The Invisible Muslim: Journeys Through Whiteness and Islam 1787383024, 9781787383029

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introduction
1. ‘Mzungu!’: Kenya and Tanzania
2. Where Many Others Have Prayed: Muslims in Tibet and Ladakh
3. Swallows and Rats: Summer in a Turkish Fishing Village
4. A Tale of Two Eyebrows: Norouz in Iran
5. Distant Enough for Intimacy: Mostar and Sarajevo
6. A Blessed Tree: Digging for Andalusian Roots
7. The Strangers, At Home: Muslim and British in the UK
8. Love in a Lacuna: Sex and Marriage
9. Hiding in Plain Sight: On Hijab and Invisibility
Notes
Index

Citation preview

THE INVISIBLE MUSLIM

MEDINA TENOUR WHITEMAN

The Invisible Muslim Journeys Through Whiteness and Islam

HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL © Medina Tenour Whiteman, 2020 All rights reserved.  

The right of Medina Tenour Whiteman to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. Cover and interior art by Alice Mollon. A portion of Chapter 8, ‘Love in a Lacuna’, was previously published in Critical Muslim, ‘Issue 10: Sects’, edited by Ziauddin Sardar and Robin Yassin-Kassab, 2014. A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 9781787383029 This book is printed using paper from registered sustainable and managed sources. www.hurstpublishers.com

In memory of Clare Larmore (1924–2019), Hajj Hossein Alkaei Behjat (1931–2018), and Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore (1940–2016): ‘The Earth is not bereft of Light.’

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix Prologue xi Introduction 1 1. ‘Mzungu!’: Kenya and Tanzania 29 2. Where Many Others Have Prayed: Muslims in Tibet and Ladakh 57 3. Swallows and Rats: Summer in a Turkish Fishing Village 77 4. A Tale of Two Eyebrows: Norouz in Iran 93 5. Distant Enough for Intimacy: Mostar and Sarajevo 111 6. A Blessed Tree: Digging for Andalusian Roots 125 7. The Strangers, At Home: Muslim and British in the UK 159 8. Love in a Lacuna: Sex and Marriage 197 9. Hiding in Plain Sight: On Hijab and Invisibility 217 Notes 239 Index 257



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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MY DEEPEST APPRECIATION goes to everyone who generously gave me their time, observations and support, letting me bounce ideas off them and shamelessly steal their anecdotes. In particular (but in no particular order): Sadaf Khan, Yasmeen Rasheed, Umar Atallah Khan, Javayriah Masood, Will Noor, Nora Fitzgerald, Hamza Weinman, Anna Preger, Shireen Cameron (thank you for taking me on the road trip of a lifetime in Bosnia!), Shakir and Radia Massoud, Abdal-Rahim Gulliver, Kamila Toby, Rahma Harrison, Veronica Polo, my sister Hanna Whiteman, Ali Rafi, Rebecca Lemaire, Deo Ravinder, Siddiqa Summers, Abu Qasim Spiker, Yamila Margarit, Fouad Dakhouch, Ahmedou Bamba Diawara and Zainab Montero, Rahma Blanco, Humera Khan and Fuad Nahdi, Hamida de la Rosa, Medina Trevathan, Yussra Nordenfeld, Sheila Ruiz, Francisco Martínez Dalmases, Yasmine Ahmed-Lea, Sophie El-Hajj, Firoz A. Osman, everyone at Rumi’s Cave, and many others who preferred to remain anonymous. Some names have been changed in the text.   I owe a huge debt of gratitude to everyone who so kindly hosted me while I was travelling, especially my Iranian family, who utterly redefined my idea of hospitality.   I would like to extend my thanks to Samia Rahman for suggesting this book and for continually encouraging me to push through my reluctance, and to my late poetry mentor Daniel Abdal-Hayy  



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Moore and his family for nurturing my writing. I’m grateful to Hurst for taking a chance on me and especially to my editor, Farhaana Arefin, for putting my manuscript through its paces.   Special thanks are due to my husband and children for their patience while I was writing this book, and to my parents, not only for countless lunches, babysits and bookshelf borrowings, but for placing me firmly on the fence—at times an uncomfortable place to sit, but one that has given me a better view.   Last, but far from least, alhamdulillah wa shukru lillah, wassalatu wassalam ‘ala-nnabii. All praise is due to Allah, and all the errors are mine.

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‘I’M AFRAID I CAN’T let you into the United Kingdom if you’ve overstayed your visa in Spain. How do we know you won’t overstay here?’   For one long, hypnotic moment, I was standing in Stansted Airport, a few miles away from the village where I lived out my teenage years, my feet stuck to the ground with red tape.   I was holding my recently renewed American passport, minus the Indefinite Leave to Remain stamp that I had flippantly thought would be easy to recuperate. Right now, this passport felt like a foreign appendage or a phantom limb. It seemed I had been officially transformed into the outsider that—with a touch of smugness—I always felt I was.   This was not, in fact, the first time I had been stopped at the British border. A year before, at Bristol Airport, taking two of my children to spend the summer with their father, I breezily mentioned that my ILR stamp had been lost when my passport was stolen and reissued in Spain, and that I would try to fix this apparent triviality during my stay in the UK.   The young, affable woman at the gate summoned a superior, far more curmudgeonly official, who told me bluntly that there was no record of the lifetime I had lived in the UK and that she had every right to demand I leave my children, then aged three and five, at the airport while she put me on the first plane to

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America. She must have seen my knees buckle, because I was given another chance to make my case. This time my defence that I was only visiting as a tourist was accepted, and I was allowed to enter the UK. I was now officially a sightseer in the country where I had grown up; the rug of home had been neatly pulled from under my hitherto blissfully unaware feet.   I had been living in Spain for six years by then, having moved there with the naïve idea that a piffling thing like residency would be easily obtained. I’ve learned enough about performing to be able to stride through airports with the breezy air of a Scandinavian on her way to any ordinary European destination, say, an annual reindeer hustling event. But Spanish immigration prohibits American nationals from spending more than three months at a time in Spain, and getting residency there as an American had a long list of absurd requirements, including proof of United States residency, social security and health insurance, as well as a doctor’s letter declaring you free from STDs, HIV, tuberculosis, yellow fever, typhoid, and—I kid not—the plague.   Every time I entered Spain I would gird myself up with plenty of silent Qur’anic invocations to stave off the growing anxiety, but a combination of Spanish bureaucratic incompetence and the assumption that a white blonde woman couldn’t possibly be an illegal immigrant meant that nobody ever checked the dates on my stamps. I don’t typically wear hijab, especially not going through airport security. I looked like any other acceptably Caucasian tourist.   Technically, I could have been deported from Bristol to the US, a country I’ve never lived in. I figured, on the one hand, that this was a test of faith; on the other, it was a reminder of the fact that an African, Arab, South American, or Asian woman would  

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not be able to blag their way through border control as I so easily did. To non-EU nationals who have entered Spain without papers, or asylum seekers and refugees who have crossed borders—and even the Mediterranean Sea—to enter Europe, without a home to return to or any guarantee of surviving the crossing, it’s clear that our situations are worlds apart.   For a privileged person like me, having no official recognition of home might seem like a mere formality, but for many others it is visceral. It can make you dodge the public gaze, haunting quiet spots where you won’t be seen or staying at home and reading the news. The white gleam of a police car sends a bolt of electricity through your nervous system. You need to work, so end up accepting poor conditions, meagre pay and zero healthcare in order to avoid raising red flags.   As a white American citizen, I had none of those horrors to deal with, but the experience gave me a tiny glimpse into the insufferable frustration brought about by one piece of paper, or its absence, rising in an unseen barbed-wire fence that separates humans from hospitals, police protection, and the freedom to work. Immigration paperwork is so dense with jargon and rules that often change faster than the bureaucrats’ knowledge of them—not to mention the lawyers’ bills—that you can easily feel you’re caught in the centre of a nightmarish web that you’ll never escape from without a miracle.   Fast forwarding back to Stansted, I drew out my father’s birth certificate, which I had brought with me as proof of British descent so I could apply for citizenship of the UK. It’s handy to be able to hide or play the British card as needed, the way a ten-year-old is ‘only’ ten when it’s time to help out with housework and ‘already’ ten when there’s the chance of getting grown-up privileges.  

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  There was an added irony: the border guard facing me down was a British Asian woman wearing a hijab. If she had guessed my religion from my lengthy Arabic name, she didn’t show it. ‘I’m Muslim too!’ I wanted to tell her, eager to reach out to a sister, before weakly remembering that it was irrelevant to the situation.   Drawing up every last ounce of confidence, I gave her a rapidfire version of the story of my problematic nomenclature. Her eyes started to boggle, her head visibly to swim. Eventually she gave me the benefit of the doubt, telling me, with a hint of reproach, to solve the problem forthwith.   It would take innumerable phone calls with passport advisors (who all offered conflicting advice: ‘you cannot become British’; ‘you are already British!’), a name change by deed poll to correct the spelling mistake on my Spanish birth certificate that had set this whole nightmare in motion, and several months of wrangling with the passport office for me to finally secure that magical red book. By that time I had realised I was six weeks pregnant. My husband Ali, who is from Iran, could not get a visa to the UK to visit me. Here again was the barbed-wire fence that shuts out certain nationalities where my whiteness has consistently earned me the benefit of the doubt.   Two days after officially becoming British, I was on a plane back home—to Spain. * * * TO UNDERSTAND WHY I was in this passport pickle in the first place, we have to follow the same plane trajectory south and reverse the clock to 1982, the year that I was born in Granada, Andalusia. At that time outsiders were rare; even to this day,  in  rural areas, a stranger will be ogled at unashamedly. xiv

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‘Generalísimo’ Franco had died only seven years before, ending a dictatorial reign of quasi-fascism that had lasted nearly fifty years. The main modes of transport in the Albaicín, Granada’s old Moorish quarter, were puttering mopeds or poo-producing mules. If you wanted to make an international phone call, you would have to queue for hours at the Post Office. Rumours abounded that Gitana women snatched babies out of the arms of new mothers as they left the hospital; sadly, the marginalisation and demonisation of Gitano people is still very much alive in Spain today.   My parents had driven from Norwich to Granada with me in utero—I suppose that’s why I love the thrum of a moving vehicle—to join a burgeoning group of Sufi Muslims, galvanised by the echoes of Al-Andalus in that city, the last seat of Islamic rule in Spain. Most of them were Spanish converts, although there were an important number of Americans. One erstwhile visitor was a young Hamza Yusuf, a white American convert who would later become renowned as a teacher of Islam and the cofounder of California’s Zaytuna College. Three decades before he would be condemned by many people of colour for his dismissal of the Black Lives Matter movement and mockery of Syrian refugees, as well as contentious political moves,1 in 1982 Hamza was freshly arrived in Granada from studying classical Islam in Mauritania under the scholar Sheikh Abdallah bin Bayyah. He was told that a tiny, two-kilo baby with jaundice had just been born in a flat near Plaza Nueva. It was a stark, if romantically remembered, event: my mum labouring while gazing up at the Alhambra, ice cubes in her mouth to beat the summer heat, and a cassette tape of jazz legend Herbie Hancock with West African kora music rolling on repeat. Hamza gave me an Arabic name prevalent among the Mauritanian Tuareg people: Medinat An-Nur, the City of Light. xv

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  The civil registry had a hard time with us foreigners, and we with them. Add to that my mouthful of a name, with multiple sections and a disappearing ‘t’, and only one surname, my father’s, rather than the surnames of both parents as per Spanish convention. The Spanish registrar managed to record my first name correctly on the birth certificate, but, in a botched effort to get round the issue of a single surname, inscribed my dad’s middle name as my family name and vice versa. Dad didn’t speak enough Spanish to see the problem, and I was registered as Medinat An-Nur Whiteman Roland.   Dad had bigger issues at hand, anyway, as it was becoming clear that we couldn’t remain in the Sufi community in Granada. There was a Kafkaesque atmosphere of spiritual micromanagement, not to mention no work. A few months after I was born, he returned to England ahead of us to look for a house and a job, while Mum took me to the American consulate in Madrid for my papers. In those days, nationality followed the mother, and in any case, Americans were welcomed with open arms pretty much anywhere in the world.   There was a problem, though. My surname didn’t match my father’s. Dad was nowhere within telephone contact (recall the aforementioned primitive telephony), and Mum only had enough money to get directly from Seville to the UK. Mentally channelling Susan Sarandon, she fixed the consul with a dramatic stare and said, ‘If you don’t give this baby her papers, you’re going to be looking after us from now on!’   The clerk hesitated, then circumvented the problem by scrawling my name as ‘Medinat An-Nur Whiteman’ along with the words ‘Mother’s affidavit’, before stamping the certificate and sending us on our way. I like to think he added, in a robotic drawl, ‘Have a nice day, ma’am.’  

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  And so, with two birth certificates registering entirely different names, getting a British passport would require jumping some serious hoops. But who cared, when I had always had that magical Indefinite Leave to Remain? There was a certain debonair gleam to being a foreign national and having continental bureaucracy woes, especially in the whiter-than-white area of Essex where I grew up. It gave my Anglo-Saxon appearance a whiff of exoticism that I did nothing to dispel. The Arabic name was the cherry on the cake, even if it did lead to irritating mispronunciations at the doctor’s surgery: ‘Meddy Gnat?’ No, it’s Medina!   My youth was marked by a growing sense that I belonged to some vaguely foreign, Islamic place, unconnected to any specific land but nonetheless definitely not English. This awareness underlay every childhood experience outside the walls of my home. It was present at sleepovers at classmates’ houses, in the absence of the comforting sounds of grown-ups praying or the feeling of safety in Qur’anic talismans hanging on walls. For all the fun of those girlish giggle-fests, I always had a sneaking feeling of being in alien terrain, where dogs lolled on sofas and booze lurked in cabinets.   This feeling was there on my A-Level French exchange, when I was paired with a Mormon girl (perhaps the thinking was that Muslims and Mormons were both weird enough to get along). My exchange partner and her mum were sweethearts, but I felt too awkward to pray in her room and faked a day off sick to catch up all the prayers I had missed.   The feeling stood behind me defiantly when my Home Economics teacher, who was sore that I had won the right to wear black trousers instead of the embarrassing uniform kilt, barked at me to remove the inordinate strings of hippie beads xvii

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that hung around my neck, sneering, ‘Or is that against your religion too?’   It laughed when a girl at school exclaimed, ‘Oh! I thought Muslim girls all had jewels in their bellybuttons.’ Indeed there are pockets of Essex where Disney’s Aladdin is still held to be an animated documentary about the Muslim world.   Its heart sank when, in a kebab shop near my school in a town where ethnic diversity was restricted to restaurants, I asked pointedly if the meat was halal and was challenged to recite Surat al-Fatihah as proof that I was Muslim.   It held my hand as I tried to play it cool when turning down teenage classmates’ offer of alcopops with the explanation that I don’t drink, to replies of, ‘But you do smoke, don’t you?’ And it shook its finger at me like Jiminy Cricket when I stubbornly coughed my way through a packet of Marlboros as a rite of passage.   As I grew out of crimping irons and slouch socks, it became a familiar shape, squashed into the back of my conscience like an unwanted birthday gift from a well-meaning family member. Shortly after 9/11, I got chatting with a boy on a bus who mentioned Muslims with a dark look, inviting me to join him in railing against them. Every nerve in my body jangling, I politely told him I was, in fact, one of them. The conversation ended abruptly, and I carried on listening to Alanis Morrisette on my Walkman, acting ironic but feeling rather jagged.   Even now, when I should surely have grown out of fretting about identity, that feeling sits with me pensively in every smalltown cafe, bus stop or children’s playground in England, where I slip into familiar banter and even regional accents, unconsciously transforming myself like a chameleon so as not to stand out.   Part of me wants to scream: Let me be myself ! Let me act without editing, according to my own script! Let me dance if I xviii

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feel like it and cry in public without shame! Let me talk about God if I feel moved to, without fear of scorn! Let me pray without having to scuttle off into quiet corners, sensing people panicking behind me! Let me just be!   But another part, the part that so often wins out, wishes nothing more than to be one of the team, whomever I’m around. And that elasticity of outlooks, that weariness from wanting to commit to an immutable identity but knowing that it is too complex, has been the leitmotif of my life.

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WHENEVER I MEET someone new, a question burns like an extra-hot mint in the back of my mouth: Where are you from?   I have always taken to heart the Qur’anic statement that humans were created ‘in nations and ethnic groups so that you may know one another’,1 and passionately believe that human stories of heritage and journeys can be incredible horizonopeners. But if I’m talking to a person of colour, I’ve learned (the stupid way) that this is a very sensitive topic to broach. Often I have been reminded that a new acquaintance is not only Pakistani, but also—and maybe primarily—Glaswegian, Mancunian, or Welsh.   Having never been made to feel unwelcome because of my ethnicity, being asked where I’m from isn’t triggering. I take it as a perfectly innocent icebreaker. Maybe my interlocutor knows my hometown or has some piece of trivia to share about it. But for a person of colour, the question ‘Where are you from?’ most likely touches a nerve rubbed raw from innumerable reminders of their Otherness.   Talking with people of ethnic minorities, it quickly emerges that we white people are, on the whole, clueless. We put our collective foot in it almost constantly with comments that may not seem individually awful but that trigger painful resonances of injustices past and present, ranging from Partition to

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European colonialism in Africa, from transatlantic slavery to racial profiling and police brutality—injustices far too numerous and far too profound to be enumerated and fully discussed in any single tome.   Let’s imagine, for a moment, a person of colour asking a white person in the UK where they’re from. Everyone has come to this island from somewhere, right? ‘It’s not an equal exchange,’ says my Palestinian American friend Yasmeen. ‘If you’re a white person, you have a position of power and privilege in the West, whereas I’m a visibly religious minority that’s demonised constantly in the media, so you asking where I’m from is like, “You’re in my territory, where do I place you?”’   I actually do get asked where I’m from sometimes on account of my Arabic first name, incongruent with my surname and the ethnicity to which the latter points in large, neon-red letters. One Belgian friend’s mother said about me, ‘Her name’s Medina? She must be Arab. You can’t be English and Muslim— is she half-Muslim?’ By looks I could be Dutch, Swedish, Scottish, Canadian, Australian. When I was speaking French in Morocco, someone asked if I was Lebanese. To the question of where my name comes from, I could probably get away with replying, ‘I had hippie parents; my middle name is Cucumber,’ but it feels inauthentic.   However, if I thought that having a foreign-sounding name would put me in the same camp as the Other, I was mistaken. Being asked where your name is from reveals an assumption that you’re still one of the gang—it’s just your name that’s different. Having an exotic name can be an asset; having exotic genes often isn’t. But names are not just superficial add-ons, and for me my name is an integral part of my Muslim identity. While many converts to Islam choose to change their names, for me the name 2

INTRODUCTION

I was born with is a lifeline to a community from which my whiteness can sometimes distance me.   ‘Third culture kids’—people raised in cultures different from their parents’—often say they don’t fit in either camp, always belonging too much in one to fit comfortably in the other. I’m starting to wonder if I’m so curious about where others are from because it’s such a tricky question to answer myself. And if you can’t tell me your origins in a single word, then we’re both in the same boat. * * * SPEAKING OF BOATS, my mother’s ancestors crossed the Atlantic and set up home in North America. On one side her family originated in Alsace-Lorraine, a historically contested border area between France and Germany (the feeling of straddling two cultural spheres is familiar), while the other side of the family tree traces its roots back to Ireland. Americans love calling ourselves Irish; it helps us to avoid feeling guilty about being descended from English people, who breezily annexed most of the continent and all but annihilated its indigenous people.   If we really get down to it, though, those maternal ancestors were Scots-Irish, descended from Scots who had relocated to Ireland, some as part of the Plantation of Ulster—an organised process led by King James VI of Scotland and I of England to colonise Northern Ireland with people from Great Britain— and some in a separate wave of migration. Beginning in the eighteenth century, many of the Ulster Scots emigrated again, setting a course for the United States.2   My progenitors settled in Maryland, initially farming strawberries and watermelons while their descendants later became crab fishermen. Born in 1919, my grandfather Ernest (known as 3

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Toby) would be the first member of the family to get a college education, studying medicine at Johns Hopkins University. In later life he diagnosed himself with Asperger’s, after a lifetime of being ‘the weird kid’.   My grandmother Clare was born in 1924. Growing up during the Depression, she was raised on johnnycakes—corn fritters— and the occasional chicken brought back from visiting a family member in town. Her family were clever horticulturalists and, like most Americans of their period, managed to be self-sufficient on modest resources. Her mother, Cora, made a fine art of ‘make-doand-mend’, teaching rag rug–making classes at an adult education college, and died just shy of the age of 103. For her part, Clare had six children and one miscarriage, worked as a nurse, and did a stint in an aeroplane factory for the war effort—part of the first wave of American women to wear trousers to work. She passed away at the grand age of ninety-five while this book was being written.   Toby was one of only three white-collar workers in the town. His being the local doctor meant my mother took plenty of phone calls as a child, thus getting to know all of the town’s happenings: ‘Mrs Henderson’s gone into labour, Pop’; ‘the Purdue kid’s fallen out of a tree’. Once, a man came to the house carrying his arm, which had been torn off by a passing truck while he slept in the cab of his van with it hanging out of the window. The assumed homogeneity of 1950s small-town America belied an unexpectedly diverse assemblage of people, including a family of dwarves whose furniture was scaled down to size, and Roma families whose gold jewellery my mother dreamed of being allowed to wear. But racial segregation was also a fact of life; black people literally lived on the other side of the railroad tracks from my family. The town was scandalised when my mother danced with a black boy at a high school event. 4

INTRODUCTION

  Growing up on the Atlantic beaches of the East Coast, Mum fantasised about travelling the world beyond the ocean, yet she didn’t leave America until she was twenty-seven (even today only 42 per cent of Americans hold passports). While I am an American citizen, I haven’t been to the US since I was sixteen, and today travelling with my husband and son—who both have sole Iranian nationality—would be complicated. President Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ may no longer be in effect, but as the US considers Iran (along with North Korea, Sudan and Syria) a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’, they would need to be interviewed to prove that they are not dangers to Homeland Security. I have no desire to go back to America alone—what’s the point of visiting family if you can’t bring their cousin or nephew to meet them for the first time?   Although I recognise in myself a passion for horticulture, an almost wartime attitude to DIY and upcycling, and a penchant for extraordinary human stories, I don’t feel that the US is my ancestral homeland. So, in my search for roots, I turn, with some reluctance, to my English side. Why do I feel so ill-disposed towards the land that nurtured me?   My great-great-grandmother Alice Cornwell was the daughter of a railway porter from Melbourne, Australia. Her husband, John Whiteman, had emigrated to Australia from the UK, throwing his last few pennies overboard and vowing to make his fortune from nothing. John went into corrugated metal and managed to fulfil his vow on the back of the construction boom in the late 1800s. He would go on to become chief whip of the Australian parliament, and today there is a street named after him in Melbourne’s Southbank.   With Alice’s newfound affluence from her marriage to an up-and-coming steel merchant, she bought a supposedly  

 

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exhausted gold mine, used dowsing rods to ascertain where to continue digging, and made millions when the vein reappeared. She later separated from John and boarded a ship to England, leaving their five-year-old son George with his father. With the proceeds of her literal gold-digging, she snapped up various newspapers and magazines in London, including the Sunday Times, and indulged her love of dogs by founding the Ladies’ Kennel Association.   At the age of eighteen, after his father died, Alice’s son followed her to London, where he changed his name to Sydney Carroll and became a theatre impresario. Sydney co-founded the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park and discovered various actors, including Vivien Leigh and Lawrence Olivier. Even when his shows were tanking, he would rent a Rolls-Royce to arrive at restaurants like The Ivy, his protégés draped over his arms.   Sydney deserted his family, having already acquired an extramarital one, but did ‘the honourable thing’ and put all of his children through Oxford, as well as distributing among them various editorships at some of Alice’s magazines. Thus my paternal grandfather was editor of the fabulously glamorous Exchange and Mart. Sydney’s excesses didn’t help the family fortunes, but it was an article smearing the British monarchs in one of Alice’s newspapers, and the libel case that ensued, that forced her to sell her newspapers and retire to Hastings, where she lived out her last days breeding pugs.   Dad’s more immediate family became Quakers, perhaps foreshadowing the religious transformations that would later take place in our twig of the family tree. My paternal grandmother was a local historian, while Uncle Martin, better known as Kaye, became a journalist. Beginning his career at Cement Weekly, he later made his way to Lagos, Nigeria, where he spent half his 6

INTRODUCTION

working life and about which he wrote a travel guide in his latter years. Kaye eventually became the editor of West Africa Magazine (he was the only white man in the office, and with a surname like Whiteman to boot… groan) and as a member of the Royal Africa Society he would write speeches for the Queen.   Kaye’s wife Marva came from Barbados, and he wasn’t the only person on the English side of our family who married beyond the British Isles; in total, over four generations, we have collectively partnered with people from Barbados, Jamaica, Armenia (via Tehran), Germany, Spain, France, Poland, Iran, India and Japan. * * * I AM WARY, HOWEVER, of the feeling of self-satisfaction that this international mix of family members can encourage. I’m not immune from being racist or prejudiced; how could I be, as a privileged person in a system that not only advantages me but also feeds me all kinds of biases? Even as a woman I sometimes find I have internalised misogyny, struggling to remember the names of women whose work I respect and want to honour, when the names of important men seem to fix themselves so easily in my mind. Racism, too, is not an individual’s moral failing, but a structure that deeply underpins the past and present of Western society. Accepting the impossibility of not being racist in this context can be liberating, because it removes the fear of being an evil person that admitting to racism entails. White people will not be able to able to challenge the racial hierarchy without first accepting that it is our problem.   I grew up in a 1990s Britain that was beginning to pride itself on its multiculturalism, preferring to believe it was ‘post-racial’ than to grapple honestly with its prejudices—a cunning way for 7

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white people to absolve ourselves of responsibility for racial issues, branding them ‘brown people’s problems’. White people didn’t have to concern ourselves with discussing race; in fact, we didn’t even allow ourselves to talk about it for fear of making a blunder and sounding like the racists that we are, so we tiptoed around the subject, in the process creating the illusion that we don’t really have a race at all.   The critical issue for me, as I lurched clumsily into teenage self-awareness, was the indisputable fact of my whiteness. Not the village by the name of Whiteness in the Shetland Islands, but a rather more accessible whiteness—indeed, one that I could not avoid accessing for a single moment. I started to feel disgusted at my ethnicity, at the atrocities perpetrated by white people. At school I learned about the Pioneers’ settlement of North America from history teachers who didn’t shy away from exposing the grimmest crimes that Europeans wrought against the First Nations. And this was only the tip of the iceberg: British, French, Belgian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch empires laid rapacious, violent foundations for the world we live in today. Was this an inherently white condition, I wondered, or an accident of history, coinciding with the development of firepower? Was there something inherently callous about white people, and was I therefore doomed to be incapable of compassion?   It’s not that the authors of a horrifyingly long litany of evils just happened to be white, either; they justified their actions by a brutal ideology according to which they assumed themselves to be inherently superior because of their whiteness. From the Holocaust to South African apartheid; to the sale of as many as 12.8 million Africans in the transatlantic slave trade (and the deaths of many more en route); to the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow segregation laws; to the concentration of Aboriginal 8

INTRODUCTION

Australian people into camps to breed them out of existence; to the genocide of 99.5 per cent of the Aboriginal population of Tasmania in just over a generation;3 to the contemporary rise of far-right terrorism across Europe, the US and the Antipodes; to the vicious patrol of European waters to keep out refugees… if you haven’t begun to feel like vomiting by this point, remind yourself that this list keeps growing, apparently unchecked.   But like a fungus spreading its mycelia through a forest, much of white supremacy’s growth is underground, out of view for those of us whom it protects and privileges. It means that workers from ethnic minorities are paid less than white Brits,4 and must send 80 per cent more job applications than whites to get a call-back;5 it’s institutional racism in schools and universities;6 and it’s a chronic—even lethal—lack of state investment in ethnic minority neighbourhoods, which in 2017 led to the loss of at least seventy-two lives in the fire at Grenfell Tower in West London. It is the racial profiling of ethnic minorities as violent criminals, sexual predators, or submissive and weak. It is the fact that African Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of their white counterparts7 and are two and a half times as likely to be killed by police,8 and that people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds comprise 14 per cent of the UK’s population but more than half of young people in prison in England and Wales.9 It is casual microaggressions and the dismissal of stories of trauma as ‘hypersensitivity’. It is TV shows and films that consistently place white actors in the spotlight, relegating black and brown actors to stereotyped, subsidiary roles as tickbox tokens, comic sidekicks, or dangerous villains.   If I thought that growing up Muslim might have popped my white privilege bubble altogether, it wasn’t until I married a Middle Eastern man that I started to have the slightest inkling of what people of colour experience in white-majority settings.  

 

 

 

 

 

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When I’m in public with my husband, I’m often oblivious to a cold stare that an otherwise nice-seeming neighbour casts him. Occasionally, I’ll catch a passer-by’s face sending a pleasantly indifferent gaze my way and then contracting into an inexplicable frown when they see the man at my side. Once at a restaurant, I was attended by a waiter who pointedly ignored my husband, and then laughingly pretended not to have seen him when he complained about not receiving his meal.   The most brazen instance of institutional racism I ever witnessed was at a Spanish police commissary, where I had gone to enquire about getting Spanish residency. By then I’d technically been sin papeles (or, even more ignominiously, ‘irregular’) for six years—and without any problems. Although my husband Ali had initially entered Spain without a visa, by this point he had been a legal resident for over ten years. As we chatted to a friendly adviser, behind him appeared a higher-ranking official, who barged in and barked at my husband to produce his residency card. This he duly did; the official snatched it up, went to the computer and checked his details. On seeing that they were in order, he tossed the card back without an apology or so much as a glance at the man he’d effectively accused of being ‘illegal’. In fact, the one who was in the country illegally was me. * * * I HAVE OFTEN WISHED I could escape the badge of whiteness that I carry on my face. How can I take pride in my AngloAmerican roots? Not only have innumerable injustices been wreaked in the name of my ethnicity, but my own family history uncovers our personal complicity. Like so many Americans, I am directly descended from people who materially benefited from slavery. My grandfather Toby grew up on a farm in Maryland that his parents had bought from some cousins, who had owned 10

INTRODUCTION

slaves. Upon Abolition these slaves had been freed, but with no economic or social capital, education, or place to go, they had stayed on at the farm as labourers. They were paid in chits that could only be redeemed at the local convenience store… which, conveniently, was owned by my great-grandparents.   It goes without saying that the victim of this story is not me but the freed slaves involved; however, I’m inclined to think that the way that white people deal with this ugly inheritance—the shame, anger, sadness and revulsion we feel—has a great impact on the way we approach racism. It’s easier to suppress these feelings, at the cost of allowing racism to proliferate and our souls to be squashed to the approximate size and substance of a slug under a car wheel, than to face them. But what is the best way of owning this knowledge? I see such psychological issues among privileged people, from imposter syndrome and low self-worth to narcissism, depression, anxiety and substance abuse, that I can’t help but think that we’re carrying a toxic karmic load. I believe white people know deep down that our advantages were not earned and have come to us through violently discriminatory means. In my view, the only ways to deal with this reality are to live in denial, or to tackle the poison of privilege. Similar to the way that revulsion against violence carried out in the name of Islam—an Islam deformed in the fists of a warped, heartless ideology—obliges me to stand up for the Islam I know, as a white person I feel it is incumbent upon me to say in no uncertain terms: not in my name. I can’t take on the entire global system of toxic whiteness myself, but what I can do is try to unpick the thinking that leads to racial injustices, large and small, in a personal attempt not to be one of those oppressors.   But to brace yourself for this tricky task, you need something solid to grip on to. I always thought I needed a deep sense of 11

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roots, yet I felt no connection to mine. Some years back I even did a DNA test, hoping I would find something that might break the monotony of my Anglo-American whiteness—something I would want to honour. There was (if a home testing kit can be trusted) some Andalusian, Portuguese, German, Bosnian and Serbian (interesting), a sprinkling of North American settler… Conclusion: I am completely Western. It was almost as if my helices were taunting me—or teaching me a valuable lesson: no amount of privilege can endow the luxury of selecting your ancestry. ‘Belonging envy’ of an exoticised Other might be the ultimate in white folly.   Just spending one evening a week among Muslims of widely varied backgrounds meant that quite early on, I became aware of my body’s position on an ethnicity spectrum. I recall gazing at my mother’s Kashmiri friend and marvelling at her beauty, quite unlike the pasty chops of most people in my village. My skin didn’t seem so average anymore; in fact, my pallor began to seem downright eerie, as though someone had dialled up the contrast and washed me out. Perhaps people were really supposed to be darker-skinned than this, and I was tonally lacking. Back then I was too young and self-absorbed to have any inkling of what racial awareness might be like for a person of colour having to navigate the dominant whiteness around them every day, and certainly not of their exhaustion at having to deal with white people’s panicky, denying, ham-fisted engagement with race. I slowly came to see that loathing myself for the mere condition of my whiteness was not going to help anything. It isn’t so much white skin that’s the problem as the way whiteness has been used to bring about brutal inequality.   Inquiring into my own privilege is a profoundly uncomfortable process, one that I have in no way completed, but I believe 12

INTRODUCTION

that working through this shame and guilt is an essential part of growing as a human being. A common trope in millennial social media culture dictates that we should strive for self-confidence, self-love, and banish any notion of self-doubt. There are sound reasons for this in trauma therapy, but for the average privileged muppet, this is like a Get Out of Empathy Free card. We do need to look at our feelings of shame when they are connected to having hurt someone; brushing them away in order to avoid discomfort leaves that injury stinging, and deprives us of the opportunity to ask for forgiveness and develop humility.   A desire to transcend our differences might have noble aims, but if there’s a way for whites to cack it up, somehow we will find it. Declaring racial categories to be completely irrelevant might make sense if you think about the genetic impossibility of racial ‘purity’, and the oppression against black and brown people that has so often been justified by this notion. However, suggesting that we can transcend race altogether and achieve ‘ethnic fluidity’ is also deeply problematic. When Rachel Dolezal was outed in 2015 as a white woman claiming to be black—acting as president of her local chapter of the NAACP, no less—the internet hit the roof, with good reason. The obvious complaint from black people might be: ‘White people have appropriated our music, dress, slang, even our bodies—and now this? What else do you want, our blood?’   So if I can’t escape my whiteness, I turn to my religious community, one that embraces myriad ethnicities and cultures. Perhaps here I’ll find a doorway through the veils that appear to separate humans along racial lines, a map to reach a spiritual kin with whom I can truly belong. * * * 13

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THE ALREADY TANGLED issue of nationality in our family was complicated by the irruption of Islam into my parents’ lives. Their conversion to Islam was by no means superficial and dramatically altered the course of our family history, making even more of an impact in the early 1970s than it would today. Dad had grown up in the shadow of wartime propaganda against the Ottoman Empire. The phrase ‘to turn Turk’, meaning to betray, backstab, or generally go over to the dark side, still occasionally crops up in speech today;it was originally coined to describe conversion to Islam, which, with the spectre of Ottoman expansion at Europe’s periphery, was once much the same thing.   The 1960s were a decade of extraordinary social change, a lot of it kindled by new music scenes. While studying architecture in London, my father had become a jazz session musician in London, part of the mod outfit The Action and later a progrock band called Mighty Baby. One of his bandmates, Martin Stone, had secretly converted to Islam through a charismatic Englishman called Ian Dallas, or ‘Abd al-Qadir. One day, Martin was praying in his hotel room in Munich where the band was performing when my dad walked in on him and asked if he was looking for something under the bed. Another time, their roadie braked a little too hard and some books fell from the top of some equipment at the rear of the van, hitting my dad on the head; they turned out to be two volumes of Yusuf Ali’s English– Arabic translation of the Qur’an. Within a year most of the band had embraced Islam; my dad recalls that it was the qasidahs, devotional poems sung to traditional North African tunes, that initially enthralled him.   In 1971, a caravan of Brits drove down to Meknes, Morocco to meet the light that had sparked their transformation, a Sufi saint called Muhammad ibn al-Habib. The sheikh was thought 14

INTRODUCTION

to be 101 at the time and would pass away barely two months later on his way to hajj. Mighty Baby continued to play, including both editions of the Isle of Wight Festival, but their focus was turning elsewhere, and they split. There was a brief musical collective that grew out of its ashes, The Habibiyya, which recorded one album, entirely improvised after several hours of dhikr—Sufi sessions of remembrance of God—in an expensive studio, featuring home-made shakuhachis, a koto, Rumi’s poetry, piano, electric bass, trap drums and even Stevie Winwood’s pipe organ, which had been stored in the studio. For a while a group of these neophytes squatted in several houses around Bristol Gardens, West London; about half of this community of roughly fifteen families were Americans who would later return to Berkeley, California—partly to promote the Habibiyya album—and set up further zawiyahs, spiritual lodges or hubs, in the US.   Like many Americans of her generation, my mother became interested in Eastern spirituality as a way to escape the psychological drag of post-war consumerist culture. She initially ­studied the Tao Te Ching and was also drawn to Buddhism, practising Vipassana silent meditation on her own after reading about it in a book. When she read that reciting la ilaha illallah—‘there is no god but God’, the Islamic declaration of faith—was a great mantra for spiritual elevation, she tried it out and was startled to find that it had a powerful effect. At the time, Pir Vilayat Khan (the son of the Chishti Sufi leader Hazrat Inayat Khan) had set up a few communities in the US, although my mother wasn’t convinced that they conveyed an authentic Sufi tradition. Moving to San Antonio, Texas to run a bookshop for the Iraqi-born Sufi sheikh Fadhlalla Haeri, she met and married my father, who was then working as an architect and designer for the same sheikh. 15

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  After years of attempting to live in a variety of Sufi communities in the UK, the US and Spain, mutual disagreements eventually came to a head and my parents opted to live in the relative isolation of bucolic English villages to practise their new religion the way they felt was most manageable. My siblings and I grew up hearing outlandish stories from this crucible of hippie ideals and lucid Islamic spirituality, of travel and learning and self-discovery. I longed to have such an extraordinary life, in spite of the trials it had brought them.   Our Islam made my family rather outward-looking. Main­ stream society wanted me to believe that European politics, philosophy, art, literature, movies, beauty standards and fashions were all plainly superior; you couldn’t even question that for fear of being seen as some sort of Trotskyite hippie, ungrateful to the Western capitalist saviours of humanity. But my ­parents did not raise us to feel pride in being British or American—on the contrary, it was a bit of an albatross. At home, the philosophers we most admired expressed themselves in eloquent Arabic, while the greatest poets we knew wrote in Persian. Whiteness was a distasteful inescapability that we tried to avoid thinking about, but neither did we make any radical attempts to bring down white hegemony. Whether that was born of comfort or not knowing how, I can’t be sure.   Then there were many wonderful aspects of my BritishAmerican youth: a salt-softened beach house in Delaware, a cabin in the woods with the smell of pines in summer, blackberry hunting down oak-dappled English lanes, coming home to a good book after a rainy walk, Radio 4 over breakfast and CBBC after school, my mum ironing while watching Wimbledon, and always a copy of Private Eye open somewhere. Our home aesthetic was Habitat meets Turkish bazaar, with a 16

INTRODUCTION

sprinkling of Andalusi calligraphy and Kashmiri throws. My musical heroes were almost all black artists, from Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan to A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, Tracy Chapman, Lauryn Hill, Toots and the Maytals, Gilberto Gil, Tania Maria, Oumou Sangaré, Cheikh Lô, Cannonball Adderley and Thelonious Monk. Bouncing between all these cultural influences, my heart felt like a ping-pong ball shot back and forth between… well… two famous ping-pong players.   While Islam might be a peripheral element of the identity of, say, an Eastern European of distant Muslim origin, secularised by communism, for our family it was a stark reminder of our difference from the English people around us. Our parents had unpronounceable names that morphed into surreal insults in schoolfriends’ mouths; my father’s name, ‘Abdal-Lateef ’, became ‘Up-to-the-Teeth’ for a while.   For children, being Muslim gets reduced to tangible things, like what you eat. When I was young, many commercial biscuits still contained lard; thus, for a while, being unable to eat Hobnobs or Penguin bars became the distinguishing feature for our religion. Pigs in blankets sounded outrageously haram, let alone devilled eggs. As I got older and vegetarianism started to be more acceptable, I started telling people I was veggie to avoid probing. This was awkward, of course, when I was caught wolfing a halal merguez sausage.   But English people are great with awkwardness. This is why, for most of the planet, Mr Bean is the perfect avatar of Englishness. We like being dorks; it gives our arrogance a healthy left hook—until we become proud of our own dorkiness, of course. When it comes to the status quo, however, there are varieties of awkward weirdness that even Brits cannot stand.   A Muslim is not easily packaged as ‘that nice bohemian person down the road’ or the token ethnic minority in a children’s  

