The Reluctant Mullah

by Sagheer Afzal

  As she had grown to maturity, however, she saw that what was for her a fortress was for others a dungeon which held their minds captive. But although she was alone, she realised she need never be lonely. For the secure sanctuary was not bound by the dimensions of her veil; it was as broad and open as the skies and guided by the mercy of Allah. This for her was the real test of her faith. To learn that sorrow was transient and that it was, after all, the creation of a divine will that was forever in a state of flux. Too many times she had tried to find the source of joy and tragedy but now there was no confusion. She had come to know the wisdom in surrendering herself to the divine will and relinquishing the ownership of her life. There was in this surrender a supreme and sublime peace which she could summon at will.

  22

  “Look Musa, you ain’t got that long left. It’s May Day. Every breath you take, every step you make, has all gotta be for one thing. You gotta get a woman. Confucius once said, ‘To choose is to refuse and to refuse is to choose.’ Meaning get your head out of your ass and get moving. You get what I’m saying bro?”

  Musa nodded wearily. Babarr wondered if it was the kind of weariness men display at times when they know they are cornered by the force of argument of someone superior in wisdom, or by plain depression.

  “Who are these people? How long have you known them?” Musa asked.

  “The girl’s name is Shagufta and she’s the sister-in-law of my mate Raza. He’s a mechanical engineer at some power plant. Now I ain’t ever seen Shagufta but I know his wife Rozia. Now Rozia is a good woman and since her mum and dad spend most of their time in Pakistan she’s had to take charge. I’m telling you it’s a good family.”

  He stopped the van. “I get why you’re pissed off but you still gotta keep trying. You can’t give up. All you gotta do is go in there with an open mind. You go inside and speak to the girl and just see how it goes. How’s that sound?”

  “Aren’t you going to come in with me?” asked Musa. “Not this time kid. I got stuff to do. I’ll pick you up in an hour or so.”

  Musa nodded his agreement. He got out of the van and inhaled deeply. It was time to go through it all again. He knocked on the door and it was quickly thrown open.

  “Hiya. I’m Rozia. Shagufta’s sister. Come in.”

  “How are you?” asked Musa.

  “Oh busy. I’ve hardly got time to breathe these days, with the children so little. I’m always chasing after them. They’re just like their dad, they’ve got so much energy!”

  She showed him into a dark room where the scent of air freshener lingered. The carpet was covered with a white cloth.

  “How old are they?”

  “My youngest is a year old and the other one is two. Having kids close together takes it out of you. I’ve got no time for nothing now. Still at least I won’t be old when they’re older. But you know what, the second you have kids, you change. You stop being a girl and start being a woman…” She gestured to him to sit down.

  Musa gazed at her as she continued talking about the woes of motherhood. Rozia was attractive. She had a fair face with large hazel eyes and her long brown hair was plaited down her back. As she talked her face morphed from one smile to an even bigger smile and then her eyes would widen as her voice dropped. She was animated in the way few girls in his culture were. There was no reserve and no formality. Her conversation was not guarded or contained, just simple and commonplace. He tuned in to her conversation again.

  “So afterwards I thought to myself our elders know more than us, innit? They been there and done it all and we should listen to them. And besides Raza was always out and about and I was getting a bit bored around the house. Especially with…” she pointed at a photograph on the mantelpiece “him and his wife. They were like so strict. They never told me to do anything but they just kept giving me the evils all the time. Then as soon as I had Bilal, they were OK. Before that I was just hired help. But what about you then? Raza told me you were in a madrasah and you know the Quran off by heart. You’re not one of them strict types are you? ’Cos Shagufta likes to have a laugh. She ain’t gonna be happy with a fella who tells her she can’t wear make-up or go out with her friends and stuff. Because you know in Islam we have a lot of respect. But all them imams just wanna keep us down, like we’re women back home. Is that what you’re like?”

  Musa blinked. “No not at all. I fully believe that women are empowered with the same rights as men. And I’m not looking for a doormat.” He stopped suddenly. He had said this before. “I’m looking for someone who will be my companion. My soul mate as it were. One of the reasons that I didn’t go for the veiled option is because I don’t want to come home at the end of a long day and just talk about Islam.”

  “You know, you speak dead posh. You go to a private school or something?” asked Rozia.

  “No, not really. I only went to a proper school up until year eight and then I went to a madrasah.”

  Rozia nodded. “I’ll go and get Shagufta. Are you all right chatting to her by yourself. You’re not one of them geeks who gets all shy in front of women are you?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “OK then. You wait here a tick and I’ll go get her. When’s Babarr gonna be back?”

  “In an hour.”

  Rozia rolled her eyes upwards. “He’s probably gone down to the local. You can’t keep men from their drink.”

  “No I suppose not,” said Musa courteously.

  Some minutes later he heard a gentle knocking on the door.

  Shagufta walked in and sat down with her hands tightly clasped and her back bent slightly. She wore a tight-fitting hijab and a long black shapeless dress and had obviously dressed to suit the occasion.

  “Assalaam-u-alaikum. Wa barakata ho,” she said carefully and correctly.

