The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  Mustafa hadn’t intended it seriously. He was an atheist. For all of Sami’s life he’d told him the courageous thing was to look death in the face honestly, without inventing stories to console yourself. Men are atoms of nations. They are replaced, and the nation continues. Even the nation is replaced eventually, but humanity continues. Then humanity dies, but the universe continues. Perhaps the universe will die too, but we won’t know about it. We’ll have rotted long before. Don’t shirk reality.

  When Mustafa talked about the sky he was evoking their shared past, not the future. And he was doing what Qabbani did: it was the self-ironizing consolation of poetry. It meant nothing concrete. Words are terrible liars.

  So Sami never looked at the sky. He could do without the sentiment.

  He had a composite memory of numberless instances of stargazing, from infancy to his teenage years, from the perspective of their London home and from British fields and mountainsides. Also from dry nights on trips to Syria. All these scenes collapsed into one, in which Sami stood enclosed by one of Mustafa’s arms, the other pointing conically upwards into darkness. Mustafa’s dark manly odour, cigar smoke, aftershave, and the greenish cold air. Little Sami surrounded by rough warmth and the giant shape of his father. Mustafa pointing at brief atoms of light.

  The best nights were moonless. Otherwise they had to wait for the moon to fall. Then the sky would clarify and harden, losing some cheap romance but gaining detail and (so Sami imagined) intellectual force. Mustafa, joining the dots, found lines and arcs in the chaos.

  Their favourite constellation was Orion, bright enough to distinguish from their urban doorstep. Sami followed Mustafa’s finger as it traced the warrior’s belt, bow, scabbard and upraised arm. He repeated the Arabic names of the stars. Al-Nitak. Al-Nilam. Mintaka. Shapes with meanings, histories.

  ‘This is a warrior you know already. His real name isn’t Orion, but Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh our great ancestor. It was us who named him first, in Sumer. You know the story.

  ‘And over here’ – swinging his arm rightwards and Sami’s small weight with it – ‘is the red eye of Taurus, the Bull of Heaven. You see Gilgamesh’s arm raised to strike him?’

  Ishtar the love goddess convinced her father Anu, god of the sky, to send the bull to earth. The bull destroyed crops and slaughtered men. It unleashed havoc where there had been order. But Gilgamesh fought it, and restored peace.

  ‘There, Sami. Watch Gilgamesh’s arm. This is the moment he strikes. Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu, the wild man. They slew the bull on Cedar Mountain. It’s called Mount Lebanon today.’

  Sami said his part. ‘Then Enkidu fell ill and died.’

  ‘Yes. Enkidu fell ill. That was his punishment for killing the bull. Ishtar’s revenge.’

  Mustafa could map genetics and geography on to the sky. Sami half expected to find the map of Syria up there. He expected to find himself.

  Mustafa used to say any Arab could feel pride simply by observing the stars. It was Arabs before Greeks who had navigated by their light. Arabs who had narrated the first sky stories. He said the Arab nation had brought writing and irrigation and myths and cities to the world. By the Arab nation he didn’t refer merely to its latest embodiment, the Muslim Arabs who had ridden out from the Hijaz. He meant all the Semitic peoples in their eternal consecutive march. Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Nabataeans. These were his Arabs.

  He used to say the Arabs had no need of religion to make them great. He saw the Islamic period as a falling off from previous glory.

  ‘We’d always had gods,’ he would say, ‘but we didn’t surrender to them. We always knew they were our creations. We invented them and destroyed them at our pleasure. We used to make gods from date stones when we were bored.’

  And then he told the story of the Arab whose camels strayed while he was praying to a stone idol. The Arab ran to gather his camels and then returned to address the idol in verse. What use are you to me? he asked. Keep in your place. I am flesh, and you are only rock.

  ‘What,’ asked Mustafa rhetorically, ‘has kept us backward for a thousand years? What makes us think we’re starting the fifteenth century, according to the moon, and not ending the sunny twentieth? What has subjected us, the fathers of civilization, to thickheaded Turks and Albanian slaves and bloody Frenchmen?’ The answer followed with an exasperated waving of hands. ‘All this false consciousness. All this focus on the unseen. All this superstition and bloody otherworldly stuff. It’s out of character for us. We should be a people of worldly power. We should be contributing to material culture, as we did before.’

