yet you insist on labelling me an extremist. Sorry, I just don’t see how this helps you deal with the issue at hand.
It wasn’t the only Stupid News item. Once again the BBC is making much of Zacarias Moussaoui’s attendance of Brixton Mosque. I call it a Stupid News item because anyone who knew anything about Muslims would realise that – as people required to pray five times a day – we will attend the mosque wherever we find ourselves. So I have prayed in Brixton Mosque (once) and in the famous Finsbury Park mosque too (twice). I have also attended the Muslim Welfare House mosque in Finsbury Park many times, and Central mosque, and East London mosque, and a tiny Bengali mosque behind Euston Station. I have prayed in the Muslim Heritage mosque in Westbourne Park, the Shia mosque in Maida Vale, the Sufi mosque in Cricklewood and the prayer room in the back of the Salafi bookshop there.
I have attended the main mosque in West Ealing and the Pakistani mosque five minutes away. I have prayed in a Bengali mosque near Kings Cross that used to be a pub, and I have been to the Murabitun mosque in Norwich. I have attended an assortment of mosques in Peterborough, and the former Methodist chapel mosque in Hull. I have been to Hounslow mosque, and two in Southall, and I once tried to find Acton mosque. I have attended York mosque and Stirling mosque, and the Goodge Street mosque, and Aylesbury mosque, and Chesham mosque, and one in Leicester, oh and the Turkish mosque in Leicester too. Then there’s the Turkish mosque in Shoreditch and the other one up near Dalston. I have also walked past the main mosque in Dodoma, Tanzania, while I have attended many different mosques in Istanbul and the Artvin province of Turkey, not to mention my flying visits to Izmir, Izmit, Rize and Ankara. I have even utilised the Prayer Room at London Heathrow Airport and Wycombe General Hospital. Is that news? There’s a whole selection for you, depending which label you want to assign to me today.
The other piece of Stupid News focuses on how terror suspect Khalid al Fawwaz led prayers in Woodhill Prison in Buckinghamshire for a short period in 2003. Again, what is so incredible about this? In the absence of an imam, any of us can lead a group of Muslims in prayer. When friends visit my house, I lead the prayer. If I visit someone else’s house, my host will lead the prayer. In university prayer rooms up and down the land, students are leading others in prayer. What are the journalists thinking? Funny frock? Dog collar? Evening song and mattins? No, dear journalist, it really is not extraordinary at all.
Now I admit that I don’t really have any idea what goes on inside a Synagogue or a Sikh temple, but then it’s not my job to know. But these are journalists – it is their job to find out what is going on in the stories they are reporting. If journalists feel they have earned the right to lambaste bloggers as fountains of irrelevant opinion, they should at least try to prove it. These Stupid News items only seem to confirm that many of them are as stupid as me.
In an opinion piece on a US website last week, a British Muslim journalist lamented the growth of pop culture within the Muslim community. She was commenting on the response of female audiences to the nasheed (song) performances in a central London concert hall which in her opinion resembled a boy-band fan club.
“Eminent scholars throughout history have often opined that music is haram,” she wrote, “and I don’t recall reading anything about the Sahaba whooping it up to the sound of music.” It was a passionate piece, arguing that we Muslims would be better expending our energy listening to the cries of our brutalised brothers than listening to “what is haram”.
While she was undoubtedly correct about the state of the ummah and our need to do much more than we are, her article became something of a rant against one particular performer in places. I am not intending to rally to his defence, for I am neither familiar with him nor qualified to contribute to the music debate. I just feel like responding to a couple points.
She complained that the British-born performer asked his audience to cheer if they were proud to be British. “How can anyone be proud to be British?” asked the author, a convert to Islam, “The Union Jack is drenched in the blood of our brothers and sisters across Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine.”
Now I have studied political geography with particular reference to the Middle East, so I am well aware of this nation’s shameful engagement in those lands and others. But is this all that can be said about Britain?
Pride is not the word I would use to describe my relationship with my homeland, but hatred is not the alternative. The British can be happy to know that we have a national health service which is free at the point of access, providing healthcare to all.
We can commend the British for being generous to those in need: whenever there is a disaster anywhere in the world, we will dig deep and give to charitable causes. We can be enthusiastic about British tolerance which – although it has been eroded over recent years – has granted us freedoms unparalleled in many other parts of Europe. I agree that Britain is a contradictory place in which to live, but I disagree with those who say it is all bad.
