‘You don’t drink?’ a girl named Sophie asked.
‘No, Muslim and all that, y’know,’ I answered, trying not to look into her huge brown eyes.
‘But the Muslims I know are the biggest pissheads going,’ said the Bradford boy.
‘Really? Yeah, well, I just never have, y’know.’
‘Fucking hell. So you mean to tell me that you have never touched a drop in your life?’
‘Nope.’
‘You’ve never been tempted?’
It wasn’t peculiar that my university friends wanted to know why I did not drink; what is far stranger is that I was not tempted. In the six years I lived in Manchester I went through three years of university life during a time when the city was one of the hippest places on the planet. I started university in Madchester’s heyday, when the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets were all exporting the baggy sound to the world; I went to the Hacienda nightclub, saw Oasis in the week that their first record came out and I did it all stone cold sober. I lived two hundred miles from home, surrounded by amateur alcoholics. I understood that if I was to join in with the drinking I would probably have more success with girls (less success was not mathematically possible) and yet I did not touch a drop.
If anyone asked why I did not drink I would reply that I was a Muslim. ‘So, are you quite religious then?’
‘No, I don’t drink and I don’t eat meat that is not halal.’
‘But do you believe in the religion?’
‘Err, well . . .’
‘What’s the difference between a vegetarian teetotaller who is not a Muslim and you?’
If pushed I would usually answer that I did not drink because I didn’t want to disappoint my parents; the cliché of the Muslim who goes mental at university was all too familiar. Years later I met other Muslims whose university and work lives were double existences riddled with lies and deceit; they were one way in front of their parents and entirely another when around friends. I didn’t want to be like that. I only half succeeded: although I never touched alcohol my mother was convinced that I was secretly drinking. ‘You come home smelling of cigarettes, far from home with all those white boys going to pubs. How can I believe you don’t drink?’ she would ask me when I returned to Luton.
‘But I don’t join in when they drink!’ I would protest.
’And what am I supposed to believe that you drink? Water? You probably have some white girl up there in Manchester too, is that why you don’t come to Luton very much?’
‘I don’t drink and I don’t have a girlfriend!’ I would reply, disappointed at the truth of the last part of that statement.
Religion is a powerful thing; some of my earliest memories are of my mother describing Hell. It was a place of eternal fire and torture; as a young boy I would imagine how it might feel on Judgement Day knowing that until the end of time you would be burning in Hell, all for not having lived a better life when you had the chance. Some of that fear abated with time but some remained. ‘The greatest sin in the eyes of Allah is to have learnt Arabic and to have forgotten,’ my mother would tell me and even as an intelligent university graduate those words pierced through me. I had largely forgotten Arabic and the guilt for having lost the faith remained. Even if I didn’t believe in Heaven and Hell I did want peace of mind on Earth; I envied those whose faith gave their lives meaning. Atheism is a cold and soulless road to travel; I wanted to believe and I hoped that by not drinking the possibility of a return to Islam still existed. So long as I did not touch alcohol then I could say I was a Muslim. It was not much of an identity but it was the only one that could not be denied to me. I was a Muslim. I just did not know what that meant.
Losing my father threw me into a crisis; it seemed so pointless to live, struggle, dream and achieve and yet at the end to die. Could it really be as brutal as that? It was in the months after his death that I most envied those who had faith; for all the tears my mother shed and the nights when she could not sleep, she did not once express any anger that her husband was gone. She was distraught, but even in the depths of her darkness she was able to say: ‘It was Allah’s will, he gives us life and he can take it away as he chooses, it is not our life but His.’ One part of me wanted to scream, ‘Where was Allah in the hospital room when you begged him to give you your husband back?’ but another part wanted to say, ‘I want to believe like you do.’ I wanted so much to believe that my father was not actually gone but had simply passed on to some other plane but the feelings never came.