  His academic work focused on the ancient and the contemporary Arabs, cutting out the fourteen hundred years in between. He wrote about the pre-Islamic Age of Ignorance (which he campaigned to rename), about the priests of the old religions and the desert poet-prophets, and then left them stumbling and sinking into a morass of Islam, averting his gaze in distaste until he caught sight of them climbing out from under it in the late colonial period.

  ‘It’s a crumbling edifice. It’s already nine-tenths gone. It only kept going so long because of our energy accumulated beforehand. Now it’s all over and we’re unmoored from tradition. Well, it’s a bloody good thing. We can wake up, take a step back, see who we really are. We can get back to the essentials of being Arabs.’

  According to Mustafa, voices like Qabbani’s were leading the Arabs to a better future. If the Arabs felt a lack where there had been religion, then poetry, and freedom, could compensate. He used to talk about a ‘god-shaped hole’ (Salman Rushdie’s phrase). A wound remaining after the extraction. The chief concern of the responsible intellectual, he argued, was to heal this wound. ‘Man doesn’t live on bread alone,’ he said. ‘You need some hashish, some moon, to fill in the gap.’

  Sami heard different mythology from his mother. When Mustafa was out of the house they curled up together and she told him the adventures of God’s messengers. Of Khidr the Green Man. The tales of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. And as well as the history of the past she told him the history of the not-yet-happened. The signs of the end of the world, the Day of Standing, the final judgment.

  Sami learnt early on to separate these two narratives. If, for example, his father was talking about Egyptian gods and Sami brought up the story of Pharaoh and Moses, Mustafa would turn to his wife with darkened face.

  ‘What’s this you’re telling the boy? I want an educated son. Leave him alone with your superstition.’

  And he would calm himself, pacing between chairs and coffee tables, by reciting Qabbani. Usually ‘Bread, Hashish and Moon’, which railed against Arab backwardness.

  What does that luminous disc

  Do to my homeland?

  The land of the prophets,

  The land of the simple,

  The chewers of tobacco,

  The dealers in drugs?

  Sami’s mother’s name is Nur Kallas. She sells halal meat on the Harrow Road, wears patterned hijabs, prays five times a day. She dared do none of these things when her husband was alive. In those days all she had was a copy of the Qur’an, which she hid on the top bookshelf behind other volumes. She would kiss it and press it to her forehead before reading. Holding Sami to her breast at bedtime she would quickly mutter its protective verses. If Mustafa caught her reciting, he declaimed more Qabbani, stamping and tutting with the rhythm:

  The millions who go barefoot,

  Who believe in four wives

  And the day of judgment;

  The millions who encounter bread

  Only in their dreams;

  Who spend the night in houses

  Built of coughs…

  Worse still, Nur told stories about the jinn. First- and second-hand anecdotes of how they inhabited Damascene houses, and their good or evil interactions with the human occupants. She strayed into supernatural territory absent-mindedly, forgetting her husband’s sensitivities. Mustafa tolerated ghouls (an Arabic word)
, plus sprites, leprechauns, dryads and goblins. Also dwarves, elves and hobbits. He read Tolkien to Sami. But he drew the line at jinn, because these were mentioned in the Qur’an.

  ‘But everybody believes in the jinn. Even party members. Even Christians.’

  ‘Show me a jinn. Measure me a jinn. Weigh one. Can you? We want logic in this house. Two plus two equals four. It can never equal five. That’s how we talk here.’

  Then he would quote Qabbani’s ‘Stupid Woman’:

  Shallow… stupid… crazy… simple-minded…

  It doesn’t concern me any more.

  The poem’s intention was to protect women from the mockery of men, but Mustafa felt his use of these lines against Nur was somehow appropriate. Wasn’t belief in the jinn part of the whole repressive package? Didn’t his raillery therefore contribute to liberation?