The author does not seem to like the idea that Muslims should serve this nation of ours. Our minds should always be on the lives of others elsewhere, while we ghettoise ourselves. I feel like inviting her to engage with the UK charities I am familiar with, to see the affect of our over-there mentality.
Social depravation, abuse and mental health problems in our own communities are left untackled, the response under-funded precisely because of this attitude which sees only overseas recipients as worthy causes. Responding to the performer’s alleged plea that Muslims should join the Metropolitan Police Force, that author roared:
“Astafur’Allah! Dude, these are the same cops who have a shoot-to-kill policy and would have gunned down a Muslim last year if they could tell the difference between a Bangladeshi and a Brazilian. This is the same police force that has raided more than 3000 Muslim homes in Britain since 9/11.”
It is also the same force that is working to investigate the fire bombings of Asian businesses over the past week in South London. It is the same force that does its best to fight violent crime, street robbery and social disintegration.
In light of the growing culture of criminality amongst our youth (the four drunk Pakistanis who kicked another to death in Leicester Square and the Somali gang who beat up a Pakistani imam in Hayes are sadly not queer aberrations), I should have thought the idea that Muslims should join the Police would be considered commendable. Are we witnesses to this society or mere spectators?
The writer concluded thus: “Quite frankly, I really don’t know how anyone in the Ummah can really let go and scream and shout with joy at pleasure domes when there is so much brutality and suffering going on in the world today.” With great fervour she demands: “Oh, Muslims, wake up! The Ummah is not bleeding; it is haemorrhaging. Listen not to what is haram. Listen to the pain of your global family.”
I cannot argue with that. I just wonder whether she is using too broad a brush. There are many, many people doing the little things in their communities. They recognise where their power to implement change lies; the bigger picture just makes us impotent. So they teach in our schools, nurse in our hospitals, care in fractured homes and police our communities. I have seen my own soul and those thoughts that emerge in the face of despair, and they scare me. The middle ground is better. Surely.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4965116.stm
Oh Muslim youth, I weep for you. Those of you who gather outside the mosque immediately after Jummah prayer, the F-word already littering your conversations once more. Those of you stunting on your mountain bikes in front of old ladies so that they quake in their shoes. Those of you who park on private property and angrily argue with the owner about how you must, or else you will be late for the prayer. Those of you who throw drinks cans from the window of your car as you speed away. Those of you out on the town, inebriated by your alcohol consumption, who stamp on a stranger’s head, leaving him dead on the pavement. Oh Muslim youth I weep for you. You were given the greatest of gifts and you have thrown it away.
I weep for you, but still I have hope. Perchance Allah will replace you with a better nation.
So it is the day after May Day once more. While I often forget my birthday, this bank holiday and the day that follows it in the UK calendar is stuck in my memory. Eight years ago this wee holiday was the weekend I concluded that I believed in Islam. The Tuesday that followed was the day I uttered those few significant words: None has the right to be worshipped except God and Muhammad is his messenger. I am not alone in this however. I did not meet my future wife for another three years, but by God’s will she too had become Muslim over that same early May bank holiday in 1998. So we’ve both been living this life for eight years. It is some kind of reminder for us: the little we have done, and how much we still have to learn. And it could all have been very different: I trapped my ankle in a revolving door that bright sunny morning and almost turned right around to hobble my way back home. I had also decided, while believing Islam to be true, that I’d talk to my family about it first. Instead, I uttered those words that I have repeated at least fifty-thousand times since.
I am, as they say, ker-nackered. I have spent the afternoon in the garden, trying to prepare my wife’s vegetable patch. We are on very heavy clay soil and the clumps are like rocks. After spending a couple of hours trying to break the chunks of mud into smaller pieces, I started digging in 300 litres of organic matter. The job is not yet done, but I cannot go on. I can feel the blood pulsating through my veins and I ache all over. I am not complaining however: it brought back happy memories.
When we lived in London, we used to share an allotment with dear neighbours of ours. They lived a good fifteen minutes’ walk from us, but we were always dropping in for green tea and conversation. Unfortunately (for me) they emigrated on to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates a couple of years ago. My friend was from Peshawar but had come to England maybe two decades before; his grandfather was an English convert to Islam from the days of the Raj and so he had some connections with old blighty already. He was married to a Polish convert to Islam – the lady who produced the Polish translation of “Jesus Prophet of Islam”, for which I designed the cover. So for two or three years we shared an allotment about five minutes walk from his flat.
