The Study Circle

by Haroun Khan

  ‘I said nothing. Seriously. It wasn’t me.’

  ‘You grassing on me, Shams? I said hold nothing back.’

  ‘That’s why I’m telling you. It wasn’t me. They didn’t even ask about you…’

  Mujahid held Shams, pushing down on the sofa. Shams put his hands around his head as if he was about to be hit.

  ‘So why did they stop you? I want an answer or you’re not getting out of here.’

  Shams looked at the walls. Patches of damp, browned plaster had fallen off in places. Some spots had haphazard but annealed fillings, leaving the room looking scabrous. His mind flailed, grasping at air until he felt something solid, but not sure of its true shape. With an uncomfortable stammer, he threw it out like an offering.

  ‘It wasn’t me. It was Ishaq. Ishaq reported me.’

  As soon as he had said it. As soon as those words made it sacrificial, he knew he had transgressed. There had always been an invisible boundary that he had skirted well. Until now. He felt an estranging fill him, a gap eaten in by his eyes and mouth. As soon as he had verbalised it, animated it, he also knew that it could not be true. Ishaq wouldn’t do that. But it was too late. Shams’ lip started to quiver.

  Mujahid checked over Shams, and took in his shivering disposition as fear of him. ‘You sure? Why would he do that?’

  ‘That’s what the MI5 man kinda said. To save his own back…maybe. Maybe it wasn’t him but the man kinda said it was…’

  ‘You were all stopped though?’

  ‘But I was the only one questioned by them. The other bros went through normal police stuff.’

  ‘That little chicken-shit. He was talkin’ all nice with me just today. You asked them about this?’

  ‘No, I kept it to myself. By Allah, I didn’t tell them what happened to me.’

  ‘Good, so what did they want?’ Mujahid let go of Shams and started pacing around, taking in a surmising orbit like a bird of prey.

  ‘Just random questions about…a lot about Ayub’s circle. They just wanted me to keep an ear to the ground. Maybe it’s about drugs and teefing ? I don’t know.’ Shams uncoiled his body and watched Mujahid move. ‘It felt bad though, you know? Like I had done wrong even though I hadn’t.’

  ‘That’s what they want. They want you to feel wrong even if you are doing nothing, walk around with your head low and beating on yourself,’ said Mujahid not breaking his movement, not looking back at Shams. It was as if he were talking to himself. ‘They want you to take responsibility for everything going on among the Muslims, while they take none for nothing.’

  ‘I was scared.’

  ‘They’re scared of you. You should enjoy their fear. People who see clear. They’re such hypocrites. You know Shams…about drugs…this country once forced Indians to grow opium and then sold it to the Chinese at the end of a gun. Opium Wars. Look it up, yourself.’

  Sham forced a wan smile. Not sure what he was going on about, but Mujahid seemed to be more bothered by the government than Ishaq. A good thing. ‘Like I said…I’m not sure what they wanted. They just want to stop criminals. It’s all nothing.’

  ‘Yea, but who are they to judge what a criminal is? Shams, do you think someone stealing an apple because they are hungry is evil? Do you? Yea, these pigs are far worse. They make systems. Massive companies to do their sin-eating.’ Mujahid had finally started looking, more like peering, at his lone audience. Shams could not keep up with Mujahid’s outpouring as he rumbled around the room, kicking-out at indistinct objects.

  ‘Slaves, they made them into cattle and shipped millions. Taking their names, so they don’t know who their parents were, or their religion, or what country they came from. They made people become rootless. A product. The Jews, they wiped them out in Europe. Like they were killing chickens it was so organised. Native Americans and Aborigines, they created laws stealing their land and destroying them. Then they turn around and say “my bad” and expect it to all fade away. Want us to forget, say it’s over because they say it’s over. They start shifting things, saying it is humanity’s sin, not unique to them. Then, after a while, they start focusing on our faults, until we, the boy stealing that apple, is the worst thing that ever happened in history, and they say the sin is ours alone, not spread around like theirs. But here’s the thing with that trick; we don’t forget history…it’s not over. ‘

  Shams waited to see if Mujahid would continue again. The words reverberated around the room and he found it difficult to focus, but the emotion just felt true. It felt right. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  Mujahid stopped pacing. ‘This changes everything. I can’t come with you now. I’m gonna protect mine, my family. So you go back and sort it yea? I believe in you.’