17

THE INVISIBLE MUSLIM

cartoon. And it’s not just the obvious stereotyping of Muslims as dangerous, ideologically deranged, girl-grooming blots on the moral landscape. For anyone who has been trained from childhood to sense it, derogatory portrayals of Muslims appear remarkably often, and in mainstream sources. I loved Bridget Jones’ diaries, but they never refer to anything vaguely Islamic in less than glowering terms. After Bridget’s friends take her out for a birthday meal rather than gathering around her like the ‘huge, warm, African, or possibly Turkish family’ she had envisaged, she declares, ‘Love the friends, better than extended Turkish family in weird headscarves any day.’ Did Helen Fielding not expect hijabi women to read her books?   In reality, Muslims are too varied, too heterogeneous, to be pigeonholed into comfortably discrete categories. Are we ghetto or posh? Yemeni-poor or Saudi-rich? Marginalised or privileged? A mass of nobodies, or a Lamborghini-driving elite? Are we nameless taxi drivers, or famous athletes? Are we Malcolm X right-on, or Saddam Hussein tyrannical? Are hijabi women ultra-styled, made-up and bejewelled, or suffocatingly swathed and oppressed? The nymphomaniacs of Orientalist fantasies, or the sexually repressed puritans of tabloids?   Are we cool? Or are we an embarrassment?   Can we ever be accepted for the irreducible humans that we are?   As much as England can stretch its acceptance of others, at a certain point its elasticity starts to snap. * * * THERE IS A VEIL THAT recurs throughout my life, and I’m not talking about a headscarf. In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote: ‘It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different  

18

INTRODUCTION

from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.’10 As a black man in turn-of-the-century America, his experience is utterly different from my own sheltered existence: I would certainly have been situated on the other side of that barrier. Nonetheless, the image of the Veil strikes me with perfect clarity. It can exist in a variety of contexts, between ethnicities, genders, religions, the ablebodied and disabled, and so on—in fact, anywhere that a divide exists between Self and Other.   When I am among white people, I’ve seen on so many occasions this Veil dropping when the penny also drops. Faces change subtly, or not so subtly. Fingers start nervously fidgeting. All kinds of thoughts and questions begin visibly running through the interlocutor’s face: Are they a progressive Muslim? Do they believe that infidels should be shot? Or was it stoned? Are they secretly judging me for wearing this low-cut top? Should I be concerned?   Over the years, I’ve fallen into a pattern of not drawing attention to my religion—something that is possible because my skin colour allows me to pass as non-Muslim. This gives me the advantage of being able to weave in and out of seemingly ordinary events: being welcomed like a regular at a pub where I only order cranberry juice (pretending it’s half full of conveniently transparent vodka), and being greeted by other white people as if I were just like them. Of course, some would be amply welcoming of me if I weren’t white or if I were visibly Muslim, maybe even making an extra effort to show how little they care about colour or religion, unaware of how unnatural this jolly tolerance can come off.   But when my religion comes up, there are also those who don’t bother masking their hostility towards Muslims, who seem 19

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to be fair game in the current climate. This is especially noticeable at parties, when alcohol has started to rub off the sheen of polite acceptance. A public school toff once told me, in complete drunken seriousness, that he’d investigated Islam very deeply and had come to the conclusion that it was ‘an evil religion’. Sometimes, even without alcohol, little judgements will slip out. One hippie friend, in a conversation about the wonders of Sufism (the acceptable face of Islam to most non-Muslims), blurted out to me, ‘But the attitudes to women in Islam are frankly disgusting.’ She gave a little gasp afterwards, either in relief of getting that monumental judgement off her chest, or in delight at her own daring. A dear friend even asked me bluntly, over a nice birthday buffet, ‘So what’s all this about killing infidels, then?’   After the initial shock has passed, these moments can turn into great opportunities for dialogue, if you have conveniently prepared responses for the usual, predictable criticism. But you can start to feel like a UN peacekeeper, treating everyday situations like potential sources of conflict, always having to stay on the balls of your feet. And while preparing for these inevitable verbal assaults might lead Muslims into a fascinating deeper study of their own religion, it’s draining.   On the other hand, while it can be a privilege to pass as nonMuslim and bypass these challenging conversations altogether, the fact that my religious identity is not immediately apparent can also be frustrating. If a statement like ‘I’m Muslim’ is routinely greeted with surprise, by Muslims or non-Muslims alike, I find myself going through a familiar sequence of events: 1) Prepare uneasily for a response, which can range from warm interest to shutters visibly sliding down over a soul in confusion and distress. 20

INTRODUCTION

2) Wonder whether Islam is actually ‘a brown thing’, a distant, unattainable identity that I don’t really belong to. 3) Try harder to belong there. 4) Fail in proving my own Muslimness to some. Feel exhausted. 5) Go back to hiding my religion to try to avoid discomfort and invalidation.   Thus was my ‘invisible Muslim’ alias born. Like Clark Kent, only with less spandex.   Invisible Muslims like me are on tricky ground. We assimilate and blend in among non-Muslims, perhaps out of fatigue from being treated as different, or perhaps because it feels like the most genuine thing to do. Yet it can also feel like we’re in denial, shying away from being labelled out of a desire to be treated as humans first and Muslims second. At times I’m wracked with guilt for not showing solidarity with my fellow Muslimahs by wearing hijab and being upfront about my spiritual path.   In many ways, my white privilege means that the Veil that places Muslims completely beyond the pale (pardon the pun) doesn’t affect me tangibly—I’ve never been harmed by a ‘Veil that hung between [me] and Opportunity’.11 I grew up in a ‘nice’ neighbourhood; none of my family have been in prison; both of my parents went to university; and none of my ancestors have been impacted by colonialism or my living relatives affected by violent Western military intervention. When turning up to a job interview, I can relax in the knowledge that I don’t have points against me from the outset for appearing ‘foreign’. But while I might not be affected personally, I feel a connection and solidarity with my Muslim brothers and sisters worldwide, whose lives appear to be less important when they are lost and whose political repressions receive far less media attention than that offered to historical buildings that catch fire in Europe. 21

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  Here we arrive at a second veil—the Veil that separates me from Muslims of colour. In Muslim circles, reactions to white Muslims can range from pleasant surprise to outright disbelief, through to warmth and friendliness and, in extreme cases, unctuous flattery. One convert friend of First Nations and Latina heritage told me about how much more attention her husband, a white convert, received than she did from Muslims of colour: ‘I was like, what am I, chopped liver?’ Then there is the outright fetishisation of whiteness. One Bengali woman called up my mother’s friend and said, very matter-of-factly, ‘I want my son to marry one of the Whiteman girls.’ An Arab man we knew, whose white English wife was pregnant, insisted that she rub bellies with another pregnant white Muslim woman who had blonde hair, on the spurious basis that it would make their child turn out fairer. As blonde girls my sister and I attracted an offensive excess of attention. At the airport in Jeddah, when we were traveling to Saudi Arabia as teenagers, a Syrian woman ran over and asked excitedly if her son could marry one of us, not caring which one.   It’s perfectly understandable that white Muslims might seem a novelty, especially those of us who were born into Islam at a time when conversion was still rare. However, I don’t deserve to be presented as a poster child for Islam, nor to be held in esteem for my whiteness. When my Pakistani American friend’s stepfather, a white American convert, speaks up at their majority South Asian mosque, everyone falls silent to listen to what he has to say. It may be that he does have interesting things to share, but the alacrity with which white Muslims’ opinions are attended to is depressing. Particularly grating is the insinuation that we legitimise Islam to non-Muslims, that our whiteness makes Islam more palatable and less alien. Often white Muslims 22

INTRODUCTION

are asked to do da’wah, or outreach, at the mosque, the underlying assumption being that a white face is somehow more approachable; you could call it whitewashing Islam. Here again white privilege rears its head—but with a special Islamic twist, one that wants to touch you for luck.   At the other end of the scale, the suggestion that my whiteness somehow invalidates my Islam, although rare, is unsettling. Converts—many, though not all, of whom are white—often suffer from loneliness. Their families may angrily reject their decision, disinherit or disown them, while their local communities of Muslims might not be altogether welcoming either. When collecting my sister and me from the school gates, my mother would try to greet the Pakistani mums by saying salam. They would laugh and tell her, ‘You can’t be Muslim—you don’t speak Urdu!’ I have met Muslims who demanded proof of my faith and my sincerity and have been given the third degree trying to enter a mosque. My American friend Nora and her husband Hamza in Morocco have even heard rumours that they aren’t Muslim at all but spies. Nora’s father was arrested in the early 1970s when, as a recent convert, he tried to enter the Koutoubia Mosque. He was dragged through the Jemaa el-Fnaa square to the police station, where he was only released after pronouncing the shahadah (the Islamic declaration of faith).   It must be said that the exclusion of white Muslims from wider Muslim circles isn’t a patch on the exclusion experienced by people of colour. White Muslims are not being subjected to insinuations or outright accusations that we are subhuman, or inherently violent or criminal. We aren’t being stopped and searched, sent to prison for minor traffic violations, or held in a lethal chokehold for a bogus misdemeanour by a policeman who walks away without a conviction. And as Muslims, we can 23

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receive extra attention or favours by Muslims of colour who find us a delightful novelty. It is much to the credit of people of colour, who are well used to navigating asymmetries of privilege, as well as to spending thankless hours trying to educate whites about race when it is in no way their responsibility to do our work for us, that this kind of exclusion happens so rarely.   By and large, signs of rejection are overshadowed by expressions of privilege. Any special interest in me as a white curiosity is usually short-lived, and only one of a range of social dynamics. Once I went into a Muslim bookshop on Brick Lane, defiantly (or delusionally) without hijab, to ask for a copy of the Qur’an. The British Bengali guy behind the counter responded with friendly curiosity. When another man popped up and started scolding me for my uncovered head, the first man stopped him, insisting that it was my choice. Perhaps this man had given me the benefit of the doubt for being white, deeming me too new to Islam to know any better. In any case, the reactions of both men—albeit patronising—were somehow proof that they felt we were part of the same social group. If I were a non-Muslim Englishwoman, I’m sure they wouldn’t have mentioned hijab at all. In some ways, then, sharing a religion does seem to provide a mechanism for connection across ethnic lines—even if it’s not always in the way that we would like.   Western Muslims of all ethnicities disrupt the stereotyped notion of a monolithic, ‘foreign’ Islam, but we also face challenges when navigating our multiple cultures. From the way we dress to our attitudes towards music, free mixing of genders, sexuality, marriage, careers, or parenting, there are so many possible points of friction with our parents’ generation—and so many ways in which Muslim cultures are evolving. As a child of converts, I have been lucky in that my parents have largely 24

INTRODUCTION

understood my lifestyle choices, even supporting me as a musician, an opportunity that few Western-born Muslim women of colour have had because of religious and cultural taboos against the use of stringed instruments and women singing in public. Even within the apparent wholeness of the ummah, the global Muslim community, there are lines.   At times, the Veil doesn’t drop between me and Muslims of colour, but it falls around us instead. In the winter of 2018 I caught up with some university friends at a restaurant in London. One of them had brought along a friend, Hassan, from her adopted home in Germany. Judging by looks alone, he could have been Spanish, Greek, Italian, or even Scottish. But I knew.   Hassan’s face changed subtly when he heard my name; he had to double-check. There was a kind of complicity between us, a secret shared with barely a facial expression, let alone a handshake. The greeting ‘Assalamu ‘alaikum’—peace be upon you— is more than that: it’s an offering of fraternity, as well as a tacit query about the other’s beliefs and affiliations. Will the other reply in kind? Even if they were raised Muslim, do they wish to be associated with Islam? On this occasion, across a large table loaded with dumplings, it didn’t seem appropriate; it might have opened a floodgate of questions that washed all other conversation away.   These are the sublime moments when the boundaries that demarcate race, social class, gender, and culture—all the territories we so love to defend against the threat of an Other—melt away. These are the moments that keep me coming back to the religion of my birth, in spite of all its challenges. There’s something marvellous about knowing that a new acquaintance is a kind of distant relative. It makes me want to cross streets and hug random passing hijabis, as the most common response— instant sisterhood—is among life’s most heart-swelling joys. 25

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  Most of all, when I’m in a circle of dhikr (remembrance of God), the lines defining groups, even individuals, seem to be effaced, if only temporarily. Our attention turns away from externals and focuses on the point in the centre that is common to all, whether you call it a soul or humanity. Even when the dhikr has ended, there’s an afterglow, a feeling that we share something extraordinary that could put an end to all human misery if only we wanted it to hard enough.   This wondrous welcome is precisely why it can be so hard to rejoin the majority. When I experience the bliss of being understood by my kindred spirits, I start to feel that mainstream white society is galaxies away, incapable of understanding this other family I belong to, afraid of the disruption to the norm that we represent. How can I step out of that loving circle and still find points of connection?   But a person walking alone isn’t a circle: they’re a dot. It’s a whole different geometry. As they trace an orbit around the centre of an unmoving circle, they encounter other gravities. It’s so easy to be pulled off course, but in those tangents there are other worlds to be seen and discovered, and the peripheral vision brought by those diversions expands the circle itself.   Growing up as an Anglo-American Muslim has made me alert to the marvellous heterogeneity of the ummah, invisible behind all-eclipsing stereotypes. Instances of Muslim marginalia, liminal spaces that traverse and sit between, have always called to me as the only places I could find belonging.   So for two decades, I tried to stride as far as possible towards the margins of the ummah in an attempt to escape my whiteness and the blinkered culture that I associate with it. But, like they say, however far you travel, you always bring yourself along. This book is an account of that round trip, of those many occasions 26

INTRODUCTION

that caused me to question my self-assurance as a Muslim, as a white person, as a Westerner, and as a human amalgam of all those identities, like the spot between intersecting circles in an infographic, circles that continue overlapping outwards in an infinity of vesica piscis.

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1 ‘MZUNGU!’ KENYA AND TANZANIA

‘I’M HERE FOR THE white people,’ said the man at the dock as the boat from the mainland moored on Lamu Island. Since my mother and I were the only people of that description on board, we assumed he must be our friend’s cousin, sent to give us a traditional Swahili welcome. We staggered off the boat, cramped from an eight-hour bus ride from Mombasa, during which my mother was riveted by the sight of a Maasai woman standing in the aisle and holding the railing.   ‘She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen!’ my mother told me afterwards.   With an eighteen-year-old’s touch of moral superiority, I rolled my eyes. We were supposed to be here for an ‘authentic’ experience of Kenya, not as gawking tourists on a jolly holiday abroad.   We strolled through the main town on Lamu Island, so small it only admitted one car, belonging to the district officer, while the main mode of transport was on foot or on donkeyback. Older women drew their black silk buibui cloaks over their mouths; younger women strode by in black synthetic ‘abayas, their eyes coolly gauging our attempts at respecting

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the Muslim dress code—our linen trousers, kaftans and cotton headscarves—just as we took in their traditional garb, their elegant aloofness.   Like other towns on the Swahili coast of Kenya and Tanzania, Lamu’s old town consists of closely packed blocks of whitewashed buildings concealing riad-style interior courtyards for shade and privacy, where the walls had been built of the most easily available material: slabs of yellow coral. In places where the lime plaster had fallen away under the yearly battering of monsoon rains, the honeycomb texture of the coral could be seen. Where optimistic builders had tried to repair ruined masonry with cement rather than lime, the coral had been corroded into crumbly hollows. Coconut palms and mangroves fringed the water’s edge. Fishing boats sat patiently on the beaches, waiting for dawn. For me it was astonishing to see everything simply being, exactly as it was, ignored by passing Lamuans for whom it was normal. Out on the Indian Ocean, pale turquoise streaked yellow where sandbanks rippled up into view, and scything through the muggy air came the triangular sails of dhows, the vehicle for this singular coastal culture, still used for fishing and to take tourists (the ones with good sea legs, or the overly naïve) to the mainland.   Juma, the Lamuan man who had come to meet us, was the cousin of Fuad Nahdi, a London-based journalist from Mombasa whom my parents knew via their vast and extremely helpful network of British Muslims. We followed him down a narrow alley between white plastered walls, patterned with charcoal trails of past downpours, to a carved wooden door in a sober, windowless wall.   Once inside the cool, dimly lit interior, we gratefully accepted tea and mandazi—outrageously calorific doughnuts made with 30

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coconut milk—and politely chatted with our host. His wife, Asumini, sat with us, timid and silent. I found myself wondering if she spoke English, as any child growing up in postcolonial Kenya was still expected to do, or if she had perhaps been to an Arabic-speaking madrasa (Lamu has a much more conservative Muslim population than most of the mainland). But was I projecting ideas of an Africa that lagged behind Europe, that was soulful and real but poor and pitiful, notions with which I had been conditioned over a lifetime of subtle—or overt—messages threaded deeply into European group-think? I was drawn to Kenya specifically to rewrite this coding, to expose its fallacies, but in order to do that I needed to witness the country honestly—without the Veil of projections. With several members of European royalty plonking holiday villas on Lamu’s unspoilt coastline, and a casino in the only other village on this very traditional island, it wasn’t hard to imagine that Asumini might have her own ideas about Westerners too, perhaps with elements of indulgence and profligacy, and echoes of the racist violence of colonial rule. Perhaps my presence, my gaze as a foreign white Briton, was uncomfortable to her. Or perhaps she really was just shy. From the outset, I was conflicted about how to approach people here who might reasonably feel ambivalent about me.   The British beat English into Kenya, home to sixty-eight spoken languages, with the unflinching dedication of a small-town schoolteacher who wished he were an army commander. In his book Decolonising the Mind, the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o describes his experiences of this inculcation during his childhood in British colonial Kenya. Any child who was heard speaking their native tongue at school would be given a button. That child would be encouraged to listen out for their classmates committing the same crime and would then hand them 31

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the button. At the end of the day, the last person in the snitching chain would recite the names of the other culprits, who would be caned, fined, or made to wear a plaque around their necks with inscriptions like ‘I am stupid’ or ‘I am a donkey’.1   But on this teenage trip, I had not yet begun to open the shallow grave of British colonialism. It had been hinted to me that ‘we’ did something terrible here, that the damage is so deep that this nation—like so many others that Queen Victoria gleefully scooped up—has never been able to recover. Right before leaving I had visited a dentist, who sniffed: ‘My father was a missionary on the Dark Continent,’ making me gag on the antiseptic swilling around my epiglottis. Bare-faced expressions of racism like these made me want to run several thousand miles, in an effort to discover the ‘real’ Africa… or so I told myself. If I was really honest, I was looking for the ‘real’ me underneath this cloying layer of First World egocentricity. I hadn’t yet reckoned with the problematic nature of this journey: Was it fair to expect Kenyans to bring about my own self-discovery? Was this trip about witnessing them, or using them as a mirror? Did I really need to take such drastic geographical action to shed the parts of myself that I despised? Knowing almost nothing about my own nation’s painful legacy in Kenya, I wanted complete immersion, to be soaked so thoroughly that I would be dyed a different person when I emerged.   Before embarking on the hallowed British tradition of degreegetting, I had decided I wanted to undergo a somewhat more recently evolved rite of passage: the gap year. Thinking I would get a head start on my BA in African Language and Culture, I had called up my family’s friend Fuad. Within about ten minutes, he had conveniently arranged my entire gap year, from where to stay to where to volunteer, right down to the Kenya Airways 32

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saleswoman to talk to. A lifetime of leaning on Muslim strangers for free hospitality looked like it was set to continue.   My future alma mater, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, had been founded to train would-be colonialists to be sent off to the Raj or Britain’s ‘possessions’ in the Near East and Africa. Since the end of the British Empire, the university’s core demographic changed, such that it now attracts a varied bunch of students with broadly anti-imperialist leanings. With a library boasting books in over 1000 languages, SOAS seemed just the place for a self-proclaimed xenophile like me. I was told that Swahili contained plenty of Arabic, so I saw it as a lazy person’s method of picking up the latter. Plus, as my teenage mind fancied, how cool did it sound to be studying Swahili? I already felt like a foreigner in the UK, anyway. Would going all out and embracing ‘the exotic’ help me to shed my whiteness?   When I arrived in Kenya, I didn’t detect in the people I met any glint of resentment or malice towards me because of my Britishness; on the contrary, everyone seemed friendly and curious about foreigners. And as tourists, my mother—who couldn’t pass up the opportunity of accompanying me—and I were supposedly helping Kenya’s economy, right?   So what was the harm in admiring a few grinning kids playing with a homemade football? Or condensing our experience of Kenya to shareable photos of the elephants in the safari park, where the minivan had broken down and the park ranger and Maasai herdsman had to push us out of the mud? Of course, there was that show of Maasai jumping we were taken to, in that tourist village showcasing the different tribes of the Kenyan mainland… Oh, God… here we were, precisely in the place we had been desperate to avoid, standing behind an unseen Veil of privilege, watching black people dance for our entertainment. 33

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  We had come to Kenya, at great expense, from a nation that has grown rich partly from its exploitation of this former colony—a relationship whose effects are still felt half a century later as Kenya sits in the vampiric grip of economic neo-colonialism. If tourism helped so much economically, Africa would surely have been lifted out of poverty decades ago. On my trip I was informed that much of Kenya’s spectacular coastline had been bought up by Italians, who had brought hotel staff over from Europe. None of this money stayed in Kenya, except perhaps in a corrupt bureaucrat’s back pocket. * * * WHEN MY MOTHER AND I rose to take leave of our hosts, after they had given us directions to the tomb of the local saint, Habib Swaleh, Asumini brought us a gift. It was a leso, a brightly patterned wrap of the sort sold in pairs, one to wear as a headscarf and the other as a sarong. Swahili women wear them at home or under their buibui. The graphic designs are accompanied by Swahili sayings printed at the bottom that can serve as coded messages. This unusually plain leso, white with black and blue stylised vanilla pods, had been carefully worn, the starch washed out, the ends hemmed with a contrasting thread.   Today I wonder about that leso’s twin, the one she kept. I take mine out sometimes to pray in, loath to give it away despite my overflowing scarf stash. The motto reads: Kila mwenye kusubiri Mola hatomuadhiri. God will not abase anyone who has patience.

  We had splurged on two nights at a hotel, right on the island’s waterfront. My mother was entranced by the sound of girls reciting the Qur’an, but we never managed to locate the madrasa 34

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it came from. We spent the night sweating in 100 per cent humidity under a mosquito net that rendered the ceiling fan useless. The giddiness of travel, combined with mild heat prostration and fear of getting malaria (the concierge advised us to smear Vaseline over our bodies, so that mosquitoes that tried to bite would become trapped, embalmed in paraffin slime), was weirdly thrilling.   In the morning, determined to do some ‘Sufi tourism’ rather than just enjoying a tropical holiday (although we didn’t say no to a mango smoothie or snapshot on a pristine white beach), we set off for the tomb of Habib Swaleh. The name is a Swahiliisation of Saleh, just as ‘Swahili’ comes from the Arabic word sahel, meaning ‘coast’. We had been told by our Kenyan Muslim friends that Habib Swaleh’s tomb was an essential part of a trip to Lamu—especially if we were going to miss the Maulid (celebration of Prophet Muhammad’s birthday) for which Lamu Island was famous, and which Habib Swaleh had founded. As we saw it, here was an opportunity for two white AngloAmerican Muslims to relate to a people and culture to which we were almost entirely alien: our Islam represented a rift in the Veils, a doorway into the unknown.   Habib Swaleh had arrived in Lamu in 1870 as an eighteenyear-old from the Comoros Islands, though he was of Yemeni descent. Legend tells that a storm broke out during his crossing by boat, but his prayers calmed the wind and he was able to land safely. In Lamu he continued his scholarly life by studying under several important teachers.   Swaleh was appalled at the situation of slaves on the island, who were treated abysmally by the muungwana, or ruling elite. These were a culturally Arabised people of diverse East African origins who were distinguished by being freeborn, and who led  

 

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trade caravans into the hinterland—often trading slaves. Swahili people are a mix of Omanis, Persians and Africans of various ethnic backgrounds from over a thousand years of monsoon trade and settlement, but those with stronger Arab connections—ethnically and culturally—have typically received social privileges associated with higher class.   When Swaleh’s lessons on Islamic law and Qur’anic exegesis at the Sheikh al-Bilad Mosque were shut down by the muungwana, he shamed a renowned poet Sayyid Mansab into giving him land to build an earth-and-thatch madrasa where slaves and the similarly marginalised Yemeni immigrants could study and pray. At the mosque Swaleh taught that Islam obliged slave masters to give slaves the same clothing, food and housing they would expect themselves, and not to burden them with tasks that they would not wish to carry out themselves. Importantly, this stopped short of calling for abolition, but it meant some measure of improvement in the lives of Africans, whom Arabs had been trading as slaves—along with ivory, cloves, nutmeg, and other precious goods from East Africa—for generations.  The muungwana were outraged at Swaleh’s attempts at racial equality, but eventually Swaleh and his followers succeeded in forcing them to give slaves the right to an education. Funds from supporters in Cape Town allowed Swaleh to construct a larger building in 1892, the Riyadha mosque and madrasa, which is still in use.2 Although slavery would not be abolished for another half century, Swaleh is held as a hero by the people of Lamu for challenging the racialised class structure of his time by insisting on Islam’s emphasis on equality. As a defender of education as a means for the spiritual and socioeconomic advancement of the marginalised, Swaleh has been dubbed the ‘sharif of the slaves’.3 I am struck by the example of a shared faith being 36

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used as a means to draw aside the Veils separating humans on grounds of race and class.   On a sandy mound, sheltered only by a structure with low walls, open sides and a corrugated tin roof, Swaleh’s tomb lies beside his wife’s and is enclosed in carved wood with a painted Qur’anic calligraphy inscription. Sitting on the sand, my mother and I started to recite Wird al-Latif, an Arabic litany of Habib Swaleh’s Ba ‘Alawi Sufi order, which we had been reciting for some months from a booklet. We fell to weeping with the unmistakable sense that the saint was welcoming us. Shukurani zetu pokeeni wa dua njema tunawaombeeni. Accept our thanks, and we ask you to make a beautiful prayer for us.

* * * ONE WORD WOULD BECOME my constant companion in East Africa: ‘Mzungu!’   Technically the word means European (by contrast, mweupe means ‘white person’). However, whiteness is so assumed to be a condition of Europeanness that the two are often used interchangeably—even for a British Jamaican-Polish woman who came to visit. While in a white majority, a mixed-race person is defined by their non-white ethnicity—as British Ghanaian writer Afua Hirsch expertly describes in her book Brit(ish)—in East Africa, having one white parent and being culturally European instantly confers mzungu status.   The term mzungu (pl. wazungu)—a Bantu word shared by numerous languages in East and Central Africa—is thought to be derived from the verb kuzungu(ka), meaning to spin around on one spot, supposedly because the first white people to appear in East Africa were peripatetic travellers who appeared to wan 37

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der about aimlessly; kizunguzungu means ‘dizziness’. European culture, which is deemed to be inherently connected to whiteness, gives rise to the mzungu concept, a verbal finger-twirl around the temple, a cipher for the proverbial mad dogs and Englishmen who behave in peculiar ways in the sun. There is a definite cognitive link between wazungu and wealth; kizungu (or chizungu) means both ‘of the wazungu, or wanderers’ and ‘behaving rich’. In Malawi, mzungu had been uncoupled from whiteness altogether and has come to mean ‘wealthy’, regardless of race.   Outside of Europe, ‘white’, ‘European’, and ‘Western’ are frequently bound up in the same expression. In Senegal and Gambia, the Wolof term for ‘white person’, toubab, is nevertheless applied to any perceived traveller, including foreigners of black African descent, foreign-raised locals and visiting expatriates.4 In Yoruba, Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin, a white person is an oyinbo or oyibo (literally, a man with peeled-off skin), but the word can be used to denote anyone who is perceived not to be ‘culturally African’.5 There are so many subtle, interconnected iterations of ethnicity around the globe, and yet every language seems to have a term for a culturally foreign Other—even those who are racially similar or identical—down to the smallest delineation: in Cornwall a non-Cornish person is a ‘grockle’. For Persians, a foreigner is khariji—even if they are born in Europe or North America to Iranian parents. I’ve heard of half-Pakistani, half-white Americans being described as gora (white) in Pakistan.   But every time I heard ‘mzungu!’, I jumped defensively. Why does it raise my hackles to have my relative Otherness pointed out?   Talking about race carries a stigma among whites because it disrupts the illusion that our whiteness is normal. Not only that, 38

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but it is a subtle reminder of our proximity to the white supremacy that for centuries has shaped and inscribed itself in virtually every society worldwide. Decolonisation was not a neat event that took place at the end of the British Empire: Dar es Salaam in Tanzania is still laid out along colonial lines, with white expats and NGO workers living in a neighbourhood called Uzunguni—‘the place of mzungu-ness’—in large houses with black maids, drivers, and Maasai warrior guards. If the toxic resonances of whiteness are easier to overlook back home, here they are unavoidable.   Initially I found it shocking that an epithet that pigeonholes me as a foreigner should be used so flagrantly. Adults and children alike pointed out my mzungu-ness multiple times a day— usually with a gleeful smile—but occasionally it verged on the aggressive, making me jump out of my skin. I wondered if their drive to yell ‘mzungu!’ at strangers was born of amusement at having a way of making Europeans feel vaguely uncomfortable, of placing us firmly in their territory and watching us squirm. I wouldn’t blame them at all for doing so; it would amount only to a small prod of defiance after hundreds of years of being monumentally exploited and mistreated. Moreover, being white and hearing ‘mzungu!’ couldn’t be more different from being black in Europe or North America and hearing a stranger yell the n-word, or being South Asian in Britain and having ‘P*ki’ spat at you in the street; the power relationships are profoundly different. Wazungu are just curiosities, bumbling tourists who don’t know our way around or how to reply. It isn’t degrading to be reminded of that, only a little annoying—and it can even be a sign of affection. In short, mzungu isn’t a racial slur.   And I must admit that mzungu has a fun ring to it; I can see why people would want to say it, loudly and often. Children in 39

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particular delighted in shrieking it as I passed. It drove me to better learn Swahili—which I found pleasurably complex, rhythmic, rich in meaning—in an effort to slip organically into its cadences, to understand and be understood. Growing up in a monolingual household, albeit one that drew knowledge from Arabic and other sources, I had become fixated on language as a portal through the Veil, an entry point into another culture’s way of seeing the world.   Brits are famously resistant to polyglotism, enjoying what could be termed language privilege: everyone seems to want to learn English—the lingua franca (ironically) of the internet and much of the world’s popular culture—so why should we make an effort to learn other languages? Many a British expat on the Costa del Sol has spent years avoiding Spanish, barely getting past ‘gracias’. Unsurprisingly, becoming multilingual thus became my burning ambition, my ticket out of the mirrored hall of English culture. But once I hit that magical terminal velocity that might be termed fluency, I realised that it was insufficient to bridge the divide entirely. At best, I could strive to diminish my mzungu-ness by speaking Swahili. But this still seemed a more worthwhile pursuit than self-acceptance—and who can be bothered with something as challenging as that? Kila mlango na ufunguo wake. To every door its own key.

* * * AFTER MY MOTHER returned to the UK, part of me wanted to start having a gap year of the sort that my school friends—who had gone to South America, Nepal or Australia as part of very expensive ‘voluntourism’ programmes—would understand. This was difficult, as I was staying as a guest in a traditional Muslim 40

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household, even dressing somewhat like Mombasan women donning a hijab and loose dresses. I was thankful, though, that this was a real Mombasan home and not a hotel, and my hosts were remarkably generous. Hospitality in the Muslim world is so astonishing that nothing compares to it afterwards.   However, there was no way to disguise the fact that I was a mzungu. I had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it was admittedly flattering to receive attention, to be taken to houses as an honoured guest and enjoy the general goodwill. On the other hand, I knew this special attention was undeserved, and there was the nagging sense that the roots of the inequality that brought it on were so deep and so widespread that I could not possibly hope to dig them up, even if I embarked on a lifetime of humanitarian work. I wanted to do something. In spite of the religion that I shared with my hosts, and much of the surrounding community, I had still come abroad with more or less the same motivations as any of my white, non-Muslim friends from school: to see the world, to give back in some paltry way, and— that famously antediluvian chestnut—to find myself.   My hostess kindly organised for me a brief stint volunteering as an English teacher in a primary school in Mombasa. I had completed an online TEFL (Teach English as a Foreign Language) course before leaving home, but it had no practical component, and I was totally unprepared for working in a classroom of actual kids. I should have thought about how a couple of weeks having a mzungu substitute teacher would affect the boys in my class— how much was I really ‘giving back’, and how much was I muscling in on the everyday lives of Kenyan people for the sake of feeling I had had an illuminating experience myself ?   Although the school was state-run, families still had to pay for their kids to attend—in neatly turned out uniforms and 41

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mended Bata flip-flops, lugging their stationery and notebooks in carrier bags. A plastic sign indicated the school’s patronage by Fanta, and there was a fizzy drink stall in the playground, otherwise empty apart from a large tree and a metal bed frame. The roof of the building dissolved into the air in rusted iron wires where the reinforced concrete structure could not be finished.   The students were predictably bored in class, and probably a bit excitable at the change of teaching staff. Some of the boys were nearly as old as I was but had been unable to pass their final year of primary school because most of the classes were in English, an alien language they couldn’t get to grips with, let alone sit exams in. I floundered at keeping control—a cringeinducingly telling term. The headmaster, a strapping guy who spoke ten languages and could switch from a cheeky grin to a commanding yell at the drop of a kufi hat, regularly had to enter my classroom to restore order. In the staffroom, at least, the other teachers were friendly in a wonderfully laidback way. The headmaster’s wife had a baby girl while I was there and named her after me. I was flattered, if a bit uncomfortable at the suggestion that I was worth naming a baby after. Being a mzungu might have marked me out as an oddity, but it also assured me special treatment.   One of the teachers, Amina, invited me to spend a weekend at her family home out in the countryside. We took a matatu, one of the minibuses that ply the streets looking to pack as many people in with their kids, shopping and luggage as possible. Next to me sat a woman with a remarkably acquiescent chicken in a carrier bag on her lap, its head protruding through a hole in the plastic. As we waited for more passengers to board, street hawkers passed by selling filtered water in cellophane pouches, homemade biscuits, nuts, and newspapers. A man in our matatu 42

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bought a newspaper through the window; once he had read it, he passed it to the person sitting beside him, who later passed it on down the row. I was struck by the strange camaraderie of being squashed into a small, sweaty space, the dignified patience of strangers who neither negated each other’s existence nor fussed.   We got off the bus on a red earth road that wound between fields. There wasn’t an electricity line in sight—to my delight, but probably to the locals’ annoyance. Crickets chirruped in rolling waves. The homestead was where Amina’s mother and brother Shaaban lived with his wife and their children. Shaaban proudly showed me, in that humid, sweltering sun that makes everything feel dream-like, the papaya tree and vegetable plot.   Amina’s sister-in-law Kamaria made goat’s-hoof stew, a salty, slimy soup, essentially dissolved tendons, and surprisingly delicious. The kids tumbled about gleefully. Kamaria had a batteryoperated tape player in the kitchen; she confided that her favourite singer was Michael Ball. As the sun went down a kerosene lamp was lit, but out on the porch, fireflies were dancing. With no TV to squabble over, the kids tried to teach me Swahili and cackled at my mistakes. The house had three rooms: one for living, with a kitchen corner; one for Amina’s brother and his wife; and another for everyone else, with a double bed for Granny and one grandchild, and a bunk where I fell asleep, crammed in with another kid under the mosquito net. It was about as close to normal as I had felt here, my mzungu-ness fading to a temporarily unimportant detail on which my hosts kindly didn’t remark. I was unused to such a degree of familiarity with Kenyans and wanted to hold on to the moment. I didn’t want to go back to the town—to the continual reminders of our mutual Otherness—where the spell would be broken. 43

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  But the next day we returned to Mombasa, and I to my hosts’ compound, with its outer walls, half-dug swimming pool, Kenyan maids and Bangladeshi driver, and the gardener, who had turned up one day giving his name only as the word ‘boy’ in his language. The Veil dropped thickly again, this time a Veil dividing by wealth and privilege; my hosts, as Mombasans of mainly Yemeni extraction, inhabited a similar space to the whites to whom I was genetically bound. Even between Muslims, we have become so disparate in terms of wealth and social capital that it’s hard to see the ideal of an egalitarian ummah, or global Muslim community, being realised. Can we ever breach the gaps in privilege—in terms of race, wealth, education, healthcare, and access to running water, electricity and the internet—simply by virtue of sharing a faith with people from all over the world? Hakuna lisilo wezekana. Nothing is impossible.

* * * THROUGHOUT MY LIFE, my parents’ interest in global Islamic cultures meant that they never bought a house but chose to spend their modest designer and bookseller income on memorable trips—to Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Spain— almost always staying with friends or family. These weren’t usually holidays as much as they were visits to Sufi sheikhs, communities, tombs of saints, mosques. The aim was not to get suntans and souvenir T-shirts but to soak up the atmosphere of ancient spiritual sites and modern-day circles of devotion. When we prayed or made dhikr together, it would feel like a deep gasp of fresh air away from the suffocating strictures that our different worlds impose… at least for a moment. Then we 44

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would return to our respective places in the world, with the painful realisation that the feeling of unity would not last.   After reading Malcolm X’s autobiography, in which he describes the beauty of hajj pilgrims of all colours dressing alike and treating one another as brothers, converts to Islam often feel they have finally found the solution to problems of racial exclusion. In his last sermon, Prophet Muhammad declared: All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab; also a white person has no superiority over a black person nor does a black person have any superiority over a white person except by piety and good action. Learn that every Muslim is a brother to every Muslim and that the Muslims constitute one brotherhood.

  The story of Bilal—the Abyssinian man whom the Prophet rescued from a painful death, freed from slavery, and appointed to the honourable position of first mu’adhdhin (the person who calls Muslims to prayer), despite his difficulty in pronouncing Arabic—is often naively held up as proof that the ummah is immune to racism. But there is a stark difference between the anti-racist stance expressed in the Prophet’s last sermon, and the reality of the ummah, in which racism is ingrained. Richard Burton’s 1885–8 translation of The Arabian Nights is shot through with repulsively racist descriptions of black people, typifying them as sexually voracious, ugly and evil. Gulf nations have appalling records of mistreatment of migrant workers from Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, who are largely service providers: drivers, gardeners, builders and maids. About 1,200 migrants have died building Qatar’s 2022 World Cup stadium.6 In Yemen and Mauritania, caste-like systems place darker-skinned people lower down in a racialised hierarchy. 45

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  Prejudices against black people can be subtler, too, to the point that we might fool ourselves into thinking they don’t exist. Stories of Arab or South Asian parents declaring that there is no racism in Islam but explicitly forbidding their daughters from marrying black men—no matter their suitors’ impeccable piety—are lamentably rife. Despite our lofty aims of brotherhood, Muslims are still guilty of anti-black oppression—in fact, we are often some of the worst culprits.   While it is hardly comparable in terms of discrimination or racial hate, outside of the West white people can also be viewed through a filter, this time of decadence and licentiousness, an assumption reinforced by the debauched behaviour of some of the ultra-privileged that plague East Africa. Stopping overnight in Muscat, Oman on my way back to the UK, I was approached by a young man in a white thawb and a turban after dinner. Relieved at being en route to the West and therefore able to drag out my usual Western attire, I was back to being an invisible Muslim. The Omani man asked me my room number; fortunately I could not remember it offhand. He insisted. His intentions dawned on me. Withering refusal ensued.   I returned to Europe wondering how I would ever be able to reconcile my Westernness and my Islam. Mambo mazuri hayataki haraka. Good things don’t want to be rushed.