This afternoon, tiring myself in my wife’s vegetable patch, I recalled those days fondly. I remembered the days when we first got the plot. It was a massive piece of land – around 30m by 8m – and it was covered in weeds when we took it over. I remember the day when we got the key – the only tools we had were a screwdriver and a hammer, and so he and I were seen on our hands and knees trying to work the roots of thistles out of the ground with our primitive implements. Later on, we created a knot-garden at the front of the plot – a round bed of roses in the centre, with four other segments on the other sides of the path. We had a rose and a buddleia climbing over an arch at the front. That first year we had a constant supply of giant marrows all summer long and fresh tomatoes too. We also had a great crop of potatoes, which we had not planted.
My fondest memory, however, is of the chain gang. We had all that land, the soil rock hard and covered in thistles. We wondered how we would ever make any progress. My friend told me to leave it with him; I remember the sight – and the look on the faces of all the other allotment holders – when I arrived one Saturday afternoon. My friend and what seemed like fifteen Afghani men – dressed in sandals and salwar kameeze – were standing in a row, digging a trench with pickaxes and spades. By the end of the afternoon they had overturned an area 8m by 8m of weed-filled soil. I remembered that sight today – it made me chuckle. We did make progress in the end. We had a field of corn beneath which grew cucumbers. We had potatoes, carrots, parsnips and strawberries. But most of all, we had great friendship down there.
I miss my friend, but he is always there whenever I am working in my new garden. The last I heard he was making one of his own in Sharjah: date palms in the sand.
So I keep going on about writing – writing, writing, writing – but there is actually another past-time fast taking over. All of my hobbies are time consuming. It isn’t that I enjoy hard work, indeed I am probably one of the laziest people you could ever meet, but I love to see the finished product. So I keep on at the writing and the typesetting, though it bores me sometimes, because I want to see the end result. And I suppose the same is true of this new pursuit of mine.
For the first few years of my marriage I was banned from the kitchen after an unfortunate incident with a cake I had decided to bake for my wife. She had also heard rumours of the birthday cake I had made for my mother as a teenager, which my sister had kindly named the Stumer Cake. My reputation went before me it seemed. I was never satisfied with the exclusions of the no-fry zone under this regime, so one day I decided I would secretly flout the injunction. There was a celebration for two colleagues at my last place of work, so I decided it would be nice if I took with me a cake. And so my little adventure began, the result of which was a marble sponge, half ginger, half cocoa. The next day at work it all went rather splendidly – it literally went down very well indeed. Interestingly, one of my colleagues sneaked a piece to my wife for we used to work in the same office – and my destiny was changed forever.
I don’t know how many times my wife has asked me to bake a cake now. There was the one she requested when her friends were coming around, one for a visit by my siblings, one for my father and one more for my parents on our recent visit up north. I am now the official baker of at home. But cakes are not all I do. I’m onto pies now. Cheese and onion quiche. Apple, sultana and cinnamon pie. We took an apple pie to my grandmother. And the tour-de-force: lemon meringue pie.
Although there is a rather unfortunate tale accompanying the last.
We have at work a certain member of staff who is always on hand to help absolutely everyone out. She is underpaid and overworked. I can only say she is not of my generation – it is all I dare to say. Everyday I ask her how she is when I go to change the back-up tapes on the server. There was a week when she kept saying, “I’m fine, but I’d be much better if someone brought be a chocolate cake or a lemon meringue pie.” So I went home that weekend thinking that I would bake her pie. If anyone deserved a pie it was her, and so on Sunday evening I set about the task. It took me hours – the pastry base, then the fresh lemon filling and finally the meringue – but I enjoyed it all the same. Monday morning I delivered the pie. Well, who would have known it? I was certainly the flavour of the month. The whole of the executive team were busy tucking in.
Unfortunately word got out. My wife has a friend who works in my organisation and she had stories to report. Suffice to say, another embargo has been put into force. I am prohibited to take any more baking with me to the office. So a day or two later, there I was eating a slice of my homemade apple pie at my desk in the office when in walked our friend from the front desk. She asked where her piece was. I had to explain. “But didn’t you explain that we’re all happily married ladies?” she asked.
