Real Differences

by S. L. Lim

  #

  One afternoon Tony saw a vaguely familiar form coming towards him on the walkway. She was wearing ultra-tight jeans, and her hair was cut in a style that was extremely flappable. As she came closer, Tony noticed she was rather flat-chested, and as she came closer still, he realised it wasn’t a woman at all. It was Hasan.

  ‘Well hell-ooo!’ Hasan’s voice was louder than he remembered. ‘How are things? How are you?’ Beaming ecstatically, he flung his arms open for a hug. Their bodies pressed together awkwardly. ‘Oh, man. Oh, man. It’s been forever since I saw you. I was just thinking, I should get in touch with Tony. Oh my God! What have you been up to? I’ve been up to lots.’

  Tony was just opening his mouth to formulate an answer when Hasan turned away again. ‘Oi, Alan, where are you? Alan, come here! This is Tony! He was one of my best friends at my terrible, awful, no good, very bad high school.’

  Alan came smilingly forward. Tony looked him up and down. Extremely skinny and possibly Korean, Alan was dressed in a smart but mostly conventional way: collared shirt, V-neck jumper, good shoes. ‘Oh, hello,’ he said, with a diffidence that could have been either shyness or reserve. ‘Good to meet you at last. Hasan has told me lots of good things about you.’

  Hasan broke in on them, beaming. ‘Alan is my gaysian boyfriend,’ he announced. ‘As you’ve probably already noticed, he is the cutest, most gorgeous and lovely human being in the entire world.’ Alan laughed with a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment as Hasan slipped an arm round his waist. ‘How are you, Tony?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ Tony could still feel the imprint where Hasan’s fingers had made contact with his flesh. Behind the ostensible conviviality, there was something defiant in his smile – He wants me to be shocked, Tony thought. I am not going to reward him with that. ‘Well, Hasan, I’m not going to act like this isn’t … surprising. Last time I saw you, you were –’

  ‘Miserable and closeted.’ Hasan eyed Tony levelly, daring him to make some challenge.

  Perhaps sensing the tension, Alan jumped in. ‘He’s pretty gay, I know,’ he said apologetically. ‘Sometimes even I feel like there’s too much gay going on round here, and I’m his boyfriend. This is why it’s better to come out during high school. By the time you get to uni you’ve got it all out of your system. It doesn’t have to be, I dunno, like, supergay all the time.’

  Hasan laughed and leaned his face into Alan’s shoulder. From the way their bodies moulded together, it was clear that they had done this many times before.

  ‘Well,’ Tony said. ‘I’m still a Muslim, you know.’ Right after he spoke, he berated himself for having felt the need to assert this. It raised the possibility that in future he might not be.

  ‘Are you?’ Hasan shrugged. ‘Oh, well, it’s up to you, I guess. It can be pretty exciting, but it wears off after a while. Believe me, I’ve been there.’

  Tony bristled at the condescension. He did not like the way Hasan thought he could dismiss him like that, as if Islam were a private possession of his which he could loan out to people like Tony and then casually retrieve at will.

  They stood staring at each other. Then, as if Hasan realised he had gone too far, he sang out, ‘See you round then,’ and turned to leave. Alan hovered for a moment, before Hasan grabbed his arm and steered him off down the walkway. It was as simple, and as final, as that.

  He thought for a while that it was a funny story. He almost wanted to tell Katherine about it, so they could laugh about it together. The boy I used to know is now virtually a girl, holding hands with men. To his surprise, however, thinking about it aroused in him a faint but unmistakable nausea. He told himself it was silly to let it get to him, but still the thought clung on. He remembered the clear voice with which Hasan had enunciated the words ‘Everyone welcome!’ when inviting him to that first talk about Islam in their high school hall. The way charisma had hung about his body, gathering along the ends of his beautiful eyelashes. Now these moments only existed in the past. There was no more sacredness in Hasan’s universe, only gaysians and gaytheists. The knowledge did nothing to shake Tony’s faith, but it made him depressed. Yet another corner of the universe had turned ugly.