When I was young my mother had told me that every Thursday the spirits of the dead return to the homes of their living relatives. If their family still remembers them they return to Heaven but those who have been forgotten are punished. Each Thursday after my father died, my mother would prepare some food: two chapattis, some curry and salad, and a glass of water. She would place them on the dining table and then recite a prayer from the Koran. During the time the television would be switched off and the rest of us would be silent. On every anniversary of my father’s death we would contribute a few thousand rupees which my mother would collect and send to an orphanage in Pakistan. The orphans would then devote themselves to reading the Koran, reciting it day and night until it had been read twenty or thirty times. The more times it was read the sweeter the blessings for those in the afterworld. I did not know if these blessings ever reached my father but it was reassuring to know he was not forgotten.
Losing my father did not make me more religious but it did remind me that I was a Muslim. Sohail was also spurred into learning more about Islam. ‘What you have to remember,’ he said to me some months after my father’s death, ‘is that you might not think about your religion most of the time but there are times when it is shameful to not know the basics. You remember Dad’s funeral? We did not know the correct prayers to say. We had to get someone to come over and say them. That is embarrassing! We should know these things, how to pray, what to say when someone dies, even if we never think about it, we should all know what to do.’
It seemed a reasonable suggestion; it is only in those life-changing moments of birth, marriage and death that we tend to ask the truly significant questions. For all my protestations that I was not a Muslim my religion was continuing to shape who I was; it was the reason why thinking about relationships and marriage was such a fraught business.
I moved from Luton to London and found myself making excuses for why I could not come home for Eid. With my father no longer around, Eid was not what it was. At the age of thirty I was comfortably British, occasionally Pakistani, and only technically Muslim. This was the twenty-first century after all. What did religion matter?
It was almost two in the afternoon when my mobile phone rang. It was a clear bright Tuesday in the second week of September 2001. I was heading back home to Luton; today was a rare day off and I had promised that I would spend it with my family. I answered the phone. It was Amolak. ‘Hey, mate, have you heard anything about a plane hitting the World Trade Center?’ As I worked in journalism friends would often run rumours and conspiracy theories past me; on this occasion I told Amolak that I knew nothing. We had been to the top of the World Trade Center some years earlier; the idea that a small plane might have accidentally crashed into it seemed plausible. I rang work to ask if they knew anything more.
‘Sorry, not a good time to talk,’ was all they could say before hanging up. I contemplated going into work. As a journalist the first impulse on hearing breaking news is to call in and offer to help; no one wants to miss out on the story of the decade. I sensed that something might have happened in New York but it did not yet seem worth sacrificing a day off and disappointing my family who already complained that I did not spend enough time at home.
Minutes after boarding the train the phone rang again. It was Uzma. ‘Are you watching the television?’
For the next forty minutes as the Thameslink train sped northwards to Luton phone calls and text messages described what the rest of the wo
rld was watching on television. It was too soon to know who might be responsible for smashing two passenger planes into the twin towers but I had my fears.
An hour later I was in the living room of my mother’s house eating keema aloo with chapattis and watching the second tower collapse in a mountain of dust. My mother was crying. ‘Those poor people, all they were doing was going to work,’ she said. ‘Going to earn money for their families, why did they deserve to die? Who would do such a thing?’ I continued eating and said nothing. Since she did not speak English my mother would often ask me to translate what she was hearing into Urdu. ‘Who are the idiots that would take innocent lives?’ she continued. ‘Do they not have a conscience? Taking fathers from children? What are they saying? Do they know who did this?’ I looked up from my food and said, ‘They’re saying it was Muslims.’
Osama bin Laden changed my life. For the first thirty years of my life I had been running away from my religion but on 9/11 my religion caught up with me. There was nowhere left to hide. A few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center I was having a drink with Amolak in Luton town centre. ‘You realise what this means, don’t you?’ my friend asked me. ‘It means that America isn’t ours any more.’
I said nothing but understood.