“Don’t worry,” I replied, saying the first thing that came to my mind, “I told her you were all golden oldies.”
I am sorry to report that I was no longer the flavour of the month. In under twenty-four hours my personal rating had shot through the roof and then back down through the floor. Oh, for my culinary adventures!
Last year I moved house and changed jobs at the same time. We got the keys for our new home in the last week of May and I started my new job in the first week of June. In both cases it was the start of something new in an unfamiliar town. We had lived in west London for a number of years and now we were moving out to a country town. I had worked in central London and now I was off to a small market town a few miles from my new home. In the process therefore I cut myself off from my neighbours, from my community at my old mosque and from my friends at work all at the same time.
Looking back on it now, this may not have been such a good idea. It has been a very strange year for me. The sense of isolation I have felt at times has sometimes been quite acute. I have realised this more over the last week or so having joined a tiny group for writers. The members are international, but there is some sense of relief as I hook up regularly with my new found virtual friends. This is not to say I have been living in a cupboard for the past ten months – friends have come to visit us and we have visited them. But there is something in having people to talk to near at hand.
I have great respect for my colleagues at work: they are very good at their jobs and extremely competent people, but conversation isn’t their strong point. I like to feel alive sometimes, but just coming to work, getting on with it and going home sometimes makes me feel like a tree. I guess everybody feels like this sometimes. Sitting next to the constantly whirring photocopier, my ears ringing, I often wonder what it is that is driving me around the bend, but I think I have a fair inkling now. The absence of like-minded folk.
But there we are. There is no conclusion to this post. I’m just writing down random thoughts.
Some of the people dearest to me are people who would call themselves “Salafis”. They nurtured me when I was new to this deen, helped me and never failed to offer me support. Over the years I have seen each of them evolve in their own particular way. One of my friends is sensitive, has had his ups and downs with like-minded people, but is firm on this path; he has had the jibes about his baseball cap and the times he returned to rap, but he always comes back, each time stronger than before. Another friend is an intellectual: he reads widely, thinks deeply and is gentle in character. As for me: what can be said of me? I decided several years ago that I wasn’t going to call myself a Salafi because the term “Muslim” was enough for me. But what group do I belong to? I don’t belong to any: I am just a simple Muslim, trying to do the best I can.
But something has changed along the way. My regular company has altered perhaps. One of my closest friends once kept company with those people we hear referred to as “hardcore salafis”; he believed passionately in that way, but things happened that left him severely bruised. These days he is an adamant critic of almost all of those who call themselves salafis, with perhaps the exception of a mutual friend of ours.
It is interesting: while my experiences has hardly been negative at all, other people’s cynicism has had its effect on me. In my mind I have exaggerated my few meetings with some less pleasant characters: like those lectures when I first became Muslim which saw some brothers boycotting me because my friend who couldn’t be there was a sufi (in fact he is one of the most resolute salafis I know; he just happened to be studying Arabic under a non-salafi sheikh).
The cynicism reveals itself in a number of ways. If I happen to be talking about a salafi opinion, I will find myself saying, “The salafis or wahabis or whatever you want to call them say…” Subhanullah, I have also found myself making fun of the double letters in their transliterations, the use of complicated parenthesis within parenthesis and the excessive use of footnotes. I feel ashamed really. I do not consider myself a salafi, not because I am passionate about something else; it is simply because my life does not resemble the lives of the earliest generations at all.
Salafis come in for a lot of stick, the kind of thing that drives this cynicism, but over the years I have met people from all sorts of groups who display exactly the same characteristics. In fact there are the people who take the same line as the salafis regarding going back to the earliest generations – except they insist on following Maliki fiqh instead of the Hanbali madhab. I have seen extremes in many a group, and yet I know that extremism is not its primary characteristic. Some of us owe our Islam to those people. Some of us have forgotten. I find that some of their biggest critics are those who were once proud to call themselves salafis; mankind is ever pessimistic, always ignorant of the blessings. As I wrote just a week ago in my post entitled “Words”, it is time we recognised that all of us are brothers.
You may wonder what has made me write all this. It was an article I read this lunchtime by a sister who is certainly not a salafi herself; an article which kicked me, because she talks about a trap I regret I have fallen into myself. It is a beautifully well written piece entitled “To be a Wahabi” and I would advise everyone to read it. She left me humbled and full of remorse.
You can read the article here: http://www.sunnisisters.com/?p=1429