  He told Katherine what had happened. He expected her to shake her head and say in a distant way how sad it was that behaviours like these had even spread to Muslims who should know better. Instead she went off at him. ‘You mean you let him go? Just let him walk away from you?’ Tony nodded wordlessly. ‘How could you do that? You should have said something! It’s not like he was born a kufr like we were. It’s worse when you know the right path, but you go away from it. You should have reminded him of his deen. You should –’

  She went on and on. At first he didn’t see what there was to be upset about. What else could he have done – reached in to rearrange the folds of Hasan’s brain? The more he got to know Katherine, the clearer it became that they were not really composed of the same material. She was incapable of weakness or hypocrisy. Once convinced of the rightness of an action, she would do it, regardless of potential conflict or embarrassment. This included doing dawah to any gays she came across. When Tony realised this, he was ashamed of himself. He had walked away from Hasan because it was easy, not because it was right.

  He brought it up with Can. ‘They’re going to burn in Jahannam,’ he said suddenly, out loud, and as he said it the fire opened up beneath his feet. The stink of cordite, the scalding hiss of smoke between his toes.

  ‘Really?’ Can seemed considerably less perturbed. They were sitting on the grass outside the law library, one of the few occasions in recent months that Tony had managed to pin Can down long enough for a conversation. ‘Yeah, that is pretty disappointing. People change so much, you know? But the thing about Jahannam, well, you can go a bit far with that. You should be careful who you listen to. There’s always some sheikh trying to freak people out.’ He continued to masticate the muesli he was eating from a lunchbox with a plastic spoon.

  ‘What are you talking about, Can? You were the one who taught me about this. It’s written down,’ Tony added, not without a squirm of embarrassment he did not quite understand. It felt weird to be schooling Can on a topic he’d only recently started to learn about in detail. He had been doing some guilty googling since he’d last talked to Katherine. ‘If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done. That’s from the Prophet, peace be upon him. It’s not just some random sheikh making things up. We don’t get to ignore the sayings of the Prophet when they’re not convenient. Part of me does want to ignore them, and that scares me - just because I like Hasan, because I was friends with some guy at high school.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Can, in a way that made it clear he didn’t think Tony was being fair at all. ‘Still, I think you have to be careful with stuff like that, you know? The way I see it is, it’s kind of like a fable, or a metaphor. You’re not supposed to cling on to the literal meaning of every single word.’

  ‘How am I supposed to take it, then?’ Tony’s temper was beginning to fray. Can’s denial of time, his pretending not to notice that over the last few months he had completely reversed his opinions, infuriated him. More than that: it was Can’s smugness, his glib assurance that millions of Muslims throughout history had been wrong and he was right. Apparently they had made some obvious, elemental error in their reading of the Hadiths, and he and his ilk were the first to notice it. Can, like certain high school English teachers Tony recalled without affection, acted as if it were self-evidently foolish to interpret what you read based on what was actually on the page. Yet they gave you no guidance as to how you were really supposed to interpret it.

  ‘OK, fine, so let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the bit about killing homosexuals is a metaphor. But a metaphor for what? Is it telling us we should love gay people and be friends with them?’

  ‘Well, I’m not an expert. And neither are you, Tony. You’re not a scholar or
anything. That’s what I’ve been learning lately - there are actually lots of different scholars. Some of them even say that being gay is not that bad -’

  Tony almost honked at the sky with frustration. ‘Yeah, like, five of them! Reformers or moderates or whatever. What the hell has happened to you, Can? I thought you hated those guys. Sure, there’s people out there who say the Quran is totally pro-gay. But have you noticed the timing? Is it just a coincidence that people only started noticing how Allah totally loves homosexuals once the secularists started shoving it in everybody’s faces? Seriously, Can, have you thought about this for more than thirty seconds?’ Even as he spoke, he felt his anger giving way to disappointment. They had drifted far. He knew they wouldn’t be best friends again, not the way that they had been, but he’d hoped that they could bond over disliking the same people.

  ‘I’m not going to argue with you, Tony –’

  ‘Because you’ve lost.’