  Even as a young child Sami wondered what had brought his parents together. He knew they’d met at university. Nur had also studied literature, and had planned to be a teacher, but she’d accompanied her more successful husband to London instead. Photographs of the early years showed her as an impressive extension to Mustafa’s cosmopolitan intellectual, with her bouncing brown hair cut short, her eyes shining with energy, her body bursting from low-cut dresses. Strange, unreal depictions. In his memory Sami saw her wearing her hair long and lank in protest against the lack of hijab. Her face closed. Her eyes directing their light inward.

  At some point she’d become more religious. At first she’d innocently mixed Islamic language with that of nationalism and modernity, not understanding how they could exclude each other. When she did belatedly understand, she chose Islam. In silence. With immovable determination.

  By the time Sami entered high school Mustafa had grudgingly accepted that the boy needed to know something of the patriarchs. For the sake of Sami’s secular education he gulped back his discomfort. These Semitic myths, after all, were essential to the literary traditions Sami would study. So Mustafa delivered his interpretation of religious pre-history. He explained that, as with Oedipus or Achilles, there was psychopathic drama in the lives of the heroes, a drama in its essence no different from that of today’s Speakers’ Corner soapbox types, or of the schizophrenics following mysterious itineraries through the city’s streets. The scriptural heroes heard the same internal mumblings and insinuations, but as they belonged to an epic age, with epic genres, these were granted mythic status. It was pre-psychological, pre-ironic. There was high seriousness everywhere, blowing out of the desert and rolling up from the sea. There was prophetic articulation of destiny. There was the terror of God’s voice.

  This raged, for instance, in the ears of Ibrahim. Where monotheism started: in the ears of Ibrahim and at the neck of Ismail. Mustafa told the story as he thought it deserved to be told, at hysterical speed. Ibrahim and Ismail. Another father and son duo. The old man despite his barren dotage begging God for a child, and the Voice after the passage of tears and time saying Yes, and the man bringing the boy up as the apple of his glinting eye, his only heir, only to hear the same Voice ringing in his raddled brain, telling him the unsayable, the obscene. Commanding him to cross dust fields and lakes of rock to a certain craggy mountain top, there to bind the perfect child, to sharpen the stone, to cut the slim throat. To wet the rock with his son’s lifeblood.

  The Voice relented, but the man had been ready to do its murderous bidding, that was the point. The boy too. The boy who, against both instinct and logic, helped prepare the place of slaughter.

  The foundational event of three religions. Attempted murder. A proud-humble refusal of logic. It filled Mustafa with righteous anger.

  ‘The voice in my head is God, especially when it urges me to perversity. Especially when it asks me to kill what I love. From now on I will ignore human law. From here henceforward I will fuck up the world for the sake of the unseen.’

  He raised his voice when Nur was near. Let her hear! Let her learn!

  Sami heard of the prophets from this voice that vanquished them. He learnt religion through the prism of civil war. Qabbani versus Qur’an. Mustafa’s bookish noise, and the unspoken but resistant verses of the Book. These were the opposing camps of Sami’s childhood.

  It didn’t take long for him to choose his side. He couldn’t accept a supernatural truth. If he had chosen one, his mother’s for example, he’d have had to deny all the others. And there were so many others. Just on his bus route to school there were as many one-and-only truths jostling for attention as there were fast food outlets. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists. The Nation of Islam in natty suits and carved hair. Rastafarians, both black and (absurdly) white. Anglicans, sagely complacent despite the colonization of their churches. Hare Krishnas singing while lapsed Catholics wolfed their free curry. Sikhs with daggers and briefcases. Freemasons with briefcases only. A Hindu incarnated as the bus conductor bowing inwardly to the elephant god. Scientologists offering personality tests. Grinning Discordians. A Sufi roadworker at his drill, pruning the rose garden within. Rebirthers. Crystal healers. Buddhists of the latest version. To name but some. All of whom had found the exclusive answer.

  Sami smiled from the rocking top-deck seat. All these people had to do was to stop and talk to each other and listen carefully and reflect for a moment. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to realize that they couldn’t all be right. In fact, that none of them could be.