  ‘Akhi, I’m not sure he’ll listen.’

  ‘Shams, this is your mess now. You’re lucky you told me everything before I found out myself, otherwise you’d be in big trouble. Know what I’m sayin’?’ Mujahid leaned over Shams, the iron scaffolding of his face taut, and prodded his chest with each word. ‘So. You. Sort. This. Shit. Out.’

  Shams started to reply but Mujahid waved him away and pointed to the door. As Shams trudged, his stooped body barely holding him up, Mujahid called after him, ‘Next time I see you I want my money or the products, or there’ll be big trouble. Trust.’

  14.

  Ishaq and his father sat in sullen silence as they watched telly. News footage showed an old London riot in full rage. Some pop star’s son was in court for swinging like a crazed baboon on a Union Jack attached to the Cenotaph. Ishaq remembered a similar white boy had invaded the Houses of Parliament in protest for his right to hunt down and murder foxes. Ishaq thought that if it had been him, at best he would have undergone ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. Not really cricket that.

  Next up was a feminist group called Femen. Women, naked, not a fig-leaf between them. Outside a Paris mosque, they were trying to force their way in to protest at oppressive patriarchy. Ishaq was surprised to see that their troop were still going despite it being revealed that it had all been started by some old white bloke, who only hired nubile models to demo. Youthful women jiggled away, hoping that, by jumping up and down, their undulating breasts would start tremors. Tremors that would reverberate through the Muslim world and make veiled oriental women discard their vestments. Kinda like their version of the Butterfly Effect.

  Looking at all the grinning, blithely-eyed youngsters, hands in pockets, coming out of the mosque to take a look, these ladies had miscalculated their effect on the western-born. They definitely had made a gender rise, just the wrong one and not really the kind of rise they were looking for.

  With pendulous breasts still dominating their 50 inch plasma, Ishaq, through the corner of his eye, peeked at Dad, saw his mouth ajar, gawping, and tried to imagine that they were watching Countdown.

  Ishaq buckled under the weighty stirring of silence and bosom. ‘Dad, did you know in pre-Islamic Arabia some women used to walk around bare breasted?’

  His father looked, not impressed, ‘Hmmph’ and turned the television off.

  ‘You know when you were a baby we were worried you would be a right dumb-dumb. You started crawling late and backwards. Bloody hell I said. A dumb-dumb, we’ll be looking after him forever. Mum went running about for advice. Stayed up night after night praying…You turned out alright though. Smart. Too smart. Your mother has been crying.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Ishaq, as his eyes involuntarily welled.

  His father’s eyes studied him from above Mother’s cat-eye glasses, that were perched on his nose. ‘What do you want, one of those head to toe covered niqabis, who have a massive list of what you can and cannot do in the Sharia? Create a mini Islamic state in your house?’

  ‘No, but I don’t want the Muslim equivalent of all those boring posh girls at uni, who are proud that they read a lot but know nothing.’

  His dad shook his head and took in a long breath. ‘It was wrong, Ishaq. They were guests
in our house. I’ve told you before, even if your greatest enemy knocks on your door then you need to be hospitable. These are the old ways. Our traditions. The guest is king, and you broke that. Amir Bhai is a good man. We have so few friends from the old days in Pakistan. We must keep our ties.’

  ‘I know. I just want to have a life that means something.’

  ‘I want you to build a happy life. Build that first. In the end I don’t care if you marry Brown, Green, Yellow. I don’t care. Be Muslim, be happy. Just promise me one thing. Don’t forget Pakistan, don’t forget your mother’s and father’s roots.’

  Pakistan. The old country. Like a lot of the Islamic world, they were crap at being Islamic and crap at being Western. Honesty, hard work, self-reliance, loving your brother, all of the traditional Muslim values lost. Ishaq felt that giving to Pakistan was like giving, in painful love, to a doped-up sibling.