‘Me and you, Sarfraz, we always thought, fuck this country; if Britain doesn’t want us we always have America. Not any more, mate, now we are going to have to do what we can in this here country because you know that the second you try to land at JFK they are going to haul your arse into jail. They’re not going to bother with questions. My friend, we are fucked.’
‘You know I’m supposed to be going to New York next week, don’t you?’ I said. I had booked a short holiday to the United States, a treat for having worked through summer without a break.
‘You seriously thinking of going?’
‘Yeah, I’m still going to go.’
‘Mate, listen to me. Don’t go on that bloody flight. Are you fucking daft? Cancel the flight. Do you think they will even let you on the plane looking like you do? It’s going to be hard enough walking through the Arndale without being frisked.’
Earlier that summer there had been rioting in three British towns. At the time the disturbances in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham had been described as ‘race riots’ between Asian or Pakistani youths and the police. After 9/11 it was no longer about Pakistanis, Indians and Bengalis but Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. And there was no doubting who was public enemy number one. Flying into New York was always a tense experience, the thin-lipped airport security staff seemed to enjoy taking extra care in studying my passport photograph. I dreaded to think what arriving in JFK might be like following the attacks; the newspaper reports of innocent Asians being detained for questioning and then slung back to Britain confirmed Amolak’s grim theory that the United States was no longer our promised land. I cancelled my flight. It took a few days for me to notice the irony: I was scared of flying because I was scared that others would be scared of me not because I was frightened of terrorism.
It was a year after the 11 September attacks that I felt confident enough to visit the United States. Bruce Springsteen had reunited the E Street Band and had released an album, The Rising, that was being seen as his response to 9/11. One of the songs on that album, ‘Worlds Apart’, featured the Pakistani qawwali singer Rahat Ali Khan. To hear a Pakistani Muslim musician performing with Springsteen was an intensely emotional experience; for so long I had heard my parents condemn my music tastes by telling me: ‘Why do you like their music when you have your own?’ and here was the evidence that both worlds could exist together in one song.
When it was announced that Springsteen and the E Street Band would be playing in New Jersey, I knew I had to go. Amolak could not get time off from his work so I found myself buying a single concert ticket and booking a seat to JFK. Before I left I packed photocopies of newspaper articles that I had written. If the immigration officials wanted evidence that I was the journalist I claimed to be, I would have it available.
In the line at JFK I sucked hard on a mint and tried to remember to breathe deeply and look relaxed. I had not done anything wrong, I told myself, there was no reason to be anxious. I could feel my heart pounding. I was motioned to approach the immigration officer. He was a large man with a ruddy face and furry moustache. ‘Passport,’ he said. I handed it to him. ‘What is the purpose of your visit?’ he asked.
It was interesting how immigration officials could ask the same question to different people and apply varying levels of menace; if it was a pretty young girl the same questions would be asked as if they were just a formality but when they were directed at me it was as if I was in a court of law fighting to stay out of the electric chair. ‘I’m here to see Bruce Springsteen,’ I told him.
The man stopped what he was doing and looked up at me. ‘You’re here to see Bruce? And you’ve come all the way from England?’
‘Yes, and it’s not the first time either,’ I explained. ‘I’m a hard-core fan. Saw him in Barcelona when the tour started.’
‘Hey, Danny, this fella is seeing Bruce at Meadowlands,’ the man said, talking to his friend on another booth.
‘No kidding. That’s great, man. Bruce is the best. A real working-class guy, y’know.’
‘Yeah, I know, I’ve met him actually and he’s a really nice person too.’
‘Wait a second, you’ve met him!’
‘Yup.’
The paperwork was completed. ‘Well, let me tell you something: there is no better reason to come to the United States than to see Bruce Springsteen. You take your passport and have a great time at the gig, you hear.’