  ‘Look, will you …’ Can was clearly struggling not to roll his eyes. ‘You’re smarter than I am, all right? I get that what you say sounds pretty logical, and I used to think that way too. And yeah, I’ll admit, I struggle with some bits of the Quran. But things don’t have to be one hundred per cent correct to help you live your life, you know? It’s like an analogy. Not exactly the same, but similar.’

  ‘An analogy?’ Tony spread his hands, grasping physically at nothing as Can seemed to be doing spiritually. ‘Sorry, Can, that’s not enough. I want to go to Jannah. I want to know what happens to me after I die. My actual, literal death. Which will happen to my actual, literal body. What am I supposed to do with an analogy?’

  But a certain shrinking in Can’s body language gave every indication that he wanted to withdraw from the conversation. It was plain he thought that Tony had gone mad.

  How strange, Tony thought. All I did was bring up death. It’s the only certainty in our lives, but apparently even mentioning it makes you a crazy person.

  #

  But there were comforts. The rituals of purity: he loved making wudu, splashing his ankles with water and dabbing it onto his scalp with a sensual sigh of relief. Yet around him, everything was ugly and growing uglier. He wanted to move out of home. Though overt hostilities from his parents had ceased, he was never entirely confident that Daisy wasn’t pouring alcohol surreptitiously into the cooking. When Daisy got wind of his plan, though, she went wild with grief and terror. His mother’s pain still had the power to move him. ‘Heaven is at the feet of the mother,’ the Prophet had said – though when he looked at his mother’s feet, with their painted toenails and colourful, plastic, Chinese-made thongs, he had his doubts.

  She had recovered from the depths she had sunk into when he first converted. She had started dieting again; she kept on saying she had lost three kilos, although you couldn’t tell it to look at her. She was going out with friends, and though he was glad she looked happier, it embarrassed him horribly to think of her walking around with half her body exposed, her sagging jowls, her lumpy arms protruding from a shirt with a dumb cartoon on it. What happened to modesty? he thought. Even Sunday-only Christian women like her were supposed to respect their bodies. Though he reminded himself that her sins were hers and hers alone, that they had nothing to do with him, an atavistic lurch still went through his stomach when he saw that she was making a fool of herself.

  She seemed to take pleasure in his physical vulnerability. ‘Oh, cold, are you?’ she would say, appearing at his door bearing an armful of woolly blankets. ‘Here, take this one.’

  ‘No, thank you –’ he would begin, but she would already have deposited it on his bed. For some days he’d make a point of not using them, but one freezing June evening, after a cloudless, eerily summer-like day, he shifted instinctively in his sleep and pulled it over his body.

  ‘Aha!’ he heard her say when she came in, uninvited, to open his curtains the next morning. She screwed up her nose. ‘Pfffff-euh! You must be very warm and sweaty! Did you remember to shower last night?’

  He hated how she tried to bring him down like that, reducing him from a mind and a soul to just a body. She knew nothing about his soul; his flesh was all that was left to her.

  In these moments his need for faith reached an excruciating peak. All around him was corruption; he felt like a castaway huddled on a tiny island in the middle of rising sewage. Everywhere he looked were sin and fitna, other people’s and his own. His own parents were kufr. Can was obsessed with winning a job at a bank to lend money at every possible rate of interest. Hasan, of all people, was fucking another boy in the arse. Some days he had to physically restrain himself from calling out to Allah, begging Him to wash away the stench of his many mistakes. You tried as hard as you could and still your saw your errors, failures and weaknesses accumulate, until, looking back, you saw only a whole mountain range of sin, tall enough to blot out the sun, obliterating any small good you had managed to accomplish.

  There were times when the grime of the world, his disgust at Daisy and himself, pushed him to an agony almost beyond endurance. He would begin to stammer and his eyes would lose focus; with an almighty effort he would fix his attention on whoever he was supposed to be talking to. As soon as he could he would flee to the bathroom and turn the shower on so he could stand beneath the beating water. It would run down his arms and across his scalp and onto his neck. He would scoop the water in his palms and wash himself: his fingers, the private parts, the roots of his hair, just as Muhammad used to do. Allah loves those who cleanse themselves. But then the water would run away from him, leaving him sweating and impure.