  Belief X cancels belief Y. Leaving zero belief. Religion can’t last much longer. It had developed in deserts and villages. Here it’s an immigrant thing. It can’t survive the cosmopolitan city.

  Things looked like that then.

  Of course there were times when, because of his name, because of the expectations of neighbours and acquaintances, it became necessary to visit mosques. London mosques. This usually meant the suffocating lethargy of suburban living rooms, or maybe the neon vacancy of a disused warehouse. There were calligraphic plates on the walls instead of triple ducks in flying formation, but behind them there was mildewed wallpaper or damp pocked plaster. Instead of dry air swirled by ceiling fans, the stagnant soupy stuff of central heating. The odour of besocked feet instead of frankincense. It didn’t work. It didn’t fit.

  The mosques smelled of feet and mist and moss and wood. Wheezes and groans invited the faithful and atheists alike to prayer. Sami yawned back tears, shivering from his teeth to his anus, and settled and rocked on thin folded legs. An old man croaked the Qur’an in an Arabic deprived of a third of its consonants. Someone half coughed, like an engine failing on a frosty morning. And among the nostril noises, palate clicks and throat-clearings of older, heavier bodies, Sami in his isolation did in fact pray, blowing the time faster through a tiny hole in his puckered lips, but only for the prayer to end.

  How long it took. And Islam taking its time to die, oozing like blood in a geriatric’s hardened veins, sluggishly, soporifically, dripping and dropping away from an unseen wound.

  Accompanied by Mustafa, however, these mosque visits were also a kind of tourism, a glimpse into other people’s slightly sad, slightly exotic lives, a glimpse which reinforced the stable comforts of his own. Crouching at the back of a wintry English mosque, touching his forehead to the musty colour–bled thread of carpet, was for Sami what a stroll through dusty farmland might have been for a gentleman of the Raj, what a visit to a refugee camp would be for a portly American journalist. He was slumming it, in among cringing Old World reptiles, and Mustafa snorting quietly at his side, making him snigger, a wink and a ludic nudge after the prayers as they sat down to eat. The irony was delicious. The storing up of joke details for later in the car. The unsuspecting earnestness of the godbothered. They were – Traifi senior and junior – disguised by curling hair and thick eyebrows, by black eyes, wrapped in the mufti of their own faces. They had superior knowledge, so it seemed.

  It was an entirely different matter when the mosque invaded his home. When his mother had visitors and dared to roll out her prayer m
at with them. Mustafa slammed doors and played Egyptian dance music as loud as the stereo would allow, screamed ‘For God’s Sake!’ – in English, so that it wasn’t an invocation of the supernatural but an entirely realist expression of bad humour. Sami, swirling in a vertigo of shame and self-loathing, observed his mother from the height of his disdain. The worst of it was, he felt an urge to jump.

  There was certainly something attractive about the ritual movements Nur made, standing, bowing, crouching and kneeling according to an invisible logic. Despite Mustafa, and in contrast to her usual flustered manner, she performed each section of the prayer at a leisurely pace. Bangs and crashes failed to make her flinch. It was as if she was deaf. To Sami’s eyes – sickened, fascinated –a halo of peace and slowness surrounded her. It was with incomprehension he turned from her to the window, and saw rain, cars, people scowling under umbrellas. His father’s noise, the TV, and then back to his mother looking intently in front of her, moving her lips, her back straight, her fingers outstretched. There were conflicting worlds in this scene, worlds which could never be reconciled.

  Even as he frowned he felt a breath of wonder. Nur repeated holy words whispered or sung by hundreds of millions, their prayers rippling over the earth at times determined by the sun, as shadows progressed and dawn advanced behind. It was, despite the coughs and splutters that defined it locally, a chorus he would have liked to join. Part of him. In a way. Beyond the chorus there was a – he thought the word quietly – a civilization. A civilization made of sound instead of pictures. The names of its centres – Lahore, Samara, Isfahan, Timbuktu – resonating like the ancient desert poetry his father recited and which he couldn’t understand.