* * * AFTER TWO YEARS OF SOASIAN anthropological mind-bending, I returned to East Africa for my study year abroad as one of five classmates—all English. For the first term we were at a language institute in Zanzibar, an archipelago that used to be part of the Omani sultanate and later the British protectorate, off the 46

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mainland of what was known as Tanganyika under German occupation; the two entities were fused at independence in 1961 to form Tanzania.   I’d left my heart in Zanzibar on my last trip. After Mombasa, I had spent a few weeks volunteering at ZIFF (the Zanzibar International Film Festival: hip gap year experience, check) and had my first taste of independence in a rented apartment overlooking the Catholic church. The pace of life here invites you to ponder, stroll, catch the breeze whenever possible—especially when you aren’t dependent on a local income.   In the streets teenage boys in tall, embroidered kufi hats hawked hand-braided baskets or trays with packets of peanuts, clacking columns of coins in their hands to attract trade. Grimy cats skulked about, scavenging. Men sat on front stoops playing bao, a game similar to mancala, carving wooden boxes in beautiful floral patterns, or selling vivid tingatinga paintings or batik artwork to tourists. You might see a woman sitting on a corner with a low charcoal stove, flipping what are known here as chapatis—evidence of Indian Ocean influence.   While my gap year had been little more than five weeks abroad, this time round I had six whole months to try to subsume my unwanted Europeanness in a real immersion, especially by attempting to achieve that holy grail of fluency in Swahili. But my experience here was different from my time in Lamu and Mombasa; in Zanzibar’s Stone Town foreigners are a common presence, whether tourists, development workers, or long-term residents, so the sight of white people isn’t quite so startling. Now and then, children might still let slip a surprised ‘mzungu!’ before their mums pulled them along by the hand.   Though I hated to admit it, it was something of a relief to be able to slip back into the old camaraderie with other Brits. I 47

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rented a ridiculously cheap apartment with one of my classmates from the UK. Taking inspiration from East African women, who used their kangas (the Tanzanian word for lesos) for everything from towels and baby-carriers to makeshift potholders, we draped a few around the flat to add a bit of colour, and sat on the balconies looking out at the street, the skyline of rusted corrugated roofs, coconut palms, and occasional rooftop lookout with coloured glass windows.   Despite being on an island where 97 per cent of people belonged to my own religion, the British university lifestyle was hard to break. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I also worried that I would weird out my classmates if my invisible Muslimness were suddenly to become visible. In typical English style, I didn’t like making people feel uncomfortable, a tendency that I’m glad to have since grown out of, even if nobody else is glad about it.   Thus, at first I did not wear a hijab. There were so many foreigners here wearing Western clothing that I thought I would feel even more out of place being practically the only mzungu woman adopting Swahili dress. In Zanzibar, this meant wearing a baibui (called a buibui in Kenya)—a long black garment similar to an Arab ‘abaya—over one’s clothing, which would often be a light cotton dress or a kanga worn as a sarong with a T-shirt. A kanga as a headscarf made a bright complement to the baibui, but some women chose hijabs in plainer fabrics. Christian women often had dresses made to order in colourful, batik fabric, which is heavier and more resilient.   Opposite the entrance to our flat, next to a fossilised giant clam encrusted into the yellow coral of the wall, was a tiny tailor’s workshop. I couldn’t resist getting an outfit made for my flatmate for her birthday from a set of kangas I had bought at the market. Kangas seemed to me the perfect cheap and cheer 

 

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ful, multipurpose textiles. I didn’t know then that they had such cultural significance, even beyond the cryptic proverbs printed at their edges. Before Abolition in 1897, slave women wore plain wraps, sometimes dying them using locally sourced indigo. As freewomen, they tried to leave behind the painful associations of the indigo wraps by patterning them using resist dye methods, block printing, or hand-painting. The earliest kangas are thought to have had a speckled pattern, similar to the feathers of a guinea fowl, which is called a kanga in Swahili—hence the name. Now the prints range from graphic interpretations of flowers and fruits to telephones and other household objects. I even saw one kanga with the enlarged face of the prime minister alongside political slogans. But much as I loved kangas, I didn’t feel right abandoning my wide-leg cotton trousers and linen tunics for them. Apart from the taint of cultural appropriation, I stubbornly resisted the notion that being a Muslim woman necessitated one specific kind of dress.   Besides, without a headscarf I was an invisible Muslim, and could piggyback off my mzungu-ness to overcome the restrictions that local Muslim girls seemed to live by. In Stone Town we hung out at the Africa House, the old colonial boozer that had been converted into an open bar with pool tables and the best sunset views from the roof terrace. I splashed out on a scuba diving course, made mini-trips to resorts and islands to swim, went out on night boat trips to see phosphorescent algae. One night our class was invited to a full-moon beach party by some Zanzibari guys who had more or less adopted us, and we danced to a tape of Bongo Flava (Congolese rumba-influenced pop) on their ghetto blaster. Boys seemed to be given licence to enter the world of the wazungu; local girls had to be chaperoned by a parent or brother when out in public, and certainly didn’t snorkel. 49

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I was ambivalent about relinquishing all this fun, even if I did want to savour the opportunity of living in a Muslim culture for a time.   Soon Ramadan came round—my first time spending the whole of the holy month in a Muslim country. In the daytime, much to the annoyance of most wazungu, restaurants stayed shut; the streets were dismally quiet except for mangy cats rummaging in bins. Delirious from a combination of a blood sugar low and delight that here I was not regarded as suicidal for fasting (‘Not even water? Every day for a month?’), I wandered about in quintessential mzungu style, deliberately letting myself get lost in the alleyways of the old town or the leafy outskirts. Once, I stumbled upon the Zanzibar Natural History Museum, a single room assiduously cared for by a couple of motherly women who were happy to show me the dodo skeleton, the twoheaded stuffed goat kid, and the photos of a coelacanth fish and an unidentified spherical sea monster.   The Zanzibari people I knew generally tolerated me not covering my head (although, frankly, this was a stupid thing to do on the Equator, where at noon the sun reaches its closest point to the earth), but during Ramadan they insisted I respect the tradition. In front of the mirror in my room I nervously experimented, slightly panicking at the change the other wazungu would think had come over me. My flatmate was surprisingly enthusiastic and helped me try out different styles. Surely we were all grown-up enough to accept changes in spiritual expression?   But while I wasn’t sure if I was ready to ‘come out’ as a visible Muslim, some of my friends on the other hand certainly were not prepared. On the first day I wore hijab at the language school, one of my classmates was clearly rattled by my new religious look. She wouldn’t look at me, and at one point got up to 50

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play compulsively with our classmate’s hair, as though suddenly remembering how luxuriant a woman’s uncovered hair was. I doubt she realised the gesture struck me as strange, but I had been sensitised to suggestions that I was not really one of the English crowd. It was a sinking feeling I had tried for many years to avoid, even at the cost of feeling I had sold out my faith for the sake of fitting in. And British culture so often rails against any kind of faith. One of our class, despite having a British Muslim girlfriend, said to me in disgust, ‘Do you know what the problem with Islam is? It’s all about God.’ Funnily enough, that’s about the most perfect description of Islam I’ve ever heard.   I tried to tread a middle path, which turned out to be less happy medium and more symphony of twanging nerves. In Ramadan, feeling the strain of meeting the expectations of a town that had suddenly grown extra pious (where had all the singing drunks gone?), my flatmate and I make an escapade to Nungwi, a resort village in the north of the island. Fasting while snorkelling felt strange; did the salt on my lips break my fast? Without daring to tell the locals for fear of incurring disapproval, I smuggled some fruit into our room for a rushed solo suhur—the pre-dawn meal—without an alarm clock, praying I’d intuit the time of daybreak.   In spite of this liberty, I longed to connect with circles of tasawwuf (Sufism); it seemed crazy to be here and miss out on it, especially in Ramadan. I decided to write an essay on the twelfth-century Kizimkazi Mosque, the oldest on the island, and made a research trip there by daladala (the Tanzanian version of the matatu). When I arrived, I was barred from entering by a gruff, suspicious caretaker, who told me that the mosque was too small to have a separate space for women. The Veil was back, and this time it was my gender that had been shut out. 51

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  Most nights in Ramadan, my classmates were invited to eat at the family home of some Zanzibari friends who had more or less adopted us underfed younglings, far from our families and incapable of making proper coconut milk. Here, with a surrogate grandmother, some bossy aunties and little kids to knock the corners off us, there was some semblance of normality, a Muslim family with their doors open to whatever strangers might wander in. I learned not to say a word at mealtimes; sitting on the floor and eating by hand from shared plates makes you inclined to eat fast and skip the chat, or risk getting an audience but no dinner.   We didn’t cook at home, anyway. Our hob had a dodgy cable and electrocuted us even when we poured water from a metal cup into a pan. There were plenty of places to get street food, and like anywhere in the Muslim world, every night in Ramadan was a party. My favourite street grill offered fresh mkate wa ufuta, delicious spongy bread made with coconut milk and sprinkled with sesame seeds, served with sizzling fresh beef skewers. Stacks of mangoes, oranges, eye-wateringly sour rubber tree fruits, guavas, papayas and bananas were piled up on house stoops for sale. In the evening we browsed the Forodhani Gardens market: there was barbecued lobster and crab, skewers of fresh tuna, swordfish, or barracuda, and the famous ‘Zanzibar pizza’—omelette fried in a thin pancake, with optional Laughing Cow cheese. There were mangles for pressing sugarcane juice—best with ginger and lime, skip the ice in case it comes with a side order of typhoid—and open stalls with benches where people sat and drank tea.   It was at one of these ‘tearooms’, while I was sipping a ginger infusion, that one of the local men gestured to the scarf on my head and asked me bluntly, ‘Why are you wearing a kanga?’ 52

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  ‘Because I’m Muslim,’ I replied, in rising dread at the impending avalanche of questions and advice.   ‘But you’re not wearing it properly. Look at our sisters, they all wear a black baibui and a hijab that covers everything. I can see a bit of your hair!’  ‘Dini yangu moyoni mwangu, siyo nyweleni yangu,’ I replied, a little smartly. ‘My religion is in my heart, not in my hair.’ I wondered if he would jump to his feet, affronted, and tell me not to try and educate him about his own religion. Instead he and his friend erupted into loud guffaws, shaking a finger at my sass but conceding the point.   I was beginning to see that Swahili people had a sharp sense of humour and didn’t shy away from needling people to get a reaction. I slowly started to get over my defensiveness—to a degree—and to see this prodding as a sign of closeness, like cousinly teasing. Paradoxically, if people were comfortable enough to address me so openly as ‘mzungu!’, this was a sign that my Otherness was being recognised and accepted, rather than squashed into a fearful corner and denied. I wished I could relax about it as much myself. Usinione nimecheka, moyoni nimekuweka. Don’t think that I have laughed at you; I have placed you in my heart.

* * * WHEN I ARRIVED BACK in the UK, ambivalence set in. I became nostalgic for that awesome place: the crumbling splendour of yellow coral buildings studded with giant clams, the horribly innocent-tasting menthol cigarettes, sugarcane juice, even ugali, the stodgy cassava meal staple. Kids jumping off the waterfront into the azure shallows, scattering the iridescent pipefish. A flash 53

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of vivid kanga scarves on black baibuis. Everything was so easy in Europe: buses ran on time, and there was no risk of the water cutting out or the unnerving whine of mosquitoes. In our corner of Essex it startled me to see so many white people everywhere. But even though Zanzibar had felt like home, and I had loved being swept along in the melopoeia of Swahili, I had to accept that I couldn’t transplant myself to another place and pretend I truly belonged there.   I had gone to Kenya and Tanzania hoping to find some kind of belonging in a Muslim-majority society. I did find connections, but this was mostly because of the openheartedness of the East Africans I met, who might simply have been treating me as any other mzungu who tried to move beyond tourist clichés. Yet even learning the language, I could not integrate entirely. As generous as my friends and hosts were, I realised that there was a line that it would be inappropriate for me to try to cross. The history of white people appropriating whatever we desire of Africa is long, and a cultural identity is surely one of the most valuable things a people has. Mzungu-ness will always carry with it the ghost of European colonialism, reincarnated as a tourism that objectifies and exploits, and even a development industry that ensconces white saviours in the same colonial hierarchies of old.   Besides, living in East Africa made me own my Westernness and realise how leery I am of losing the lifestyle to which I am accustomed. Apart from when I wore hijab during Ramadan, I could easily take advantage of my invisible Muslim status (read: white privilege) to overcome the traditional restrictions that local Muslim girls had to live by. I would always have one foot in and one foot out.   Not long after my return, my mum dug up a kanga from the inner recesses of her cupboards, blue with white and red 54

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spots and giant paisleys—amusingly the colours of my dual national flags.   ‘I found it in one of the houses we shared when I first became Muslim,’ she explained. ‘It was a curtain, or a tablecloth… We wrapped you in it when you were first born. Your sister, too.’   It was one of those moments you feel Fate has lined up for you, sowing seeds decades back and guiding you to the right places to find its fruits. The message on the cloth in my hands, whose faded, almost transparent cotton had enveloped my mother’s newborn babies, read:  

Zawadi yako. Your gift.

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2 WHERE MANY OTHERS HAVE PRAYED MUSLIMS IN TIBET AND LADAKH

THE SUMMER AFTER I returned from my language year abroad, travel bug having firmly embedded its fangs into my neck, the chance to go on a trek in Northern India came up. With what I had to spare of my student loan, I felt entitled to push my year of travelling a little further. It had become an addiction for me; I anxiously raked through my experiences abroad and felt they weren’t ‘enough’—they hadn’t shaped me sufficiently yet, broken me in.   Some French and Belgian friends were planning a trek in Ladakh, geographically part of India, in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, but ethnically and culturally Tibetan— and therefore, presumably, Buddhist. This piqued my interest, less for the hiking element than the prospect of diving into a human environment that was completely unknown to me. In that aloof, reductive way Westerners often have of thinking we can peel away the cultural clutter of Oriental wisdom and take a draught of it neat, I was intrigued by Buddhism, seeing it as a remote, more gnomic cousin of my native Sufism.   Moreover, our destination, the Zangskar Valley, lies in the Himalayas—another land fixed in the European imagination as

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the antipodes of human experience, as different from England in climate, geology, beliefs and lifestyle as can be imagined, and therefore a bucket-list candidate for any Western xenophile. Getting there would be demanding; at the time the valley was only passable for a few months of the year, by foot or by pony.   I flew into Delhi alone and late at night, and from the airport took a taxi to the Ladakhi-run hotel where my friend had thoughtfully booked a room for me. The next day I was told that it was Indian Independence Day, and that, bizarrely, my hoteliers would be fined if they had foreigners staying. Trying not to feel petulant that India had not thrown open its arms to me, I left my backpack in a locker at the bus station and went for a wander.   A few hours of sightseeing later, I stopped at an internet cafe to reassure my family that I hadn’t been eaten by Bengal tigers. Next to the internet cafe was a curious sight: two onion-shaped domes, horizontally striped black and white, emerged from behind some walled-in trees. Finishing my computer business and thinking it time for some spiritual business, I walked around the block looking for an entry point to this mosque. Eventually I found a footpath behind some houses. A cow grazed pensively.   Sitting at one corner of the open-sided mosque was a woman working at a hand-driven sewing machine, her bright hennadyed hair uncovered. Startled at my presence, she greeted me politely and left me to it. I went to pray, brushing away some dried flowers from an overgrown bush, and then sat listening to a pair of love birds twittering in the arches. When I got up to leave, the seamstress pulled me into her house, insisting on feeding me daal, which turned out to be eye-wateringly spicy for my feeble English taste buds. Her daughter spoke excellent English and we chit-chatted for a while. I tried to play down my excitement, but it was a wonderful feeling to be welcomed by stran58

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gers as something akin to a distant relative. I have little recollection of what was said, and they were far too courteous to pry into the reasons why we share a faith, but it hovered in the room with us, a happy mystery that pulled us together.   The seamstress and her daughter advised me to go and visit the tomb of Humayun, the second Mughal emperor. I covered my head walking through the Muslim neighbourhood, but my solitude marked me out as a foreigner as much as my face. I cannot speak Hindi or Urdu, and in any case, giving casual salams might create more confusion than communion. Besides, I didn’t want to risk looking like a Westerner ostentatiously feigning assimilation, so I didn’t bother, and nobody bothered me in turn.   The following morning, after a hairy all-night bus ride from Delhi to Manali,1 where I met the rest of the trekking party, a long journey by 4x4 took us through all four seasons in one mountain ridge, breaking through a frosty mist to a verdant slope—our first glimpse of Ladakh. Several Ladakhi guides were waiting for us at the first encampment to lead our group and the pack ponies. While they spoke Hindi to a few members of our party, their own language is a historical offshoot of Tibetan.   En route to the Zangskar Valley, we stopped in the dusty town of Padum. There we came across an unusually tall man wearing a classic Tibetan cross-fronted burgundy shirt, leaning forward with a serious gait as he strolled across the road, his arms held behind his bulky torso. Unlike the Ladakhi Buddhist men, who wore their hair and beards long, this man kept both trimmed close to the skin; otherwise there was not much to differentiate him, at least to a casual observer. One of my travelling companions followed my gaze and nudged me.   ‘That’s a Ladakhi Muslim,’ he casually mentioned. 59

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  I could hardly believe my ears. Although I rejoiced at this new discovery of Muslim marginalia, a small part of me was strangely disappointed that my attempt to journey as far away as possible from all that was familiar had been stymied. It reminded me of a Sufi story in which a man sees the Angel of Death in Alexandria and flees to Bukhara, where he runs into the self-same Reaper, who says, ‘Ha! That’s lucky! I saw you just two weeks ago in Egypt, but I’ve been commanded to take your soul in Bukhara today!’   The only other time I crossed paths with another Muslim during this trip was when we finished our trek and spent a night at a hostel (beds! showers!) in Kargil, a town close to the border of Pakistani-administered Kashmir. But I didn’t strike up conversation with the locals, partly because I was too exhausted for amicability, and partly because I was not sure how a hijab-less Muslim woman trekking in a mixed party of non-Muslims would be received.   In any case, what I really thirsted for on this trip was a taste of something more remote than the Islam I grew up with. I wanted to witness Tibetan Buddhism in all its glory, in villages that lie hours off the most remotely beaten path, or a monastery constructed around a spring in a cave where the disciples of the Buddha meditated. In one monastery we were invited into the room of a cheery monk who offered us sampa, roasted barley flour mixed with tea and rancid yak butter. Surprisingly moreish.   We saw numerous chortens, the Tibetan word for stupas, stone constructions containing the relics of saints. They were strikingly beautiful, the monasteries breathtaking, the continuity of an ancient spiritual path marvellous, but with some surprise I found myself pining for the familiar aesthetic abstraction of a mosque. The vividness of the monasteries rattled my nerves; 60

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their abundance of painted and carved deities, demons, boddhisattvas and hungry ghosts were gorgeously painted but made me claustrophobic. One of my trek companions told me that the contrast between Tibetan Buddhism and the stark simplicity of Zen is thought to come down to the Himalayan landscape itself, so otherworldly that it gave rise to a wildly detailed panorama of spiritual entities in its inhabitants’ consciousness. There is also the syncretic blend of Buddhism with indigenous Tibetan paganism, Bön; in one monastery I saw animal skulls hung in prayer rooms and an inflated animal bladder hanging from a ceiling. I craved clarity, but I could not seem to find it here. Maybe there was too much of me in the way.   Yet if the Ladakhi Muslim I saw in Padum was anything to go by, Muslims and Buddhists had been living here side by side long enough to be almost indistinguishable. How had the followers of these two religions managed to maintain this neighbourly relationship? Back in the UK, I set to scouring the SOAS library. * * * ISLAM AND BUDDHISM first became acquainted on the Silk Road, those threads of human movement that wove between China, Persia, India and Central Asia from the fourth to the tenth centuries. Merchants trading salt, spices, turquoise, coral, amber, opium, tobacco, hashish, tea, silk, leather and sheep’s wool would routinely risk life and limb to ply treacherous Himalayan trails on trips lasting months to reach Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Nicknamed ‘The Roof of the World’, Tibet was known to the travellers and geographers of antiquity as an important trading hub, though it was virtually unknown to the Western world until as late as 1980, and has been synonymous with the unreachably far-flung. 61

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  After the birth of Islam, many of the merchants traversing this route became Muslim, and a number of them settled in Tibet and Ladakh permanently—maybe with the perilous return journey in mind—where they married local women. Pollinated by trade, but rooted in the family, this was the beginning of the Muslim community in the Tibetan Empire, which at the time encompassed Baltistan in present-day Pakistan, Bhutan, Tibet, Mongolia, and Ladakh. Religious intermarriage was so common that to this day it is almost unheard-of for Muslims in Ladakh and Tibet not to have Buddhist relatives.   This burgeoning community of indigenous Tibetan Muslims was gradually supplemented by traders from Kashmir, mainly Shi’i merchants, and, much later, Chinese Hui Sunni Muslims who fled Chinese state persecution during the Cultural Revolution. (Sunni Muslims are Kha-che in Tibetan, ‘from Kashmir’, while Shi’a are sbalti, ‘from Baltistan’.)2 Finding a peaceful environment in Tibet, albeit one whose living conditions were harsh in the extreme, a small number settled, dedicating themselves mainly to farming and butchery. While Buddhist monks and nuns are strict vegetarians, lay Buddhists in this area are often meat-eaters, although, in order to avoid accruing bad karma, they leave the killing of animals to others—specifically Muslims. The latter, as a mark of respect, avoid monasteries and chortens when slaughtering animals. This curious symbiosis meant that in Leh, I could eat anything I liked in the restaurants as everything was halal.   But friendliness between Muslims and Buddhists goes beyond the merely gastronomical. In seventeenth-century Tibet, it is said that the fifth Dalai Lama, Lozang Gyatso, saw a Muslim man praying on a hill on the outskirts of Lhasa. When asked what he was doing, the Muslim explained that he was praying 62

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there because there was no mosque in the area. The Dalai Lama ordered that arrows be fired from the top of the hill in all directions, and the land between the points where the arrows fell was bequeathed to the Muslim community. This area is known as rGyang mda’ khang (The House of the Far-Reaching Arrows) and is the site of Lhasa’s first mosque—still used today for jumu’ah prayers—as well as the Muslim cemetery.   The fifth Dalai Lama also gave official patronage to the original occupants of this area as part of his policy of ‘invitation of peoples’. Though proselytism was forbidden, Muslims otherwise enjoyed complete religious freedom, as well as exemption from certain Buddhist rules such as covering the head in the presence of monks during the sMon lam festival. Muslims were also allowed to govern themselves according to their own laws and were exempt from paying taxes when trading—an activity that was vital to the Tibetan economy, given its geographical inaccessibility. * * * PART OF THE TIBETAN Empire, Ladakh had been Buddhist since about 200 BCE. After the collapse of its monarchy in the ninth century, Tibet became more closed to the outside world; as a result, the Muslim community in Tibet was severed from its lifeblood—the caravans—and lost its vitality.   The newly independent kingdom of Ladakh, on the other hand, remained open to foreigners. Islam spread in neighbouring Kashmir in the fourteenth century; the son of a Tibetan chief, Rinchana Bhotta, converted to Islam (probably for political reasons) and founded the first mosque in Srinagar, in 1320, on the site of a previous Buddhist temple.   In 1384, when severe flooding seriously damaged the then capital of Ladakh, Shey, the king called on outside help to recon 

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struct it. Mir Syed Ali Hamdani, a Persian Sufi, is said to have arrived from neighbouring Baltistan to oversee the works. The people of Tyakshi village saw him praying by the roadside for the floods to cease, and built a mosque there in his honour—the first to be constructed in Ladakh.   Kashmir had always maintained close relations with Ladakh, or ‘Little Tibet’. For several centuries, there were various attempts by Muslim rulers in India, Kashmir and Baltistan, as well as by the adventurer Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat, to attack Ladakh, mostly in order to invade Tibet and taking control of the lucrative Silk Road trade. Many would-be attackers were thwarted more by the extremities of weather and geography than military ferocity. However, in the course of these attacks, many villages were sadly decimated, Buddhist monasteries (gompas) destroyed, and the Ladakhi power structure divided.   One Ladakhi king, ‘Jam-dbyangs rnam-rgyal, agreed to convert to Islam in order to marry his Balti vanquisher Ghazi Mir’s daughter. In 1679, when a Tibeto-Mongolian army—led by the fifth Dalai Lama—invaded Ladakh, the Ladakhi king called on the Mughal ruler of Kashmir, Ibrahim Khan, for help. His request was answered, on the condition that he embrace Islam, repair the mosque in Leh, and sacrifice much of his kingdom.   There were numerous Muslim–Buddhist royal marriages throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Zizi Khatun, a Balti chieftain’s granddaughter, married Nyi-marnam-rgyal; Queen rGyal Khatun (regarded by Buddhists as an incarnation of the White Tara) was the daughter of a Shi’i prince; King Tshe-dbang rab-brtan had two Muslim wives; and Hurchu Khan, the ruler of a principality near Kargil, also married a Ladakhi Buddhist princess. Like much of medieval history, these alliances were far more connected to consolidating 64

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power and trade interests than to disseminating Islam. With little exception, the monarchs ‘all continued their reigns in accordance with Buddhist customs, to respect Buddhist precepts and to support the Buddhist Church’, founding numerous temples and sending so many donations to Lhasa that it led to the nation’s financial ruin.3   Besides conversions, Muslims and Buddhists in the Tibetan cultural zone have been socially intertwined in many ways. After the loss of Ladakhi independence to the Dogra kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir in 1846, it was Ladakhi Muslims who led the biannual Lopchak caravan, which brought gifts to the Dalai Lama in Lhasa. Lasting a gruelling three to four months, it carried not only saffron, textiles, and gold but also Ladakhi boys destined for monastic lives in Tibet’s monasteries. Muslims were entrusted with the onerous task of leading the caravan because they were known for their integrity and expertise, while they, in turn, were given a valuable opportunity to trade.   In his memoir of working as the ‘last caravaneer of Tibet and Central Asia’, Ladakhi Muslim Abdul Wahid Radhu describes attending the succession ceremony of the present Dalai Lama, then eight years of age, in Lhasa. While the Buddhists in the audience filed past His Holiness, prostrating one by one as they did so, the British agent and the Muslims in attendance were granted exemption to this custom, with the latter offering him salams instead.4   The Tibetan cultural area absorbed a great deal from their visiting merchants and immigrants. Urdu songs were the basis of the Tibetan operatic song form Nang Ma (from naghma, meaning ‘melody’), while the author of Khache Phalu’s Advice on the Art of Living—the most beloved of Tibetan literary treasures, an extraordinary blend of monotheism with Buddhist 65

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philosophical references—was a Tibetan Muslim. The Leh dialect of Ladakhi is rich in borrowed words, particularly from Urdu and Farsi. The Ladakhi king Tshebtan Namgyal introduced a type of coinage borrowed from his Muslim neighbours, while polo has also been kept alive in its original Persian form by Muslims in Chushot, providing summer entertainment for the local community, regardless of religion.   Of course, the flow of influence is never one-way, and indeed Muslims of Tibetan origin have borrowed a great many cultural elements from their Buddhist neighbours, too. The Gya Kha-Che Chinese Mosque in Lhasa is a unique blend of Tibetan and Chinese architectural and decorative styles, while flapping above Shi’i mosques are strings of prayer flags in green, red and black bearing Qur’anic verses, inspired by the Buddhist custom. Mosque decorations sometimes incorporate the swastika icon, an ancient symbol representing divinity or spirituality, which also appears in Hindu, Buddhist and Mughal architectural decoration.   Sadly things were not always so harmonious—at least, not universally. In contemporary times there have been sporadic conflicts between Muslims and Buddhists.5 From Partition until 2019, Ladakh was governed from Jammu in winter and Srinagar in Indian Kashmir in summer, and resentments have long simmered over a Muslim bias in government. In 1989, tensions culminated in the Ladakh Buddhist Association (LBA) calling for a social and economic boycott of Muslims, initially aimed at the Kashmiris who dominated the administration, but later extending to all Ladakhi Muslims. Violent protests broke out in and around Leh, with monks of the Soma monastery and worshippers of the Jama Masjid at one point actually fist-fighting. The boycott was lifted in 1992, when the Indian government 66

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convinced the LBA that it would not consider granting Ladakh union territory status if it continued, but relations between the two main religious communities were seriously damaged.6   Another thorn in the side of the LBA is that of Buddhist women along the Kashmiri border converting to Islam through marriage. (While Muslims make up a little over 15 per cent of the population in Leh, along the Kashmiri border the population rises to almost 77 per cent, putting the proportion of Buddhists to Muslims in Ladakh at 51 per cent and 49 per cent respectively.) Rather than being a kind of ‘love jihad’,7 as its detractors have called it, the propensity of Buddhist women to marry Muslim men is doubtless affected by the slightly skewed ratio of marriageable men to women. This is due in part to the ancient Tibetan cultural practice of fraternal polyandry, in which a woman marries a man and his brothers in order to prevent the splitting up of family land by inheritance, and in part to the Buddhist custom of dedicating one male member of every family to monasticism. Many Buddhist men have also migrated to areas with greater economic opportunities, with the result that ‘for the first time in decades Leh has more Buddhist women than men’.8 Conversion also cuts both ways, with some Muslims from Ladakh converting to Buddhism.   However, frictions between the two main faith communities in Ladakh appear to be the exception rather than the rule. Beneath a veneer of politically motivated grievances there runs a strong undercurrent of mutual respect and tolerance, with deep historical roots. In the seventeenth century, under the reign of King Sengge Namgyal, the head lama of the ancient Hemis Monastery presented a staff to the imam of the Leh Mosque in order to strengthen Buddhist–Muslim friendship. The staff is still used at every jumu’ah gathering as the imam  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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gives the khutbah, or sermon, while the manuscript of the Qur’an that the imam gave him in return has been preserved to this day in the monastery.   Ladakh specialist Helena Norberg-Hodge has noted that at the Buddhist celebration Losar, Eid, and Christmas (a small minority of Christians, the fruit of missionary activities in the late nineteenth century, also live in Leh), visitors of all three faiths stream to each other’s homes, presenting kataks, white silk scarves that symbolise respectful greetings and goodwill—a Buddhist custom that has been secularised in Ladakh. The admin of the Ladakhi Muslim Community Facebook page describes how Buddhists close their wine shops during Ramadan, while monasteries reduce the volume of their prayers when the adhan is called from mosques. Likewise, at the beginning of the Buddhist holy month Saga Dawa, which falls between May and June, Muslim butchers close their slaughterhouses, while both religious communities gather together at each other’s houses to give one another their condolences at funerals. ‘This is love, respect and kindness. That’s my Ladakh.’9 * * * TO OBSERVERS OF WORLD events in which Muslim nations violently suppress religious minorities, it might seem implausible that Muslims could find commonalities with their Buddhist neighbours on matters of faith. Surely if the Taliban destroyed the Bamyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, and sultans of old were happy to rampage through Ladakhi monasteries and villages alike, all Muslims would take umbrage at Buddhists’ worship of icons and effigies?   And yet many of the converts to Islam that I have known arrived at Sufism by way of Buddhism. My mother practised 68

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Vipassana for a while and says that she gained a great deal of peace and clarity from it. My poetry mentor, Daniel AbdalHayy Moore, first came into contact with ‘Eastern philosophy’ as an emerging Beat poet in Berkeley, California, in the aciddrenched 1960s, via the Zen master Sensei Shunryu Suzuki. In his poetry collection Laughing Buddha Weeping Sufi, Moore creatively ponders why Buddhas are described as laughing while Sufis are thought to weep abundantly when witnessing the Divine. Yet, ‘it is said of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, that he was the most laughing of men. And the Buddha? Sombre and sober.’ Moore further quotes a friend who had been in Morocco at the zawiyah of a Sufi saint: ‘I was struck by how, as he poured forth prayers and blessings to us … the things he said were in a voice that made me think at first he was weeping until I saw that it was actually laughter.’10   There are other similarities between the two religions. Muslims might see the Reality described by the Buddha as a reflection of ‘Al-Haqq’—‘The True,’ or ‘The Real’. The current Dalai Lama talks quite freely about God in his talks and writing, interchanging God with Buddha or—when talking with Muslims—Allah.11 While Muslims would surely object to the idea of Allah being synonymous with a historical human Buddha, the values associated with both resonate so well that no-one contradicts him. I am fascinated to know how he would define God, or if he would agree with the thirteenth-century Egyptian Sufi Ibn ‘Ata’illah’s statement that ‘Whatever you think concerning God—know that He is different from that!’ In his foreword to Reza Shah-Kazemi’s book Common Ground Between Islam and Buddhism, the Dalai Lama writes: ‘The Buddha taught that every sentient being has a mind or consciousness whose fundamental nature is essentially pure, unpol 69

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luted by mental distortions.’12 The concept sounds remarkably similar to the Islamic notion of fitrah, the natural inclination towards God-consciousness that humans are all born with.   Buddhist teachings point to emptiness as a means of escaping suffering; rather than being a nihilistic path, this is an expression of non-attachment, of ‘non-ego’. I see little difference between this and the Sufi nirvana of fana and baqa’: annihilation of the ego and subsistence in God-consciousness. The Buddha’s central teaching of walking a ‘Middle Way’ between the extremes of asceticism and carnal sensuality is almost identical to Prophet Muhammad’s middle path. So, too, the Noble Eightfold Path central to Buddhist praxis—right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration—mirrors Islamic ethics and spirituality beautifully. And like classical Islam, Buddhism places great emphasis on compassion in daily interactions; the Tibetan term for ‘thank you’, thug rje che, literally means ‘great compassion’.   The Qur’an states, ‘For each of you [communities] We have established a Law and a Way; and had God willed, He could have made you one community’,13 an affirmation that lays a solid Islamic basis for interfaith dialogue and mutual respect. So the 2016 Marrakesh Declaration, signed by 250 Muslim-majority nations to mark the 1,400th anniversary of the Charter of Medina,14 exhorts Muslims to engage in a pluralistic cooperation that ‘must go beyond mutual tolerance and respect, to providing full protection for the rights and liberties to all religious groups in a civilized manner that eschews coercion, bias, and arrogance.’ It further calls upon ‘religious groups bound by the same national fabric to address their mutual state of selective amnesia that blocks memories of centuries of joint and shared living on the same land’, and affirms that it is ‘unconscionable to  

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employ religion for the purpose of aggressing upon the rights of religious minorities in Muslim countries.’15 Whether these sound words will be applied is a moot question, but it is undeniable that Muslims have ample reason to put aside our chauvinism. Indeed, tolerance is too low a bar: ‘I tolerate you’ rings rather hollow when compared to ‘I accept you’. * * * UNFORTUNATELY, WE are no closer to freedom from religious discrimination today than in the past—and in some ways persecution has worsened as the technology of war improves. Of 6,000 Buddhist monasteries prior to China’s 1959 invasion of Tibet, only forty-eight escaped major damage during the Cultural Revolution. Prominent Muslim leaders were among the thousands of Tibetans arrested and tortured, and at times China forbade the selling of food to Tibet’s Muslims. Sixty years later, there are approximately 85,000 Tibetan refugees living in India.16   China’s aggressively anti-religious policy has not improved since then. The nation’s 10-million-strong Uyghur Muslim minority have borne the brunt of a brutal counter-terrorism policy that many Arab governments have cynically applauded. In August 2018, as many as 2 million Muslims from Xinjiang province were herded into ‘political camps for indoctrination’,17 where they are reportedly forced to denounce Islam and watch Communist propaganda videos, as well as eat pork, desecrate the Qur’an, and remove ‘Islamic’ clothing. It should come as no surprise that there are political and economic motivations for this persecution: Xinjiang is rich in oil, coal and natural gas, and is located in the way of projects in the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, which plans to repurpose the ancient Silk Road and create a 71

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three-continent-wide trade superhighway to cement China’s position as a dominant world power.   Like Tibetan and Ladakhi Muslims, whose religious origins hark back to international Silk Road traders, Uyghurs have Turkic origins, unlike China’s dominant Han ethnic group. Thus their persecution for their religion also has a racial dimension. Their situation is reminiscent of that of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Myanmar against whom the Burmese military and local Buddhists have wrought genocide, raping, slaughtering and immolating tens of thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands more to flee.   In India, too, things took a troubling turn in the summer of 2019. On 5 August, India ruled to abrogate Article 370 of its constitution, which had given the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir special status. The following day, the government revoked Article 35A, which had barred non-locals from buying property, alleging that it encouraged discrimination and the violation of certain fundamental rights. However, the grounds for the ruling seem rather shaky, given that other states in India also enjoy special status.18 Immediately, a curfew was enforced, as well as a media and internet blackout that prevented Kashmiris from sharing news or videos of events, although rare clips posted to Twitter show Kashmiris running chaotically in the street to the sound of gunfire—on the day of Eid al-Adha.   Within a matter of weeks, a reported 4,000 Kashmiris had been arrested under the state’s controversial Public Safety Act, a law that allows authorities to imprison people for up to two years without charge or trial. Security forces have responded to protesters with tear gas and pellet guns, leading to civilian deaths and countless injuries. Against the historical backdrop of  

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Kashmir—an area that Pakistan and India both contest, and which has fought for independence for three decades—these developments are deeply worrying.   In the wake of the announcement, there has been a torrent of racialised misogynistic tweets and comments on the video platform TikTok from Indian men trumpeting their newfound right to marry Kashmiri women. Standing before a poster of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Vikram Saini, a politician from Modi’s Hindu nationalist ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said in a video: ‘We can get the bachelors among our party workers married there now, there is no problem… Our Muslim party workers should be happy, now they can go and marry fair-skinned Kashmiri girls.’ Google searches in India for ‘Kashmiri girl’ surged from 5 August.19   On 31 October 2019, the state of Jammu and Kashmir was split into two union territories: Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. The move brought relief to some Ladakhi politicians, who have resented being governed from Srinagar. Leh’s BJP MP, Jamyang Tsering Namgyal, is predictably supportive of his party’s decision, describing the move as marking ‘independence from Kashmir’ and saying, ‘We’ve waited 70 years for this moment.’20 Welcoming the lifting of restrictions on property ownership, he foresees a development boom in Ladakh. In Namgyal’s words, the ‘patriotism of the people [of Ladakh] and their unwavering commitment towards India’ runs high.21   It is too soon to say how this will affect Ladakhi Muslims, many of whom have Kashmiri origins but strong Ladakhi identities. In February 2019, Ladakh, which had previously been part of the administrative district of Kashmir, was granted its own divisional status by the Jammu and Kashmir state government. The Ladakhi Muslim Community Facebook page responded to  

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the news with a ‘sigh of relief ’, as the move had long been demanded by the ‘people of Ladakh both from Leh and Kargil’.22 But as early as 2018, several Ladakhi Muslims interviewed by Indian news company NewsClick expressed their fears of the abrogation of Article 35A. Ashraf Ali Barcha, president of the Anjuman Imamia of Leh, believed that, ‘If they remove article 35A we will lose [our] peace. Businessmen from Delhi and Punjabi cities will come and take over here and all the traditions we have as a community will be lost.’ Bashir Al Ladakhi, a Kargil resident, stated, ‘[We] Ladakhi folk will suffer. Our population is small and our tourism is growing, and if they start opening big chain hotels around here us locals will be out of business.’23  

* * * I CAN’T SAY MY SUBJECTIVE experience is relevant to Ladakhi Muslims, but their story has transformed my own spiritual path. There are lessons for Muslims living in pluralistic contexts here, proof that we don’t need to fall back on the ‘People of the Book’ argument to justify a live-and-let-live attitude.24 If Ladakhi Muslims build their mosques in a local style, write Arabic prayers on flags like Buddhists do, and live largely in the same way as do followers of a faith that seems so unlike Islam, then to be a British, Western or white Muslim is not such a new or heterodox notion. It is simply a matter of perspective.   In the case of Ladakh, this is a perspective that gives us vast, dun moonscapes, eerily beautiful with white cauls of snow lying permanently over 7,000-metre peaks. Marmots scamper around mountain slopes rarely frequented by humans. Yaks munch peacefully beside squat stone houses whose roofs are heaped with hay. Chortens pop up on the abandoned pathways like giant rosewater shakers, as well as piles of stones carved with the 74

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gorgeous Tibetan lettering of the enigmatic homage Om mani padme hum—‘hail to the jewel of lotus’. It is breathtaking— quite literally: oxygen levels at this altitude are often half those of air at sea level. These are excellent conditions for a lightheadedness conducive to awe.   The sheer remoteness of the Himalayas asserts itself at every moment, stunning the observer into recognition of their infinitesimal smallness and contemplation of the infinite. Besides, mere survival in hostile terrain like this is so challenging that adding to it the human complication of religious conflict seems like reducing the odds to a dangerous low.   Here it is certainly possible to sit side by side in contemplation of the mystery that is at the heart of existence, and hang our alterities on the wall. As the Tibetan proverb says, ‘Kneel where others have knelt, because God is present where many have prayed.’

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3 SWALLOWS AND RATS SUMMER IN A TURKISH FISHING VILLAGE

THERE ARE TWO KINDS of animals living in the chapel: swallows and rats. That’s if you reduce the zoology of the place to a pair of species, ignoring the tiny tortoise that oars slowly, grandly, across the sandy floor, or the grey cat, Pushkin, who likes to curl up in the bay of my sleeping body, sharing his fleas.   But for the moment let’s return to our neat binary of swallows and rats. The former nest in the crevices in the rough stone masonry of this former Byzantine temple, throats trilling like water whistles at dawn. The latter, on the other hand, live in the roof of the makeshift bathroom-kitchen extension; this part is rather more recent, dating back to when the current owner tried to turn this abandoned prayer space into an art gallery.   The owner himself, Rüzgar, lives in a small, whitewashed stone house a little further down the hill, buried half into it, in fact: a single room with cobalt-painted fruit crates nailed to the walls for bookshelves. He tells us how, after he returned from his bohemian stint in Germany, he would place a theatrical mask—a black horse’s head trailing a cape—on his chimneystack. It must have cut quite a figure, the cape flapping like a baleful flag across the Aegean seascape, yet nobody ever noticed

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it. Proof, he smiled, of how easily we erase from sight things that don’t make sense.   My travelling companion and I sleep on huge, squashy cushions strewn over a wooden stage that has commandeered the apse of the church. At the beginning of our trip we gave ourselves the nicknames Summer and Marine after a cheapo snorkel set of the same name. The pseudonyms reassert themselves in periodic fits of giggles.   Leaving sober, transcendent Istanbul a week before, we had boarded a bus down to this fishing village near Bödrum, best known for its sub-Ibiza club scene and English tourists splayed on beaches like boiled crustaceans with beer bottles and epic manicures. But this village turned out to be more of a quiet getaway for Turkish out-of-towners. A mass of arid rock and scree, flecked with wild herbs and bushy evergreen trees, angles steeply down to the turquoise water. A placid cove is bifurcated by an island populated by giant lop-eared rabbits that have gone semiferal. A woman from the mainland wades out once a day to dump a bucket of scraps for them.   At low tide, you can walk across the gravel to Rabbit Island, spiking your heels on shards of Roman pottery, for an early morning climb and a dive into the lapis depths if you’re brave enough. I hold my breath and lie on my back underwater, looking up at the sun’s rays sparkling towards me through the salt in a spiral of oscillating legs, like a brisingid starfish.   On the far side of the bay, the broad steps of some imposing Byzantine monument that thundered into the water during an earthquake centuries ago rise out of the opaque depths to just below the surface. You can stand on them and look like you’re walking on water, hovering over the present with your soles on the ancient past. It makes you cast your mind, fishing line–style, back to when Brutus fled here after he murdered Caesar. 78

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  But other dramas are unfolding now; not momentous ones, mere droplets of water on a dozing sunbather’s shades.   There are two kinds of animals that live in the chapel: swallows and rats.   We were only meant to stay here a week, but the sea air has lulled us into a glad unawareness of time. The leisurely mornings on the beach while we avoid working, smeared in a demonically effective sun-cream (99 per cent Vaseline, 1 per cent cocoa butter aroma) haven’t hurt either, except once when, in our pasty English zeal, we overdid it and fried ourselves alive. This unofficial ‘woofing’ arrangement—food and board in exchange for time and effort—had been procured via some of my parents’ friends, English Sufi converts who had spent many summers with Rüzgar when their son was young. The offer was too good to pass up.   There are two Turkish orphans working for Rüzgar for free, too, a teenage brother–sister housekeeping duo with round, wide-eyed faces who live next door and hardly talk. They labour here because Rüzgar has told them that he will, one day soon, take them to live in Germany. In the meantime, Marine and I will apparently be working alongside them to convert this chapel-turned-art gallery into a bar. Me, a Muslim who doesn’t even drink, setting up a bar! Specifically, it is to be a plywood structure, with a thin seam of plants and whitewashed stones delineating the edge where the hill begins to drops away, its vertiginous slope overrun by prickly pear cacti. There are no lights. Nor is there a cash register, or a float.   It seems to make sense to Rüzgar, though, and his enthusiasm has infected others. Azra, a thirty-something artist with a sophisticated air, arrives in a buttoned-up shirt and pencil skirt, her curly black hair tied into a knot at the top of her head.  