  The questions that had pursued him in the Haqq did not stop bothering him now. There were pictures on the internet, rows of bodies with gaping mouths and wounds, laid out with the caption SECULARISTS DID THIS. He asked himself why he continued to look and feign grief like the worst voyeur, instead of actually doing something about it. The more he thought, the clearer it became: he was afraid for himself. He did not want to sacrifice his comfortable life with his phone and his car and, yes, even music from iTunes occasionally. He was a softened, pampered hypocrite. His head was full of revolution, yet here he was, eating the dinner his mother had cooked and going dutifully off to class.

  He and Katherine talked for hours every week. They watched dozens of videos on YouTube and looked up the references in the Quran and the Hadith and the Sunna. This, he realised, was what had been missing from the Haqq: proper scholarship, real reading. He had not realised how far he had drifted away from the actual substance of their religion. Katherine could quote you a scholar for any occasion, and the Hadiths she chose were always bracingly action-focused. There is nothing more beloved to Allah than two drops or two marks. The teardrop that falls from the fear of Allah, and the drop of blood shed in the Path of Allah.

  Hers was not a faith beaten flat like a sheet of metal and reshaped into politics. Nor was it only a personal choice, yet another selection from an endless smorgasbord for the spiritual consumer. Katherine’s Islam was a command, a call to purity. Tony thought this was exactly how it should be. Allah was their Creator, after all. Not some silly first year he’d been assigned to do group work with in a tute.

  He told Katherine his thoughts. She took him seriously, which enabled him to look with serious eyes at himself. When she spoke about the Muslims who had been murdered by the kufr in Baghdad, you could see that it truly meant something – it wasn’t just gratuitous outrage. She was full of knowledge on the subject; he had thought himself a voracious reader, but that was nothing to Katherine’s appetite for words and command of all of the intricacies of the subject. When she recited quotes from scholars and martyrs and other luminaries, you felt that they were real to her, as familiar as if they had just walked out of the room. The map of Islamic history becomes coloured with two lines: one of them black, and that is what the scholar writes with the ink of his pen; and the second red, and that is what the martyr writes with his blood. And more beautiful than this i
s when the blood is one and the pen is one, so that the hand of the scholar, which expends the ink and moves the pen, is the same hand that expends his blood and moves the nations!

  Despite her vehemence, it was actually he who first explicitly brought up the topic of their becoming martyrs. ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we did something – I mean, to really show …’ he began, wanting to impress her with his piety, never imagining she would take it as genuine and imminent.

  Katherine’s expression became complicated for a moment. Tony could read nothing in it, except that no trace of fear was to be found. ‘You’re right,’ she said at last. ‘I think we should do that, yes.’

  The next step was to find out just how, logistically speaking, the thing could be accomplished. There were all kinds of instructions going round, some more reliable than others. Some had silly titles like ‘How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom’. They discussed various plans, most of them extremely vague and wildly impractical; over time, they began to lay out the specifics. Tony was periodically amazed at what the two of them had started to plan – at what he had helped plan. He felt he was observing a different version of himself: older, braver, more significant. This made him very proud. He liked to imagine what the others would say – Can especially – when they found he had gone further than them all.

  At other times he would be struck by a tidal wave of panic. These attacks began quite without warning. There was no trigger, no identifiable stimulus: just pure distilled fear, as overwhelming as it was inarticulate. An animal reflex, like being terrified of heights or boiling water. It was bad enough alone but worse when he was in company; it was only the greater horror of being embarrassed in front of Katherine that prevented him from breaking down and whimpering in her arms like a small injured mammal.

  Katherine never seemed fazed by the direction they were heading in. She read through all the instruction manuals methodically, just as she had aced their exams simply by completing the homework and showing up. Perhaps that was the secret to accomplishing whatever you wanted in life: breaking down a task into its constituent parts, each of which was individually achievable. Learning all you could about the nature of your task before executing it to the best of your ability.