  “Waalaikum assalaam,” replied Musa.

  They gazed at each other. Shagufta’s face was wide and round and with two dimples that deepened when she spoke. Her eyes were not hazel like her sister’s but amber.

  She was heavily made-up and her lips shone with gloss.

  “How was your journey?”

  “Oh it was fine…thank you,” replied Musa.

  “I understand you’re a Hafiz. You’ve memorised the Quran,” said Shagufta.

  Musa nodded.

  “That must have been really difficult. I mean really really difficult. You must be really brainy to have done something like that. I could never do something like that. I reckon that’s why I was never good at school. I just couldn’t get stuff into my head. But you must be born clever. Was it really hard?” asked Shagufta eagerly.

  “At times, yes.”

  “But once it’s inside, it’s never going to go away. That’s the important thing isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  Shagufta thought hard. “So where do you think Osama bin Laden is?”

  Musa was startled. “I don’t know. They say he’s somewhere in Afghanistan.”

  “Do you think he did all those terrible things?”

  “Well considering he confessed to it, it’s difficult to deny it,” replied Musa.

  “But you know the thing I can’t get my head around is that he’s really well off. His dad left him about three hundred million quid. I mean if I had all that money I’d go and spend it on some nice things. Maybe do a bit of travelling. You get what I’m saying. Better than being cooped up in a cave all day long. I couldn’t stand that. I hate being stuck in one place all the time.”

  “What do you do now?” asked Musa.

  “I’ve done a course in Nursery Nursing. But my parents won’t let me get a job. They say I’ve gotta be settled first.”

  “That seems a little unreasonable.”

  Shagufta sighed.

  “It’s the way they are now. They never used to be like that when we was all little. But when my Dad got ill, he starting hanging around all these religious people and they kinda got into his head and he started acting all di
fferently. He started looking at us different. He used to look at me and my sister like we’d done something wrong all the time. He was really strict with Rozia, but soon as she got married, he was OK.”

  “What happened to your father?”

  “He had a heart attack and then he had to have a bypass. He’s OK now. He and my mum spend all their time in Pakistan. They come back just once a year to tell us off. My dad’s got no control when he’s angry…I’m telling you Rozia was lucky. They didn’t have to look too hard for her. People were always asking for her. Raza’s family were asking for her a long time. They said no at first because he’s too old but they kept pushing and in the end she said yes because he’s got a good job and a big house.

  “He was really sweet on her at first. He was always taking her out and buying things for her. Then when she had her kids, she got busy with them and he got busy with his work. That’s always the case, innit? When people get married, they got no time for nobody. Not their mates, not their sisters. All my mates are married now as well,” she added gloomily.

  “What are you looking for then?” asked Musa, his voice controlled.

  All of a sudden Shagufta was animated and chirpy.

  “Well you see, I’m not like clever at books and all that. But I know how to cook and keep the house really clean and stuff. And I ain’t into expensive clothes but I’m into my religion and all that. I’m not stuck up like some of these educated girls are. I’m into respect and culture and all that. And the other good thing about me is…”

  As she extolled her virtues, Musa knew. She was a decent enough girl who wanted desperately to be like her sister. She wanted to be looked after and she was not choosy about who she wanted as a husband. Any man would do as long as he was a good man. He smiled at her and her eyes shone with pleasure and she talked more eagerly. Her world was so simple. She was completely content with whatever was before her and her horizon never moved beyond her grasp. The thought that she could be so easily happy in a way that he never could disturbed him.

  As she rambled on Musa drifted off to a place where everything was shapeless, where there were too many people like him constantly searching across a changing terrain for a beautiful face or a means of escape. He saw a microcosm of a world where people flew past each other in their search for some glorious object of desire, a world where their paths never met. There never was an end point, a place where hope and desire finally met.

  “She was OK and she was wearing all the proper gear. I really thought this one was going to be a winner but all he told me when I picked him up was that she’s a nice person but not the one for him,” said Babarr.

  “What the hell did he mean by that?” asked Armila.

  “It was probably his way of trying to get out of it because she was a minger! You would not believe what a guy will do to get out of that kind of situation,” said Shabnam.

  “But that’s just the point. She wasn’t a hottie like Shabnam,” Babarr ducked as she threw her shoe at him, “but she wasn’t a minger.”

  “Something weird is going on inside his head. He’s not thinking straight,” remarked Suleiman.

  “Musa is sensitive. He has a lot of poetry in his soul,” Armila mused.

  “Fuck poetry. The fact is that he has hardly got any time left. After that, he’s gotta marry his cousin. No two ways about it. And he won’t be able to back out because he agreed to the deal in the first place. Then you know what’s gonna happen, she’s gonna walk all over him and he’s gonna spend the rest of his life as a doormat. Chicks from the homeland respect a guy who is strong and who don’t take no shit from no one. Musa just ain’t like that!” said Babarr.

  Suleiman walked to the office window. It was getting dark and the parking lot was almost empty. Across the unit he could see people in the insurance office. A balding man with a big belly in a colourful suit was talking excitedly to a couple of laughing secretaries.