 

 

 

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Having emigrated from Turkey to francophone Belgium, she has returned for some rest—and hopefully creative inspiration—in her homeland. One day she sketches me and Marine on long rolls of paper in swift, intuitive pen strokes: gawky elves in shorts and vests with near-identical cropped blonde hair. I have a baseball cap pulled down over one side of my face, where a mosquito bite on my eyelid has swollen and disfigured me.   Within a week, Azra has let her short mane loose into a frizzy halo, erupting frequently into loud, hoarse laughs. She chain smokes and is suddenly as tanned as terracotta. As industrious as she is creative, she has got to work sewing cushion covers for the comfy seating area of the bar (by repurposing our beds; I’m guessing we aren’t expected to sleep while it’s open).   One of Rüzgar’s friends, Emirhan, is our constant companion, too. Around fifty, with salt-and-pepper ringlets and beard and smart-but-wrinkled linen suits, he looks like the local marijuana dealer, which is exactly what he is. Azra immediately falls in love with him. In the evenings, once we have all put in enough painting, sewing, gardening or carpentry, we sit down to eat supper at the long banquet table inside the chapel, a couple of candles in green bottles, red wine sloshing in everyone’s glasses. I cover my glass with my hand, pouring myself water instead. It already feels semi-sacrilegious to be a Muslim praying in stolen moments in the chapel, after everyone has gone home.   We—the Snorkel Twins—Rüzger, Emirhan and Azra sit around the banquet table late into the night, smoking a ridiculous number of rollies and talking about philosophy. At least, I think that’s the subject of conversation, which takes place mainly in Turkish, translated into French by Azra for Marine, who translates it into English for me. It’s like being at university, but with better food. 80

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  Once everyone has left for the night, Marine and I lie on the squashy cushions in the dark and talk. After she falls asleep I lie awake wondering how I ended up here, what God has intended for me, what the lesson in this trip is. Being in Turkey, the land where Rumi is buried, chain smoking and pretending to understand Kant.   Marine and I spend our afternoons journaling on the waterfront, a fringe of planks built over the water’s edge with tables and chairs for a series of cafes and restaurants. Hanging overhead are long strips of traditional woven tent cloth; the tables are upcycled windows, enclosing still lifes of beach shells and sand dollars beneath the glass. Some have hammocks hanging over the shallow, almost luminous turquoise water.   Our favourite place for tea is a patisserie run by a beautiful, bronzed Turkish man with floppy hair and a smidgen of goatee, who plays the soundtrack to Amélie on repeat. We call him Cake Boy and flirt shamelessly with him. Beyond this end of the boardwalk, set with the more traditional low stools and chairs, is the understory of a huge fig tree, its thick, sinuous grey branches clotted not only with leaves and fruit, but also fluttering strips of coloured fabric.   ‘People tear off a bit of their clothing and tie it onto the branches,’ Cake Boy explains, ‘making a wish as they do so.’   I’m sceptical of the tree’s ability to grant wishes, but there’s something intriguing about tearing off a piece of perfectly good clothing, purposefully making it incomplete. It reminds me of the custom of kilim weavers who incorporate deliberate mistakes in their rugs so as not to rival the perfection of God’s creation. It echoes the Sufi ideal of non-attachment to materiality, of not building your world on the spider’s web of the dunya, or earthly world,1 of not putting your faith and trust in things. 81

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Marine and I duly tear a hem from our skirts, making a wish. I soon forget what my wish was.   It turns out that this neck of the woods is not entirely off the tourist trail; like the bottom corner of a handbag, it’s where all manner of unconventional people seem to collect. All of us trying to escape ordinary European society, and meeting it in one another.   ‘These mountains are the best place to stargaze—no light pollution!’ an ageing American astrologer enthuses one night. She has swept us along with her stargazing group towards the dark, moonless slopes, faint suggestion of waves like seagulls of silvery light on the water’s onyx surface.   ‘Venus is in conjunction with the moon… and look, there they are together on the Turkish flag!’ she adds, pointing to my souvenir T-shirt. ‘Love is in the air!’ she laughs, and playfully grabs my boobs. As startling as this invasion of privacy is, there’s clearly no reasoning with sexagenarian astrologers excited about Venus, and I pretend nothing has happened. Stiff upper lip. * * * THE DAY OF OUR home-bound flight looms.   We delay it. * * * ONE NIGHT, WE ALL PACK into Emirhan’s hotboxed van and careen, to the sounds of Morcheeba, along serpentine, un-signposted mountain tracks to another beach. This time it’s a more touristy spot, a waterfront made up of open-air bars with colourful beanbags and wooden dance floors lit by strings of paper lanterns. A Cuban band is playing ‘Quizás, quizás, quizás’ and we fling ourselves about, bare feet tanned but for the sandal 82

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strap marks, giddy with the spontaneity of the moment—us, there, then. * * * There is a problem. The toilet at the back of the chapel has backed up and overflowed, its frail soakaway system unaccustomed to visitors who stay for such a long time. Rüzgar casts us uncharitable looks, calling us ‘Western princesses’ in an undertone he scarcely bothers to conceal.   ‘It’s true,’ Marine concedes wretchedly. ‘We’re taking advantage of his kindness, lounging around on the beach half the day, eating the food he’s paying for, and look what happens—he has to clean up our shit.’   She’s right, but I don’t want to admit it. Only my parents have the right to brand me a princess. For all my decolonial rhetoric, I still expect special treatment.   But I don’t want it to be him that teaches me the lesson, to have to go to him with my head bowed. Rüzgar’s standard expression in my direction is a scowl, and I suspect I have started to mirror it. He begins to look more and more wooden to me, his skinny limbs dangling flimsily on hidden metal hinges. His head hangs low on his neck, as though the puppeteer’s hands have grown slack, and the marionette’s eyes are beetlish and scheming.   A boy from the cyber-cafe in the next town comes to the chapel to deliver a letter for me: naïve, but sweet. In his zeal to compliment me, he compares me to Princess Diana. I suppose all white girls with short blonde hair are indistinguishable here, but the reference to Western princesses still stings.   There are two kinds of animals living in the chapel: swallows and rats.   Rüzgar has taken to inviting Marine to spend long evenings talking at his house. I feign indifference; it gives me more time 83

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to journal all my important philosophical thoughts. But I have told Marine that I think we need to leave. The atmosphere here is too heady, surreal, suspicious. I can’t forgive Rüzgar’s unforgiving attitude. He tries to appear just, but I know he wants me out. * * * A COUPLE FROM ISTANBUL call by, and we have tea on the porch. They are intensely calm, sit very upright on the wicker chairs in the lotus position, and have the sort of edgeless tans that have clearly been achieved by spending a lot of time outdoors naked. The couple run a yoga studio in Istanbul, but they escape the August heat of the city at a house they built themselves in a village some way up the mountain. They have the sorts of lingering gazes that feel into you, a faint smile in their eyes, as though the entire universe were showering them with its secrets at that very moment.   A few days later, the same yogi shores up on the beach where Marine and I are sunbathing. He irrupts out of the sea, gasping for air, his long sun-kissed hair and beard drenched, the Indian dhoti clinging unpleasantly around his groin. He fixes me immediately with a soul-inspecting gaze and asks my name. It is the only time I have ever explained my religion to a stranger while wearing a bikini without them batting an eyelid.   ‘You should come to do a meditation session with us this Saturday,’ he says.   Is it that obvious that I need it? * * * AZRA APPEARS AT THE chapel, flustered. ‘Emirhan is in trouble with the police,’ she explains. ‘We’re going to Istanbul. Maybe 84

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when the cops get bored we can come back again. See you, darling girls.’   The spell is breaking by degrees, the incantation reversing letter by letter.   There are two kinds of animals in the chapel…   Saturday comes and Marine decides to stay with Rüzgar to talk. I shrug haughtily and set off on foot, following the directions Rüzgar has been all too happy to give me: out of the village, away from the sea, on a yellow dirt track leading up at an oblique angle into the hills.   When the sun is halfway past its zenith and I know I won’t get sunstroke, I set off. The path is rocky and dry. By the road are bushes of pink oleander, wild rosemary, lavender and thyme, figs and junipers, and the odd sour pomegranate tree. There is silence but for the white noise of crickets. The sun, which sets each night into the Aegean Sea between a spattering of islands— some Greek, some Turkish—flashes on the water’s surface in dizzying glints.   Halfway up I pass a pack of wild dogs, which start barking furiously at me. Shaking but too stubborn to stop, I automatically press on, lowering my eyes and pretending I don’t see them. I recite Ayat al-Kursi under my breath, not wanting to show my teeth for fear they will read it as a provocation. The dogs continue to bark but let me pass.   I find the yoga house without any trouble—it is the only one in this village that seems to have been transported magically from Dharamsala. Late, I slip into the meditation room as quietly as I can. Yagiz the yogi peeps at me, bowing faintly in welcome. The class is silent, apart from the occasional directive given by Yagiz (in English—clearly there are enough European hippies here to make a living from them) to focus on our breathing in various ways and visualise our astral bodies. 85

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  This is my first time silently meditating in a room full of strangers. I itch all over. My feet go to sleep, one after the other. I want recognition. I am repelled by recognition. I want attention. I don’t want anyone to see me, trying to be empty and failing. The whole thing makes me cringe. It is not like a dhikr, where everyone is singing, with whatever voice we have been given, a melody to carry and words to sink into, and hands to hold.   In Istanbul we had gone to a Jerrahi dhikr, one of the few circles that escaped being banned by Atatürk’s enforced secularisation of the country by being rebranded as a cultural experience for tourists. In a way, this did Turkish Sufism a favour: some of these visitors would be so taken with the atmosphere of musical meditation that they would become adherents themselves, bringing Sufism back with them to create new circles in their home countries—little ripples thrown out from the sonorous centre.   Marine and I had watched from the women’s gallery above as concentric rings of men moved in alternate directions, their arms joined to their neighbours’ shoulders and waists, their feet stepping slowly to the rhythm of the hand drum. In the centre a dervish’s white robe unfurled around him in a columbine of rising and dipping waves, red felt hat cocked to one side, ears listening to the sound beneath the sound.   This was my spiritual home, in devotional song, in calling on God in a language that is not my mother tongue but which still makes sense, if I can just open a new window in my being to understand it. This home is almost always surrounded by such ugliness—heaps of shoes, peeling plaster, rambunctious children, gruff women, stringent rules—that the beauty at its core is protected from pretention. New Age spirituality, by comparison, seems so aesthetic. 86

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  After the session, Yagiz takes me on a special tour of his tastefully rustic home. Natural pigments hand-plastered on the stone walls and a cloud of jasmine on the bedroom balcony. Butterflies (Yagiz tells me) rush in on summer nights and swarm around the mosquito net.   But even in heavenly places, bodily functions cannot be ignored.   ‘Could you tell me where your bathroom is?’ I ask.   ‘It’s that room there,’ he points out, pleased, for some reason.   ‘Ah, the one without… erm… a door.’   I try not to be prim. The toilet is in full view of the hallway, and there are still a few people milling about in post-meditation euphoria. A sunken bath is surrounded by a rim of what appears to be volcanic rock. But however you look at it, the door is pointedly lacking. It is like an absent monument to the way the house’s owners have transcended such silly, backward things as Islamic principles of modesty. Summoning up all of my ability to go with the flow, I answer nature’s call, silently praying that no-one will want to do the same thing at that exact moment.   Yagiz is out on the patio, which leads to a long sliver of mountainside garden. Along the outer edge a low wall is dotted with plant pots… of pot. ‘Medicine,’ he shrugs with a roguish smile. ‘But don’t let your mind come in, judging.’ His gaze becomes uncomfortably arresting. ‘You see, Medina, the world is a mirror. All that you see outside is in fact a reflection of what is within. Look inside yourself, Medina. Look within.’   Look inside your own self and get your mitts off mine, I just about manage to refrain from replying.   In the kitchen he treats me, with a great show of courtesy, to a glass of tea—herbal, not the usual black Ceylon. I men 87

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tion the dogs, wondering aloud if it will be safe for me to go back on foot.   ‘Let me send you down in a car,’ Yagiz replies generously. ‘Selim!’ he barks towards the back door, his pacific persona vanishing. A man appears: wide, cautious eyes, like the orphaned siblings at the chapel, nine o’clock shadow, overalls, a pair of shears in his gloved hands. Yagiz instructs him in sharp Turkish tones to drive the English lady back down to Rüzgar’s place. The man doesn’t nod, but he silently complies.   ‘You have honoured us with your visit,’ Yagiz bows.   I get into the open-sided jeep with the wordless Selim, who thankfully doesn’t bother trying to make conversation. We bump down the track until we come to a fork in the road, where an older, somewhat stumpier man is standing, surrounded by small chairs. Convivial conversation between the two men ensues, and the younger man hops out to help the older one in with his crafts—unvarnished rattan stools of the sort I had seen at the Kapalıçarşı bazaar in Istanbul. He is so focused on his task, keeping his wares from being jostled too much, that he either doesn’t notice me, or doesn’t think it behoves the situation to make it obvious that he has.   Further down the track we come to another stop, this time far less agreeable. A group of Turkish tourists have been out for a walk, and the wild dogs have savaged one of them, on her face. The woman is in shock, her cheek bleeding badly. I don’t need to speak Turkish to understand that her friends are keen to get her to a hospital urgently for stitches and a rabies injection.   By now it is almost twilight. Selim and his carpenter friend make space for the woman in the back of the jeep (why not displace me? I wonder later), and I wrap an arm around her friend, squashed next to me in the co-pilot seat, so that she 88

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won’t fall out of the open side. Selim drives on, ignoring the turning to the chapel and heading instead to the surgery. After the woman and her friend have been safely delivered, and the older man dropped off with his bushel of chairs, Selim turns the jeep towards the chapel.   I get out and turn back to Selim, not knowing how to thank him. He doesn’t seem to understand why he should deserve thanks for doing something that was plainly necessary. But his actions had not been mechanical; they were quietly deliberate, more conscious than the afternoon I’d spent watching my thoughts, more useful than the whole time I’d spent in the village by the sea, more intelligent, in fact, than my entire Western princess existence up to that point.   He drives off and I walk back up the hill to the chapel.   Marine returns to the chapel from her audience with Rüzgar, flustered. It’s a while before, tired enough for candour, she tells me what’s been going on.   ‘There are two kinds of animals in the chapel,’ Rüzgar has told her, ‘swallows and rats. Some are wanted: they are graceful and pure. Some are superfluous, foul, unwelcome. You know which one you are.’   ‘Well, that does it. We need to get out of here,’ I retort, too disgusted even to feel hurt.   ‘No, we should stay,’ she sighs. ‘We owe it to him.’   ‘Owe it to him? We don’t owe him anything—he’s a creep!’   But she shakes her head. I don’t want to leave without her. So we stay. * * * THE FAMILY THAT HAD originally put me in touch with Rüzgar have happy memories of summers in the village, of fresh barbe 89

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cued fish, clockless hours at the beach, leaving bottles of water on the porch to be heated by the sun so that they could have camping-style showers in the evenings. When you come from a big city, as we had found, simplicity is the ultimate luxury.   Since we have revived their connection to Rüzgar, the father and his now-teenage son decide to come and spend a few days’ holiday in the village, right on the chapel bar’s grand opening night. Somehow they make it through the labyrinth of cacti up the dark hill, but when they arrive, in the ball of light cast by the single hurricane lamp, their faces are not a picture of nostalgic delight. They are concerned, and not at my appallingly bad method of mixing rakı.   ‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ the father, Sebastian, says in a hushed, urgent tone.   ‘Eh? But we’ve put so much work into—’   ‘No, you’ve got to get out. Rüzgar isn’t the same as when we knew him. I think he’s gone mad.’   While one stooge of a client sits excitedly at the plywood bar, we stuff our things into our backpacks and abandon ship. Rüzgar watches us go in mute triumph. The princesses couldn’t hack it.   ‘Don’t worry, I’ll book you a room at the hotel we’re staying at,’ Sebastian reassures us. ‘I got you into this mess, it’s the least I can do to get you out of it.’   The hotel looks as though it has been abandoned to its fate since the last time our friends holidayed in the village. In the patio, faded photos pinned to the walls portray revellers at barbecues and dance parties, their grinning faces etched out by the years that have silently elapsed.   ‘It’s like something out of The Shining,’ Sebastian’s son Marcus remarks. I haven’t seen The Shining, but I nod. It sounds about right. 90

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  On our last day in the village, Marine and I sit on the hotel’s restaurant terrace, sipping fizzy drinks and watching the waves lapping dreamily on the beach.   ‘We should have left before,’ Marine admits, ‘but Rüzgar completely drew me in. He even asked me to stay—you know, with him.’   We both shudder.   ‘There was a moment, though,’ she continues, ‘when I knew something was wrong. Remember the boy from the cyber-cafe? When he came with that note for you, Rüzgar told me that he was inviting you to go off with him, and that you were planning on running away and leaving me alone here. For a moment—for just a split second—I actually believed him.’   Marine is the sort of person who sees meaning in things that my eyes find two-dimensional. For a mind like hers to have fallen under Rüzgar’s thrall, even for a moment, makes me wonder how any of us can risk letting down our defences—even with someone we love. Is that the thrill of connection, the risk that the other person might be coaxing you out of your senses?   We drily joke that we should each write our experience of the summer in alternating chapters, just to see how differently we lived it. Soon the whole thing will seem funny, but right now we’re crashing after a party that got out of hand. We try tea at Cake Boy’s place, but even the charming accordion soundtrack fails to captivate us as it did before. The village no longer feels intriguing and rapturous, but like a movie set once the stars have taken off their make-up and the cables along the ground have come into view. Local men are still angling on the ends of the beach where no tourists strip off. Rabbit Island keeps repopulating itself. Diners come, diners go.   As much as I had thought I would be able to outrun the smothering Veil of my humdrum existence, step through a slit in 91

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it and enter another world, here I had found myself more entangled in Veils—this time between what is real and what is illusory—than ever before. And then these Veils dropped, in a flash of unbearable clarity. It is as if my eyes were full of sparkles that I now see were the aureoles of dust.

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4 A TALE OF TWO EYEBROWS NOROUZ IN IRAN

WAITING ON THE WOMEN’S side of the bus stop in Tehran stands a teenage girl with arresting, natural eyebrows. Twin arcs of luscious, un-plucked growth, touching delicately in the middle like lovers’ fingertips, her black school uniform scarf slipping back to reveal a parting like a gap between teeth. Bright, bare eyes and laughing, pillarbox-red lips.   On the cusp of womanhood, she has not yet begun the monthly ritual of beauty salon visits, or been gifted the rhinoplasty so many Iranian girls’ receive for their eighteenth birthdays. Everywhere I look there are plasters across noses (even those of young men), proudly worn as a sign of prestige, a ceremonial induction into adulthood. The young woman notices me looking and her blithe giggle stops abruptly, the expansiveness of the moment guillotined by self-consciousness.   Iran makes it almost as difficult for Europeans to enter as our own countries make it for Iranians, which means that the only tourists to be seen here are the exceptionally persistent. Americans are collectively persona non grata; my first attempt at securing a visa was denied. I am as foreign to people in Iran as they are to me, though my reception here is quite unlike that of an Iranian in, say,

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the UK. Here I am not just another foreigner, desultorily categorised as bothersome immigrant or annoying tourist, one of multitudes who could happily be lived without if it weren’t for their contribution to the British economy; I’m a guest, and Iranian hospitality—even from strangers—is world class.   There is none of the hustle and bustle of street vendors I am accustomed to outside of Europe; when out shopping for goldfish for a Norouz tableau, all I get is one shy ‘Salam?’ The streets of Tehran, though manically plied by over 13 million cars that turn a three-lane road into a four-lane one at will, are refreshingly easy to walk (if you don’t have to cross them), even at night, and even while female.   Considering how curious Iranians are about the West, the response to seeing a patent Westerner is remarkably restrained. The quintessential Persian taarof (etiquette) makes even British reserve seem brash. Shopkeepers won’t even tell you a price, as protocol requires that they reply, ‘You are worth so much more, take it for free!’—until you try to walk off without paying.   A few days later, my husband Ali, our baby son and I get into a car with my sister-in-law and her husband, whose large eyes, black moustache, and straight line of eyebrow are as Persian as his impeccable hospitality and protean driving. We cross the Alborz Mountains, crowned with ice and snow, exchanging a dun panorama of semi-desert for a tall, damp forest, thoughtfully strung with swings. This is the beginning of the North, or Shomal, a series of provinces on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. Satellite pictures show it as a fringe bleeding like fern leaves into the rest of the country. From a certain angle it resembles a dark green, untrammelled eyebrow on a sand-toned Persian face.   By now I have come to the conclusion that in Iran, eyebrows are everything. Meaningful, expressive, architectural—one  

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might even say they are the calligraphy of the face. Indeed, nasta‘liq calligraphy bases the shape of the upper part of the letters jim, he, che and khe on the human eyebrow. Even the word for ‘eyebrow’ in Persian, abru, also refers to a person’s standing or esteem. The style of the moment swoops in a subtle curve, starting about the thickness of an index finger and tapering just so. Extraneous hairs are threaded away to oblivion, and what is left is dyed to the same shade of the woman’s hair, even if it is bottle blonde or neon pink.   While Britain has only recently cottoned on to superciliously dramatic eyebrows, pencilling them in when they are insufficiently hirsute, Iran—whether admired or despised for it—has always done things its own way. Hardly surprising for a nation proud of six millennia of history, boasting a civilisation that is said to have been a forerunner of pluralistic tolerance under Cyrus the Great, that is believed to have invented the postal system, that bowed only reluctantly to the humiliation of being dominated by Arabs, and that resisted European colonisation to the end. As in history, so in eyebrows.   Paintings of Qajar princesses, from the last dynasty of shahs before the Islamic Revolution abolished the monarchy, make connected eyebrows a thing of exquisite beauty. From an Occidental perspective, the monobrow is a mark of exoticism amplified by the tame fawn lying on the princess’ lap, the samovar on the table, or the pomegranates in a bowl. These women anticipated Frida Kahlo by at least a century, revelling in the sensuality of their facial hair, or perhaps simply too kind to their bodies to want to rip out at the follicle.   We arrive to unprecedented fanfare at Ali’s childhood home. Approximately fifty family members have come to witness the prodigal son returning with the first European spouse the family 95

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has ever had, plus grandchild number 20. A sheep bleats defeatedly near the gateway, its rope held by two strong nephews, who slaughter it the moment we get out of the car amid much whooping and chatter in Farsi and Mazandarani, and a little weeping that Taj Nisa (‘the Crown of Women’) had not lived to see her last son, the youngest of her nine children, return with a family of his own.   Spring in Shomal is rainy. We have timed our trip to coincide with Norouz, the Persian New Year marked by the spring equinox. Like the winter solstice, Yalda, Norouz is a pre-Islamic seasonal celebration that has been maintained in Iran, even by the country’s most religious Muslims (who form a surprisingly small minority). Just to show it isn’t beholden to foreign impositions, Iran has its own calendar, the Solar Hijri calendar, according to which this year, 2016, is the Persian year 1394.   Ali’s father, Hajj Hossein, or more commonly ‘Babozorg’ (Granddad), ushers us in. Joyful to the point of hilarity, he chortles uproariously through his moustache—white, except for a small square of black in the centre—whenever he sees us. At eighty-three years old, he has practised a wide range of professions, from woodcutter to equestrian groom to rice farmer, in an effort to feed his growing brood. These days he still goes every day to his little rice shop, the oldest one in the market, where he does some careful accounting on a hefty ledger in a tiny office. He rises for fajr—dawn prayer—every morning, and recites Qur’an in that ponderous way Persians have of declaiming poetry. Hajj Hossein manages to combine seriousness and jollity with the astonishing ease of an elderly man who no longer cares about anything but what is important.   A never-ending plastic tablecloth is spooled out on the carpet by two grown-up nephews who have looked after their 96

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grandfather since his wife’s death. People find their places along the tablecloth and sit cross-legged on either side, women and men mixed, children seated on separate squares of plastic to prevent rice being trodden into the carpet—the most precious element of a Persian house. There is a flurry of activity centred on the kitchen, which some female members of the family barely seem to leave for the entire duration of my visit. Once, at the local market, I would even see two women running a toy shop while sorting through parsley and coriander on a flat basket, preparing for the epic daily cooking tasks in between selling lilos and tiny guitars.   We eat with spoons, a sensible utensil for rice; forks seem violent in comparison. After the welcome feast, the room collectively lolls, releasing a sigh that sounds like Aakhesh!—‘Ahh, that’s better!’ The Persian superpower of unwinding is no more evident than in the phenomenon of pyjamas. I am vehemently counselled to change into some shalvar rahati (easy trousers): Een shalvar sakht-e! (‘These trousers are difficult!’) Sage advice, I have to admit, when you’re going to end up sitting cross-legged on the floor for hours. Several nieces and nephews have brought along their pyjamas and change to be more comfortable, stopping just short of putting their hair in rollers. These pyjamas—a Hindi word derived from the Persian payjameh, ‘leg clothing’— are just as well kept as streetwear. They are even ironed.   We have eaten our fill of sweet-and-sour walnut and pomegranate fesenjun stew with crunchy bits of rice, that much fought-over delicacy, and have drunk plenty of Coca-Cola. There’s a Christmassy atmosphere, only lacking the red-suited fat man and ruthlessly severed spruce. And, as with most Muslim gatherings, there is no booze to lubricate the mechanisms of social interaction. Family members, neighbours and 97

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friends so historical they have surely absorbed each other’s genes need only a large rug, some fine Ceylon tea, and a bowl of pumpkin seeds and chocolates to while away the hours in a convivial atmosphere. Frankly I am astonished that fifty family members can sit together to eat without anyone getting uptight about a lack of private space, without a single argument or moment of tension.   As people lounge in post-prandial contentment, spreading out to various other rooms, I follow my wandering toddler. Everyone wants to greet the foreigner, and my face grows stiff from smiling—although as a language immersion this experience is second to none. With the men out of view, some of the women are curious to see my uncovered head, saying they have never seen naturally blonde hair before. One girl asks to touch it. ‘It’s so soft!’ she exclaims. I feel like a doll, but it seems churlish to resist their affections.   Apart from the blonde incident, I am charmed by the intimacy that seems so commonplace among Iranians. There is a clear distinction between public and private spaces, marked by elaborate changes of clothes, the doffing and putting-on of shoes, and—for women—a monto (from the French manteau, a thigh-length shirt or jacket) or chador. The latter is no longer obligatory, but it is still the norm in rural areas and common even in cities like Tehran, which has developed ‘halal fashion’ creatively within its restrictions, taking it to vertiginous heights. I saw women wearing skintight trousers or leggings underneath their chadors, combined with Nike trainers or stilettos. There are sparkly jacquard chadors, even indoor chadors for younger religious women that trade the usual black for all-over floral patterns.   These sartorial rituals marking ‘out there’ and ‘in here’ are a quintessential feature of the Muslim world to varying degrees. I see it as a mimicry in cloth of Islamic architecture, which presents 98

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a forbidding, even grim façade to the outside world, but hides away interior patios, the most elaborate of which feature intricate mosaics, orange trees and refreshing fountains. Classical Islamic law prescribes that the outer walls of a household patio be tall enough to prevent a man on horseback seeing over them from the street, allowing women to dress as they like at home.   At the front of traditional Persian homes is a more formal men’s reception room, which is separate from the harim, the family quarters. The word harim itself comes from the same root as haram (forbidden), from which we also get the Haramayn, the Sacred Cities of Makkah and Madinah. The connection lies in the perspective: one is forbidden for us, while the other is forbidden for others. This is where the Veil between Self and Other has its benefits; vulnerability sheds its fear of attack and relaxes.   Perhaps the ease with company that I see among Persians is the flip side of a loathing of loneliness, reflected in the famous horror vacui of Islamic art. Private space is a thing reserved for people of wealth and consequence, while ordinary people have learned to make do with a few, multifunctional rooms. In Iranian homes, these contain piles of futons—a traditional wedding gift—covered with sheets held on with tacking stitches or safety pins, which are dragged onto the floor at night. By day, the beds can be packed into a corner or wardrobe, turning the room back into a living room, a sewing workshop, a playroom for kids… In a small house, the same room could even be a kitchen.   I admire this utilitarian, make-the-best-of-things attitude. Houses in Muslim Granada were also made up of one or two multipurpose rooms, accessed through a passage with a bend in it to stop people in the street from looking in. However, I find it hard to acclimatise to constant company, and when I go for a whole day without a minute to myself, I start to get a crawling 99

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sensation all over. At many moments throughout this trip I make excuses to retreat to the room we are staying in, itself a sort of corridor leading to the back of the house, just to write or read or think or—I admit—play mindless games on my iPad.   With company comes certain social challenges, ones that I don’t always have the tools to deal with. Generosity is one of the most striking hallmarks of Muslim culture, especially when it comes to guests. But Muslims of all different backgrounds also tend to be generous with their instructions on how everything should be done: ‘The child is hot! Take his coat off ! The child is cold! Put a jumper on him! The child is cold-and-hot, he’ll get ill! Don’t turn him upside-down like that, you’ll tangle his intestines!’ The British Iranian comedian Omid Djalili has a skit in which a clamour of Persian voices instructs him on how to peel an orange correctly, ending with the advice: ‘Apple much better!’   This desire to improve others’ lives might stem from Muslims’ sense of social responsibility. However, the typical Westerner’s response is an instinctive raising of hackles, a quasi-teenage ‘Don’t tell me how to live!’ Several times over the course of my life I have been taught how to pray by well-meaning Muslims who think I have just converted.   Islam literally means peaceful surrender, and being around Muslims, it quickly becomes clear that surrender means much more than submission to scriptural laws. On a mundane level, it translates into learning to breathe through difficulty, like a labouring mother, staying calm through waves of contractions. More than that, it means learning how to be thankful for the gifts these waves bring. * * * 100

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ALI’S HOMETOWN IS Chalus, one of the main metropoles in Mazandaran province, and the suburb where his family live is (as I come to learn) so full of his Behjati family that it is actually named Behjatabad. Chalus is one of a continuum of towns that have mushroomed along the seaside; the beaches used to be very picturesque but are now continually littered with the rubbish that washes downstream from mountain villages. In some places there is so much fly-tipped furniture it looks like people live there and have just got up for a minute, leaving their armchairs looking out to sea.   Most of my in-laws live in Chalus. One of Ali’s sisters, to whom he is closest in age and whom he therefore cherishes many fond memories of annoying as a child, runs a beauty salon in the town. She is working when we arrive, so we go to visit her that evening. Outside the salon is the kind of continuous damp that England accustoms you to, but inside, the everpresent gas burner makes it warm enough to strip off the obligatory monto and rusari (headscarf ) to steam away the rain they have absorbed.   I am not expecting to receive a beauty treatment, but perhaps my sister-in-law Shohreh assumes that, given the way I look, it is painfully necessary. I have brought no money with me, which is even more embarrassing; should I offer to pay, knowing she will surely refuse? One way or another, this seems like a kind of initiatory rite into Persian feminine culture.   For me, beauty treatments usually end at do-it-yourself products from the supermarket, occasionally stretching to a commercial face mask that burns around the nostrils. I have cut my own hair since I was sixteen; sometimes I end up looking like a small boy out of Oliver Twist, but it is a habit I acquired at school and one I am usually too skint to break. Until today, I 101

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have only darkened a beautician’s doorstep once, and that was in preparation for my first wedding.   Partly this is out of restlessness, and partly on principle. Why should I sit still for an hour and spend money to change my looks? I don’t even have the patience to slap half an avocado on my face, or slather my skin in old porridge to achieve that creamy Scottish lass effect. Why shouldn’t I be happy with simplicity? Doesn’t going to a beauty parlour amount to admitting that I dislike my body or caving in to pressure from others about how I should look?   Now that I am halfway to seventy-four, and have lived in a sunny climate for over a decade, I’m starting to see the benefits of looking after one’s skin. But I still stubbornly resist tweaking what Nature gave me. Perhaps this is an Islamic idea that has been deeply drummed into me, to give thanks for whatever you’ve got; yet here I am in an Islamic state, where even devout Muslim women have their eyebrows, eyeliner, and lip liner tattooed on for ease (Iranians are among the biggest cosmetic surgery customers in the world). While female-only gyms are springing up in the cities, and the municipal pool in Tehran obligingly opens on alternate days to men and women—perhaps to counter the famously fattening diet—it clearly isn’t just a healthy radiance that most Iranian women are after.   I am gently asked to lie back in the treatment chair. I looked nervously up at Shohreh’s sweet, serious face, expertly seeking room for improvement in my own. ‘Please don’t take too much off,’ I plead in broken Farsi, ‘I don’t have very much in the first place.’ Somehow she finds something to remove, and sets to work, her swiftly crossing threads deftly skreeking between her hands. My eyes water. Quite a lot. The women in the salon chuckle to one another: ‘Awww, it’s her first time!’ Shohreh 102

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hands me a small mirror; truly she is an eyebrow artist. My eyes are bloodshot and weeping, but surprised at suddenly having so much surrounding space.   The brows are then subtly dyed so they don’t disappear altogether. I am starting to get more comfortable in the primping process in spite of myself. Isn’t this what women have done practically since time began, gathering together to give and receive beautifying care? I have visions of my early ancestors smearing goop onto their faces and scrubbing their skin with mammoth bristles to achieve that prehistoric glow.   While I am still supine on the leather chair, surrendering to said sado-masochistic beauty ministrations, Shohreh gazes down at my face, gauging what else is needed. Her sister Saleheh also cocks her head, impassively inspecting my features, and then draws a line wordlessly across her upper lip.   She may as well have drawn a line across her throat. I suppress a tiny shriek. No, there must be some other way! I want to cry out, gripping the arms of the beauty-torture chair in a panic. It’s only blond fluff ! But they have me where they want me. I will have to pay for centuries of Eurocentric beauty standards wreaking havoc in the Middle East. It’s only fair.   Fairness has myriad meanings; aside from the sense of justice, for Romantic writers it was synonymous with beauty—of course, in chromatic terms, that meant pale. A pallor that indicates enough wealth not to be out in the elements working in the fields has long been deemed attractive by shallow people the world over. My own surname, to my anti-imperialist horror, is thought to have come from a Norman name that refers to the whiteness of some forebear’s aristocratic hand. Not only light skin tones, but also fair hair and eyes, combined with small, triangular noses, continue to be glorified as impossible goals for women of all ethnicities across the globe. 103

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  Ironically, now that we have realised how unhealthy a lack of Vitamin D is (a lesser worry than the face-melting caused by the lead that Elizabethans dusted onto their faces in an effort to achieve that sickly, never-been-outside look), a wholesome tan has become the new marker of prosperity among white people, illustrating the luxury of holidays abroad, days spent lounging by pools, or expensive sunbed treatments. In Istanbul, famously the bridge between East and West, I have seen skin-lightening creams advertised in the same pharmacy window as fake tanning products. A video that went viral in December 2018 shows a Malaysian vlogger, Aqira Azlah, removing false eyelashes, blue contact lenses, and even a pointy prosthetic nose as part of her make-up removal routine. As technology advances, beauty just gets weirder.   Fair colouring and high status have long been conflated in the Middle East, partly because of the women who were once sought by men in power. Ottoman and Persian emperors heavily favoured light-skinned women, with the result that a majority of their wives and concubines came from the northern parts of their respective empires, including Turks, Greeks, Circassians, Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Abkhaz and Georgians.   Circassians merit a tangent here. Part of the Caucasus, on the Black Sea, Circassia was made up of twelve tribes that gradually became Sunni Muslim during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following the Hanafi madhhab (school of thought) of the Ottomans. Their pale or rosy skin, often blonde or auburn hair, blue, green or grey eyes, and upright, graceful bearing gave rise to an idealised—and eroticised—trope of Circassian beauty, both within the Middle East and in Orientalist fantasies of it. A lucrative slave trade arose, with many women sold to serve in the harems of sultans. The first 104

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known autobiography of an Arab woman, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar, was written in the late nineteenth century by Salama bint Said, or Emily Ruete, the daughter of the Omani sultan and his Circassian concubine.   Circassians had the dubious honour of being singled out by German biologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach as the closest to God’s model of humanity, with notoriously disastrous consequences; Blumenbach was the first person to float the idea that Europeans all came from the Caucasus, hence the designation ‘Caucasian’.   However, Circassian resistance to Tsarist incursions did not go down well, and Russia waged a whole century of war on the Caucasus from 1763 to 1864, all but obliterating Circassia. Most of the original inhabitants were deported to the Ottoman Empire, but in the process of ‘cleansing’ the land, Russian soldiers slaughtered at least 600,000 people, approximately three-quarters of the population,1 events that Russia still does not recognise as genocide. Hundreds of thousands more were marched out of their native land, an untold number dying of plague or other diseases on the way, their destinations being Turkey, the Baltic nations of the Ottoman Empire, and Qajar Persia.   We’re back in Iran, and I’m still lying on the beauty-torture chair. But my overactive mind has overshot my present location and sailed on towards the south of Iran, where the dark-skinned beauty of the women—described as sabzeh (‘green’)—is held in the highest esteem. This is little consolation for black people, who really don’t get a break in the Middle East: like the Zwarte Piet Christmas character in the Netherlands and Flanders, the New Year at Norouz is brought in by Hajji Firouz, a lovable buffoon played by an Iranian in blackface. 105

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  Shohreh insists on doing my make-up, just for fun, pasting on some lurid pink lipstick that she also gives me as a gift. ‘Mashallah!’ she says, inviting the other women in the salon to admire my new face. Her fellow beauty therapist takes out some isfand, black seeds used as incense all over the Middle East, and places them in the tiny basket of a spiralled metal incense burner. This she sticks directly into the flame of the gas heater until the metal is red hot and the seeds have started releasing a wonderfulsmelling smoke, which she wafts around me to cast away the evil eye that would surely be brought on by my newly groomed appearance. This is a procedural routine for all clients; it is often carried out in Persian households, too. The seeds, I later learn, are psychedelic when steeped in alcohol, which is how a certain red dye used in Persian rugs is extracted. No wonder Persian folklore contains stories about flying carpets; the complex, mandalashaped designs seem pretty mind-expanding, too.   For Sufi writers, feminine beauty is often a metaphor for Divine beauty. The poet Hafez is noted for having imbued the romantic language of Persian poetry with spiritual meaning to such an extent that any reference to love automatically references love of the Divine. Sufi poetry, particularly that of Iran, extols the intoxicating pulchritude (that paradoxically ugly word) of women like Layla, who made Majnun lose his wits. And yet, Layla proved that beauty is not merely skin-deep: in the Mathnawi, Jalaluddin Rumi tells the story of how the caliph was surprised by Layla’s plainness. ‘You just think that because you’re not Majnun,’ she replied.   As women, this conception of feminine beauty can seem alienating and male-normative. However, a central part of the Sufi path is seeking out transcendent beauty in the world as well as in ourselves, since we too are part of the world. Sufis seek to 106

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embody many of God’s qualities, and beauty is certainly one of them; as Prophet Muhammad said, ‘God is Beautiful and He loves Beauty.’2 In light of this, seeking to be beautiful can give people of any gender a privileged viewpoint—not as objects, but as subjects. But with this quest comes a recognition that everything in the world of form is necessarily imperfect, being finite, in contrast to God’s infinity.   Moreover, for many women the viewfinder is so often located outside us, pointing at us; if we are not exceedingly careful, our perception leaps out to that external view, the distorted mirror that indoctrinates us into reproducing male sexual fantasies and depriving us of sovereignty over our self-image. Among our many Norouz visits, even to religious households with elderly members, there is almost always a humungous flat-screen TV that not only shows state controlled media (which is actually a relief in its tameness, with its daily documentaries about Iranian villages and their traditional cheesemaking methods), but also music channels with uncensored videos beamed to us from LA via contraband satellite dishes. If I was shocked to be eating a meal in Iran with Rihanna’s nipple floating by my head, it was probably because I haven’t travelled enough; apparently this isn’t out of the ordinary in the Middle East. * * * ON ONE OF OUR INNUMERABLE house calls to family members, neighbours and old friends, we visit Ali’s eldest sister at home. In true Iranian style we sit on the couches and are unnecessarily plied with sweets, nuts, seeds and fruit, eaten on little plates on our laps with tiny paring knives, and black tea, sugar lumps suspended between teeth like they do in Russia—perhaps a vestige of a time when sugar was so expensive you didn’t want to dis 107

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solve it all in one go. How Iranians have such good teeth is anyone’s guess.   My sister-in-law’s house is all living room, cancelling out corridors entirely; bedrooms are afterthoughts springing off the sides. At some point, I go to one of the bedrooms to breastfeed our little boy. One of Ali’s manifold nieces is there too, rocking her baby to sleep on a miniature futon placed on her legs—a time-honoured Persian method of lulling infants that has the side benefit of not wearing out your arms.   But these babies are not going to sleep right now, because all of a sudden, half a dozen other women all pile into the room, apparently to change their clothes or rearrange their scarves, or just because they have a penchant for enclosed spaces. One woman takes an enormous pan lid from the kitchen and starts drumming. Shohreh gets up to dance while everyone else claps and whoops with laughter, snapping their right index finger against the webbing between two fingers of the other hand. With the faint suggestion of a joke in her eyes, Shohreh pulls me to my feet and encourages me to dance too.   The music has a jerking 6/8 rhythm that enters my bones at alien angles. Men and women alike do an endearingly flirty twist of the shoulders, as though shaking off dandruff, but with more panache. Women toss their hands like handkerchiefs about to be thrown to a suitor. With my new extended family raising the roof around me, I shake like a limbo dancer with too much lumbago to bend backwards, or possibly someone in need of a Heimlich manoeuvre.   Yet the women here are so keen to offer praise. I shrink from accepting it for fear that their bigheartedness is tinged with proWestern bias, one that produces so many feelings of bodies not being beautiful enough. Isn’t there some way we can celebrate all 108

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kinds of beauty? Or is that like saying ‘All Beauty Matters’? It hurts my head. I want to accept the kindness they offer without questioning it, and to offer it myself without complexes.   Persians are compulsively kind, the sort of kindness that doesn’t scan receipts and make calculations. It pours from hearts that love to give, to welcome, to shower with compliments. When I leave Iran a month later, I realise that this is the main takeaway of our trip (not including the 5 kilos of rice, gigantic jar of pickled vegetables, boxes of nougat, pistachios, pumpkin seeds, dried barberries, powdery cotton candy balls, and even digestive biscuits in our cases). I had been expecting to visit Sufi shrines, or at the very least to natter about Rumi with some poetry buffs, but instead the strongest impression the people of this country have made on me is of the sincerity of their affection, given so easily because they have no fear of it running out.   Generosity is a powerful undercurrent in Muslim environments, not only that of food, homes, time and effort and endless airport pickups, but of the husn adh-dhann that is embedded into Islamic jurisprudence: literally, ‘beauty of thought’. It can make people seem gullible, vulnerable in their over-exuberance. The abundance of praise can even be claustrophobic. But this benevolence might also be a doorway through the cursed Veil, a way to break out of the confines of individuality and taste the limitless bounty of the Giver.