  Yet he heard his father’s hunger. Pakistan was once an idea, a whisper in the wind for the Muslims of the subcontinent that were to live as a fragile minority in an independent India. A notion made by men into a destiny. A country made manifest, cleaved in violence from the carcass of a rancid Empire. Hard to believe but, for a while, it was a hope for his parents’ generation. A shining light. A fresh start, an opportunity to begin anew, a tabula rasa onto which they poured their hopes and dreams. A dream that quickly soured.

  Ishaq had only been once. Pakistan once again had become a concept, more of a faint sentiment. Something far off that occasionally broke the hermetic seal of their lives. It was the early hours, a phone call, piercing the dark, that had his mother crying at the death of a loved one they had not seen for years. It was not knowing how to react as he felt his parents’ guilt at not being present among family. It was an inherited identity that that generation clung on to so generously, as if it had always been, even though it was scarcely as old as they. A secular state built in the name of religion. An internal contradiction that would always eat at itself. Pakistan was an idea that hardly worked, and only brought guilt and sorrow, so why couldn’t their British progeny themselves set out to create a new identity. One that brought advancement, and built something new with the Turks and Bangladeshis and Arabs that were also born here. But still, Ishaq recognised his parents’ need.

  ‘I will always remember, Father. I will do as you say.’

  His father made an irritated shift forward in his chair. ‘Don’t throw everything away. You will regret. You have a language, another culture, for free. No work. How many of these white people would love that. They are stuck in one mind, one head. All these maulvis and maulanas, I’m sure they can tell you from a book how to live, but it’s never the same as having to do it. You have a big advantage over many children in this estate. Two parents, stable family. Sometimes, you have to compromise in life. Make life easy.’

  He appraised his son’s tracksuit bottom and football shirt.

  ‘When I was a child I was walking along the road in Lahore, and a white couple, expensively dressed, was walking the other way. The man shoved me out of the way. He didn’t even look at me as he was too busy with making his lady-friend laugh at something. Pushed without a single thought. They’re probably dead now and they never knew I even existed. Pushed out of the way, on my own road, in my own country. They didn’t make exceptions for us or our ways. The English. The West. And you kids…’

  He looked at his son’s face. A face that would have nearly fit in among his childhood friends, in their ragged salwars, playing around an abrupt pond during monsoon season. Those large, innocent, lamblike eyes, with glowing, honeyed skin. His beautiful boy.

  ‘…you’re just like them.’

  Ishaq was open-mouthed, as he search for a response. ‘All we do is compromise,’ said Ishaq, his words dying.

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I mean you kids have turned out very British. You have all of their expectations. Of what life should be…but life never works like that. You think you automatically deserve things. But you have to work at life. And you should give people a chance…she was a good girl.’

  His father went to the Mosque on Fridays but didn’t mix with the community. Always complaining about layabout ‘Tablighis’, proselytisers who left the family for forty days to travel between various mosques, visiting local Muslims and calling them to the religion. And he hated the one-upmanship of the local Punjabi community. He knew that his father cared for none of this, only wanting to live a contented life, bringing up happy children.

  ‘But Dad, if you compromise too far, it’s a gateway to hypocrisy.’

  ‘Ishaq, son, when you have family and responsibility, when you have others whose well-being is based on you, that’s love not hypocrisy.’ His father waited to see that thought settle in his son’s juvenile head before he continued. ‘One good thing about the English is that, even if they want to stab you in the back, they will shake your hand in front, especially if money is involved. Our people refuse even that and cause even more hatred because that is integrity. Stupid. We call it ‘hypocrisy’, the English call it ‘pragmatism’. Maybe we should be more ‘pragmatic’.’ Gesturing to the television as a helmeted and bulletproof-vested correspondent broadcast from a war zone in the Middle East, his father said, ‘All these religious men and politicians, and soldiers with their laws and codes. They’re meant for living a good life. They forget that, and they think that the code, what they call their honour, is more important than the suffering of people. In a way they end up worshipping the code. They want control over all things. To control all minds so that people can’t sin or make mistakes. Isn’t that a form of ‘shirk’? You tell me.’

