I had a ritual once I had finished for the evening. I would kiss the Koran on the front and back and all four sides, having a silent conversation with Allah, and make six wishes, one for each kiss. Please can you persuade my father to buy me a ZX Spectrum. Please can you persuade my father to take me to London Zoo. Please could you persuade my father to buy me a telescope. Please can you make me less skinny. Please can you make us really rich. Please can you make sure that my mother and father never die. I would say out loud: ‘Please, Allah, don’t let anything happen to Mum or Dad.’ We did not have any other relatives in this country and one of my greatest fears was that if something happened to my parents I would be left alone.
My mother loved telling me stories about Islam and the Prophet. When I came home at lunchtimes she would sit with me in the lounge and tell me about the origins of Islamic festivals. In the evenings when she was pickling peppers or preparing to make yoghurt she would tell me about the angel Gabriel who had brought Allah’s words to the Prophet. I was a reluctant audience but my mother was so passionate in her telling that despite myself I would find myself captivated. She told me about the two angels who watched everything I did. ‘One writes down the good deeds and the other writes down the bad deeds. We cannot see these angels because they are made of things our human eyes cannot see but they are there all the same.’ She told me that on the Day of Judgement each man would have to account for his sins and if the good deeds outweighed the bad he would be admitted to Heaven. My first impulse after hearing this was that I had to tell my schoolfriends about the angels. They needed to have the chance to get into Heaven.
We were playing football in the courtyard outside school when Scott asked me what I had done the previous night. I told him I had been reading the Koran and related the tale of the angels. ‘Say something Koranic,’ he said.
‘It’s not Koranic, it’s Arabic,’ I explained, ‘and I don’t want to. Didn’t you hear what I just said about the angels and how they know everything?’
‘Go on! Say hello or something.’
‘I don’t know how to say hello, I just know stuff that’s in the Koran.’
‘Say that then.’
I had by now learnt some passages by heart and was secretly quite proud of this. I quoted a few sentences in Arabic. Within seconds a crowd had gathered around me, listening to what I had just said. ‘Do it again! Do it again!’ I felt like Paul Daniels or Doug Henning being asked to repeat a particular trick. I quoted another passage from the Koran. Again, pandemonium in the courtyard, the football game was abandoned and I found myself surrounded by cheering boys. It was as if I had scored the winning goal for our school. Even the tough boys, the ones we were all scared of, could not hide their curiosity at my special talent. As I went into school I could not wait to get home and learn more from the Koran. I hoped that the morning’s events were recorded by the good angel.
I finally completed the Koran seven months after I started. This delighted my parents who happily rang their friends to tell them the good news. ‘Not even nine years old and he has read it,’ my mother would say down the telephone, ‘and I taught him at home, just like his brother and sister.’ Secretly, I had hoped for something amazing to occur in the instant that I finished the last page of the Koran, perhaps not a miracle but at least a sense of well-being, a spiritual glow that might briefly envelop me and make me feel connected to my religion. But I felt nothing. I had not understood a single word I had spent the past seven months reading and when I asked my mother what I was expected to do on completion she answered that I had to read the whole thing again. ‘And soon you can start learning how to pray too.’
Great.
Once every few months my mother would organise a Koran reading afternoon where she would invite other Pakistani women and some of their children to our home. These events were usually held on Sunday afternoons. In the morning we would take the bus to Bury Park to buy food that we carried home in plastic bags which had photographs of baskets of fruit printed on them. While my mother bought meat and rice and bottles of Tibet cream, I would buy the latest edition of Stardust, which was a magazine devoted to the Bollywood film industry. We would return home and an old bed sheet would be spread on the floor of the lounge and my mother would begin preparing food. On the bed sheet was the Koran, not the blue volume but one bought from Pakistan which was divided into thirty separate sparas or chapters. Once everyone had arrived, they would sit cross-legged on the sheet, take a spara and start reading. Having completed the Koran, both my sister and I took part. When the women saw that we would also be reading, they congratulated my mother. ‘What good children you have, to have read the Koran at such a tender age and at home! Allah will be sure to reward them for their good hearts.’
My father excused himself from those Koran reading afternoons. He was more political than religious, more Pakistani than Muslim. Naturally he wanted his children to have read the Koran and learn how to pray but that desire was as much about preserving culture as exploring Islam.
Eid was the best part of being Muslim. On the morning of Eid my father would wake me at seven and I would stumble half asleep into the bathroom where I would do what were apparently called ‘absolutions’. After a quick mug of tea my father and I would go to the mosque for morning prayers. In the first few years that we lived in Marsh Farm there was no purpose-built mosque in Luton; instead we would all gather in a converted terraced house in Bury Park. Dozens of Pakistanis and Bengalis would meet and file into the living room, a mountain of shoes piled in the back garden as the white neighbours occasionally peered from behind the curtains.
By the time I started at Lea Manor High School a brand-new purpose-built mosque had opened in the heart of Bury Park. It was built from red stone and at the top of its minaret was a crescent moon, which was the highest point in Bury Park. Wherever you walked in the area the minaret was visible.