The biggest lie that I was told when I was growing up was that there was only one way to be a Muslim. That way was to be obedient, deferential and unquestioning; it was to reject pleasure and embrace duty, to renounce sensuality and to never ever ask why. Even as a young boy this did not appeal and so I spent my life thinking that I was a bad Muslim. The irony was that for all the temptations I never actually did anything too bad: I did not drink, I did not renounce my parents, I did not become involved with any extremist groups. I kept believing in an Islam which was more tolerant, which did not take itself so seriously that it burnt the books of those it did not approve of. I wanted to be a Muslim like Philip Roth was a Jew or Bruce Springsteen was Catholic. When I was young, that did not seem possible, and so I ran away from my religion. But, eventually, it caught up with me. I still hope to find my reason to believe.
Land of Hope and Dreams
Everybody needs a place to rest, everybody wants to have a home
‘Hungry Heart’, Bruce Springsteen
I was the only boy in my school who wanted Argentina to win the World Cup and the Falklands War. It was early 1982, I was eleven years old and in my last year at junior school. In many ways I was no different from the other children in my class. I excused myself from school for Eid, but still handed out Christmas cards. At home I read the Koran and learnt Arabic but at school I talked about The Young Ones and The A Team. It was easy to believe I was just like everyone else; my father, however, believed otherwise.
My father left Pakistan when he was twenty-nine but he never stopped being Pakistani. He came to Britain for economic reasons and his relationship to this country remained rooted in financial pragmatism rather than emotional attachment. ‘This is not your country,’ he would tell me, ‘you have your own country, your own language.’ I was brought up to believe that Pakistan was our true home and Britain merely where we happened to live. When we lived in Bury Park it was an easy distinction to maintain; we lived around mostly Pakistanis, I went to a school that was mostly Pakistani and the only people who ever visited our home were Pakistanis. When we moved to Marsh Farm that all changed. At school I was just another schoolboy collecting Panini football stickers and stealing peeks at the girls doing handsprings in the playground in the hope of seeing a glimpse of their knickers, but at home my parents were const
antly reminding me I was Pakistani and different from my friends.
My father was an extravagant farter and he farted without shame or warning. If he was in bed he would turn his body and lift one cheek so it was at an angle before letting rip with both methane-fuelled barrels. He seemed able to vary the sounds of his farts; some were rapid and high-pitched while others were blustery movements in three elongated parts. His explosive farts were rivalled only by the noises he produced when he was washing his face in the morning. The routine began with a comprehensive drenching of his face in water followed by repeated gurgling of the mouth. After that came the most distressing part. From the furthest reaches of his body my father would summon up phlegm. Clearing his throat does not adequately describe the enormous effort involved; it sounded as if the phlegm was being dragged out from the ends of his toes, from the tips of his fingers, phlegm that was not coaxed but rather threatened out. After twenty minutes of this dramatic throat clearing and spitting he would emerge as if none of us had heard the sounds that had been coming out of the bathroom. It might seem as if talking about my father’s farting and expectorations is tasteless and pointless but both were indicative of something else. I suppressed my farts, I squeezed my legs tight and hoped they would be silent; my father positively celebrated his. He farted like a proud Pakistani and I as an embarrassed Brit.
When the first newsflash came on television in the spring of 1982 announcing that Argentina had invaded the Falkland Islands, I didn’t pay any attention and continued with reading my computer magazines. Within weeks, Mrs Thatcher had dispatched the British Navy to the South Atlantic and the whole country had become experts on the history of the Falklands. In the evenings when the family sat together to watch television the news was filled with pictures from Southampton and Dover with thousands of people waving flags and watching the ships set off to defend the islands. Harrier jets rocketing towards the skies from enormous aircraft carriers and the daily press conferences from the Ministry of Defence where a funereal spokesman would deliver the latest news became addictive rituals. The Union flag was flying everywhere, the whole country was gripped by patriotism. International politics did not usually interest the pupils at Wauluds Junior School but the Falklands War reached even us. In the playground when we played football it was no longer Manchester United against Tottenham but the Argies against the Brits. Everyone hated the Argies and everyone wanted the Falklands to remain British. Everyone except my family.
Greetings from Bury Park Page 20