  “Time is running out. He’s coming to the end of the road. If we know it then he’s gotta know it as well,” he said.

  “It’s just like that Sinatra song,” said Babarr. He strode to the middle of the office, put his hand in the centre of his chest and began to sing – badly.

  “And now the end is near.

  And so I face the final cousin.

  My friend I’ll say it clear.

  I’ll state my case of which I’m certain.

  I’ve been to muslimbrides

  I’ve travelled to each fa-mi-ly

  But more, much more than this,

  I did it my way.

  Regrets I’ve had a load.

  Too much to fucking mention.

  I’ve had my fill, my share of losing

  and now I’ll have some more.

  I did it my way!”

  Babarr bowed and the others cheered, jeered and pelted him with whatever they could find.

  Musa, meanwhile, had taken himself off to the Mosque. A child sat in one corner of the prayer hall rocking his head as he learnt the words of the Holy Quran phonetically. The pulpit seemed to Musa to echo a lament to bygone times when all woes could be addressed by the imam and when prayer would cool troubled eyes. The significant moments of his life were etched within the walls of the prayer halls of the Madrasah but since he had left the place he had begun to notice a change in the fabric of his life.

  Back then his moments of being had swung from the splendour of humble worship to the discipline of resisting the whispers of heady youth. Now it was all different, he too was bound by the same contours of ambition and fear. He could summon nothing, no memory of insight, no knowledge of the Quran, to aid him. Before he had prided himself in knowing that the luck which all people craved was not chance but penned by divine will and the ink was dry the instant life began. Now such knowledge was empty and futile: it did not instil calm in him when colliding with an unwanted reality.

  Musa focussed on the verse from Surah Rahman, The Lord of Mercy, engraved over the pulpit: “Which, then, of your Lord’s blessings do you both deny?” He smiled, remembering Mufti Bashir and his attic room in the Madrasah. The distance his vision had to journey to unravel such wisdom was so much shorter than the journey he had to make in the physical kingdom. He had once asked an imam why the verse was repeated so many times in that chapter and he was given the answer that because mankind was slow in learning to accept the truth, it had to be repeated.

  If he could not find what he was looking for in the short time he had left, would he forever read that verse and think like an ingrate or a victim of hapless fate? Either way the truth of the verse stood taller than the obstacles that faced him. The agreement he had reached with Dadaji seemed at the time to be a test of his faith, a challenge to his certainty that Allah hears the calls of all who cry out to him. And he had cried out, he remembered that very clearly. So what had gone wrong? Why now, after all these encounters, was he faced with the bleak prospect that his prayer had gone unanswered? He did not want a phenomenon. That was the strange thing about it. All he wanted was to find a woman who was beautiful and pleasant, someone with whom love could unfold within a modest life. That was it. Something simple and ordinary, granted a thousand times a day to others on this planet.

  He would not find the happiness which eluded his parents. He would have to marry as his father had done, in blind subservience. But he knew this much about himself: his life was only worth living when he was in the pursuit of passion and that passion would never subside. His journey would continue in flights of fantasy until the tie that bound him snapped and he would run barefoot, through hell if necessary, to find his little piece of heaven in this world.

  23

  “Assalaam-u-alaikum sisters. I am very glad to see you here and welcome to any newcomers. Tonight’s topic for discussion is the veil. Before I put forward the Islamic viewpoint, I would like to hear your own thoughts.”

  As Khadija expected, the women fell silent. She wondered who would be the first to break that silence. Probably it would be
the one who felt the most insecure about the issue.

  “Do you mean the hijab or the nikab, sister?” asked someone she hadn’t seen before.

  “Both.”

  “The fact is, I don’t wear the veil,” said one of the working girls. “I don’t have any shame in saying that. I go to the gym three times a week and I look good. As you can see I have long black hair that I’m very proud of and I don’t feel the need to cover it up. There’s no shame in taking pride in your appearance. I think that Muslim girls here should not have to follow Taliban-type rules of a country thousands of miles away!”

  “So you feel that the veil is a symbol of repression?” asked Khadija.

  “Yeah, I do, but I think Islam allows us women to make choices for ourselves and the choice not to wear a veil is one of them.”

  “Are you telling me, sister, that you are happy having men stare at you with their eyes popping out of their head and thinking dirty thoughts?” demanded a housewife.

  “Just because I like to feel all right about myself by making sure I look good don’t mean I’m some kind of slut. That’s not you coming out with those words, sister. You’ve been brainwashed into thinking that a woman is an object of sin. I don’t cause any man to have dirty thoughts about me. That’s his problem. You have been taught to think like a slave and that’s why you wanna dress like a slave!” came the defiant reply.

  “I am not a slave sister. I may not have your education or your money but I am not a slave. I wear the veil out of respect for my husband. My beauty is for his eyes only,” retorted the housewife.

  Now it was the turn of a radical girl. “I am not married, sister, but that don’t make any difference to me. I wear the veil because I want people to look at me and say to themselves, ‘She’s a Muslim’. And I am one hundred per cent proud of that.”