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5 DISTANT ENOUGH FOR INTIMACY MOSTAR AND SARAJEVO

HOSTEL MAJDA IN MOSTAR, Herzegovina, is nicknamed ‘Hostel One More Night’, as so many of its German, Australian or Canadian backpacker guests arrive in need of more than just food and water. Majda, Amina and Mirsada—whose name means ‘Peace Now’—cater to these footsore arrivals with a bowl of soup and a glance that prompts them to say, after the bowl is empty, ‘You’re still hungry.’ There are proper sofas, a guitar (missing a string, as all communal guitars are), and a resident hedgehog who lives under the decking.   Majda, pronounced Mayda, is an Arabic name derived from a chapter of Qur’an: fittingly, ‘the Table Spread’. She is a woman who seems to spread beyond her physical edges, with a white headscarf wrapped in a turban and a cardigan she swings forward to wrap around herself in the chilly evenings. Her face is wide, pale, with large blue eyes that gaze into you impassively, meeting you without aggression. When a problem is resolved on my first day at the hostel, Majda spontaneously hugs me.   Breakfast is porridge with mixed nuts and seeds and homemade jam, and chocolate Angel Delight when that finishes. They have run out of espresso; there’s only the very finely

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ground, insanely strong Bosnian coffee that needs a proper ceremony to make it. Majda stops what she’s doing—and she’s constantly doing something—to show me how.   First, you fill the bottom of the bell-shaped, copper pot (‘It’s like Turkish coffee,’ I blurt out; ‘No! Not Turkish coffee. Bosnian coffee,’ she replies sternly) with the finely milled grounds and a little sugar. Boil the water separately in a kettle. Fill up the pot some two thirds, and then put it on the burner for a minute or so to boil again.   (Majda is distracted by staff questions; our pot boils over and glitters in red fire fairies on the electric hob.)   Then—she continues—you mix the coffee with a spoon to whisk up some foam and let the grounds settle. Finally, add more hot water, until it reaches the top. ‘A little foam in each cup,’ she says, spooning some into each of the small, handle-less cups arranged around the pot on the metal tray, ‘to show each person they are welcome in this house.’ * * * THE WOMEN WHO RUN the hostel wash everything, even my shoes, dry them, fold them carefully, bring them to our rooms. No extra fee. The hostel is cosy and welcoming. A walk around Mostar with Majda’s unhinged tour guide brother Bata provides all the disturbance I could have asked for. ‘Backpackeeeeers, backpackeeeeers!’ he squawks to round us up.   A trip to Mostar centres around Stari Most, the city’s eponymous ‘Old Bridge’, a commanding, sixteenth-century Ottoman limestone arc that united the eastern, Muslim bank with the western, mainly Catholic one. The bridge was destroyed in 1993 during the Bosnian War, the worst conflict in Europe since the Second World War. The eastern side of the town is the oldest, 112

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and the side on which most of the wartime ruins have remained. Some structures, like the symbolic Old Bridge—the ‘grandfather of Mostar’—have been patched up with reconstruction aid from the EU, Japan, Iran and the Arab world. The AustroHungarian music hall was entirely rebuilt—but only on the outside. Peep through the windows and you’ll see naked concrete walls, no electricity plugs. A very attractive ghost house.   Nearby, on the old square—once the centre of the city and where the Yugoslav communist dictator Tito built his palace (since then converted into a shopping centre)—is another Austro-Hungarian building, striped in shades of pink and brickred. This one used to be a hotel, complete with a playground for children. Now its windows have remained shot through like plucked-out eyes. The roof has caved in, and wooden struts have been bolted onto the outside to stop it from collapsing. The playground is overgrown, cordoned off for safety. Even now, when I visit in September 2017, there are no parks on the old side of Mostar; when Serbian forces destroyed the other five bridges (leaving the destruction of the largest, oldest and most symbolic to their on-off allies, the Croatians), the eastern side was cut off by the natural moat of the river. While this Muslim side of the city was under siege,1 the only other park had to be used as a graveyard.   ‘Up yours, Croatia!’ Bata roars, far enough from the western side—sleek, developed, thriving—to be within earshot.   I am travelling with a group of friends on a creative writing road trip.2 We get up early on our last day in Mostar to climb the sniper tower, intending to do a writing session from the rooftop. At ten stories high, this former Croat bank was commandeered at the beginning of the war, its height and placement lending itself to the purposes of sniping. Our tour guides are due to col 113

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lect us at 11 a.m. to take us to Sarajevo, so we take advantage of the early morning autumn sun. But I am already shaky and rattled; the Bosnian coffee I had yesterday evening kept me awake most of the night.   This is not an official monument, and backpackers are warned of the dangers when visiting it, although there is a tacit acceptance that they will; it seems the appropriate thing to do when in Mostar. We skirt the exuberant graffiti of the ground floor and slip down a side alley to a wall we can hop over. Even from this alley the creeping odour of human sewage is repulsive. Inside, the floor is littered with drifts of broken glass, rubbish (there are dozens of milk cartons on the first floor; people have been staying here overnight), and the decomposing chipboard of false ceilings that have fallen in, remaining at an angle in one room like a huge heap of artificial grain. Cables. Empty spray cans. Graffiti on every single surface—some of it very good, some of it trying too hard; one apparent imitation of Banksy’s artwork is signed ‘Bambsy’.   In the stairwell—bare concrete, open on both sides—people have written encouraging statements with marker pen: ‘I believe in U, keep going, you can do it’; ‘If you ever read this, I love you’. I am surprised by the lack of politically vituperative messages, especially since elsewhere in the city there is graffiti of a strange U shape with a cross inside it: the symbol of Croatian fascism.   On the ground floor is a wall-height painting of exquisite intricacy: a man with a large, cloud-like white beard and hair, downcast eyes, and a blue maze stretching out over his cheeks. Beside it a message has been inscribed: ‘Don’t wait for God, He is waiting for you to help Him… to help you!’ One of our group points out with a gasp an optical illusion appearing on the man’s beard: a splash of light suddenly warps and ripples in ever114

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shrinking whorls. A droplet of last night’s rain is dripping from the ceiling into a puddle on the floor and reflecting the undulating sunlight onto the mural.   On my way up to the second floor, I notice an apartment block only a few metres away—government subsidised, judging by the size of the kitchen, which is only just large enough for a wide-hipped woman to squeeze in. The window of the kitchen opens directly onto the tower. As I ascend the tower (looking too much at the kitchen opposite and not enough at the steps), one such woman potters in wearing house clothes, her slippers schlep-schlepping on the tiles, and sits down to have a cup of hot tea and a cigarette. She doesn’t seem to notice me; I suppose she is all too used to young backpackers having their temporary taste of war.   I try to make it up to the top of the tower, but the sense of nausea is overpowering. I see if I can steady myself by looking out; the views are wonderful. I’m sure the snipers looked out on clear days like this and thought it was a real postcard. Then they would see the dart of a child running between trees for safety and they’d be back to the crosshairs, zooming in so close they wouldn’t need to care about the whole picture. Among the heaps of detritus I keep expecting to see a corpse, not from the war, but of some Slovenian anarchist who went to sleep here and never woke up. There is a white tiled bathroom you have to climb up through to reach the roof, which has no barriers, or so I’m told. I see a scrawl reading ‘Stairway to Heaven’ with an arrow pointing through the doorway, and I bolt.   Hurrying back down the stairs (what floor is this? how do I get out of here? when is this going to end?), I see the middleaged woman still sitting in her kitchen, smoking. Attempting to stave off the incipient panic attack, I try a cheery ‘Zdravo!’ 115

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(‘Hello!’). She looks at me bleakly and replies with the same. I feel approximately like frogspawn. But even though she doesn’t smile, it doesn’t seem she loathes backpacker-kind. It’s hard for me to imagine Bosnians loathing anyone, even though Bata might swear loudly at Croatia while swerving the van madly to make us squeal in the back.   Bata has his moments of lucidity. He tells us of the competitive swimmer Amina Kaytaz, who wanted to train for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. However, Mostar’s only indoor swimming pool was only 12 metres long. Kaytaz, then a teenager, trained in the river, whose powerful undercurrents have claimed the lives of many eager bridge-jumpers. Bata calls this the via salmonica, the harder path upstream to reach one’s goal—in almost literal terms. This, he argues with some pride, is part of what makes Bosnians so resilient: ‘After everything that has happened to us, we have hardly any suicide.’   And Bosnians have not forgotten anything that has happened. They were shelled, sniped at in the streets, dragged from their houses by soldiers, rounded up into rape camps, slaughtered—Slobodan Milošević was known as the ‘Butcher of the Balkans’ because he ordered his soldiers to save on bullets by cutting the throats of Bosnian Muslims—and then heaped into mass graves that were later dug up by bulldozers that redistributed semi-decomposed bodies into different locations to avoid the scrutiny of UN inspectors. Yet in spite of all the provocations of nationalists on both sides, Serbia’s fist pressing Bosnia into the ‘v’ between Croatia’s thumb and forefinger, Bosnians seem to stubbornly refuse to buy into the divisive rhetoric.   Though the Ottomans had ruled here for 400 years, they barely built a handful of bridges, and left Bosnia’s singular mixture of Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Muslims alone. The 116

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latter are descended from Bogomil Christians, who, like Arian and Unitarian Christians, believed that Christ was a man rather than an incarnation of God. This ‘heresy’ not only meant that they were persecuted on both sides—Orthodox Serbia and Catholic Croatia—but also that the Islam that the Turks brought was easily assimilated.   In barely forty years of Austro-Hungarian rule, pivoting around the turn of the nineteenth century, all manner of advances were made: Vienna tested out its new trolleybus concept by building Europe’s first tram in Sarajevo (still in use); they brought plumbing to the city, too (also still in use, much to the dismay of the city’s inhabitants); and public buildings were raised whose architecture respected, to a surprisingly large degree, the oriental influences of the city, with lobed arches, domes and filigree brickwork frills.   What the Austro-Hungarians also did, however, was to begin to separate the hitherto amalgamated populace on religious lines, assigning them ethnic identities according to their beliefs. So Bosnian Catholic became Croat (not Croatian, i.e. a national of the state over the western border), and Bosnian Orthodox Christian became Serb (distinct from the Serbian national identity to the east).   About 70 per cent of the three languages, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, is shared, but in Mostar—which lies in Herzegovina, a Croat-run province—the best schools and universities are taught in Croatian, and Bosnian is shunned. One of the few real resentments that Bosnians seem to be unable to shift is that Croats were rewarded for waging war on their Bosnian compatriots with a whole province, which was even added to the name of the country (Bosnia i Herzegovina).   A buffer between two long-standing foes, Serbia and Croatia, Bosnia has had a remarkable history of religious synthesis. Until  

 

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the war in the 1990s, many Bosnians recall that they did not know that their neighbours were Jewish until they upped and left for Israel, or whether they were Orthodox or Catholic Christian. Until then, up to 70 per cent of marriages had been mixed. Families and individuals would change religion at will.   Discretion is Bosnia’s unspoken motto. Like in Iran, where it is very unseemly to ask whether someone is Sunni or Shi’i, knowing about your neighbour’s religion in Bosnia is anathema. The belief that whom we worship and why is nobody’s business but our own seems here to have leapt out of a single heart and expanded to fill a whole country.   It’s refreshing, too, that even my inescapably Islamic name doesn’t elicit the usual reaction from other Muslims. Instead of happy recognition that we are of the same ilk, I receive the same warmth, the same keen, kind eyes set in an impassive face, that Bosnians offer everyone else. This is practically a nation of invisible Muslims, a beautiful synthesis of Balkan stoicism and the prophetic custom of treating everyone the same, whatever their rank.   To minds conditioned to seeing things through the lens of secularism, the question that is all the more interesting is how Bosnians can still have no qualms about mentioning God aloud, even after almost fifty years of communism and a war that ravaged them physically and mentally. Back in Sarajevo, a stoner selling jewellery shrugs as his plywood board covered with dangly earrings is blown down by the wind yet again, and explains to us with a grin, ‘It’s the will of God.’   We check into a hostel in Sarajevo, one that seems, after Hostel Majda, somewhat stark. The plates and cutlery are tucked away in a hall; the lighting is too bright and yellow; the showers hover over the toilets as though glaring at them to hurry  

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up. One of our group defects to a private hotel room. That night, listening to fast Latin jazz, I start to feel dizzy. At around 3 a.m., right when Sarajevo’s water is rationed, I’m woken by the urgent need to vomit. I spend half the night bowing to the white ceramic mirror, too weak in the morning to go to Srebrenica with the rest of the group.   When I finally surface, I wander past the reception desk en route to the living room. The hostel is deserted, all the backpackers off seeing the city that prides itself on being halfway between Vienna and Istanbul. The surly receptionist of the previous night’s shift has gone, and I get chatting to her replacement, Aida. She asks how I find Bosnia. I reply that Bosnia feels like a homecoming.   Truly it does; there’s something about the virginity of the natural environment, the hills still populated by wild ponies, wolves and bears, pine forests straight out of a Grimms’ fairy tale, steeproofed houses of wood and stone, old women in pinnies and cardigans with bright floral headscarves selling hand-knitted socks by remote mountain trails. But then there are the striking white turbaned tombstones on isolated mountain slopes of Muslim saints buried in their favourite places to meditate, and the timeless perfection of the Sufi tekke at Blagaj built over a massive crystalline karstic spring. And the women in discreet turban scarves on Sarajevo’s streets who could be old friends of my family, British, Spanish or American converts who tied their hijabs at the nape, only they’re wending paths through a city steepled with minarets and church bell-towers, where Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain were accepted and their treasured text, the Haggadah, protected from the Nazi witch hunt. For the first time in my life, I feel two elements of my being perfectly in harmony with one another. European and Muslim. Nothing unusual. 119

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  ‘Blagaj is my favourite place in the world,’ the receptionist concurs. ‘I think it’s the combination of the nature and religion. All those people going there to pray…’   I nod. I’m surprised that she would talk so warmly about religion to a stranger; in England this would be met with tight smiles and a swift change of subject. ‘I feel like I could go there to die,’ I reply, with complete honesty.  ‘Yes.’   ‘And how wonderful that it was protected during the war.’   She nods, subtly emphatic, eyes closed.   ‘I couldn’t go to Srebrenica with the rest of the group today,’ I tell her. ‘I was up half the night being sick. I think it was from going up the sniper tower in Mostar. I don’t know how Bosnians can deal with seeing those places every day.’   ‘Black humour. We joke about everything, in the most dark and surreal ways. And we pray to God.’   Laughter and prayer. Not a pairing one would usually associate with Islam, but one seems to segue into another here.   Aida has barely moved her body during this exchange, but her eyes hold mine in a close embrace. I wonder if it is this apparent diffidence that gives Bosnians their warmth, holding people at arm’s length only to hold them another way. If so, maybe the current European fad of two kisses, hugging new acquaintances, or signing emails ‘Lots of love’ (that flippant Anglicism that so amazes the French, who would only sign a letter with ‘love’ on rare, meaningful occasions) is a forced attempt at erasing our shyness, of penetrating our shield of loneliness by brute force and holding it open, even when we might miss solitude. I find a recognition with Bosnians that surpasses the emotional, that makes all those flourishes seem empty in comparison.   In Bosnia, physical touch, say, a man touching an unknown woman’s shoulders to gently move her out of his way, is not 120

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excessive or beyond necessity. Perhaps there is some relation to the fact that the formal word for ‘you’, vi, is still expected when speaking to older or respected people, compared to the informal ti—known to sociolinguists as the ‘T-V distinction’. Modern English has cut out the intimate ‘thou’ altogether (except in some Northern, Scottish, and Canadian dialects), leaving us with a pronoun whose formality we have to offset by acting out our closeness. I am reminded of the jollity of English high schools, linking arms with boy friends who aren’t boyfriends but who perhaps wished they were (note the typographical space that friend-zones them in print), and of casual physical relationships that don’t depend on any kind of emotional intimacy, merely skin contact. In Bosnia women give two kisses; men and women do not. At a hairdresser’s in Sarajevo I even saw a hijabi woman cutting a man’s hair. Nothing strange about that—not in Bosnia, anyway.   When I came to Spain as a young adult, I found it pleasantly normal to give two kisses with everyone, even Muslim males of my generation. There was clearly nothing untoward about it; I found it refreshingly relaxed. Yet now, after living in Spain for over ten years, I can see a certain erosion of boundaries hidden behind casual touch. No one wants to seem prudish or hung up, so we compete to prove how OK we are about it. Several times I have seen partners swap round after two couples break up, with no one batting an eyelid.   Intimacy is an expression of honesty, of being utterly real with another person, without masks. To assume the right to that with another person is a kind of violation. In June 2019 Keanu Reeves made the internet swoon when it was revealed that he doesn’t actually touch female fans’ shoulders when they pose for photos together; social media commentators described him as ‘considerate and respectful’ for this. 121

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  I was taught that the body is, to paraphrase the Bible, a mosque; it deserves care, cleanliness and respect. For Muslims living in secular Western nations, our ideas of personal space might extend further than our average compatriot. Religious Muslims do not hug a new acquaintance of the opposite sex, or even an old friend. There are minority opinions that when men and women shake hands it breaks their ritual ablution (wudu’); many a time have I seen a Muslim man refuse a non-Muslim woman’s handshake, sometimes unintentionally leading the latter to feel snubbed.   We might question the need to preserve this sacred intimacy if it causes such grief. In strictly segregated contexts, inter-gender relationships often become so unfamiliar that no one can have a sensible conversation. Lots of well-meaning British Muslim men have talked to my shoes; this might seem like courtesy in a conservative culture, but to Westerners it can come off as rudeness. For me it is a relief to be around Muslim men who don’t seem to feel overwhelmed at my physical presence. But it’s also nice to know there are boundaries that won’t be crossed.   An invisible Muslim treads a fine line between wanting to preserve this sacred space and not wanting to kick up a fuss. At times what seems like ordinary contact might feel like a minor invasion. Most people would probably be horrified to think they had crossed an unspoken boundary, yet we feel so awkward about changing social etiquettes on the hoof that we silently perpetuate them, and put up more masks to hide the grazes.   After checking out of Aida’s hostel in Sarajevo, we switch to another hostel, themed around Franz Ferdinand, the moustachioed heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire who was assassinated on the banks of the river Miljacka by a seventeen-year-old radical from Belgrade, triggering the First World War. The hostel’s slo122

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gan is ‘YOUR BEST SHOT!’—Bosnian black humour at work again. Jokes, like intimacy, don’t work if everything is explicit. Something always needs to be held back, like the parts of a poem that aren’t named but that sing out in their literal absence.   What all this makes me think of is the tremendous effort required to maintain one difficult reality alive within another, more prosaic one. To know recent horror and be reminded of it daily while refusing to bear any hatred towards the descendants of the aggressors. When Croat nationalists erected a huge concrete cross on a ridge looking over Mostar, Bosnian kids went up the other ridge and wrote in white stones: BiH—Bosnia and Herzegovina—and the words We Love You in the language they both understood. This is not an absence that makes the heart grow fonder, but an arm’s length that helps us to see one another more clearly.

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6 A BLESSED TREE DIGGING FOR ANDALUSIAN ROOTS

Una huerta es un tesoro si el hortelano es un moro. An orchard is a treasure if the gardener is a Moor.

IN THE MOUNTAINS around Granada there are millennial olive trees. No, they aren’t Instagram influencers, though you might scrabble to take a selfie with one if you saw their sinuous figures rippling out of the earth, or sitting squat-trunked like gnarled baobabs from centuries of pruning. Roots stretch out with the languor of ages to form primordial benches. Ochre lichens bask on outstretched wrists. A few have been hollowed out in the middle where a branch has been hit by lightning and burnt: portals to another time, or at least another field.   Unlike humans, specifically those of us Westerners living in the era of social media, it’s the oldest trees that attract the most admiration. One on the edge of my local imam’s land is thought to be 1,500 years old, and it still bears fruit. The olives it produces are small, to be fair, but the oil they yield is in high demand for its flavour. Some of these venerable old beings even get dug up and transported; a man I know turned down a million euros for one that grew on his smallholding, offered by a wealthy businessman who wanted it for his hotel foyer.

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  The Phoenicians initially brought juicy olives here from the Levant to improve the varieties eaten by Celtiberians (who were presumably following strict paleo diets and living their best lives). In the Muslim period we know as Al-Andalus, Spain— particularly the south, climatically and geologically similar to North Africa—was extensively developed. Agriculture contributed decisively to the economic and cultural renaissance that took place here during almost 800 years of European Muslim history. Today Andalusia is home to an expanse of 70 million olive trees: the largest tree plantation in Europe, parts of which have been suggested as potential UNESCO World Heritage Sites.1 Like the Alhambra or the Mezquita of Cordoba, only far less feted, agriculture still helps sustain Andalusia economically five centuries after Al-Andalus fell.   My return to Spain on finishing my degree brought on a belated personal revelation of nature’s staggering, humanityeclipsing beauty. From getting up early to pick ice-cold oranges from the trees, and tending wood fires on crisp, star-studded nights, to irrigating olive groves at 3 a.m., barefoot in August, and gorging myself on mulberries, figs or pomegranates straight from the tree, the natural world was no longer a distant, uncomfortable reality, held at a hygienic distance by civilisation, but tangible and dripping with juice. In the subtropical climate of the Alpujarras, the southern side of Granada’s Sierra Nevada mountain range where I landed in 2005, almost anything can be grown with the right topsoil and enough water, from almonds, tomatoes and cucumbers to (in sheltered spots) avocados, bananas, even dates. Surrendering to dust, rocks, heat, sweat, mosquitoes and the risk of wild boars is not just a brief holiday novelty but a sea change in perception.   My experience of Islam evolved, too. In Britain I had been put off by gatherings that were interesting but entirely urban; at 126

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Islam Expo in Earl’s Court, a man tried to sell me Islamic double glazing—would it protect me from demonic temptations while inside the house? Here in my new hispanically Wild West home, I attended dhikrs held in a round wooden yurt set deep in an olive grove, with a candle in the middle and the hypnotic soundtrack of cicada song. Like most people living here, the local Sufi community has a high proportion of cottage gardeners, proud to use their own cold-pressed olive oil throughout the year and having at least enough in the garden for a salad at all times, or a few eggs in the chicken house. Food miles are reduced to food metres, and there is always enough to share.   Romanticism it may be, but as a European Muslim living in Spain, it is spine-tingling to run my hand over the rutted bark of a millennial olive tree knowing that it was planted by a Spanish Muslim. There is something compelling about the idea of Spanish Muslims recuperating the filahah (husbandry) of their spiritual forebears. These anonymous master agriculturalists dug the craggy terrain by hand, creating flat, erosion-resistant terraces and irrigation channels (acequias, after the Arabic as-saqiyya) that run hundreds of miles all over the sierras, and even a few qanats, tunnels leading into the mountains to reach aquifers, clearly carving the legacy of Yemen into Spanish rock. They were pioneers of what we would now call permaculture, particularly in the arid conditions for which farmers are increasingly having to brace themselves.   More than anything, I noticed that the Islam of my Spanish peers seemed so much less forced than my own. Was it because they didn’t see it as such a foreign thing, but even as a natural product of eating from trees whose parents were introduced from Muslim lands? Was it because there are so many of them, raised together in interconnected tribelets? Or is it simply the 127

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nature of Andalusians to feel defiantly comfortable in who they are, the same way they shout or sing in the street, or walk their dogs while in their slippers and bathrobes? And if this is simply a function of Mediterranean culture, would that not mean that Andalusians have a lot in common with others living by ‘Mare Nostrum’, from Lebanon to Libya to Morocco? How much is culture influenced by geography, climate, food?   In the villages, the olive has a near-legendary status, respected as much for its fruit as for the heat its dense wood gives—a lifeline in high-altitude climates. It cuts an eerily perennial figure, able to survive 40-degree summers without water, a constant grey-green filigree amid changing vegetation. If trees could be patron saints of a place, olives would be the patron saints of Andalusia, but at city speed these trees seem dull. To understand an olive tree you have to decelerate to its pace, slow enough to stop time altogether, or to travel back in it. * * * IN 711, A SMALL ARMY led by the Moroccan commander Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, toppling the Visigoth King Roderick; within two decades his army would seize power as far north as Poitiers in France. Contests for control of the area immediately began between the rival petty kingdoms of Navarre, Castile, León and Aragón, but to one extent or another, Al-Andalus would continue to exist until the fall of Granada in 1492. After seizing this last outpost of Muslim Spain, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragón promptly expelled the Jews of Granada or forced them to convert. For another century or so, the nationalist Catholic monarchs tried to wipe out Islam from their newly unified land by an increasingly repressive system of enforced exile, baptism, and 128

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inquisition into the sincerity of the new converts’ faith. By 1614, Islam had been expunged from Spanish lands. Or so the official story goes.   For the last 250 years of its existence, Al-Andalus had been reduced to the Emirate of Granada, which at the time encompassed Almería, Jaén and Málaga. During this period, which later came to be known as the ‘Reconquista’ or ‘reconquest’, those Muslims who remained living under Christian rule were known as Mudéjars: ‘those who were allowed to remain’. With a population of about a million its peak, Granada teemed with Muslims fleeing other parts of the country, making it an extremely cosmopolitan place, crammed with scholars, artisans, builders, and the practitioners of a vital trade: farmers.   Muslims developed Granada from a small but important Jewish settlement from the beginning of the eleventh century, when the North African chieftain Zawa ben Ziri founded an independent taifa or kingdom. Fruit trees, herbs and spices were imported from North Africa and the Middle East: oranges (naranjas, from the Persian narenj), lemons, figs, almonds, walnuts, the pomegranates that the French named ‘pommes de Granada’, and the mulberries that made the city wealthy. These mulberries once covered the Alpujarras, their leaves feeding silkworms, whose silk was in turn woven into the city’s most lucrative export.   The only language spoken in Islamic Granada might have been Arabic, but the Andalusi demographic was surprisingly European. It is thought that from about 950 onwards, only a tiny proportion of the Spanish Muslim population were actually Arab—mostly the political elite, hence their cultural predominance. A larger sector was of Amazigh origin, many of them descended from the Moroccan army that landed in Gibraltar (from the Arabic Jebel Tariq or ‘Tariq’s Mountain’). But the vast 129

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majority of the so-called Moors (moros in Spanish) were descendants of indigenous Celtiberians, Visigoths, Slavs and Jews who converted to Islam over nearly a millennium of Islamic hegemony. The first ruler to declare himself caliph of Al-Andalus, ‘Abd ar-Rahman III, had fair colouring, while Al-Ahmar, after whom the Alhambra is named, was a redhead. Reprisals against the Moors can hardly be justified on the basis that they were foreign invaders.   When, in 1492, the wimpy, lugubrious Nasrid king Boabdil surrendered the city and handed the keys to the Alhambra over to the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand, he left on the condition that the Muslims of Granada would be protected by a treaty, the Capitulations, guaranteeing them freedom of religion. Nevertheless the new rulers strove to eliminate Islam, beginning their stealthy efforts by offering privileges and favours in return for conversion. A good number of Muslims did convert voluntarily, some apparently in good faith, but the majority resisted, taking up arms first in the Albaicín quarter and then in the mountains of the Alpujarras.   Tearing up the Capitulations, in 1502 Queen Isabella issued an edict banning Islam in Castile, which meant forcibly baptising all those Spanish Muslims who could not afford to emigrate. In several villages in the Alpujarras, Muslims were rounded up into mosques and burned alive. Roughly 275,000 to 300,000 Muslims fled, mainly to Morocco and Tunisia.2 Children under eleven were wrested from their parents’ hands as they boarded the boats, to be raised by Christian families. Officials of the Inquisition went into every single town in the former Granada emirate and oversaw these procedures. Already in 1499, 3,000 Muslims had been hastily baptised in a single event; in all it is thought that as many as 70,000 Muslims from Granada were baptised.3 130

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  In 1504 the mufti of Oran in Algeria issued a fatwa relaxing the requirements of Islamic law for Spanish Muslims to protect them from risk of exposure to the Inquisition. Wudu’ (ablutions) and salat (ritual prayer) could be performed by ‘some covert gesture’,4 and Muslims were permitted to consume pork or wine when forced, or to renounce Islam, as long as this was inwardly reviled. It is almost the only true example, and certainly the longest standing, of the modern-day Islamophobe’s much-touted taqiyyah; re-imagined by the alt-right as jihadi deception, taqiyyah literally means ‘precaution’ and refers to dispensation from outward practice of Islam due to fear of injury.   The sincerity of those who had been forcibly converted remained suspect: in the words of one Inquisition indictment, they remained ‘as Muslim as those of Algeria’.5 ‘New Christians’—who later came to be called Moriscos, literally ‘Moor-ish’—were obliged to wear a blue crescent on their turbans or caps to identify them. New Christians were under constant scrutiny by alguaciles or Old Christians (ironically from the Arabic word wazir): their doors had to be kept open on Fridays to ensure nobody was praying, they needed a travel permit to get around, and their trades were heavily taxed. If anyone exhibited evidence of crypto-Islam (and likewise crypto-Judaism) they incurred the scrutiny and even torture—for example by toca or tortura de água, similar to waterboarding—of the Inquisition to extract a ‘confession’ of heresy.6 Those found guilty could pay a fine, spend years as a galley slave, or be put to death, often on a public pyre. This ‘war of fire and blood’, as Phillip II would later term it, aimed to erase all traces of Islam and Judaism by any means necessary. The use of Arabic was banned, although in many cases Arabic names were simply Hispanised (for instance, the surname Venegas is derived from 131

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‘ibn Nazar’). In other cases Moriscos took surnames from toponyms like Granada, Madrid or Jaén,7 reflecting their sense of belonging to the land.   In spite of this pressure, or because of it, the Andalusis’ identification as Muslims did not diminish, and probably only intensified. Within a few years the resistance evolved into guerrilla warfare, with rebels taking to the Alpujarras in 1568, the mountains being easy to defend against the clumsy Castilian troops, who had trained on the plains of La Mancha. Nonetheless, after more than two years of fighting, the Spanish army suppressed the revolts in 1571. As many as a hundred thousand Muslims were expelled from Granada and scattered throughout Seville, Castile, Valencia, Extremadura and Aragon; many others died on the weeks-long journeys by foot across Spain. The expulsions meant that the south suffered immensely; villages were abandoned and agricultural production slumped, as the Old Christians from the north who were drafted in to repopulate the decimated areas had no idea how to thrive in this mountainous terrain. Spain as a whole fell into an economic decline that lasted centuries.   Some of the Moriscos who were forced to relocate from the Alpujarras are thought to have revived the Islam in their adoptive homes of the Mudéjars who had been practising their religion in extremis for generations.8 Contemporary historical research even shows that there were Moriscos who found ingenious ways to continue practising Islam—albeit in an attenuated form—in Granada itself until the late eighteenth century. These were not only poor, marginal characters but wealthy merchants, public officials and even Christian clerics.9 Moriscos in Aragon and Valencia were largely left to their own devices, since they were valuable farmhands and craftsmen, and vassals of the 132

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crown; landowners would sometimes even be sentenced by the Inquisition for tolerating their labourers’ operation of mosques and madrasas and their open practice of Islam. Moriscos were baptised, married and buried as Christians but the respective Muslim rites were sometimes performed afterwards in private. In the Ricote Valley of Murcia there was a community of cryptoMuslims until 1609, to whom the Morisco character of Ricote in Don Quixote de la Mancha could be a reference.   The revolts in the Alpujarras and continued subversive practice of Islam fuelled the Crown’s suspicions of an enemy within the nation, and through a series of decrees for Spain’s various kingdoms, in 1609–14 Philip III forced the Moriscos to leave the peninsula. However, the official story of expulsion hides another story, of displacement and assimilation. Although figures regarding this suppressed history vary, it is thought that perhaps as many as 40 per cent of Moriscos avoided expulsion, while another 10 per cent or more of those who went into exile returned to Spain, preferring to live marginal, nomadic lives to evade scrutiny.10 In every town, several Morisco families whose conversions were thought to be sincere were allowed to remain: some to teach Old Christians how to work the land, maintain the acequias, and manage the mulberry groves, the source of Granada’s silk industry; and a few others, such as dyers, who were authorised to stay to practise their specific trades.11 Well into the eighteenth century, parochial records continue to mark certain people as New Christians, with 43,000 people registered as Spaniards with Moorish origins.12 From the mid-thirteenth to the fifteenth century, Muslim builders were in high demand, developing an iconic Mudéjar architectural style that embellished churches and civic buildings with the intricate brickwork facades and green and white glazed rooftiles that had been fea 

 

 

 

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tures of Moorish architecture.13 Today, Teruel in Aragon is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its Mudéjar architecture.   Hornachos, in the mountainous Extremadura region of Castile, maintained a defiantly Muslim identity, even after two centuries of Christian rule. When the edict to enforce conversion was issued in 1502, the Muslims of Hornachos secretly conducted desbautizos, or ‘unbaptisms’, by springs and streams in the lush mountains around the town. Proving themselves to be incorrigible, in the early seventeenth century about 3,000 Muslims from Hornachos were shipped off to Morocco.14 They founded the Corsair Republic of Salé, next to modern-day Rabat, and took revenge on the Spaniards through piracy, attacking galleons returning from the New World laden with Mayan and Incan gold.15   Other Andalusis who fled to Morocco settled in Tétouan, which earlier waves of Andalusis fleeing the Reconquista had re-founded, as well as in towns such as Chefchaouen and Fez. They retained their Andalusi identities and have until today perpetuated many aspects of their identities and culture, such as their surnames, their family histories tracing back to the expulsion, and their music.   Some of the refugees, both Morisco and Jewish, crossed not only the Mediterranean Sea but the Atlantic Ocean, paying sizeable fees to human traffickers and arriving in Argentina. Among Spanish military conscripts in the Castilian colony, Andalusi soldiers with Morisco backgrounds were exempted from the Castilian ‘blood purity’ laws that prohibited Spaniards from marrying local Guaraní women, and they developed a unique mestizo culture in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, young people eluding military conscription fled to the Pampas where they could rear cattle in relative autonomy. Other Moriscos who were taken 134

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as prisoners of war or were condemned to being galley slaves at an Inquisitorial hearing also ended up in the New World.16   Back in Spain, there is evidence that Sufis of the Shadhiliyya tariqah, or order, entered Christian monasteries, particularly the Jeronimo order. In the first half of the twentieth century the Spanish Jesuit priest and Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios, who theorised that Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy had been influenced by Ibn ‘Arabi, proposed that there had been a mutual flow of inspiration between Christian and Muslim mystics of the Middle Ages, including St John of the Cross and the Andalusi Sufi he suggests was his forerunner, Ibn ‘Abbad al-Rundi.17   A word about a word: the so-called Reconquista (‘Reconquest’) has been formative in the construction of a new Spanish identity, which has conflated ethnicity, nationalism and Catholicism, and persecuted Jews and Muslims alike. But the term itself was not even used to describe these events until centuries later, in an early example of political spin that served to justify the atrocities that consolidated the power of the Catholic monarchs. Logically, if there had been a ‘reconquest’, power would have been returned to the Visigoth rule that preceded Al-Andalus. In the twentieth century the quasi-fascist dictator Francisco Franco would call upon the same association of patriotism with Catholicism, and in the twenty-first century, the far-right political party Vox has explicitly described its antiimmigrant stance as a ‘Reconquista’.18 However, as we have seen, Islam became fully indigenised in Spain, and even in parts of South America. In a tiresome repetition of history, roots that grew deep and enmeshed are again in the process of being harshly severed. * * * 135

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ANDALUSIA HAS AN ambivalent relationship to its Muslim past. Tourist literature and official signposts refer to the Andalusi period as a dominación árabe, conveniently estranging the Muslims of Spain, and typecast the Andalusis along predictably racist, Orientalist lines. Yet there is also a certain nostalgia for Al-Andalus, with its geometric designs cropping up in everything from public fountains to beer marketing. While studying in Cordoba, my sister got chatting with a Spanish woman in a supermarket who proudly remarked that Andalusians are friendly because of their Andalusi past, when travellers had to be met with hospitality or risked dying en route. As happens so often in Europe, there is a push-me-pull-you relationship to all things Arab, swinging between two projections: the allure of exoticism and the repulsion of barbarity. Yet the fact is that the Muslims of Al-Andalus weren’t foreign Arabs at all. The dissonance calls to mind the way that Andalusian identity is strongly associated with flamenco, an artistic and cultural phenomenon developed by the Gitanos, against whom Spanish law formally discriminated until 1978, and who remain marginalised subjects of much racism.   Fascination with Al-Andalus is deeply stitched into Andalusian identity. In 1885, during the first Spanish Republic, a certain Blas Infante drew up an autonomist constitution in Antequera, near Málaga, earning him the nickname ‘the father of Andalusia’. Infante was a well-known Arabist who wrote a book on Al-Mu‘tamid, poet king of Seville, as well as one in which he claimed that the word ‘flamenco’ is derived from the Arabic fellah mengu, or ‘dispossessed peasant’. This theory was later pooh-poohed by historians, although the comparison is intriguing. Flamenco has strong Andalusi characteristics, such as the Phrygean scale or Hijazi maqam, cante jondo’s similarities 136