In the first week that it was opened, racists hung a pig’s head from the crescent moon. The search for the culprits lasted months but no one was ever caught. For my father it was just more proof that we would never be welcome in this country. ‘Those dogs who did this. They must have known that the pig is an unclean animal but you see how much effort they went to? That is how much they hate us.’
As much as I loved Eid – the new clothes, the ten-pound notes from my parents’ friends when they visited, the pilau rice and visits to the Ambala Sweet Centre – visiting the mosque was deeply embarrassing. It would start with my father and I sitting cross-legged with hundreds of others. The men in the mosque were of all ages. Old men with pointed silk prayer caps, henna beards and dyed hair, their children with freshly greased side partings concealed by white cotton prayer hats. My father dressed for once not in his suit but in a traditional kurta pyjama, immaculately pressed and smelling of Brut aftershave.
The imam sat at the front and spoke in an Urdu that was so ornate I could barely understand a word. From what I could gather the imam rarely deviated from two themes: the need to get closer to Allah, and the related theme which suggested that the best way to get closer to Allah was to donate some money to the mosque. ‘They’ve built their mosque why is there still a cash fund?’ my father would grumble as the imam pleaded for us to dig deep into our hearts and pockets.
Following his pleas two men would walk past each row of worshippers with an outstretched bed sheet. As they walked past men would delve into their pockets and throw five-, ten- and twenty-pound notes on to the sheet. Just before the men with the bed sheet came towards us my father would slip me a five-pound note which I would then toss in with the rest of the donations. It was then that things became most uncomfortable. With the donations collected the imam would stand up and lead the rest of us in prayers. Having not learnt how to pray, I was forced to just ape the men around me: when they stood up I would stand up, when they turned their head left so would I and when they knelt and touched the ground with their foreheads I would do the same. I had no idea what I was doing. Whe
n my mother had tried to teach me the rituals I had not paid much attention so the symbolism of each action passed me by; as the prayers continued I would be consumed by a paranoia that everyone in the mosque realised that I was a fake. I followed each gesture terrified of getting it wrong.
After the imam had led the prayers, everyone read out loud some verses from the Koran. Each man had his head bowed and he said the prayers to himself quietly, but speedily. The entire mosque would hum with the prayers of the worshippers. My father and I were the only ones who didn’t seem to know what to say. The prayers would end, each man would turn and hug the person on either side and wish them ‘Eid Mubarak’ and slowly file out of the central mosque. My father and I would collect our shoes and head towards the sweet centre to buy barfi and ludoos for the family. Returning home, the feeling that I was a fraud would not leave me alone.
With each year at high school being a Muslim became increasingly frustrating; when I had been younger it had meant reading the Koran, going occasionally to the mosque and tolerating the boys who would knock on our door to sing Christmas carols on Eid ‘because you told us it was your Christmas’. In the spring of 1980, a television drama called Death of a Princess had featured the beheading of a Saudi princess. At school I had been taunted with comments like: ‘So do they chop your arms off in Pakistan if you steal anything? Do they cut your willy off if you cheat?’ but this didn’t last for long.
By high school my friends were starting to drink and I was starting to fast. ‘Fasting is how we show what we are prepared to do for Allah,’ my mother explained. By not eating I would be able to spend more time contemplating my faith, I would be cleansed and spiritually nourished. At the start of Ramadan my mother would take out a special calendar which had details of what time the sun rose and set. If the sun rose at 4.16 in the morning, that was the time for the fast to start. I would be awoken at four, and after weakly splashing cold water on my face I would attempt to eat the hot chapattis that had already been prepared. Even though I knew I would not be eating for many hours it was hard to eat at that time in the morning. For the rest of the day there was no food or drink consumed. When I was at high school Ramadan seemed to land in the heart of summer; athletics, cricket and exams were all confronted on an empty stomach. My head would be throbbing by the time I returned home. The most I could do was to head to my bedroom and climb under the blanket and hope to sleep away the final few hours of the fast. Navela and my mother were the only other ones fasting and they were both busy working; I would be too weak to move. In the evening before breaking the fast we would sit around the chrome- and smoked-glass dining table. The minute that the fast ended, each of us would pop a date into our mouths. ‘Shaabash, my son. Well done!’ my father would exclaim. ‘Now eat. Eat whatever you like.’
As I attempted to wolf down the pakoras and samosas I couldn’t help noting that while my father was the strongest champion of Ramadan I couldn’t remember him ever fasting. ‘Don’t you think I would like to fast?’ he would protest when anyone pointed out this contradiction. ‘But what can I do? I am not a well man and Allah says that if you are sick you are free of the obligation of the fast.’
‘And what is wrong with you?’ I would enquire.
‘You even have to ask? I am a sick man! Your mother has to make me special food, I have to watch my blood pressure, diabetes.’ Considering his myriad illnesses my father looked quite well.
It might not have been so bad if I had felt some emotional release at the end of the fast. What made Ramadan so disappointing was that my faith was not rewarded; the longed-for flash of revelation, something magical and profound to overcome me the moment I started chewing on the date did not arrive. There was only a dull headache.