  Ishaq looked his father over, slumped in his tatty armchair, his favourite beige cardigan worn over a salwar kameez. His father’s only real social life came from occasional and illicit whisky-drinking sessions with his colleagues at the bus garage – Jamaicans, Indians, and Nigerians, away from their haranguing spouses, spending time playing cards in laughter. They bemoaned their destinies and their feckless children, kids they found baffling.

  Yet, he didn’t dare try to upbraid or chide his father. He was the son. Ishaq thought maybe it was a sign that he had no conviction. Maybe a bleeding heart that was not fortified enough to hold both a moral code and the strength to act on it, without resorting to an extreme of behaviour like some of his peers. All he saw was frailty. He had seen so much of it on the estate. People stuck in a vicious spiral of hardship leading them downward. One bad mistake to another. Cars crashing, revolving and twisting in slow motion, inexorable and unremitting. His parents, like others in the community, had lived lives of struggle, constant loss, and facing up to incomprehensible change. War, partition, migration. Settling among a hostile population. Wanting to do right by their children whilst always pining for home and what was familiar. He felt chastened.

  ‘I know. I know. I understand. I’m sorry. You’re right, I shouldn’t have been so rude.’

  ‘But then what do I know, Ishaq. I’m simple. I’m not complex…complicated like you are.’

  His father relaxed back into his seat and smiled, turning the news back on. ‘I liked the story, by the way. I didn’t understand it all. You were very kiddish but I enjoyed it. That woman, the wife, she is a pain in the bum. She would have nagged you to death. I was ashamed at the situation, but proud of you too, in a way. Although don’t tell your mum.’ He reached over and put a palm on Ishaq’s head. ‘Ishaq, life is simple. You should get an education, a job, marry, raise a family and try and be happy. The world can rage around but, if you get that right, everything else will be good.’

  His father pointed at the screen as cameras moved from crying Arabs to grieving Jews from somewhere in the occupied territories. ‘Barren lands, like empty homes, all they can produce is madness. Nothing but people telling you what to do. Arabs and Jews are so stupid. Why do you think they had to be sent so many prophets? What do you think Chinamen think of all that? Just get on with it, building their country. Bloody smart a
re those lot, I tell you.’

  His dad saw the absurd grotesqueness of the world. We all secretly knew. Ishaq knew he shouldn’t laugh whenever his father skirted being sacrilegious or racist, but he laughed anyway and it broke him out of his mood. His father was far too innocent to be a bigot. ‘Dad, I think the better term is Chinese, and I don’t think you can just dismiss the wisdom of the old, you just need to sift through.’

  ‘I’m old too. Wisdom? Maybe the old Arabs had it. They want to be accepted as equals, but rather than work at it stamp their feet. The new ones don’t know how to live a life, all they know is how to blow themselves up and to teach others how to do that, too.’

  The line was too crude but something about it rang true. The hopelessness of that act was as chilling as the finality. It took bravery to spend a life struggling with your family and community, at best seeing some incremental change. As well as the warping of the faith, it just said we should give up. In a supposed moment of clarity, some split-second of glory, just give up. An easy solution. It was a full stop imposed where there should be a question mark.

  ‘Another good thing about the English is that they’ve given up trying to control the big things, so they save-up the pettiness and hate for the small things. Spend a day on my bus and you’ll see that.’ His father looked at his son’s face and then turned back to the screen. ‘Ishaq, you think too much and worry too much. You’re like an old man sometimes. It is not the time for that. I know you. Do the Phd, see what happens…maybe nothing, but a few more years wasting, being free, won’t harm anything.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ishaq, bowing his head and averting his gaze. ‘So…if I was going to be a bit backwards, why was Mum all worried and you were all chilling, relaxed?’

  His dad lent over and pressed a thumb against a forehead. ‘Because Allah had given me gifts, and if I was to look after them for the rest of my time then so be it.’ Settling back, his eyes glinted, crow’s feet extended and the corners of his mouth curled upwards. ‘Plus you know your sister has always been the favourite. Now go upstairs. If your mother isn’t sleeping, say sorry.’