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to Qur’anic recitation, mournful lyrics about marginalisation, the guitar itself, which was developed from the qitara, and certain forms like zambras, which is a direct descendant of Arabic musical styles. Some exiled Andalusis are thought to have returned to Spain and assimilated into groups of Gitanos, taking refuge in their marginality.   A fan of Arab culture, even designing a house near Seville with a Moorish flair, Infante made a self-styled pilgrimage to the tomb of king Al-Mu‘tamid in Aghmat, Morocco, where he met some of the king’s descendants and, some believe, formally embraced Islam with them. He is better known for having written the Andalusian hymn—the only patriotic song that ever gets me emotional—and introducing the green and white flag and emblem of Andalusia, enshrining a distinct southern identity. Condemned for being a socialist as well as for pursuing independence, Infante was executed by Franco’s hitmen, who dragged him and a few of his compadres to the side of the highway in 1936 and executed them without trial. For four decades, Franco ruled Spain with an iron grip, wedding church to state and evoking the supposed glory of medieval Castilian times, of a Spain united under one ethno-nationalised Catholic banner.   Franco’s reign, though admired by many for strengthening national unity and boosting the economy, particularly tourism, was effective because of its vicious repression of dissent. From the beginning, in the words of Franco’s general Emilio Mola, the aim was to ‘eliminate, without scruples or hesitation, all those who do not think like us.’19 Around 160,000 people were killed, their bodies dumped in over 2,000 mass graves, while 100,000 disappeared and another 150,000 went into permanent exile. Between 1939 and 1940 there were 90,000 indentured labourers, particu 137

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larly on the railroads, working off prison sentences (often spurious ones), while as many as a million prisoners were doing the same in nearly 300 concentration camps.20 The enemies might have been different, but the parallels with the Inquisition—in method as well as motive—are impossible to ignore.   Affiliation with the resistance to Francoism had to be kept quiet—a kind of secular taqiyyah. In some cases, dissent against Franco even had indirect links with the actions of medieval Muslim renegades. The Serranía de Ronda, a dense slab of verdant mountains near Malaga, is infamous for having been a harbour for outlaws. Right up to the nineteenth century, there are records of outlaws with Arabic names being caught and tried—living vestiges of the monfíes (from the Arabic word munfi, or ‘outcast’) who had taken refuge from the Inquisition in this rabbit warren of hills. Only a few decades later, Malaga and Ronda were particular centres of rebellion during the Spanish Civil War; dissidents were thrown off the vertiginous Puente del Tajo in Ronda, as Hemingway made famous in For Whom the Bell Tolls.   In another eerie echo of the persecution of crypto-Muslims, anyone suspected in Francoist Spain of supporting socialism— likewise associated with a foreign Other, this time the Bolsheviks—could be blacklisted (i.e. starved) or have their property stolen, while babies were taken from their incarcerated mothers and given to ‘good’ families to raise. The impunity of the perpetrators has likewise been entrenched: in 1977 the Spanish Congress approved an Amnesty Law, pardoning these crimes against humanity. No-one has ever been indicted for them. * * * 138

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BARELY THE FIRST YEAR of my life was spent in Spain, but it gave me a craving for it. Whereas the Levantine Arabs had brought seedlings of fruit trees west to Al-Andalus, I was more like a sapling that had been taken north and climatically refrigerated. A part of me that had been stunted in Britain began growing again when I returned to Spain at twenty-one; I could feel it rustling.   At sixteen, straining the leash but with parents unwilling to let me loose entirely, I had spent a summer ‘woofing’ at Los Rosales, a conference centre that hosts international Muslim retreats, with my best friend—another daughter of AngloAmerican Sufi converts. I left as a pallid, scrawny, barely pubescent, insomniac bookworm, but within days of making beds (literally, from flat packs), slicing steaks and waitressing in clean mountain air, I was tanned and relaxed and falling asleep before my head hit the pillow of my bunk in the girls’ dorm.   In the afternoons we would explore. We found tiny, blind baby mice and a wild puppy whose fur we combed for burrs. A track into the mountains led to an abandoned house; unable to resist ruins, I yanked off the vines that had closed the gate— nature’s modesty—and wandered into the monochrome tiled hall, a stuffed vulture leering at me from a corner. I crept upstairs on tiptoe, fearful the crumbling floor would give way. The beds were still as though recently unmade, covers thrown back in a rush, wardrobes left open and hastily emptied. Even more creepy was the house next door, which had been built to scale for children—and similarly forsaken. We swam in the fish- and snakeinfested alberca, spring water pouring steadily in at one end and out at the other.   That summer my friend and I hopped between bases of Spanish Muslim converts, in several mountain settings and by 139

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the beach. The Muslim kids my own age blew my mind. The girls were brown as hazelnuts from wearing strappy dresses and splashing in bikinis all summer long. They were an object lesson in jostling with boys in sisterly feistiness and spontaneously emoting—frequently at loud volumes. The boys were cheeky but accepting of girls, not as objects of lust but as members of the clan. At one rural compound, belonging to a family with ten kids, we all slept on the roof, under the stars—and the insects. My face and arms were maps of tumuli where mosquitoes had feasted on my unseasoned British blood. From my sheltered English village existence, in which traipsing around a shopping centre or bopping at a school disco until 9 p.m. was about the wildest kind of freedom imaginable, I was suddenly among adolescents who stayed up till the early hours—unsupervised!— playing djembes and guitars, smoking plentiful rollies (or homegrown weed, or hash).   This generation of Spanish Muslim converts were frank, outspoken, talked passionately about politics and the horrors of their nation’s history. They also had stories that made our English lives seem extremely tame. One man told us about a trip he had taken to a safari park near Madrid. When an elephant reached its trunk through the car window to scope out the snacks inside, he panicked and wound the window up. This trapped the pachyderm’s member inside and caused it to flail about, practically demolishing the car in the process. After making a close escape, on the way home, the man stopped at a bar to down an uncharacteristic haram brandy to steady his nerves. And when a member of the Civil Guard stopped him to inquire why the car was in such a terrible state, the answer he gave (‘An elephant got his trunk stuck in my window and smashed the car up, officer’) got him breathalysed and fined. 140

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  Another travelled to Mauritania to study under a traditional Sufi teacher, but unfortunately got robbed—of everything but his underwear. Without a passport, he had to cross the border into Morocco illegally (presumably rustling up some clothing along the way), where he was briefly detained on suspicion of being a spy, and joined a group of North and West Africans entering Spain on a patera (dinghy), effectively sneaking into his own country sin papeles. One British convert drove a piano down to Spain from his native South London on the roof of his Ford Fiesta.   Apart from occasional capers of this ilk, these converts mostly spent their days struggling to make ends meet and to raise their children, remaining close in that socially holistic way that Andalusia engenders. The deliciousness of cool summer nights after the daily inferno of cheap, modern housing makes it impossible not to spend hours in the streets or plazas after dusk. Those that were from Andalusia had often been raised on the streets themselves, usually as members of large families with houses too small to fit everyone inside for long. They had a trust in street etiquette and safety in numbers; perhaps they also thought it would be hypocritical to expect their children to behave perfectly when they had had their own adventures en route to Islam.   Thus their children had grown up as neighbour-cousins, kicking around footballs in the street, cycling around in gangs, making dens among the sugarcane plantations along the coast, throwing themselves into Mediterranean waves that dragged me face down across the gravelly beach, or climbing the sheer umber cliffs of the old road from Granada to the coast. I tried to pick up their rapid-fire Andaluz but made horrible clangers that had them screaming with laughter when I requested something rude 141

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instead of sweets. When it was time for prayer or dhikr they would generally join in the adult activities, but were trusted enough to run around the streets until 4 a.m. in benign rioting. Being surrounded by Muslims made it easy not only to fulfil religious practices that otherwise attract fearful gazes, but to relax into the ipseity of Muslimness, to live without constant self-questioning—simply seeing out, without having our deformed image reflected back in the world’s eyes. * * * IN 1974, A YEAR BEFORE Franco died, a few Pakistani men from the Tablighi Jamaat movement passed through Puertollano in Castile–La Mancha. One of the town’s residents became Muslim and subsequently opened a mosque there. Three other Spanish men embraced Islam the same year in Bristol Gardens, a squat in London around which the nascent British-American Sufi community centred, and on returning to Spain they joined the mosque in Puerto Llano. This vanguard of modern-day Spanish converts to Islam was followed soon after by a psychotherapist from Malaga called Mansur Escudero, who in turn attracted a number of others to Islam. For several years there was a steady movement of converts between Spain, the UK and the US, particularly in the Bay Area, Atlanta and San Antonio.   By the early 1980s, the focus for new Spanish Muslims had shifted to Granada, where there was a burgeoning community of local Muslims as well as many Brits and Americans. Dr Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, a white American convert and Arabist, was teaching the ajrumiyyah—a classical Arabic grammar in poetic form—alongside his African American wife Samira. However, the largest Muslim demographic in Granada at the time was of Syrians, who were seen as better integrated as they had ‘proper’ 142

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jobs—which says something about the idealism (not to mention bank accounts) of the converts.   The connection to Al-Andalus, and the impulse to reject the Spanish Catholicism that predominated, had a galvanising effect on the new converts. One year in the early ’80s, in anticipation of the Semana Santa (Holy Week) processions—in which the Americans were horrified to recognise the pointed hoods of the penitentes as the inspiration for the Ku Klux Klan’s hoods—some of the community decided to print out leaflets about Islam and the suppressed history of Al-Andalus. They distributed these leaflets among the fuqara (Sufi community, literally ‘the indigent’) and during the procession, but there was an immediate backlash, and a Spaniard, ‘Abdal-Nour Coca, and a Native American man, Tico Nour, were arrested. ‘We were asked for 100,000 pesetas as bail’ (about €3000 in today’s terms), recalls ‘Abdal-Rahim Gulliver, one of the earliest English converts from the 1970s community. They organised a whip-round and collected enough to get them out, but were surprised to see that the Spanish newspapers did not mention the debacle at all—although it did appear in an article in The Times. The first thing Tico Nour did on getting out was to board the first plane back to the US, and sadly the community in Spain never heard from him again.   In 1983–84, the atmosphere became factious. There was a split between the younger and older Syrians, the latter of whom joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile, a number of people from the Sufi community in Granada broke away from the leadership of the English sheikh ‘Abd al-Qadir as-Sufi, partly due to acrimonious disputes over a plot of land that had been bought for a mosque but had remained empty for years. A small group of Muslim Spaniards set up a separate mosque on Cuesta del Chapiz in the Albaicín. 143

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  The cultural backdrop of this was Spain’s transition to democracy after the military dictator Franco’s death in 1975. Spain went from heavy state censorship to freedom of expression overnight. La Movida Madrileña, an artistic counterculture movement, burst into life, borne mainly by music programmes that showcased punk, goth, and New Wave music, but also through fanzines, cinema, poetry and other fields of the arts. Drugs too made their inevitable appearance, leading to the deaths of several iconic figures. Franco’s ideals of womanhood, of submissive housewives who adored the fascist patriarchy, suddenly had no foundation; within a few years, the permiso marital (the permission a wife needed to seek from her husband to work, own property or travel) and the ban on the sale of contraception were lifted, and divorce and homosexuality were legalised.   I am curious as to why these converts were attracted to Islam, particularly at this time of social upheaval. Spanish Muslim commentator Abdennur Prado writes: ‘Many of the Spanish converts came from the fight against dictatorship, from the left, or from what has come to be called the “counterculture”, from a range of alternative movements that arose in search of a new paradigm’—indeed, one convert served a prison sentence for being an anarchist.21 However, Prado also notes that this does not tell the full story. Some of the converts were Jesuit-educated, religious Catholics—even Franco supporters. Perhaps they felt that the good of Christianity, already tarred by its association with the Francoist state, was being lost in this race to catch up with the rest of secularised Europe. Many converts explain that the personal charisma of a Sufi teacher was so transformative that they could not but embrace the religion they followed.   The Muslim history of Andalusia might seem an even deeper reason for the first flush of twentieth-century Spanish converts 144

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to be drawn to Islam, finding in it an authentic alternative to the Spanish Catholic identity that had been poisoned by Francoism. However, the connection between Andalusia and Al-Andalus is not clear-cut. While the semi-autonomous region of Andalusia has seen a concentration of Spanish Muslims in contemporary times, most of these early converts came from other areas of Spain, such as Catalunya, the Basque country, Galicia, Castile– La Mancha, and Extremadura. And though the material heritage of Al-Andalus is much more visible in the south, the dispersal of Muslims from Granada in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries means that people from other parts of Spain might have an equal or even greater reason to feel that Islam is part of their ancestry. It might not have a tourist-friendly Alcázar, but the Spanish capital Madrid was founded by Muslims as a trading post on the endless dusty plains of La Mancha, while Lavapiès, a barrio of Madrid, largely inhabited by North and West African immigrants today, is named after a stream where Muslims would ‘wash [their] feet’—i.e. perform ablutions for prayer.   But none of this should come as a shock. The Muslims of Al-Andalus were not the ‘blackamoors’ of Shakespeare, but rather a blend of the original residents of the Iberian Peninsula, with a small but culturally powerful sprinkling of Arabs and an important Amazigh component. A genetics study published by the University of Granada in June 2019 contends that, of 150 males from Almería, Málaga and Granada, there was virtually no genetic difference between them and people of other European countries, particularly those by the Mediterranean. (Given that the Mediterranean Sea itself is bordered not only by countries in Europe but also by North Africa, Turkey and the Levant, the lines we draw to segregate discrete races from one another begin to seem absurd.) This finding was trumpeted by the national 145

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newspaper El Pais as proof that ‘Al-Andalus did not leave a trace in the genetics of the south of Spain’.22 The conclusion is thus that the Muslims were expelled effectively, rather than that they might simply have been genetically almost identical to their Christian neighbours in the first place. Typical of the blurred, monolithic view of Islam that is so prevalent in the West, there is a stubborn notion that Al-Andalus was something foreign. About 42 per cent of the 46.5 million Muslims in Spain today have Spanish citizenship; most are of Moroccan heritage and have been naturalised, while Spanish converts account for about 0.05 per cent.23 The Spanish Muslims I have met do not seem to need to look elsewhere for their Muslim identity. The Gitana midwife at my birth has been described to me as someone who obstinately refuses to allow anyone to tell her how to be Muslim. One English convert who has lived in the south of Spain for thirty years told me, ‘People are fascinated with Spanish Muslims, because here it’s about being it and not just thinking about it. It’s become indigenous… in fact, it’s always been indigenous.’ She also told me that, while most of her Spanish husband’s family thought she was crazy for wearing a headscarf, her sister-in-law was very friendly, eventually confiding that she always put on a headscarf in the house, feeling that it was the most natural thing to do. A few Spanish converts moved to live in Saudi Arabia or other Arabic-speaking countries, but largely slipped back into Spanish customs whenever they were back in Spain. Most seem to feel that their conversion was really more of a reversion, a return to an original spiritual path to which they felt epigenetically connected. One told me ‘Es nuclear’: roughly, ‘it goes right down to the nuclei of my cells’.   In fact, there are a great many resonances between Spanish and Islamic culture. Spanish Muslims can repurpose existing  

 

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names of Arabic origin—Fátima, Ismael, Nuria, Elías, Adán— and sometimes even find Arabic roots in their surnames, for example Vozmediana, whose carrier is convinced that it is a distortion of Abu Madyan.24 In Aragon, a madha (praise poem of the Prophet) written in Aljamiado was discovered hidden behind a false wall during a house renovation in the late 1980s. It is an apt metaphor for Spaniards discovering possible Muslim roots, breaking through a false wall in their own history.   I have read of a Spanish grandmother who told her grandson ‘Christianity isn’t your true religion, you’ll discover that in good time,’ a man from Malaga who secretly fasted in Ramadan with his parents, and an elderly couple from Ronda who confessed that they were Muslims in taqiyyah.25 One Spanish Muslim from Extremadura, who I initially thought was Amazigh, right down to the blue tattoos on the backs of his hands, told me how his grandmother would wash her face and hands every day and go down to the basement, where she would put her forehead on the ground to pray. Yet another Spanish convert told me how she had passed through a village on the old road between Cordoba and Granada in the early 1980s, where local people greeted by saying, ‘A la paz de mawlana’: ‘Go with mawlana’s peace’ (mawlana meaning ‘our master’ in Arabic). I have also heard the story of another couple from Ronda who apparently both woke up one morning, having had no contact with Islam, and decided to become Muslim.   Many other aspects of Andalusian culture in particular reflect a possible Islamic origin. The beloved siesta, so much a part of the summer lifestyle that it affects shop opening hours all year round, is sunnah—a practice espoused or exhorted by Prophet Muhammad—as is the habit of taking a walk after the evening meal; in summer this is practically the only time one can go out 147

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at all, while in winter it is still common to see old ladies in their fur coats leaning on their sons’ or grandsons’ arms while taking a stroll through downtown Granada. It’s also sunnah to greet strangers, one of the more gratifying features of small towns in Andalusia. You could say that this is simply everyday kindness; from my perspective, a huge and immensely important part of Islam is just that, and should be what we look to first in our efforts to overcome religious prejudice.   ‘There are so many customs here that come from the Muslims,’ says Yamila Margarit, daughter of my local imam. ‘In the villages you’ll find people cook a stew with ham, and then take the meat out and shred it on the side. That’s because Muslims didn’t want to eat the meat.’ (Presumably it was a given that some people didn’t mind consuming the stock but wouldn’t want to eat the ham itself.) Food is a visceral key to understanding the enduring presence of the Moors here. One of Spain’s most iconic dishes—particularly in Valencia—is paella. Believed to come from the Arabic word baqiyyah, meaning ‘leftovers’, this was a Muslim custom of using up scraps of foods—meat, vegetables, seafood—by cooking them with rice and saffron (also Andalusi introductions), in a large dish on a Thursday night before the congregational meal on Friday. Like that other quintessential Andalusian dish of Moorish origin, migas (fried breadcrumbs—the Moors were renowned for thriftiness), it’s still traditionally eaten out of the same pan, like a tagine.   However, food can also be evidence of another history, that of repression. I have heard that the residents of the hometown of another convert, north of Granada, must send a representative from each family to mojar—to dip some bread in the stew made after the matanza, the widespread sacrifice of pigs—every year, without a shadow of a doubt a hangover from the Inquisition. 148

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  The Spanish nationalist need to self-define as the conqueror over a foreign, barbaric Muslim invader is astonishingly still present today. In La Puebla de Don Fadrique, a small town known among Muslims as the landmark for finding the Muslim conference centre Los Rosales, a yearly tradition known as the ‘Cascaborras’ sees young men striding about town with sticks tied to ropes that end in a rubber paddle, which they whack violently on the street, the walls, even onto the (mattress-padded) backs of blacked-up neighbours who play the role of the Moors. The purpose is ostensibly to round up funds for a Catholic brotherhood, but its origins can be traced back to the sixteenth century, to the scourges of local Moriscos.   When these contemporary Spanish converts embraced Islam, they didn’t set the cat among the pigeons with their parents as much as I had expected. ‘My father’s mother always had an attitude of, “Do whatever you like, but do it well. If you want to be a Sufi, then be a good Sufi,” ’ Yamila tells me. ‘She was Catalana; she had a more open-minded, cosmopolitan outlook. My mother, on the other hand, was from a small town in Andalucia, and her mother had a harder time accepting her conversion. But even then, she didn’t reject her. There’s hardly any xenophobia in Spain.’   Of course, the picture looks very different for Muslims of colour. Fouad Dakhouch, a Moroccan who has lived for many years in Spain, told me that he has met plenty of Spanish Muslims who disdain to be around North Africans. Ahmedou Bamba Diawara, a long-term Spanish resident of Senegalese origin, told me that while Spanish people generally treat him respectfully, he’s seen plenty of racismo maquillado: ‘racism wearing make-up’. ‘But I’m not bothered by it,’ he adds, to my surprise. ‘I know it’s just ignorance. I have such strong self 149

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esteem that their comments don’t stick. It’s like, if you lose five euros, but you have a hundred thousand in the bank, you won’t see it as a real loss.’ It’s not the first time that a Sufi has told me that they aren’t bothered by racism; is this evidence of effective psychological blocking, or a useful technique to repel hate?   An Islamic sensitivity to Providence makes many see contemporary Spanish conversions not merely as the evolutionary fruit of a historical syllogism, but as a divine gift, a grabbing by the scruff of the neck to plunge the individual mind into the Infinite. However, I can’t help but feel that there is some resonance today with the roots that this religion held firmly in Spanish soil for nearly a millennium and in extremis for another 500 years. Or am I merely romanticising, looking for roots on which to graft my own European Islam? * * * RETURNING TO SPAIN to live with my parents, who had very considerately emigrated while I was studying in Tanzania, I noticed that the crowd of Spanish Muslim kids in Granada had evolved: they were still smoking and jamming and hanging out en masse, but this time they did so in shared apartments, many while studying or having recently graduated. I got a job in a shop selling beaded wire men on bicycles and carved hippopotamuses from South Africa in the city centre—the closest I could get to a job that was even remotely connected to my degree (and I mean remotely). I kept meeting new crowds that branched off from known crowds like fractal blooms, including German Naqshbandis who linked back to a whole other efflorescence of Sufis in Germany. We would roam about on cool summer nights in the Albaicín between shisha bars and busker-friendly cafe terraces, the tranquillity punctured by the occasional jolt of handbag theft. 150

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  Not ones for long, prim romances, some of the girls in their late teens and early twenties were starting to get married. Many had started wearing hijab, turban-style, and long shirts or cardigans over their skinny jeans, or floaty hippie skirts and dresses, teamed with big earrings and lots of eye-makeup. It was a kind of glamorous modesty that I found at once appealing and confusing. It seemed they flaunted their Islam in their notoriously conservative city, where Al-Andalus had officially met its demise; of all the cities in Spain, Granada owes the most to its Muslim architects, and yet has the strongest reasons to obfuscate the importance of the Moors—and sanctify their victors.   The children of converts exist in a different era to that of our parents. While the latter came into Islam through groups that offered a fresh identity and a strong sense of belonging, the second generation have inherited a religion that we need to make our own. We have a strong social media presence, connecting us with Muslims all over the world. Some second-generation Spanish Muslims run halal tour-guiding operations—a hugely important sector in Andalusia, which has not fully recovered from its 2008 recession. Muslims from around the world, from France and Canada to Malaysia and Arab countries, want a taste of this last bastion of Western European Islam, the only nation to have developed a European Arabic script, with a culture that is still discernible through ceramics, gardens, architecture, music, food and more. But other children of Spanish converts seem to prefer to keep their faith private, if they practise Islam at all. It’s hard to make an accurate survey; ‘non-practising’ Muslims don’t tend to appear at mosques or Muslim gatherings, and so fly under the radar. Experience tells me the latter form a fairly large proportion of the younger generation of Muslims, either disaffected by religious conservatism, or just averse to 151

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being limited to the category of Muslim, ever seen through a single lens rather than for the myriad qualities they embody.   At the ‘aqiqah celebrating the birth of a third-generation Spanish Muslim baby at the mosque near where I live, Muslims from Granada, Cordoba, Murcia, Barcelona and Madrid have turned up to celebrate, plus the usual crowd of happy misfits from the world over: Eastern Europe and Western Europe; East Africa and West Africa; the Maghreb, the Levant and the Gulf; the Indian Subcontinent; Latin America and the Caribbean. Andalusia feels like the closest I can get to leaving the European Union without needing a visa. Water, power, and internet cuts are not unheard of. In summer we get a sandy rain from the Sahara that splatters cars yellow, and in winter heavy weather can scythe away riverbanks and carve new geographies, cut off cottages from the road, drown hippie vans. On the other side of the river, the land is geologically part of Africa.   Today is Friday, and we squash into the carpeted interior to pray, so close together that you risk sitting on the head of the person behind when going into prostration. A military tattoo of cracking knees rings out as we pleat ourselves down to the carpeted floor. Someone is always fussing about the shoes not being placed tidily in the racks outside, and nobody ever listens. Kids wander about with mud on their T-shirts and chocolate bulging in their cheeks. Stalls on the grass offer miswaks and spices, henna painting, homemade chutneys and pastels de nata. Smokers head out to the car park for a cigarette after the prayer.   Sitting down to eat the lamb tagine prepared from the ‘aqiqah sacrifice, I get chatting with a young mum who turns out to be the daughter of another Spanish convert family. Spooning couscous into her baby daughter’s mouth, she tells me how her father had 152

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travelled all over West Africa, as well as numerous other Muslimmajority lands, but was not attracted to Islam until he returned to Spain. ‘He found a purer Islam here,’ she commented.   Despite the woman’s delightful company, her off-hand remark rankles. I have noticed that converts, perhaps over-eager to claim Islam as their own, can sometimes tout this apparently ‘pure’, sanitised version of European Islam, reduced to abstract concepts and stripped of distasteful cultural clutter. While the appeal of a diverse global ummah might be attractive to Westerners like me, the desire for belonging can make European Muslims cling together in white gaggles. I myself am not immune to this; my closest friends growing up were the children of converts who had embraced Islam with my parents, the bonds they forged together transmitted to a new generation.   From this end of the Mediterranean, Islam seems like an Eastern philosophy. But while we ‘orient’ ourselves eastwards to pray, a Chinese or Malay Muslim would pray facing west, while for an East African, Mecca lies almost due north. In Spain Islam has come to be associated with Arabs, perhaps more down to aggressive Wahhabi proselytism than because of actual contact with Muslims. For Brits, Islam seems to be a South Asian phenomenon, while for the French it seems North or West African, or for Germans, Turkish. One way or another, it is marked as foreign—and therefore easily dismissed as incompatible with Western culture. Innumerable global iterations of Islam are thus collapsed into two-dimensional stereotypes. But not all Muslims are Arab, nor are all Arabs Muslim.   Spain has an ambivalent relationship to non-Europeans in general. Mixed-race marriages are rare compared to the UK, although they are increasingly common. And there is shockingly little awareness of how insulting and patronising the white gaze 153

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can be. Black people are described, out of what’s thought to be charity, as negritos, in a misguided effort to soften the supposed blow of the word negro. Chinos are likewise reduced to chinitos. For a while state schools gave out yellow recycling bins decorated with a stereotyped grinning Chinese face, with slanted eyes and pencil-thin drooping moustache. Much-loved comics like Mortadelo y Filemón feature atrocious disfigurements of foreigners that would be unthinkable in Northern Europe if coming out today—even though early issues of Asterix and Tintin reveal them both to be prime culprits of the same racism, and are still reprinted unexpurgated, without even explanatory notes.   Meanwhile, the boring trope of the Big Bad Muslim is never far away. When a Somali friend who wears hijab was being driven through the sleepy Alpujarran town of Lanjarón, an old Spanish guy leaned out of his window and shouted, ‘Terrorista!’ A couple I know, a half-Sudanese, half-Spanish woman and the son of Spanish converts, were about to take an apartment in my town, but when the landlord saw their names on the contract— three out of four surnames Spanish26 but, crucially, Arabsounding first names—he refused, saying he preferred ‘people from here’.   How easy it is to rely on comfortable formulae of Us and Them; you don’t need to bother focusing your vision, but can let everything blur into a vaguely homogenous mass, on whom so many problems can be conveniently pinned. When a country lane near our town was blocked, for once not by goats, but by an Arab man who had driven into an acequia, a neighbour of mine who happened to be passing shook his head and muttered so that only I could hear: ‘Estos moros.’ These Muslims.   I remonstrated, but there was too much mayhem in the ensuing gridlock to undo generations of ethno-nationalist disinfor154

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mation. How to casually weave into conversation that it was the moros who dug these acequias in the first place, it was the moros who built every town in this valley, and it was the moros who made it fertile, gave their back-breaking work and sweat and nurture so that we could live from it today, only for us to forget their efforts and condemn their name?   The dogged persistence of this false history proves that it’s not the facts that ultimately matter, but the way that society internalises its interpretation of them. You can talk yourself blue in the face about how Jesus was not a blue-eyed white man but a Jew, spruces and candles are a pagan Germanic introduction to Yule celebrations, and the jolly red-and-white-clad figure of Santa Claus was invented by Coca-Cola as a marketing gimmick, but you’ll hardly stop anyone from celebrating Christmas.   In this struggle to create an identity that feels legitimate, a balance needs to be struck between forging a genuinely rooted Western Muslim selfhood and continuing to be nourished by the wider Muslim world in order to protect us against white privilege and superiority complexes. There are times when I find that immersion into Muslim cultural spheres can feel like culture shock, but if I spend too long away from it, keeping my religion to books and individual practice, I start to feel that I’m play-acting.   However, it can also feel like a cliché to harp on about Al-Andalus (and I should know, I do it enough).27 It is understandable—the illustrious history of Muslim Spain is indeed dazzling for anyone with an interest in developing a Western Muslim identity of which to be proud. Watching in horror as the magnificent heritage of Islam is destroyed by fanatics, neocolonialist wars, or simply poverty, Muslims are especially susceptible to nostalgia. But, as one invisible Muslim who lived in 155

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Andalusia for a decade pointed out, ‘Some groups here are really progressive, but others idealise the Golden Age of Islam and don’t have the humility to admit that that time has passed.’   Tradition is like the soil, accommodating the roots of a tree and holding the trunk steady so it can flourish and fruit. We have become so cross-pollinated that these fruits might surprise us, but in genes as in culture, inbreeding only weakens. * * * THE SPANISH MUSLIMS of Al-Andalus were inspired agricultural engineers, writing texts on filahah that influenced the Arabic-speaking world for centuries. Watching cucumber plants dash up a fence, or eating tomatoes so fresh they’re still sunwarmed, with basil torn straight from the plant, lends my awe at the natural world new dimensions almost daily. It is the kind of wonder that makes a Muslim spontaneously murmur, ‘Subhan­ allah!’28 I have seen a growing interest in sustainability among Muslims; there is even a permaculture research institute in Yemen on land donated by the Sufi sheikh Habib ‘Umar, who has stated that ‘permaculture is wajib’—obligatory.29   It is not hard to see the spiritual dimension of earth stewardship as portrayed in Islamic sources. The Qur’an describes humans as khulafa’ or vicegerents of the earth, endlessly waxing lyrical about the perfect balance of heavenly bodies, day and night, waves on the sea, plants, animals, mountains, clouds, the rain that returns the dead soil to life. It exhorts us to pause and marvel at this harmony. You could almost see it as the David Attenborough documentary of its day. Part of the genius of Andalusi filahah was its water management, still light years ahead of industrialised modern agriculture, which decimates forests for high-output farms that dry up streams and springs and desertifies 156

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fertile terrain. Alberca, ‘water reservoir’, one of thousands of words and expressions used every day by Spanish speakers oblivious of their Arabic provenance, is a direct descendant of al-birka, or ‘pond’, related to baraka or blessing. The verb root b-r-k means to kneel, as of a camel kneeling at the edge of a watering hole, or a person kneeling in prayer. The Qur’anic word for ‘seed’, habba, has survived in modern Spanish as the word for a broad bean, haba. There’s a certain poetry to the fact that it’s etymologically related to the Arabic word hubb: love.   Spain, and particularly Granada, has always featured in my idea of where I am from. Even though I didn’t grow up here, that I was born in Granada often led Spaniards to declare me granaína. But even after more than a decade living here as an adult, learning Spanish well enough to be a translator and studying and performing Spanish folk songs, I don’t feel that granaína is an identity I can legitimately claim. I lack many cultural references, from sayings to children’s TV shows, to memories of Spanish grandmotherly habits, like making soap from old cooking oil and crocheting every coverlet by hand. What I can do is listen to Spanish people’s narratives in their own tongue, sing the songs that are meaningful to them, study their history. And learn how they pickle their olives.   In a country where, in living memory, there was such poverty that people in Andalusia were eating paella made of cat, everyone dreams of having a huerto, a cottage garden with some tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, courgettes, a few chickens, orange trees… and that faithful survivor from ancient times, the olive. Since the early ’80s, Andalusia has taken this inheritance and commodified it, turning thousands of hectares of rolling hills into checkerboards of monocultured olives. But it is intriguing that, of the Spanish Muslims I know, virtually all have 157

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some connection to family farms that offer sustainable food production, as well as a bond with the land and the husbandry that has been handed down to modern Spain from their forebears on the other side of history’s Veil.   One of the best-loved verses of the Qur’an can be found in Surat an-Nur—the Chapter of Light—which likens Divine Light to a lamp kindled by oil from a ‘blessed olive tree neither of the East nor the West’.30 Every time I pass one of these gorgeous, mute giants, I’m reminded of how this place is neither. And both. Such a place I could call home.

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7 THE STRANGERS, AT HOME MUSLIM AND BRITISH IN THE UK

THERE IS A CAVE IN Willesden Green, North London. Between the heap of shoes at the doorway and the technicolour kufic Arabic wall hanging at the far end is a world outside of space and time. On its blue walls is emblazoned the Rumi verse, ‘Your heart is the size of an ocean: Go find yourself in its hidden depths.’ A smorgasbord of Muslims with origins as disparate as Jamaica, Somalia, Nigeria, Morocco, Iraq, Pakistan, and Elephant and Castle roll up to attend jumu’ah prayers and talks on spirituality, the ninety-nine names of Allah, and marriage, imparted by the Sudanese Sufi Sheikh Babikir. Rumi’s Cave also hosts art events, workshops, craft fairs, iftars in Ramadan and afternoon teas. The outreach project of the charity Ulfa Aid, it has a sister project, Rumi’s Kitchen, which offers free food for the homeless and needy.   The first time I visited Rumi’s Cave, it was packed to the rafters with people squashed together for an Eid celebration. A familiar face from Spain smiled at me from the other end of the room. My heart started racing as my eyes roved around the congregation—at last, here was my tribe! A gloriously multicoloured band of seekers, people of my own generation as well as those older and younger. Peppering their chats with alhamdulillahs and mashallahs, references to hip-hop or hadiths. Weaving

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their way to this luminous hub and taking a bit of its glow back into the city, like camels carrying water from the oasis for the long, parched journey ahead.   There was an open mic night coming up. I hadn’t performed music for years, jaded after nights singing to drinkers who weren’t there to have their thoughts provoked, and wary of the emotional crash that happens after the applause fades. Besides, a female Muslim solo singer and guitarist doesn’t usually go down well with more conservative Muslims, so finding Muslimfriendly venues to play in is virtually impossible. But at Rumi’s, I sang a few of my songs and was reminded of how performing makes me feel so present. This was my kind of audience, one that listened in cross-legged silence to my carefully crafted lyrics, that knew I wasn’t singing out of longing for Dave up the road who broke my heart, but for the Divine.   I had never experienced such a feeling of unity—of belonging—in the UK, even though this was the country where I grew up and should therefore have felt most at home. This was a family whose closeness wasn’t genetic, connected instead by threads woven sideways by heart wefts. The sheikh gave his khutbah (talk or sermon) sitting on the carpet, even kissed my little son’s hand when we came in, effusively welcoming everyone without any of the unease about gender mixing that so often accompanies Muslim gatherings. One evening a few of us had a jam session, a marvellous medley of freestyle grime, dancehall patois, R’n’B vocals and acoustic guitar. At one point I got up just to bounce up and down the carpeted room in glee.   But forgive me: if all this seems heartwarmingly hopeful, it is because I’ve gone straight to the foreground without painting in the backdrop. * * * 160

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MUSLIMS IN BRITAIN are, if it’s possible to generalise, profoundly uncomfortable. Mostly we’re walking on eggshells, waiting for a stranger to make a machine gun gesture at us, yell at us to go home to Islamistan, rip our hijabs off in the street, or just scowl. Everywhere from Twitter to formal workplaces is saturated with snide sotto voces or outright defamation of Islam and Muslims. Freedom of expression is cited to cleanse the stain of hate, but the damnèd spot of Islamophobia remains. If you’re Muslim in this environment, it can be preferable to be ignored, and that’s what many of us—intentionally or otherwise—end up seeking: withdrawal to a safe space where we can lay down our defences and just be.   But in practice, withdrawing is impossible. Every news stand or TV screen in a dentist’s waiting room is a potential trigger for hearts to sink at the sight of horrors authored by psychopaths purporting to be Muslim. We are suffocatingly aware that these events entrench antagonism towards all of us, the tens of millions who are assumed to be in cahoots with extremists. In 2010, a study by the University of Exeter showed that ‘assailants of Muslims are invariably motivated by a negative view of Muslims they have acquired from either mainstream or extremist nationalist reports or commentaries in the media’.1   Today, in England and Wales, Muslims are the targets of 47 per cent of all religious hate crime, more than any other group, despite making up only 5 per cent of the population.2 These hate crimes do not just occur after eruptions of so-called Islamist violence. In the week following the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019, the Islamophobia monitoring group Tell Mama recorded a 593 per cent rise in hate crimes against Muslims, even though Muslims had been the victims of the terrorist incident. Meanwhile, fake news stories  

 

 

 

 

 

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consistently misappropriate and de-contextualise photos to portray Muslims, refugees or migrants—often a dog-whistle message meaning Muslims—as invading Europe, out to rape ‘our’ women and bludgeon European values to death in a salivaspraying storm of Shari’ah-law zealotry.3 And when front-page stories vilifying Muslims are revealed to be false or distorted, the outcry is deafening in its silence. Corrections in fine print cannot undo the harm caused by headlines.4   For those Muslims who are at this very moment pottering about their back gardens, more preoccupied with how to decimate aphids than bring down the secular state, this is like living in a house of mirrors, our self-awareness regularly battered by ugly, deformed reflections, even though we know that these images aren’t accurate. News headlines are written as though we can’t understand them, or as though hurt and harm to us are insignificant. Fiction, poetry and films tend to highlight horror stories about our radicalisation or abuse, fleshed out into evermore believable narratives that can leave a terrifying weal on the minds of a generation. I sometimes get people breathlessly mentioning the movies Midnight Express or Not Without my Daughter when they discover I am Muslim. When you see nearconstant reflections of yourself either as a pernicious news item or a victim, you can never quite be centred, but are always jolted out through a warped lens to another’s way of thinking. * * * DESPITE THE FACT THAT scholars disagree over the definition of Islamophobia, often hastening to differentiate it from crude colour racism, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims recently urged the British government to define Islamophobia as ‘a type of racism that targets expressions of 162

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Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’.5 Islamophobia is often tied to racism, in the sense that it is prejudice against Muslims as a racialised Other. Although Islam is not a racial identity, white people often think it is, as our experience of Muslims— and the image of Muslims projected in the media—is almost exclusively of people of colour. It is telling that I have rarely been the target of Islamophobia, the worst that I have experienced being online. My association with Islam is largely invisible to outsiders, so I am taken at face value, as a ‘normal’ white AngloAmerican. Most of the Islamophobia I have faced could even be seen as a kind of proxy racism against Arabs or South Asians.   However, to me, limiting the definition of Islamophobia to racism erases the specific dimension of ideological hatred of Islam, taken out on Muslims as physical representatives of Islamic beliefs—whatever these are perceived to be. This could mean, for example, a white European harbouring racist feelings against people from the Middle East in general, but believing that Middle Eastern Muslims are more dangerous than Arab Christians, or Iranian Zoroastrians or Baha’is. A white person might make a big show of having a brown friend, but be religiously selective. One white English man told me, ‘I love Indians, but I don’t really like Pakistanis—they’re too traditional,’ by which I suppose he meant too Muslim. Muslims can be the targets of religious hatred from members of their own ethnic groups, too; India’s 200 million Muslims are scapegoated in Hindu nationalist rhetoric as Trojan horses for terrorism, and many live in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.6 There is certainly a racist strand to Islamophobia, but also an ideological one, which whitewashes hatred of Muslims as a valid intellectual or political stance.   There is a clear difference between dissent against religion per se or against specific religious principles—the free expression of 163

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which forms an essential element of a pluralistic society—and outright antipathy and prejudice towards entire social groups. On some counts, I actually agree with Islamophobes’ disputes about Islam. What I take issue with—aside from their poisonous, aggressive rhetorical methods—is the assumption that all Muslims accept every contentious aspect of our religion without question, or that we tacitly agree with the acts carried out by tyrants and terrorists in Islam’s name. I am tired of the trope that Muslims are uniform gingerbread men and doormat women who cannot have our own thoughts or opinions. It betrays a deep ignorance of Muslims as human beings, flawed and ignorant ourselves, but also more than capable of seeking reasonable answers to the problematics of religion.   Islamophobia can perhaps best be understood as xenophobia towards Muslims—and the more Muslim you seem, the greater the phobia. One British Pakistani friend who does not wear hijab described to me how she is treated as a ‘blendable brown person’ in white English society, whereas her mother, who is more visibly Muslim and wears a shalwar kameez and hijab, has a very different reception. White non-Muslims regularly praise me for not being ‘over-the-top’ in the way I dress, as though a hijab would be a step too far. A number of Muslim women—of all racial backgrounds—abandon hijab altogether to avoid the invective they receive for it. You can assuage the fear of Islam by calling yourself a Sufi—everyone loves Rumi—but get serious about your practice and watch your popularity fall away.   White Muslims inhabit a twilight zone, in which we have not lost our whiteness or our white privilege but can be considered by other whites to be tainted by our intentional association with Islam and its perceived foreignness. My friend Yussra, a Swedish convert to Islam, told me becoming Muslim can be seen as pro164