Having spent my high-school years surrounded by white friends and far from the Bury Park Muslims it was startling to begin sixth-form college in the autumn of 1987 and find the place seemingly over-run with Asians. They spoke in a strange patois, they did not share any of my music and film tastes; they were Muslims like me but I had nothing in common with them. The only Asian who became my friend was Amolak and he was Sikh and like me he was not a typical Asian. His father was an elder at the local Sikh temple but Amolak was a huge fan of Islamic qawwali music. I had grown up listening to men like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Aziz Mian, their religious devotional music was the Islamic equivalent to gospel music and it was one of the few things I could say made me truly proud to be Pakistani and Muslim.
By college I was no longer fasting during Ramadan, and had to be practically dragged to the mosque at Eid. The older I became the less sense religion seemed to make; Islam, as my parents taught it, seemed to be about rules and obedience. Not thinking for yourself but trusting the words written down hundreds of years ago; I found that an unsatisfying way to live. If religion was about answering the profound questions of how to live, I found that Bruce Springsteen gave me more persuasive answers than Islam. At college Amolak and I went around referring to ourselves as disciples of Bruce, arguing to anyone who would listen that the man was nothing less than a prophet. We called Dave Marsh’s biography of Springsteen ‘the holy book’ and quoted Springsteen lyrics as if they were psalms. We planned on forming our band which was going to be named ‘Yasser Arafat and the Ayatollahs of Love’. None of this delighted my parents. My mother would forever be goading me to take my posters off the wall; two years earlier I had come home from my summer job at the sandwich factory to find that she had taken down all my Madonna posters. The Springsteen posters, being less suggestive, lasted longer but whenever the conversation turned to how I had given up on my religion the good name of Springsteen would be used in vain.
To be a good Muslim seemed to demand that you blindly follow the rules, repeat the rituals time and time again and never think for yourself. It was only many years later that I realised it was not Islam I was reacting against, it was the cultural values of my parents’ generation. At the time I could not make the distinction between religion and culture; there seemed to be certain things you had to love and hate to be Muslim. You were meant to dislike Jews. My father’s attitude towards Jews was that of an uneasy admiration. ‘Look at what they have suffered and yet they own the world,’ he would say. ‘Do you see Jews going to pubs and drinking like the whites? No, they know about hard work. They are tough people. Like the Hindus. Very clever. Look at the corner shops: all Indian. Big companies: all Jews. And us Pakistanis? All we have are the taxis.’
You only had to watch the news during the eighties, or read about Sabra and Chatila or hear other Muslims discussing Israel to know that it was the role of every good Muslim to defend the rights of Palestine and hate all Jews. I had a problem with this. For one thing I was something of a Second World War obsessive and had read too much about what the Jews had endured to be able to hate them. Reading The Diary of Anne Frank had inspired me to write my own diary; during junior school I had loved When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and I am David. And then later I read William Shirer’s book about the Third Reich and watched the harrowing documentary, Kitty Goes to Auschwitz. By the time I was in my teens I had also discovered Bob Dylan and Woody Allen. Having seen Annie Hall made me feel I had more in common with Woody Allen than I did with the bearded men at the local mosque.
* * *
On Valentine’s Day 1989 the Ayatollah of Iran issued a fatwa on the British Muslim author Salman Rushdie. The Satanic Verses had been published the previous year. In Bradford Muslims had set alight copies of The Satanic Verses and I had seen Rushdie appear on television defending the book and arguing that it was not intended to offend Muslims. We discussed the controversy in my A level politics class; it was assumed that because I was Muslim I automatically wanted Rushdie dead. The truth was I was simply not as furious as I was supposed to be. The more the Rushdie affair dominated the news the more I realised just how little I had in common with the Muslims who were meant to be speaking for me. Not once did anyone who visited us during that time raise the subject of Rushdie
; the men we knew were pragmatic Muslims who believed in their religion enough to pray and fast but were too busy fiddling the social security to have time to demonstrate against a book they would never read. Watching angry Muslims was alienating; I couldn’t understand their anger. Perhaps real Muslims were meant to be furious but I knew that I was more offended and scared by the protestors. If they were prepared to get this upset about a book what else might they get angry about? What else might they be prepared to do?
To be a Muslim as a teenager seemed to involve not being able to do things: not being able to have Christmas presents, not eating during Ramadan and not being able to drink. Everyone knew that Muslims didn’t drink. By my final year of high school most of my friends had started visiting pubs; the following morning Scott and the others would report back on the night. I didn’t resent not drinking; having grown up in a Muslim family it had never occurred to me that I would ever touch alcohol.
In the first week that I arrived at university I was invited to have a drink. I was living in university accommodation, a block of flats called Grosvenor House, which came with its own pub. Fifteen freshers walked into the pub, unappetisingly called The Grot, and lined up at the bar. ‘So, what you drinking, mate?’ asked a ginger-haired Bradford lad whose name I had already forgotten.
Looking around I could see bottles of Newcastle Ale, Guinness and cans of Stella. Black Box’s ‘Ride on Time’ was playing on the jukebox. ‘Just a mineral water for me please,’ I said finally.
Greetings from Bury Park Page 19