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vocative: ‘It’s like, “You chose this!”’ An English convert friend who wears hijab was on the tube in London when a white man hissed at her (as he oh-so-courageously stepped off the train): ‘You’ve betrayed your own people.’ And while visibly Muslim women bear the brunt of Islamophobic abuse, men are not immune. One male convert I know was verbally abused in public for wearing a turban; Sikh men, too, have been attacked based on the misapprehension that they are Muslims.   It goes without saying that Islamophobia directed at people of colour is deeply influenced by racism. Barring exceptional cases, like the white supremacist murder of Jo Cox, an MP who was not Muslim but who was known as a champion of migrants and the people of Syria and Yemen, it is extremely rare for Islamophobia against whites to turn violent. White Muslims are protected by our white privilege, because of which our religious aberration can be forgiven. At the same time, white Muslims disrupt the notion that Muslims are foreign Others, as do Muslims of colour born and raised in the West. The disturbance of this binary can even lead to attempts to rescue us (especially when we are women) from the othered Muslim of colour. As Mahdia Lynn, a writer on Medium, put it: The fact of the matter is that as a white American woman, most of the Islamophobia I experience on a daily basis is not really directed towards me at all—it is an exercise in the preservation of whiteness. White nationalism is obsessed with protecting the supposed purity of white women. … It is the toxic and pervasive … narrative that strips us of all agency and paints us as hapless victims of (racialized) Muslim men.7

  In the myopic panorama of humanity that lumps the Other into vague, ill-defined categories, religion and race—the latter already a shaky concept, often used to essentialise—become 165

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blurred. And the more often these conflations are reinforced and repeated, the more this blur thickens into opacity, into a Veil that prevents the Other from being seen or heard as equals, or even as humans.   Islamophobia is aptly named: fear of Muslims is palpable. Talking to people who have little to no acquaintance with other Muslims, you can almost see it shivering in the air between you. We can chat, but there is a degree of separation preventing deeper connection. When the majority of news stories connect Muslims to frightening events,8 it is understandable that Islamophobia should exist. But it impoverishes conversations. If we learned how to talk about sensitive issues respectfully, accepting differences and seeking to understand others rather than trying to impose our views or jumping to the defensive, we could learn so much from one another. Instead we stick to bland topics and have to stash away all the things we’re really passionate about. Integration can be a euphemism for sacrificing a deeply held part of yourself for the sake of fitting in, and it can feeling like losing a limb.   This alienation isn’t just in our heads—it’s also systemic. Government-led programs to counter radicalisation and terrorism, including the notorious ‘Prevent’ scheme, have targeted Muslims and made many feel they are perpetually under suspicion of extremist leanings. In 2017–18, 44 per cent of Prevent referrals related to concerns of Islamist extremism, against 18 per cent for concerns of far-right extremism.9 Eightyeight per cent of those stopped and searched at borders under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 are thought to have been Muslim, even though only 0.007 per cent of those stops has led to a conviction. Detainees are held for up to six hours, are denied the right to silence, and must cede mobiles, laptops, fin 

 

 

 

 

 

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gerprints and DNA on request. They are interrogated about not only their opinions on Islamist terrorism, but also details of their basic religious practice, such as whether they pray, fast or have travelled to Mecca, on the assumption that Muslim religiosity is equated to extremism.10 There’s no denying that some effort needs to be made to counter radicalisation, but consulting with the communities involved is a far better way of doing this than appearing to inflict collective punishment on a religious group that already feels scapegoated.   Even ‘soft’ methods employed in the Home Office’s counterterrorism operations are the subject of strong ambivalence. These run the gamut from funding valuable cultural and artistic projects founded and run by British Muslims, like the Bradford Literary Festival and the Khayaal Theatre Company (which have consequently been censured by some Muslims for their collusion with the government), to online media profiles masquerading as Muslim grassroots operations, such as This Is Woke and @supersistersmag, both created at the behest of the government by the PR company Breakthrough Media.11 The Quilliam Foundation, a self-styled liberal Muslim think tank, has been criticised for accepting money from US conservative donors who fund counter-jihad organisations that stoke fears of an Islamist threat, as well as for collaborating with the English Defence League, a far-right Islamophobic group.12 The War on Terror, as poet and blogger Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan argues, effectively criminalises Muslims, treating us as a ‘problem population’ liable to descend into a rabid, dangerous mob at any moment, and therefore in need of surveillance and cultural re-education.13   Amid all this animosity, it’s tempting to retreat. Not to an isolated cave on a mountain top, but perhaps to a community on 167

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the internet. Highly digital and globally plugged-in, British Muslims are hooked to live-streamed talks from spiritual teachers, browsing YouTube and Twitter and passing around spiritually supportive memes on WhatsApp groups or Facebook. Today there are myriad Muslim online platforms, like The Muslim Vibe, Amaliah and IlmFeed, and indie print zines such as OOMK and Khidr. British Muslim TV broadcasts free on Sky and Freeview, while Alchemiya is a subscriptions-based video platform. Mostly, though, we avail ourselves of a carefully curated IV drip of social media, co-opting those notoriously blinkering algorithms to save our sanity. Instagrammers share quotes from classical Sufi teachers alongside photos of spectacular mosques from Uzbekistan to Mali, or blog posts with personal insights into keeping our faith in the midst of cynicism. There are Facebook groups to support Muslim artists, poets, mums, converts, LGBTQIA+ people, and many others.   Islam was born in retreat, in a tiny cave on Mount Hira, near Mecca, to which Prophet Muhammad frequently withdrew to contemplate. Yet, the Prophet would later comment, ‘There is no monasticism in Islam.’ We have to find a way to maintain this degree of introspection and peace IRL, in the busy spin of work, travel, caring for loved ones, dealing with everyday woes. Isolation can be beautiful when it is voluntary, but a Veil that palpably separates you from others against your will feels asphyxiating. One British Pakistani friend told me about her exhaustion at ‘just having to exist’ in a majority white, non-Muslim workplace where she feels that workmates tiptoe around the issue of her religion. ‘It’s just really lonely—I don’t have solidarity with anyone, particularly in Ramadan where everyone just thinks you’re weirder than you normally are because you look like a zombie and refuse cups of tea… I often feel I want to retreat into 168

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a cave because I can’t be bothered to try to be understood anymore, to want to be loved, to be part of a community.’   So we gather, in person or online, not just out of a primordial desire for safety, but also to feel the relief of being understood without having to explain. From inside this Muslim huddle, we know that the evils committed by dogma-deranged fanatics are only one small part of a vast picture. The image that strikes me is of a building with many windows, a few of which look on to the grotty parts of the pantry, where mutant parasitic fungi are spawning out of the cat litter tray. If you only ever look in at these windows, directed there by the flashing neon lights over them, how will you get to know what’s in the rest of the building—the beauty, light and mercy at its heart?   As counterintuitive as it might sound, given all of the above, in a 2016 survey, 93 per cent of Muslims stated that they felt they belonged in Britain, and more than half said that they felt this ‘very strongly’.14 London is exceptional for its confluence of diverse Muslim communities, but I’ve noticed that the further into the regions you go, the prouder Muslims seem to be of their local identity. I have met exceptionally patriotic Scottish Muslims, as well as one member of a Welsh Muslim cultural centre in Cardiff, with the slogan, ‘Confident in our faith, Comfortable in our culture.’15 Islam links us to a global society—in ways that might make the Home Office believe we have sympathy with brutal regimes, forgetting that the victims of those regimes are usually Muslims, too—but where we are born, raised and educated has given us terra firma to stand on, grow, be rooted. Britain has shaped everything from our sensitivities to gender inequality to our tastes in music, literature, fashion and film, to our expectations of career and marriage, to our sense of humour.  

 

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  This isn’t a case of faking assimilation, awaiting our moment to tear off the latex masks and reveal our true, sinister, braindevouring alien forms. The UK might not be the genetic parent of most British Muslims, but it has been a wet nurse, one that often feels more familiar than an absent parent who isn’t always easy to communicate with. It’s a rocky ride: poverty, marginalisation and limited access to good education or jobs mean that British Muslims suffer risks of many social problems, including drug and alcohol abuse, mental health issues and suicide. What’s more, we are often stuck between mental health workers who don’t understand our cultural specificities and religious leaders who have not yet worked out how to deal with modern crises.16 But in this limbo between generations, cultural practices and expectations, something extraordinary is blooming.   Trajectory hermeneutics (and common sense) suggest that Islam was never meant to be set in stone. Fourteen hundred years’ worth of Islamic scholarship is proof that ideas and interpretations evolve over time and space, adapting to new needs and cultural phenomena. This spirit of openness fell into the doldrums over much of the twentieth century, leading to a generalised fear of ijtihad (independent reasoning). However, just as Islam represented a tremendous break from the mould in seventh-century Arabia, it signs its own death sentence if it becomes a new mould, incapable of flexibility and unwieldy to carry. As Jonathan A.C. Brown points out in his book Misquoting Muhammad, Muslim scholars have over centuries interpreted scripture and reconciled it with outside truth. What Islamic modernists have tried to do is rescue Islam from its ‘sunken, ill-fitted medieval shell’ and find its relevance in the present—with varying degrees of success.17 It might take a lifetime for Western Muslims to untangle the polemics, to find legal  

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interpretations that we can be at peace with, but that’s what makes engaging with Islam in our times so fascinating. Like it or not, we are in the thick of a dynamic process to develop an indigenous British Islam. * * * I LIKE TO THINK THAT I began wondering how to square my dual British-Islamic influences while still in nappies, pondering its finer points in crayon. My childhood was spent in a series of picturesque villages in East Anglia complete with pretty walled gardens, hollyhocks, ornamental cherry trees, fishponds, summer houses and sedulously tended lawns. Our home was a peculiar melting pot of Jeeves, Wooster, and Al-Bukhari, Danger Mouse and the Diwan of Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, Jane Austen and Rabi’ah l-‘Adawiyyah, Black Star and Fariduddin ‘Attar, Iranian cinema and Neighbours. There was Arabic calligraphy on the walls, Turkish kilim rugs on the floor, ‘oud burning in clay incense burners, and garrulous English-speakers discussing conflicts in Bosnia or Palestine over shepherd’s pie or fish fingers. We religiously took afternoon tea, fought over who got the last biscuit, went to nice CofE schools and watched TV afterwards, just like anyone else. And then my dad would call the adhan, everything would stop, and the prayer rugs would emerge. A world within a world.   In the kitchen my mum’s ghetto blaster would pump out Emmylou Harris, Stevie Wonder, Rickie Lee Jones, KD Lang and Senegalese musical giant Cheikh Lô, with the regular intervention of taped dhikr gatherings. Meanwhile, in his home office in the attic, my dad played everything from early Miles Davis, Bill Evans and John Coltrane to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Andalusi orchestras and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Holst 171

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and Debussy, the Manhattan Transfer, and The Goon Show— very loudly. Visiting school friends were either so bemused they didn’t return, or glad for the anthropological experience.   They weren’t the only ones. As a child I studied the particulars of British culture with a desperate eagerness, aware that I would need to reproduce them in the course of everyday interactions in order to reassure people that I did not pose any disturbance to the status quo. School was important not for the academic learning it offered (I could get that from a book in half the time), but for the insight into mainstream British society that it provided.   Although I was more interested in watching Bananaman and bickering with my sister, our osmosis of Islamic values and ideas was discreet, subcutaneous. Frustrated by her limited ability to study the seerah, the life of Prophet Muhammad, when my sister and I were small, my mother resorted to reading books aloud, while we played with our ridiculously proportioned, plastically blonde Barbies. She didn’t think it did much except soothe us with the sound of her voice, but whenever she mentioned the holy city of Medina, I would squeak: ‘That’s me!’ There was a hadith for everything, a du’a (supplication) for every predicament, a chapter of the Qur’an to recite for every woe. The things of real value were spiritual; as Al-Ghazali put it, you only really possess what you couldn’t lose in a shipwreck. We were only allowed one chocolate bar a week and didn’t know there were any TV channels except BBC1, but that probably had more to do with a hangover of crunchy 1970s ideals than Islam.   We never went to any madrasa, so our knowledge of Islamic history more or less came from bedtime stories, a dash of wonder and mythos in an otherwise rather ordinary English education. One of the stories I recall most clearly is that of 172

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Muhammad and his companion Abu Bakr hiding in a cave, on the run from the Quraysh tribe of Makkah who had attempted to assassinate the Prophet. With the two men hiding inside, a dove built a nest at the mouth of the cave and a spider spun a web across it, so that when the Quraysh came upon it, they thought nobody could have entered it recently and moved on. The lives of the Prophet and Abu Bakr were spared, and with them the future of their religion.   Once a week we would go to the house of friends in Cambridge who hosted a dhikr circle. Dhikr literally means remembrance, in particular the remembrance of God, usually through repeated mantra-like phrases, and sometimes through hadrah, deeply rhythmic recitation of Allah! Hayy! (God! Alive!). I’d be torn between racing around upstairs with the other kids, playing Sonic the Hedgehog or trying out crazy hairstyles with my best friend, and sitting downstairs singing qasidahs alongside women from diverse nations attending the University of Cambridge, the jumble of musical abilities pleasingly mashed together in a faintly hypnotic devotional hum. The melodies still get me like nothing else, transported from the Sahara or Al-Andalus, the Yemen or Damascus, while the poems rival Rumi in beauty and insight.   Aside from these cherished gatherings, my family then was at a distance even from the Muslim mainstream, which at that time found white converts odd to the point of being mythical. We would get blank looks, rapid blinking, even laughter. There was one memorable Desi wedding at which my parents, sister and I were the only white guests; nobody talked to us, but rather they stared in bewilderment from the other tables. I think the question in everyone’s heads was whether we had accidentally wandered in while searching for a white couple’s wedding. Even 173

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today, when groups of tourists from all over the Muslim world appear at jumu’ah prayers at our local mosque in Spain, it can sometimes feel like we white Muslims are curiosities, or accidental (and unwilling) celebrities. This much extra attention is rarely welcome, especially if it makes you feel like you have to be on your best behaviour. ‘When people tell me that I’m so special because I “was one of the first”, I feel like such a fraud,’ my mum reflects. The attention can also veer into scrutiny; in much the same way that many Western Muslims feel we are expected to denounce terrorist attacks on social media in order to allay fears that we might be harbouring radical sympathies, white Muslims can feel we are expected to adopt every possible Islamic ruling to prove our commitment to Islam. No pressure, then.   Growing up at a time and in an area where Muslims were routinely confused with curtain fabric and where English people converted to gas, not other religions, my relationship to Islam was intensely internal. Ramadan was interesting. I found fasting easy—indeed, it lent itself to peculiarly lucid daydreams. At school I would hang out in the library, or just sit with my friends while they ate; although some worried I had developed anorexia, they often didn’t notice that I wasn’t eating. This was a revelation: when something isn’t conspicuous, it just doesn’t flash up on the radar. As I grew older, I discovered that I could go out dancing with friends who were drinking, and nobody would guess that I was teetotal. In fact, friends sometimes giggled that I had been properly hammered, when really I was just sympathetically tipsy, or perhaps elated that some social stiffness had finally been released.   In those days, I didn’t get any slack about my Islam, partly because I could trade it off against my whiteness—not looking foreign meant my religious weirdness was tacitly ignored—and 174

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partly because nobody of my generation knew very much about Islam (unlike in the post-9/11 world, where everyone knows just enough about it to despise it). In the comfortable middleclass English reality of the time, the Muslim world was a distant, shadowy place on the other side of a Veil that thankfully protected our ‘civilised’ Western existence. When I was in sixth form and about to go to Saudi Arabia for the ‘umrah pilgrimage, a girl on my bus asked me in shock, ‘Isn’t it really dangerous there?’ The best I felt I could do was to be more or less innocuous, to exist as a friendly counterpoint to the negative stereotypes of Muslims that would with time become more vicious and pervasive. However, even in such an apparently innocent attitude, I can scent the odour of white privilege. In trying to be more personable and palatable by removing any obvious traces of Muslimness from view, I was playing into the ideological agenda of white supremacy, which deems anything other than Western culture to be unacceptable.   In practice, it isn’t always easy to find or create genuinely diverse communities. Today, ethnic minorities make up about 13 per cent of the British population—and back in the ’90s it was less than half that figure. Most of my parents’ closest friends were other white folks with whom they shared the bond of embracing Islam together. The lack of diversity was partly because we lived in the countryside, which was (and still is) overwhelmingly white. But I think there was also a comfort factor: we knew how to navigate English politeness, which is based, to a large degree, on emotional dishonesty. In private, English people might think or feel a certain way, but in public we know how to put on a show. We might be asked how we are, but we know a frank answer will be met with nervous bewilderment.   Part of English etiquette is not talking about matters of belief. We might spontaneously say ‘Thank God,’ ‘For God’s sake’, or  

 

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‘Oh my God!’, but expressing these feelings in a personal, honest way will earn you sharp shrift. Overhearing something I said in a maths class at school, one of my classmates turned around scornfully and almost spat in my face: ‘You don’t actually mean you believe in God?’ This excoriating hostility towards any kind of spirituality only encourages people of faith to retreat in selfdefence, hedgehog-style. It sounds like a silly complaint, but it’s awkward talking about God if you’re English. My Englishness was comfortable, but also constricting, pushing me to blend in with the status quo. I longed for a place where diversity was not a novelty but embraced as a basic human fact.   I started my degree at SOAS a few days after 9/11. Confident that I had joined the most right-on college in the country, I was eager for my mind to be stretched to a more globally representative shape. But looking back at my degree in African Studies, I realise that only a handful of my teachers were African, even those teaching African languages. Besides, what was I really learning about the wider world from the comfortable terrain of the SOAS library? Was my degree just a convenient distraction from inquiring into my own deepest-held ideas? If there had been a course on British Muslim identity, I’m not even sure I would have taken it.   The SOAS Islamic Society terrified me. There were a couple of sisters who powerwalked in black khimars that swished along the ground. I didn’t dare identify myself as a Muslim in front of them for fear of being cornered with a lecture about covering my elbows. Once, I screwed up my piddling courage and ventured into the prayer room (only slightly larger than the shoe rack by the door), and one such sister was giving a ‘talk’—to an audience of one, who didn’t seem too chuffed to be there—about the correct positions the body should make when prostrating in prayer. ‘Your knees mustn’t touch your stomach,’ she instructed 176

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with confidence. I shuddered to think how she would have judged my prayers, with cobbled-together ‘halalifying’ outfits (a jumper wrapped around the waist, a shirt becoming an ersatz scarf in a pinch). I preferred to think that I was focusing on the inner experience of prayer, although perhaps some helpful pointers about positions might have revitalised a practice that can easily be performed on autopilot.   Out of sheer cowardice, I maintained my cover as an invisible Muslim throughout most of my degree, keeping my Islam between friends (some of whom were invisible Muslims too). But there were times when it was lonely. One miserable winter Ramadan, I ate every single suhur (the pre-dawn meal) and iftar (the dusk fast-breaking) on my own and ended up more depressed than I had ever been in my life. Iftar fell absurdly early that year, at around 4 p.m.; with none of the fuss and fanfare that Ramadan usually receives in the Muslim world, I would excuse myself from class to eat a clementine while sitting on the itchy carpet of the hallway, and would return immediately, trying to minimise the disruption.   Only in my last year at university, after a close friend converted to Islam, did I finally cave and attend an ISoc iftar with her. To my astonishment, the room was not filled with the stern sisters I had seen before and magnified in my mind, but with all kinds of Muslimahs: warm, loud Arab women with manes of unveiled curly black hair, a Moroccan from South London who taught Zumba, a British Indian hijabi who was an undying fan of rock music. I realised I had been stuck in a fear warp, assuming that most British Muslims were somehow too ‘un-English’ for me to meet them on common ground. For all my anti-imperialist bluster, the empire had conditioned me pretty good. * * * 177

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AS ABNORMAL AS I FELT growing up, there has actually been a long (if marginal) tradition of Brits who adopted Islam. Unlike most of the 1970s generation of converts, who found Islam by way of acid, music and/or a rejection of Western political hypocrisy, these neophytes were largely eccentric, wanderlusting aristocrats, or polyglot academics.   The earliest I can find on record was Edward Wortley Montagu, the son of an MP who was sent as British ambassador to Ottoman Istanbul in 1716. A young Edward was the first Brit to be inoculated against smallpox; he was convinced that his later conversion to Islam was due to Turkish blood entering his veins as a child. Ever the non-conformist, he followed an erratic British school career and waggish beau monde existence in London with a stint studying Arabic in Leiden, the Netherlands. After abandoning one wife and whisking away that of the Danish ambassador to Egypt, he became enamoured of the lifestyle and religion that he discovered in ‘the Orient’, living à la turque for years even after returning to Europe. Montagu’s nineteenth-century biographer stated that: ‘His loose and roving life made him the hero of much vulgar and indecent romance. There is little doubt that he was more or less insane.’18   Another early convert to Islam, Abdullah Quilliam—born in 1856 in Liverpool, home to the oldest black British and Chinese populations in the UK, and given the wonderfully rhyming first name William—became a Muslim in 1887 after visiting Morocco. With a donation from the crown prince of Afghanistan, he bought three houses in his home town and in 1889 turned one of them into the Liverpool Muslim Institute, the first working mosque in Great Britain. Other projects included a boarding school for boys, a day school for girls, an orphanage, a museum and a science laboratory. Given the honorific title ‘Sheikh of the 178

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British Isles’ by the twenty-sixth Ottoman caliph, his da‘wah or outreach work included the weekly magazine The Crescent and the monthly Islamic World.   A Liverpudlian greengrocer and twice-elected MP by the name of Robert Stanley was one of some 600 Brits who became Muslim through Quilliam’s da‘wah, as well as vice president of Quilliam’s Institute (not to be confused with the Quilliam Foundation think tank mentioned above). Curiously enough, Stanley’s great-great-great-grandson Steven converted to Islam ten years before discovering a photo of his forebear Robert ‘Reschid’ Stanley in a 1908 copy of The Crescent, unearthing his family’s Victorian Muslim history.19 Around the same time, through the Ahmadiyya movement, a few Anglo-Americans were also embracing Islam. The earliest is thought to have been Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb, who converted in 1888, while in 1896, a Christian theologian from Pennsylvania called Rev. Dr A. George Baker, who knew Webb and was in touch with Abdullah Quilliam in the UK, also publicly declared himself to be a Muslim.   The first Muslim in the House of Lords was one Henry Stanley who had become Abdul Rahman in 1862 and inherited a double baronetcy in 1869. His faith led him to close all public houses on his estate in Anglesey, but he lovingly restored four churches on it as well—to the bewilderment of all those who thought Muslims incapable of pluralistic feeling. He wasn’t the only British aristocrat to embrace Islam around the turn of the twentieth century: Sir Abdullah Archibald Hamilton, 5th and 3rd Baronet—whose son by his first wife was second cousin of Queen Victoria—converted in 1924, commenting that: ‘the beauty and simple purity of Islam have always appealed to me. … Islam recognises genius and individuality. It is constructive  

 

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and not destructive.’ His third wife, Lilian Austen, embraced Islam too and changed her name to Miriam. The Scottish physician and baronet Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton also became Muslim, taking the name Jalaluddin, while the Irish peer Rowland Allanson-Winn, 5th Baron Headley, became known as Sheikh Rahmatullah al-Farooq after he converted in 1913, and later presided over the British Muslim Society. One of the key members of the Woking Muslim Mission (the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking was the first purpose-built mosque in the UK, constructed in 1889), Baron Headley was offered the throne of Albania in 1925 but refused it; he later went bankrupt and lived out his last years in the Wiltshire countryside.   The first British woman to perform hajj, in 1934, was Scotswoman Zainab Cobbold, née Lady Evelyn Murray. Lady Cobbold provides proof, if it were necessary, that faith in Islam is not mutually incompatible with a sense of British patriotism. An encomium written after her death at ninety-five describes her as ‘an indomitable woman … a typical example of that class of the aristocracy of Scotland who are fiercely proud of their blood, descent and Scottish nationality, and consider the English to be inferior.’ In accordance with her will, she was buried in Scottish aristocratic tradition, her coffin ‘followed by a bag piper playing lamentful tunes.’20 Her tombstone, on a hilltop in a Scottish glen, is inscribed with the Qur’anic phrase, ‘God is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth.’   Lady Cobbold once tried to convert a certain Marmaduke Pickthall, a linguistic genius with a thoroughly British background, having been a classmate of Winston Churchill at Harrow School. He declined her suggestion, although he was intrigued by the Muslim world, having travelled some years earlier, in the late nineteenth century, to the Levant and Egypt, 180

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where he was struck by ‘the joyousness of that life compared with anything that I had seen in Europe. The people seemed quite independent of our cares of life, our anxious clutching after wealth, our fear of death.’21 Gaining fluency in Arabic, he made his way to Jaffa, where he dressed as a Palestinian and disappeared from the British missionary radar. Only in 1917, in dramatic and spontaneous fashion at the end of a lecture, did he say the shahadah and formally become Muslim. At one point Pickthall delivered Friday khutbahs in Woking Mosque, before becoming headmaster of a school in Hyderabad, where he completed his famous English translation of the Qur’an. Although he denied it, he may have been the basis for Fielding in his friend E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India.22   Among other European Muslims of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we find French painter Alphonse-Étienne (or Nasreddine) Dinet (1861–1929), who, along with the Algerian intellectual Sliman ben Ibrahim, may have been the first to use the term Islamophobia, or its French equivalent, islamophobie; Ivan Aguéli (or Sheikh ‘Abd al-Hadi ‘Aqili; 1869– 1917), a wandering Swedish artist, former anarchist, and devotee of Ibn ‘Arabi; and the Swiss traditionalist Titus Burckhardt (1908–1984). Aguéli was one of the first Europeans to enter Al-Azhar in Cairo and set up a secret Sufi society in Paris in 1911, where he initiated the French intellectual Réné Guénon (‘Abd al-Wahid Yahya, 1886–1951) into Sufism. One of Guénon’s students and Burckhardt’s confreres was the English­ man Martin Lings, a highly respected writer on Islam and Sufism in the English-speaking world, whose book Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources has near-canonical status among Western Muslims.   The ‘good breeding’ and high level of education would probably have spared these early converts much of the Islamophobia  

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that was rife in a Europe that feared Ottoman expansion— although Aguéli was suspected of being an Ottoman spy by the French, and extradited to Spain, where he died penniless after being hit by a train. Some adopted Arab dress, or at least appeared so attired in photos. Guénon eventually decided to walk his traditionalist walk and abandoned French society altogether, settling in Egypt and gaining citizenship in 1949. On the whole, however, it seems these early converts saw no contradiction between their European identities and their Islam.   As extraordinary as many of these stories are—and those of contemporary converts are no less fascinating23—it is curious that white converts should be paid any special attention when it comes to matters of faith. Is it because their conversions reveal a conscious engagement with Islamic beliefs that a person who inherited the religion from their parents might lack? Some of the most prominent figures in Western Islam, particularly Sufism—Hamza Yusuf, Dr Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, Abdal Hakim Murad, Yahya Rhodus—are white converts, and attract audiences that span every conceivable ethnicity. A number of Arabs and South Asians have told me that they had practically abandoned their religion, handed down in a dry, mechanical way by their parents, until seeing it from the new angle offered by converts who articulated their vision of Islam in terms that seemed more approachable for people raised in the West.   Muslims often find inspiration and confirmation in convert stories, but I am wary of white exceptionalism. White converts account for only 3 per cent of Muslims in Britain, yet have become some of the most prominent household names. As well as enjoying undue respect and elevation, I have seen some white Muslims become insular, rather than standing as allies to our brothers and sisters of colour. Such people can quote Ibn ‘Arabi  

 

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backwards and forwards but dislike Arabs, devour translations of Sufi poets or thinkers but hate to rub shoulders with South Asians or North Africans, and fail to show solidarity with the struggles of people of colour. To my mind, it smacks of whites colonising Islam. It might be comfortable to keep the company of people who share a common cultural language, but there is a clear risk that by keeping ourselves to ourselves, white Muslims can slip into the role of the colonial Brits pontificating about Indians or Kenyans from the stiff comfort of a whites-only club.   It is true that, while the overall experience of white Muslims in wider Muslim circles is of genuine welcome, there are occasions when we feel we don’t belong. The classic example is Eid parties, when you turn up almost giddy with excitement at being part of a huge and glorious community, only to find that everyone disappears after the prayer to their family homes for three days of feasting and fun, forgetting that—particularly if you are a convert—you don’t have one of those to go to. A proportion of converts later renege, frequently because they are expecting a global brother- or sisterhood but are instead confronted with expectations to dramatically alter their way of life overnight, and endure judgments about how ‘correctly’ they are practising (a point on which there are diverse juridical opinions). Children of converts, being so few, and our family histories having been so recently altered, often struggle to create a strong Muslim identity. Tired of constantly having to prove themselves, some give up on religion altogether.   All this makes me wonder what relevance, if any, whiteness has to my British Muslim identity. Are these mutually exclusive categories? I do not switch between Muslim, British and white personae, as though suffering from some kind of cultural personality disorder. On some level, there must be an interweaving 183

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between the multiple facets of our being. Fears that Muslims are disloyal to our Western homelands should be negated by the fact that many non-Muslims share our dissent over certain elements of Western foreign policy. Somewhere between 750,000 and 2 million Brits—the majority of them non-Muslim— marched through London in February 2003, one of sixty demonstrations all over the UK and many more throughout Europe, to protest against the war in Iraq. Was this a sign of the protesters’ split allegiances, to nation and conscience? Or was it not the very picture of democracy in action? One of the wonderful things about Europe is that we have the freedom to express our indignation at our government and to hold it to account; this is part of what makes us proud to be British.   White British Muslims share our home and our religion with our POC brethren, but we usually lack a strong connection to a secondary culture beyond the British Isles. Our connection to Islam itself can rarely be traced back through our family history. Likewise Islamic music, clothing, home decor and much more, not to mention knowledge of the Arabic language, are more or less recent adoptions—or appropriations. As is often noted, cultures naturally appropriate from one another—I couldn’t have written that last phrase without using words that English ‘borrowed’ from French—but it is clear that casual or commercial adoptions of non-European customs by white people, like Katy Perry wearing cornrows, or Iggy Azalea doing a Bollywoodstyle dance routine complete with sari and bindi, erase the people whose cultures have produced them while profiting from their cultural capital.   There is actually a point at which I worry that my very existence as a white Muslim verges on cultural appropriation. Is it OK, for instance, to be white and have an Arabic name, to wear 184

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an East African batik skirt, use Indian throws around the house, or burn bukhoor incense? Am I being inappropriate when I sing traditional Moroccan devotional songs in Arabic? None of this is authentic to my Anglo-American culture, yet it pertains to different geographical facets of a global Islamic culture to which I feel I belong. Ultimately, I am not entitled to make the call—it is up to the people whose cultures are at risk of being appropriated, and so far the responses I have had from Arabic speakers of myriad backgrounds to my renditions of classical Sufi music have been warm and positive. But while there is much that we have in common, it is vital to observe the Islamic practice of checking our intentions and leaving our egos at the door, and to respect the lines delineating one culture from another, lest we (whites in particular) fall into the old pattern of exploitation.   So how does whiteness itself impact on a Western Muslim identity? I have been asking myself this question for several decades now, and my tentative conclusion is that its primary relevance—other than the undeniable and extremely pernicious influence of white privilege—lies in ancestry. As hard as it has been for me to come to terms with my white heritage with the knowledge of how it is weaponised against people of colour, I recognise now that honouring ancestry is important: to rephrase Kierkegaard, life must be lived looking forwards but understood looking back. We could speak of vertical and horizontal resonance: the former is a connection to our progenitors, whose genes we carry and to whom we owe our existence, while the latter is a connection felt on this temporal plane, whether through shared ideas, beliefs, lifestyles, tastes or behaviours. Both are valuable, and both contribute to making us who we are, but we can only consciously choose and change the latter.   Having a history of white converts might support the nascent identity of white Muslims today, providing proof—like the 185

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Spanish Muslims of Al-Andalus—that Islam can be indigenised on European soil. But we are only one small ingredient in a much richer, vaster pot of cultures. What’s more, all of us need to work together to engage with the question of how Islam can be understood in our time and on our terms. * * * WESTERN MUSLIMS OF all ethnicities are venturing to piece together a workable identity that incorporates the many elements of our selves: European languages and education; faith in a God with an Arabic name; siblinghood with people of widely differing cultures worldwide. The Qur’an tells us: ‘And We have sent no Messenger save with the tongue of his people, that he might make all clear to them…’ (14:4) It is essential to dig past specificities to Islam’s core values, which can be variously applied in our temporal and cultural contexts. The upshot of these difficult efforts is a surprising closeness. We are all in a communal process of trying to figure out what it means to be a Muslim in the West in the twenty-first century. I know it is possible—if the clash of civilisations were real, I would have spontaneously combusted by now.   But being Muslim isn’t just an identity: it’s a whole way of relating to the world that contrasts starkly with mainstream secular views. Take the problem of suffering, for example. From an Islamic viewpoint, any harm that comes to a person in this life is a kind of purification, the way a fever burns away pathogens from a body. You lost a loved one? Never fear—they’re in a better place. Smashed a salad bowl? Be thankful—it took evil away with it (a common folk belief, at least). Lost money? Zakat you should have paid—no loss. Worried about work? Cultivate tawakkul, trust in God (an essential practice for freelancers, I 186

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have found). Islam is fundamentally optimistic, as everything is taken to be a gift from the Divine, even if removing the wrapping might be painfully difficult. The only real sorrow is being so caught up in mundane concerns that God is forgotten.   The message I got growing up, whether from Sufi poetry or conversations with my parents over toast and marmalade, was the same as that taught by any spiritual path: the world of form is bound to fade away, and is therefore not the place to anchor our entire existence. Hinging on the Qur’anic teaching that God is closer to us than our jugular vein,24 Sufi spirituality focuses on denying the ego its whims in order to concentrate on the Infinite. The death of a saint is described as an urs or ‘marriage’, an occasion for celebration at their spiritual union with the Beloved. There are narrations by Sufis that exhort their followers to despise the world and detach their hearts from it entirely.   But in a Western context this attitude can seem nonsensical, especially as Muslims are also expected to be committed to social justice, to look after the needy, and to care for the environment as khulafa’ or vicegerents of God on earth. This apparent paradox comes from a conflation of the ‘alam, the physical, geological, biological world—which is full of signs of the Divine, and which we are entrusted with protecting—and the dunya. The latter is usually translated as ‘world’, but what it really refers to is the ego’s relationship to the ‘alam: that insatiable desire for more, whether it be wealth, prestige, career development, fitness, attractiveness, even information. By contrast, inner work is focused on finding more peace, contentment, thankfulness, patience, generosity, compassion, and the insights that this ego-blitzing produces. The trick is to strike the right balance: ‘Tie your camel but trust in God.’ A constant striving for the middle path. 187

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  Easier said than done. When I stepped out of the cave of my family home, I discovered that England was not a place that nurtures this outlook. In a consumerist culture that claws its way towards ever greater comfort, marketed to us as progress (as long as the price paid to the environment or foreign workers doesn’t spoil the view), I get the impression that we are on a neverending highway, anxiously competing in earnings and ownings. Even educational institutions are a bit like shopping centres: you go in, browse their goods, pick up something that might be useful, pay, and leave, feeling temporarily improved. If people knew they could reach inside themselves to find all the fulfilment they needed, the economy would surely crash.   Yet in many other ways, Britain is paradise for a Muslim like me. Lush green hills and dales, old-growth forests, summer idylls of gardens and seashores, light mist, dry wit, reserve, and books—lots of books. This is not even to mention the economic stability and recourse to law and order that are so often sorely lacking in corrupt Muslim-majority nations. There has always been a Britain of intellectuals, artists, social activists—people thinking outside the box, who have a healthy dose of self-doubt and curiosity about the world. Britain to me is about not judging a book by its cover, but having the curiosity to open it and the attentiveness to read.   Surprisingly, even the hedonism that this freedom sometimes slips into can provide a great dash of perspective. Stone cold sober at warehouse parties in the early 2000s, surrounded by revellers getting progressively more wasted, I remember feeling intensely the presence of God, to the point where I preferred this upsidedown world of contrasts to a calm, pleasant mosque environment where spiritual expression can become mechanical.   In a secular world that sucks its teeth at the idea of God, it can be hard to communicate these ideas to non-Muslims. But if 188

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there is one Islamic value that can be universalised, and that could be a powerful antidote to privilege, it’s adab. Generally, adab is taken to mean ‘good manners’, but it’s much more than just minding your p’s and q’s. Adab implies behaving with respect and consideration in all situations. It means not scrolling on your phone while others sit uncomfortably in the shadow of your self-involvement. It means thinking through all the ramifications of one’s behaviour to pre-empt injustice. Adab is a white person centring the perspectives of people of colour on issues of race, or a man deferring to a woman on feminism. Having adab in worship means not fidgeting, keeping prayer spaces clean and beautiful, trying to clear the mind of chatter and the heart of ugliness. Adab towards the natural world is treating the earth’s resources with care and consideration for future needs. Adab can also be translated as ‘decency’ or ‘humaneness’, or perhaps most accurately as ‘mindfulness’, not in the modern sense of meditation, but of thoughtful and ethical behaviour.   To European sensibilities, adab isn’t a remotely alien concept. I see it in a certain kind of Britishness, in the culture of doing one’s civic duty and picking up rubbish from a beach, of minding one’s own business, or debating sensitive topics respectfully. It is a Christian woman sitting contemplatively through a dhikr gathering at my parents’ house, even voluntarily donning a headscarf and joining us to pray.  Practising adab forces a person to confront the tyrannical ego, which lies at the heart of every human problem I can think of: prejudice, discrimination and intolerance; waste, consumerism and ecocide; narcissism, privilege and chauvinism. Adab is the perfect antidote: you can’t practise adab towards people, animals or the planet while exploiting or abusing them. It’s rooted in another Islamic concept: muhasabah, calling oneself 189

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to account, reflecting on intention with the goal of sincerity. For white Muslims, our ethnic privilege is so pervasive that it requires constant muhasabah to avoid falling into it. * * * I CAME OF AGE WITH the profound sense that I didn’t belong in the UK as a Muslim, that my family and the white Muslims we knew were a kind of cultural island, so I spent two decades seeking belonging elsewhere. But while I wasn’t watching, that island revealed itself to be a peninsula, one with connections to other continents and cultures, even if there are occasional tolls when crossing. In a diverse place like Britain, we are guaranteed to come into contact not only with non-Muslims, but probably with Muslims of different backgrounds, too. Something extraordinary is happening among Western Muslims more broadly; today I can say salam to a stranger in hijab and not receive the blank, stupefied looks or stern advice about my outfit that I once would have, but rather a warm greeting, with barely an eyelid batted.   Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the British Muslim community is larger, more settled, and—despite intensified negative press—more sure of itself. In a 2017 report marking twenty years since its first study on Islamophobia, the Runnymede Trust stated: Compared with 1997 the [British Muslim] population has grown considerably, to nearly 3 million (from approximately 1.2 to 1.4 million), with a young median age and a large number born in Britain. Furthermore … [it] is much more organized, with a wide range of public, private and civil society voices, ranging from the arts and media to sports and politics. As part of this growing, more socially mobile, younger and more activist community, they have also challenged Islamophobia directly.25 190

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  Some of these activists are creating physical spaces for what everyone seems to miss: community. The Inclusive Mosque Initiative is a kind of pop-up mosque that welcomes all worshippers, regardless of background, degree of practice, gender express­ ion or sexual orientation. There are still conservative currents in British Islam, which can alienate many younger Muslims, but a growing sector is striving for balance and authenticity in a pluralist society. Europe’s first eco-mosque opened in Cambridge in March 2019, under the auspices of Professor Timothy Winter, aka Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad. Its innovative steam-bent wooden pillars criss-cross to form a series of geometric cupolas like the canopy of a forest. The mosque—designed by a Jew and a Hindu—also boasts grey water recycling, solar panels, lowimpact heating and cooling, and green roofs. It features screens of different heights for separating genders, so that women can choose their preferred degree of visibility. The gardens combine classical Persian designs with indigenous English trees and flowers, and the local-style bricks used in the masonry feature kufic Qur’anic phrases.   If you want to understand a society’s sense of itself, look at its art. British Muslim artists have been developing and fusing a range of styles, from the contemporary to the traditional. A few striking examples are the pop art-inspired paintings of Farah Bhoyroo; Mo Negm’s abstract paintings; graffiti murals by street artist Mohammed Ali, aka Aerosol Arabic; the vibrant collaged photography of Hassan Hajjaj; Halima Cassel’s playful sculptures drawing on Asian, African and geometric shapes; and Amber Khokhar’s designs, including the first modern carpet to be commissioned for Buckingham Palace. Hundreds of artists, from beginners to advanced practitioners, Muslim and nonMuslim, have been turned on to traditional Islamic geometry 191

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and arabesque on courses led by Adam Williamson, born to Sufi converts, together with his colleague Richard Henry.   Music, for so long taboo among mainstream Muslims, is also turning a corner. British Iraqi grime rapper Lowkey commands rapt audiences both at concerts and panel discussions, while Riz Ahmed, aka Riz MC—whose track ‘Englistan’ evokes the ‘racist beef, cakes and tea’ of English culture—has crossed over into Hollywood acting. Probably the best-known British Muslim convert, Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, has not only come back from a twenty-five-year-long break from the music industry to record several new albums, but has also founded the Maqam Centre in North London for cultural events, as well as the multimedia label Sakinah Arts and Culture, which represents a new generation of artists singing English nasheeds (Islamic devotional songs). London-based British Caribbean sister duo Pearls of Islam have broken new ground with their original songs and renditions of sacred music on acoustic guitar, as well as organising events and retreats that support Muslim youth, arts and wellbeing.   High-profile Muslim sportspeople are on the frontline of changing stereotypes. Mo Farah and Mo Salah (both of whom have rebranded their names from Mohamed) are held up as sources of pride for UK sports fans. Mo Salah’s success has even been linked to a reduction in hate crimes against Muslims in his adopted city, Liverpool, with fans chanting: ‘If he’s good enough for you, he’s good enough for me/If he scores another few, then I’ll be Muslim too.’26 Like them or loathe them, London mayor Sadiq Khan and Baroness Warsi are at the front row of politics, while in comedy Guz Khan’s Man Like Mobeen tears strips off Islamophobia by pillorying the practice of racial profiling and the rise of the alt right. Writers like Leila 192

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Aboulela, Kamila Shamsie, Sabrina Mahfouz and Onjali Q. Raúf compellingly explore the British Muslim lived experience, while in radio, TV and print journalism, Remona Aly adventures through everything from hajj and music by Muslim women to Celtic, Hindu and Christian mysticism.   Sociologist William Barylo points out the value of grassroots charity work carried out by Muslims, citing outreach work by Polish Muslims who handed out roses attached to leaflets about Prophet Muhammad, while others established dialogue with people who had expressed Islamophobic views on Facebook— with tangibly positive results: ‘Many from both sides expressed satisfaction and the feeling of having had a “positive experience” and having “learnt something new”.’27 He states that the work of charities ‘is recognised as “constructive” for the community … and dampens hatred and misconceptions at a local level amidst a creeping Islamophobic climate.’28   Places like Rumi’s Cave—as well as similar projects at venues like The Ark in Birmingham—offer much-needed hubs for British Muslims to carve out their personal, spiritual and artistic identity today. Often this is through poetry and music events, which can serve as a launchpad for talented creatives like the Bristolian hip hop duo Muneera Rashida and Sukina Abdul Noor, known as Poetic Pilgrimage, and Roundhouse Poetry Slam 2018 winner Rakaya Esime Fetuga. But these spaces are sadly under threat; Rumi’s Cave’s main venue is, at the time of writing, due to be demolished by Brent Council to make way for a new housing development.   The Qur’an relates the parable of Ahl-ul-Kahf, the People of the Cave—a retelling of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus mentioned in the Bible—in which a group of people (and their dog) enter a cave while the world outside descends into corruption, 193

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remaining there miraculously for hundreds of years and only emerging when everything outside has changed. A non-literal interpretation of this story could be that they retreated to a timeless, inner space that transcends alterities.   Caves can be lungs, ventricles, wombs, or resonating spaces: a harmonium, or cupped hands to make an owl call into. They are the archetypal shelter, representing protection and togetherness against an onslaught of bitterly cold weather. When I wanted a blogging alias, I baptised myself ‘Cavemum’. Natural caves are eerily timeless, with no variation in temperature, places where we can cohabit with stalactites that took millennia to creep longer, one calcium particle at a time.   The English word ‘cave’ is derived from the Proto-IndoEuropean root keuə-, which gives dozens of languages words with similar phonologies and meanings, such as the Latin cava, Irish cúas, Persian kav. Linguists have not found any historical connection to the Arabic kahf, and yet they are curiously almost homophones. As somewhere we took shelter during early human history, to which rock art dating back 30,000 years or more across the world attests, it could be one of the oldest words in any human language.   But retreating excessively, particularly into the passive pessimism of the internet hermit, draws Muslims into a cycle of negative feedback. No one gets to know us in person, so our image continues to be painted by those who have never seen their models. We might feel safer, but we leave a vacuum in which ugly, false views can proliferate. Even when they don’t involve outright Islamophobia, discussions about religion tend to get reduced to sneering, reductive vivisections unless people with broader views make them known—and perhaps the best way to do that is through the arts. 194

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  This is why, despite the ache of wanting to be safe, British Muslims are getting out there. As Audre Lorde put it, ‘That visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.’29 Our world is growing, and with it the chances that we can accept one another—and ourselves.   Still, talking about Muslim identity betrays the realities of actually being a Muslim, of seeking meaning beneath the surface, whether in a busy marketplace or a remote Sufi lodge. It is about living the wisdom of ‘action is in intention’; ‘a smile is charity’; ‘when people treat you badly, treat them well in return.’ Along the way, we practise what might seem like absurd rituals, like fasting in Ramadan, to starve the ego so that it doesn’t blot out our clarity, or adhere to restrictions on our behaviour in this life—such as on extramarital sex, intoxicants, and certain foods—hoping that our restraint brings greater freedom in the next. But behind these religious acts there always lies a personal lived experience that cannot be reduced to abstractions.   Western Muslims everywhere are forging a way of being that appreciates the good of our environment, but keeps a door open to that timeless cavern of the heart, a safe haven for when storms break out—even if we do have to watch out for bears. Like the people in another cave, that of Plato’s allegory, we look at shapes flickering on the wall and perceive something brighter beyond. And once you start seeing things this way, the shadows cease to be the goal, and all you want is the light that casts them.

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TRAVEL ISN’T THE ONLY way to leave your comfort zone.   As a writer, I’ve always found that the best parts of travel— even if it’s just to the next town—lie in quiet observation. Sensory perception is heightened; snatches of conversation are overheard; passersby sketch themselves as full-bodied characters in a story. With this outlook, you can slow travel right down until you’re journeying mere metres—or no physical distance at all: the ultimate challenge is to view home through the lens of newness. Take that shift in perspective to its logical conclusion, and you start travelling in.   Marriage is half of the deen, the Islamic religion or way of life, according to Prophet Muhammad—and don’t the aunties love to remind us. Sharing a home, everyday activities and physical intimacy with another person surely qualifies as one of the greatest adventures of all time, complete with thrills, disappointments and joys. In the mirror of a partner, every personality sham gets tired of asserting itself, and new depths—as well as carbuncles—of character are discovered, like the roots of a tree washed into visibility after a monsoon. Marriage is also a protection, from sex outside of marriage, considered a grave sin in

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Islam, as well as the frustration of loneliness; sex toys are famously poor conversationalists.   It is also is one of the core issues over which Western-born Muslims often feel torn, with multiple cultural influences all vying for pre-eminence. But before we can get to marriage, there is a minefield to navigate: of chiselled jawlines, smouldering looks, curves glimpsed in lowcut tops and short shorts, workmates chatting breezily about their weekend conquests, adverts featuring girls practically humping their new car/handbag/ chocolate-sprinkled yoghurt, music whose lyrics are crawling with barely veiled obscenity (yes, I am a millennial granny— don’t even get me started on the videos), and men who promise the world, but not while their wives are listening.   In ninth-century Arabia a whole discipline developed known as ‘ilm al-bah (the study of sex), devoted to the science, philosophy and practical aspects of lovemaking. Some of the bestknown names in classical Islamic literature, such as the Egyptian-Persian As-Suyuti, the Afro-Arab Al-Jahiz and the Andalusian Ibn Hazm, did not mince their words in expressing how sex with one’s spouse was the basis of a happy, healthy life. Technically, an Islamic marriage is merely a contract permitting sex between two people, but marriage is meant to be much more than that; the Qur’an tells us: ‘And of His Signs is that He has created mates for you from your own kind that you may find peace in them, and He has set between you love and mercy.’1 Sex in Islam is not necessarily for the purposes of procreation, and is considered to have a spiritual reward for both husband and wife.2   Despite flourishing for a thousand years, ‘ilm al-bah declined in the nineteenth century, when, as British Nigerian sexologist Habeeb Akande remarks, ‘puritanical sentiments became com198

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mon’.3 This coincided with greater contact with European culture, which painted sex as a necessary evil for the continuation of humanity. The late Algerian sexologist Malik Chebel described the ummah’s slide into puritanism as ‘the result of the trauma of our collective defeats—the rout in Granada (1492), subjugation to the Ottomans, colonisation and botched decolonisation.’4 The Pakistani writer Tariq Rahman notes: ‘it was only after the invasion of the British that South Asian Muslim reformers began to regard eroticism as shameful’, while Professor Abdur Rahman I. Doi attributes the change in West African Muslims’ attitudes towards sex and marriage to European imperialism.5   By contrast, Akande argues, ‘Islam is a sexually enlightened religion which teaches that sensuality should not be devoid of spirituality.’6 This sensuality is not only for male benefit, either. Addressing one of his companions who abstained from sexual relations, Prophet Muhammad said, ‘Your wife has a right over you,’ thereby recognising women’s right, by Islamic law, to sexual pleasure—a right by which a Muslim woman can divorce her husband if she is not satisfied. In a bookshop in Zanzibar I once found a Swahili pamphlet, called Guidance for Married Life Based on the Islamic Religion and written by a male imam, that dedicated the first couple of pages to how women should massage and relax their men as part of foreplay, and the rest to detailed descriptions of women’s erogenous zones and how to stimulate them.   Nevertheless, over the centuries attitudes towards women’s sexuality in the Muslim world have generally worsened, as jurisprudential texts proliferated depicting women as temptresses who needed to be kept at home. Sadly very little of the ‘ilm albah corpus remains extant. Despite hadiths in which Prophet  

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Muhammad discussed sex openly, it has become so taboo to talk about it—even practical aspects, like whether one has to shower after lovemaking in the middle of the night in winter (an issue that Hanafi scholars took seriously, as there were records of people becoming ill and dying after doing so)—that many young Muslims marry without having a clue how to do it. * * * MY MUM, who was raised by Methodists whose idea of letting it all hang out was to share a beer once a year, sat me nervously down when I was about fourteen and tried to give me ‘the talk’. Whether I was genuinely insulted at her idea of my naiveté or just too ruffled to hear her out, I protested that I already knew, God, Muuuuum, and she dropped the topic (perhaps with some relief ). I had somehow missed sex ed at secondary school (now I wonder if my mum deliberately exposed me to the flu), so eve-rything I knew about sex came from girls in my class. And a few of the boys. In secondary school, girls my age were starting to have sexual encounters at an age that would have flabbergasted my mother. One friend told me she had lost her virginity—at least, she assumed—on a holiday abroad during which she’d turned eleven, as she had woken up one morning in a strange man’s bed. To me the implications seemed horrifying, but she shrugged at the recollection; casual sex at a young age was already so normalised in the ’90s that you risked seeming a prude by raising your eyebrows. There were a few moony couples, but the general atmosphere was not inclined towards deeply fulfilling relationships. One morning a boy came into my GCSE woodwork class (in which I was the only girl) and announced to the rest of the boys, without any preamble, ‘I fucked a bird last night.’ 200

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  This was years before smartphones made sexting a thing. Porn then meant VHS tapes furtively borrowed from the video shop or magazines from a dad’s secret drawer, and would seem laughably tame by today’s standards. In fairness, our school was set in a small and rather dull town, where the main entertainment was getting a pineapple fritter at the chippie, a beer at your choice of yellow-ceilinged mock Tudor or shiny, soulless Wetherspoon’s pub, or—for some real sophistication—a Cadbury’s hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows at the local caff. Sex was about the only thing that kept people from dozing off in the afternoons.   I resisted as long as I could. I really did. But my faith had to contend with my fear of being a social pariah, and for children (and teens are still neurologically children, even if their bodies tell them otherwise), fear of not fitting in will make some go to absurd lengths to gain their peers’ approval. I decided that if I was to maintain any grain of Islam at all, however buried, my only option was to compromise; trying to remain impervious to societal pressures would end with me resenting my faith and abandoning it altogether. It was with some guilt but an equal amount of relief that I finally caved. Virginity might be a hot coal burning a hole in your underpants, but once it’s gone, it’s strangely anticlimactic.   From my lofty, sagacious position now as a thirty-sevenyear-old mother of three, the issue of how to educate children—of any gender—about sex in a healthy, positive way seems absolutely critical. Ideas of what a woman is expected to do with a man in the bedroom—writhe, moan and not complain, lest she puncture her boyfriend’s ego and make him lose his erection—have given rise to disturbing statistics about how frequently women feel pain during sex (30 per cent during  

 

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vaginal sex, compared to 7 per cent of men),7 even though they might grit their teeth and continue. As Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health, explained, ‘When it comes to “good sex”, women often mean without pain, men often mean they had orgasms.’8 It calls to mind the psychological phenomenon of ‘relative deprivation’, by which underprivileged groups, trained to have low expectations, report similar degrees of satisfaction to those who have been accustomed to more. By contrast, consider how easily privileged people grow outraged that they have been displeased or mistreated.   Most men would surely feel horrified to know that their partner had faked an orgasm for the ordeal to be over more quickly. However, I have sadly also seen Muslim men leaving comments on social media that women who speak out about sexual pain are complaining about nothing. Talking about sex doesn’t necessarily mean talking dirty—it can protect from harm. Shutting down the conversation is actually dangerous.   When my son turned eleven, the average age at which children are first exposed to porn,9 I sat him down and delicately explained that sometimes on another boy’s phone he might see images of naked people… cavorting, and to look away immediately. This, I hastened to explain, was not because sex is something dirty or evil, but because porn is a kind of film in which actors are paid to do it, without love, tenderness or trust—all ingredients of beautiful sex. I added that porn can take hideous, demeaning forms particularly towards women, who can be hurt during sex if it’s not done right. What I chose not to elaborate on was that some studies link abuse of porn to a contemporary rise in erectile dysfunction and low libido in men10—that would really have sent him running. Mum! Shut up!  

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  However, the bottom line is that children really need an older ally—not a parent, duh, Mum—who can convey these messages. In the absence of trusted humans with whom to talk in person, ‘Sheikh Google’ has become the go-to for a huge number of young Muslims who are curious, not to mention panic-stricken, about sex.11 Expositions of the fiqh (jurisprudence) on such matters as masturbation and oral sex are increasingly discussed in Muslim forums or websites such as SeekersGuidance.org, in which surprisingly tolerant positions can be found. In a digital context, and with responsible moderation, private Facebook or WhatsApp groups could be safe spaces for fret-free sex ed. However, there is also enough freely available porn online to give a million teenage boys an embolism. The internet is just as young as many virgins seeking answers, and it’s no substitute for real human contact. * * * SEX ED IS ONE THING, but Muslims who stick to their guns enter a whole new world of social anxiety. Marriage in Islam is essentially a leap of faith, with the intention to do right by God and the expectation of miraculously finding love in the lacuna of mutual ignorance. Assuming there is no premarital nooky, courtships can be short and flustered. We humans have a ‘lower trunk full of sympathetic but/hectic marsupials fighting for/ prominence’, as poet Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore amusingly put it,12 and these marsupials are too eager for satiety to give us enough time and calm for reasoning. And a haste to wed can bring major casualties.   Irrespective of whether single-sex schools do or don’t lead to better academic performance, gender segregation distinctly hinders one from interacting with members of the opposite sex 203

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without being reduced to a gibbering mess. It is true that the Qur’an instructs men to ‘lower your gaze’13—before mentioning anything about how women should dress or behave, in fact—but in a Western cultural context, this avoidance of eye contact can come off as rude, as though women’s faces are abhorrent. Outside of their own families, many devout Muslim men and women have few opportunities to learn how to relate to one another platonically. When it comes to marriage, it then proves difficult to strike up the kind of relaxed interaction that might organically lead to a relationship based on shared interests and mutual understanding, rather than just initial fireworks. The effect is that many Muslim couples hardly know each another when they tie the knot. As Humera Khan, of the London-based women’s organisation An-Nisa, put it to me, ‘Women are marrying strangers, and of course it doesn’t work.’   However, Khan also notes that Western Muslim society is naturally evolving. ‘Nowadays, hardly anybody says that they’re going to look for their children’s partners, unlike twenty-five years ago. These days boys and girls are going out in mixed groups all the time. We [parents] can give advice, urge caution— but things have changed. The issue is not segregation; the issue is that you have to have the integrity not to take advantage of someone. Muslims have lost trust in themselves, so sex has become a taboo.’ For Muslims living in Western nations, it’s impossible not to mix with other genders; the trick is learning how to do so with sense and sensibility. One British Pakistani man told me that he has noticed, in recent times, a ‘social recalibration in which you realize, “Aha, it doesn’t have to be sexual.” I think generationally it’s changing.’   Treading the precarious line between friendship and intimacy isn’t always easy, though. The key Islamic virtue of haya or mod204

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esty means that many Muslims dare not even kiss before their wedding night. Research shows that the higher the percentage of Muslims in a nation, the fewer reports of premarital sex, even among members of other religions.14 At the same time, plenty of others do indulge—even women who wear hijab, or outwardly religious men. Just over half of college-age Muslims in the US have had premarital sex,15 and I very much doubt the figures for the UK would be as low as our mums believe. Pressure to sacrifice religious principles runs high in the secular world, where having sex before even thinking about marriage is so commonplace that waiting until you tie the knot boggles non-Muslims’ minds. Apart from anything else, what if they’re bad in bed?   A number of Muslim singletons are seeking love through Muslim matrimonial websites and apps like Minder, Salam Swipe, Yelli and muzmatch. Talking with users has been an eyeopener for me; several have told me that they are used by married Muslim men openly looking for a ‘bit on the side’. One told me that women are following suit, apparently because they are in ‘dead-end marriages, arranged marriages, they can’t get divorced so they go on these apps to find some fun.’ And on the other side, women are discovering that their husbands have secretly taken a second wife abroad, or were already hitched with kids. That this was a surprise to me shows that I evidently have a naïve view of Muslims.   In journalist Hussein Kesvani’s book Follow Me, Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims, he tells the story of Londonbased ad executive Saira Khan, whose mother drew up a marriage CV for her, describing her looks, education and work experience in detail, in an effort to find her the perfect match among their contacts. But Saira found her first few dates disappointing, ‘because the men were [either] too eager and immedi 205

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ately started talking about marriage and kids [or] emotionally unready for marriage … they didn’t know how to talk to me, or to women!’16   ‘Halal dating’—which might mean bringing along a chaperone, or meeting in a public place like a cafe—can be a good way to get to know someone without the pressure of meeting prospective suitors at the family home. However, such hopefuls may struggle to gain the sanction of parents, who still believe that any kind of premarital contact is courting temptation. And it’s not just parents; I met one woman in Mombasa who was terribly sad that her prospective husband had seen a photo of her without her niqab.   Racism also rears its vile head in the Muslim courtship minefield. I heard of one couple—a British Pakistani man and a woman of British West African heritage—whose families both championed the ummah’s diversity but refused to attend their wedding, taking a dislike to the other side purely, it seems, on account of their ethnicities. I have come across countless stories from women—either looking for a husband on a Muslim marriage site or having a meeting arranged by family members— whose potential suitors say they are looking for a fair-skinned girl.17 YouTuber Diaspora Ukhti points out that marriage apps facilitate discrimination, as ethnic biases are factored in as ‘preferences’—usually for light-skinned sisters. ‘The black women are just left out to dry.’18   But not everyone wants a ‘love marriage’—sometimes for surprising reasons. One British Muslim told me that she asked her parents to arrange her marriage as she was ‘too busy trying to build my career in IT.’ There was no awkwardness when she and her partner met: ‘Alhamdulillah, we just clicked. We were open with each other from the start. Once we got talking, it felt 206

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like we had met before and had been best friends.’ Maybe skipping the fireworks makes for a more realistic bond.   In an article in the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, Rajnaara C. Akhtar actually posits those opting for an Islamic marriage, katb al-kitab or nikah, as a potential sign of British Muslims’ integration, with the faith-based marriage representing a liminal relationship mode without legal registration with the state, akin to cohabitation.19 In Iran it is common to run up a contract and then wait, say, six months or a year before moving in together; if it becomes clear that the relationship won’t work, you can cut your losses without embarrassment. Indeed, the imam of one mosque in Granada has started advising young couples to use contraception for the first year of marriage, just in case it doesn’t work out.   But many Muslims are uncomfortable with the heavy implications of marriage, not just because their non-Muslim friends aren’t planning to take their vows until their thirties, if ever. British Indian writer Nafisa Bakkar, co-founder of Amaliah. com, explains that her father was disappointed when she told him she wanted to get married at the age of twenty-two: ‘Marriage to him had connotations of having your wings clipped.’ We have become used to the idea that women should finish their education before getting married, while at the same time some parents discourage their daughters from doing a masters as they might be seen as ‘overachievers’ and deter suitors. It still seems ingrained that women must choose between marriage and career, a dichotomy against which many people raised in the West, like Bakkar, can’t help but rebel.20   A big wedding can be a ransom keeping a couple devoted to their marriage, as though admission of its failure amounts to ‘letting everyone down’. The witnesses at a wedding, who are meant to support the couple through potential issues, rarely  

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exercise that vital role. Yet an Islamic marriage can be a simple garden tea party instead of a re-mortgage-inducing gala. The practice of mehndi purportedly comes from a poor would-be bride who was afraid she would be unable to afford a bridal outfit; Prophet Muhammad advised her to decorate her hands and feet with henna instead. I have attended Muslim weddings held in living rooms, restaurants, even the sunroom of a pub.   Our ideas about what marriage should look like are evolving, too. Numerous people (read: aunties) complain that Muslim women today expect a man to have the down payment for a mortgage ready and a glittering career behind them before they’ll even look their way, which not only suggests that our expectations are rising, but also says something about our ideas of success. It isn’t just about box-ticking financial or academic achievements, though: our ideas about gender roles are also rapidly changing. Women want men who listen and do half of the housework, men with whom we can travel and discuss books over sushi. By contrast, men who grew up being fussed over by women who didn’t teach them how to fry an egg present a level of entitlement from which Muslim women raised in the West understandably recoil.21   The swarm of needs that buzz around us can make it almost impossible to see the other person through it, but the most important of these needs are much more than material. I believe this is a level of connection we shouldn’t sacrifice. We no longer worry about reproducing before dying of bubonic plague at twenty-three; on the contrary, fears of planetary overpopulation might well make us more inclined to seek someone to hold on tight to while the ecosystem collapses around us, a partner to take the other oar while we row into the apocalyptic sunset. * * * 208

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I NEVER LIVED WITH anyone until marriage, but in early adulthood I had a string of long-term infatuations with non-Muslim men who would have surely thought me insane for insisting on getting hitched. Most were friends who turned into something more; one relationship was downright toxic. Perhaps if I had been less sheltered, I wouldn’t have knowingly wandered into what were clearly crocodile-infested waters. Either that or I just had to learn to be more circumspect about throwing myself headlong into tragic romances.   By twenty-four I was already tired of this pattern, so I quickly informed the next man to enter my life that I planned to wait until marriage. My thinking was that this would surely sort the wheat from the chaff, but I hadn’t banked on needing to be truly, deeply certain myself. I was essentially putting a marriage proposal squarely in his court. This led to a series of events that seemed to have been scripted from on high—as I still believe they were. There was a magical dusk prayer on an abandoned spot above the Alhambra, and the feeling of happy ghosts rising up at the sound of our adhan. And there was a proposal, to which I instinctively replied, ‘How could I not say yes?’   How could I, indeed, when I was expecting my nuptials to be orchestrated by destiny? My view of marriage was coloured by the notion that it was a salve to my spiritual and emotional crises, one that would bring a shower of heavenly sprinkles down to immunise us from personality clashes: Fate as a substitute for effort. Marriage might be a leap of faith, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to beat your wings.   Within a year of marrying, we both realised that we didn’t have enough in common to make it work, but by then I was pregnant with our first child, so we put our doubts on ice. An unhappy marriage is like a toothache. In the pretence of a ­harmonious 209

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home, the absence of moments of connection become phantom limbs amputated from a body left spasming in shock.   Barely five years after getting married, and with a three-yearold and a breastfeeding baby, we called it a day. I felt like a lump of meat that had been forgotten on a grill, gnawed at half-heartedly by a porcupine, and thrown under the caterpillar tracks of a tank. But I can’t say I was abused, or in any other way a victim. I wonder whether a first marriage is what many of us privileged folk need to sand down our rough edges, leaving behind softer, realer beings. Future relationships certainly benefit from the wisdom gained from such trials—even when facing a lacuna of knowledge about the other. * * * ALL THIS FOCUS ON finding a mate and getting wed can be an obfuscating preamble to the actual work of marriage. As any older married Muslim will tell you, marriage is ‘half of the deen’ because it’s an everyday personal development practice, bringing us up against our own foibles, rather than leaving us to attempt spirituality in abstraction on some lonely mountaintop. ‘Marriage involves care, not just passion,’ my mother advised me. ‘Love takes different forms over time. You need to develop patience, and the ability to apologise and forgive’—things that an individualistic culture egregiously neglects.   Having kids, especially soon into a relationship, can throw a living spanner into the works—and an emphasis on family, or a lack of knowledge about birth control prior to marrying, means that Muslim couples have tended to have children fairly early. Studies show that parenthood lowers economic status and ability to study, and affects sleep, sex life and overall happiness; marital satisfaction has been shown to drop by 70 per cent after  

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having a child.22 Parenthood is very often the first major test faced by a couple raised in relative affluence in a developed nation. You suddenly see each other—and yourselves—at your joint worst, too drained and ratty for kindness.   Perhaps it isn’t surprising that younger generations of Muslims are seeing higher rates of divorce. Lamentably, many Muslim women are told to be patient and endure miserable marriages, even in cases of abuse. Those who only have a religious marriage (as is the case for 60 per cent of British Muslim women)23 are not protected by civil law in case of divorce. Many Muslim women don’t even know that they can initiate a divorce—known as khul‘a,24 as opposed to the infamous talaq divorce proceedings set in motion by a husband’s repudiation of his wife—or that Islamic law insists on child maintenance. I am sick of seeing Muslim women struggling to feed their children while their exhusbands (and current husbands!) conveniently forget their overriding duty towards their families. I have also heard one imam claim that a divorced man has the right to take away his threeyear-old child; on child custody the madhhabs, or schools of thought, have different positions, but by and large Islamic law allows children to live with their fathers after the age of seven or sometimes puberty—but only with the mother’s consent.   My parents’ generation had such a high rate of divorce and remarriage that I thought of it as a rite of passage, the trauma that might spark a personal renewal powerful enough to usher in a healthier relationship. Taking this attitude seems narcissistic if you think about the impact on children of divorced parents, but it can be a useful way of understanding the past, if only in retrospect. If a couple haven’t gone through enough formative experiences to know themselves, they can hardly know one another, let alone love one another enough to pull through the  

 

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storms. But how do you know who your spouse really is until you’ve gone through those trials?   The majority of my Muslim friends from Generation Y have gone through a divorce—many more than my non-Muslim friends, who haven’t always got married, or did so later, and certainly not in any rush. Almost all of us have patchwork families, with kids from first marriages who have step- or half-siblings, or both. Many children of converts have come from similar family scenarios ourselves.   But Muslim marriages are not nuclear family facsimiles. British Libyan writer Ghyda Senussi describes having a househusband who looks after the kids while she brings home the halal bacon, and the concern and disapproval that their happy arrangement elicits from other Muslims.25 Several British Muslims have told me they don’t plan to have more than one child; birth rates in the UK have been dropping generally since 1947, with changing aspirations and education cited as possible reasons, as well as economic factors like the dearth of affordable housing.26   Raising children is another area in which Western Muslim culture is adapting. We no longer tend to live close to our parents or extended families. Economic pressure means we can’t afford to give up one income readily, nor can we rely on our own mothers or extended families, who work nine-to-fives and are too exhausted to offer free babysitting. I have seen all kinds of Muslim families: single mother; single, widower father; single mother pregnant again; couples who are together but live apart; separated couples; couple unofficially fostering the child of a woman who left her children to remarry and move abroad… Traditionally Islam doesn’t countenance adoption, due to the importance of preserving lineage, but fostering—particularly of orphans—is considered mustahabb (praiseworthy). 212

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  While motherhood is sacred in Islam, it is not essential for a woman to be complete. As the scholar Ayesha S. Chaudry writes, ‘it is noteworthy that, with the exception of his first wife Khadijah, Muhammad did not have children with any of his other wives’, whom Muslims refer to symbolically as the ‘Mothers of Believers’.27 Many a Muslim woman, whether by choice or not, does not marry at all. The most celebrated Sufi woman, eighth-century mystic Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyyah, turned down every marriage proposal and never had children, too in love with God to trouble with earthly intimacy.   As my greatest confidant—my mum—says, it’s only since the middle of the last century that we have come to think of families in nuclear terms at all: ‘There used to be so much death and disease that everyone had a patchwork family, or was raised by an aunt or grandparent. It’s only now that we see it as abnormal.’ Imam Zaid Shakir—himself the son of a single mother of seven—has noted that most of the prophets and many saints were raised by single mothers or were orphans.28 Still, the struggles of single mothers, financially, educationally and emotionally, can be crippling. This is probably why in Islam divorce is seen as ‘the most disliked of permissible things before God’. Yet, even Prophet Muhammad divorced one wife when the two of them couldn’t get along, all but one of his wives were widows or divorcees, and two of his daughters also divorced.   Even so, in most Muslim communities, divorced women are seen as used goods. At the rate we’re going, divorce and remarriage urgently need to be destigmatised among Muslims, or there’ll be no second chances for anyone.  

MEETING unknown.

MY HUSBAND

* * * Ali was an adventure into the

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  The first time I noticed him, he was sitting on the terrace of the Moroccan-style café in our town, reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. He offered me a polite ‘Assalamu ‘alaikum’—so he was Muslim. He didn’t look Spanish; according to my myopic geography he had to be North African. In the absence of any concrete information, and like most women with too much imagination and too little discipline to channel it into proper stories, I invented a tale about him. I decided that he was a journalist, fleeing a stiflingly comfortable home in search of who he was, what Islam means if there isn’t a mosque calling the adhan on every street.   Eventually I discovered that he was a calligrapher from Iran, whose day job is making and selling falafels at music festivals. I had the vague, unresearched notion that Iranians only went to cities where they’d get jobs, or be able to study medicine or law like ‘good immigrants’. After the initial pique of my wellcrafted fiction being so off, there came a small question: would he be… Shi‘i?   Here my imaginative fission engine ran out of fuel. Like most Sunnis, my knowledge of Shi‘ism added up to a quarter of a pint of random observations, a sprinkling of data from secondary school Religious Studies, and the murky, impenetrable sense that there was something a bit wrong with them, like people who stubbornly insisted on believing that Elvis never really died and is living a secret life as a small-time revolutionary in an obscure Latin American country.   But in my twenty-nine years, I’d learned enough about mediated information not to believe everything presented as fact. If you’ve ever read an article about something you happen to know about, and felt the sham of journalistic expertise crumble in your hands as though the newspaper itself were being eaten by 214

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worms, you’ll know that the faith we hold in the news is a shallow confidence.   Much more importantly, we were falling into a galaxy unknown to telescope voyeurs, whose bliss could barely be transmitted by the communiqués sent back home. For those who have climbed out of a wreckage like divorce, the smooth rhythm of loving quotidian exchanges can be a home for evacuees. Ali had memorized dozens, if not hundreds of Persian Sufi poems while studying calligraphy. With him, I felt I could understand those poems a little better, the ones that declare, ‘Love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries.’ Unbeknownst to me then, I had finally found someone with whom I had the least culture clash.   Getting married less than a year after a divorce meant jumping in at the deep end. I wonder how much our romance owed to my relative emptiness, both in emotional attachments and knowledge. I had nothing to lose; by the same token, the lacuna in my understanding was filled with acceptance. There can be such relief in silence, no ideas to clutter the moment, no dogma to stick in our craws. If I’d been filled to the brim with information about our respective sects, would there have been any room to let him exist the way he is?   Every time I meet someone who shyly admits that their spouse isn’t in the same Sufi group as them, or is of a different madhhab, or isn’t practising, as though this is proof of their dismal connection, the divisions—those pesky Veils—seem more and more imposed, exaggerated, and less conducive to love. It’s not so much that we need a list of personal information about the other in order to know them; if we can step back from the clamour of data for a moment and simply witness one another, maybe we’ll find everything we need to know. * * * 215

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GEOGRAPHICAL TRAVEL is a series of stand-out experiences, snapped, shared, revisited. In this book I have described many of these memorable moments, which, thus highlighted, probably make me look better-travelled than the average. But I have also concertina-ed away years in which the most travelling I did was to Granada, an hour’s drive—and even then, the contrast between blackberry-picking country life and the city’s stiff fashions and honking mopeds practically gave me altitude sickness. The adventure of raising young children, holding a family together through the cyclone of divorce and the unchartered terrain of remarriage, means that just getting everyone to school and back often feels like scaling mountains.   In recent years I have also begun to see how my flightiness was an astigmatism that needed corrective lenses. God only knew I longed for roots. So I scraped pips out of fruit with my thumbnail and nurtured seedlings in yoghurt pots, scalded carob seeds to allow them to germinate, learned how to milk sheep by hand and make baskets from olive suckers. Whirling around the planet in aeroplanes isn’t good for the environment, or for earthing. And as much as I complain that they drive me nuts, my family have tethered the flapping tent-cloth of my wandering mind. Relationships are as much of a journey as setting out on the road, and with the harm that vehicles wreak on the environment, perhaps this micro-travel is the most sustainable kind there is.

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THE CULTURAL CENTRE is divided into two halves: one for women, one for men. My mother, sister and I peel away from my father and brother (all of us staying at a Canadian family’s home in Jeddah for the end of Ramadan) and follow separate paths into the gendered doors for the Eid party. It isn’t an unfamiliar experience—we’ve done this at countless mosques, if there’s a women’s section at all—but this time the segregation is nationally mandated. The awareness of my gender, a loud pulse in my teenage veins, is described in unequivocal silhouettes by the headscarf and black ‘abaya that Saudi law prescribes, and it feels to me exactly the way it looks: forbidding. My body is forbidden from view.   Opening the door on the women’s side, we’re greeted by an American convert expat in a long, sequinned dress with shoulder pads, her blue eyes haloed in blue eyeshadow, bleach blonde hair aerated to Dallas dimensions. Kids are running around shrieking with glee at a game of musical chairs. Most delightful to my mind (and ears) is a Sudanese band, with powerful singer accompanied by hand drummers. All female! I marvel. A female world, devoid of male eyes, except those still young enough not

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to count. Whose perspective have I been adopting? That of the outsider, the curious gaze frustrated at being denied a view? Or of someone on the inside, who may well be feeling empowered by the inner sanctum that this Veil creates?   A physical veil can feel protective—not in a concrete way like a helmet, but conveying a palpable sense of being sheltered, held, almost in a maternal embrace, or simply taken out of the limelight. There’s a Spanish word for that feeling: arropado/a, literally meaning ‘clothed’, but carrying connotations of cosiness, comfort and homeliness. It’s a relief to turn your antennae inwards, to focus symbolically and intentionally that most sacred of human possessions—our attention—on the infinite mystery within.   When we go to leave the cultural centre, pleasantly stuffed, I rush to tell my brother about the party. ‘Lucky you,’ he replies with a grimace. ‘The men did nothing but play cards. In silence.’ I realise we women are not being deprived of some all-important male presence; in this exclusive spatial arrangement, they are being deprived of ours. * * * FOR MUSLIM WOMEN, this arrangement is epitomised by hijab. Ever since adolescence, the age at which Muslim girls are usually expected to start wearing hijab—recognition of our womanhood, and the invasive masculine attention that bedevils it—I have struggled with this seemingly simple item of clothing. On my first day of sixth form, attempting to channel quirky selfconfidence and a nascent awareness of my Muslim identity, I wore a headwrap. One of the cool boys snorted in derision: ‘Why are you wearing a bandage on your head?’ I scuttled off to the toilets and removed it, but not without a pang of shame at 218

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being incapable of withstanding criticism, tucking my Islam away into a secret pocket where nobody could dissect it or pigeonhole me for it.   I had by then met plenty of Muslim South Asian women who did not ordinarily cover their heads, only putting a hijab on to pray. But the white, 1970s-era converts whom I regarded as my elders almost always wore a scarf, knotted at the nape. Perhaps it was a sartorial expression of the change they had undergone. Hijab wasn’t just an item of clothing that signalled modesty; it was charged with meaning, an almost defiant representation of difference—from non-Muslims, and from their past selves.   I often envied my parents’ and their cohorts’ passage into Islam. There were jam sessions, overland journeys to Moroccan deserts, meetings with people born in the nineteenth century who still communicated a pre-modern, pre-colonial world. Photos were few and unfiltered, treasured for their rarity. Women were not alone in donning special apparel, for the men initially wore turbans and robes, even kohl around their eyes (there are amusing stories of men thus attired praying en masse in British parks and next to major thoroughfares).   In photos from the 1980s, my mum is my style icon: slouchy elf boots, button-down linens and denim, oversized sweaters with the cuffs rolled up, red hennaed hair tucked away in a floral print peasant scarf, eyes rimmed with black kohl. These Western converts still wore trousers and shirts, or skirts and dresses (not always down to the ankle and up to the wrist), combined with a tied-back hijab. In Granada the Catholic women thought my mother was a widow, while in one English village where we lived there was a community of Plymouth Brethren whose women covered their heads with a small bandana, and who eyed her with some excitement when we first moved in. A simple piece of 219

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cloth can easily become a flashing light that sends out identity markers: My body might look like it’s at home here, but my soul belongs elsewhere.   I wanted to belong, in both dimensions, and couldn’t bear the feeling of being ripped from one community by this declaration of difference. Wouldn’t I be more approachable without a hijab, giving new acquaintances a chance to get to know me for who I am before I hit them with the weird religious identity stuff ?   To wear hijab in a public space in any Western country means to achieve quite the opposite effect of the veil’s original purpose, that of deterring unwanted attention, of becoming safely invisible. Physical covering can make you more exposed, at best to stares, and at worst to verbal or physical abuse. The bristling awareness of having something unacceptable around one’s face is disturbing, especially in summer, when women in hijab are deemed fair game for snarky or pitying comments. Fabric is not just fabric; woven into its wearing are strands of ideas, associations, beliefs and prejudices.   But, as I discovered, there is a whole spectrum of attentionavoiding behaviours, which doesn’t stop at eschewing ‘Islamic’ clothing. I came up with my own interpretation of hijab: dressing in such a way as to avoid attracting strangers’ gaze. If you’re white in Europe, North America or the Antipodes, this is a very easy thing to do. You see how everyone else dresses and follow suit. Act normal.   If I wear my hair down, especially in southern Spain, where blonde hair is unusual and people enjoy loudly praising women’s looks, I get plenty of attention. If I wear it tied back, I get almost none. A hat wins extra anonymity points. Brightly coloured clothes with loud patterns put me back in the eyeballing zone. Extravagant makeup, ditto. Glasses are a kind of mask; wearing contact lenses immediately makes me feel exposed (although 220

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from this side of the picture, my visibility is great). Eventually I settled on a compromise: hats wherever appropriate; a semicovering scarf (which screams wannabe bohemian, but whatever); and hijab at mosques or Muslim gatherings. I no longer worry, either, if my hair is seen by Muslims in Europe, who are surely used to it by now. There are so many benchmarks that I will never satisfy them all, so I would rather focus on what I feel is more important: beauty, meaning, compassion.   To me it is clear that where hijab is concerned, whiteness changes everything. Many times I will wear a scarf the way my mother used to—and still does, with some evolution—and not be recognised as a Muslim by other Muslims. I have had Rastafarians give me a respectful nod, while occasionally Orthodox Jewish women eye me curiously. But it can also trigger bewildered reactions. One English convert recounted to me how, on putting on her hijab when preparing to leave her non-Muslim friend’s house, the latter suddenly found herself unable to look her in the face, her eyes straying madly all over the room.   Men in turbans or shalwar kameez also often receive abuse. But while modesty is an important aspect of Islam for men, it is women who are generally singled out for inspection—and judgment. Indeed it is not uncommon to see a woman in a jilbab (long coat) or ‘abaya walking alongside a husband wearing shorts and a vest, or trousers and shirt so tight you can’t bear to look when he sits down.   Even among Muslims, the recognition that hijab offers does not always have the desired effect. Once at a newsagent opposite the main mosque in Stoke Newington, I casually asked if the store carried a Muslim lifestyle magazine to which I had recently contributed. The Desi shop owner was so intrigued by my headscarf that he held on stubbornly to my change while inquiring 221

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relentlessly, with a disconcerting smile, how I came to be a Muslim. The next time I went in, I wore a sweater with the hood up; the same newsagent barely looked my way.   Hijab can be seen as a signal that a young Muslim woman is religious, and therefore eligible on the marriage market. Several female singletons have complained to me that men on Muslim marriage apps are looking for a ‘hijabi Barbie’, a woman that fits their ideal of a pious wife—not exactly a Playboy bunny, but another male fantasy of what women should be like. And, of course, the lighter the skin, the more desirable. I have heard of one white convert who found that when she wore hijab, Muslim men kept singling her out as a prospective bride. Leaving her blonde hair uncovered proved to be a better ‘hijab’ than hijab, since the same men would pass her by, assuming that she wasn’t Muslim.   In November 2018 I decided to break the habit of a social media lifetime and use a photo of my actual visage—hair mostly obscured by a turban-style scarf—as my profile picture on Facebook, as part of a book promotion. Within hours, my page was receiving record amounts of traffic… but with it came the friend requests. Hundreds a day, more than 99 per cent Muslim men, in Algeria, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Côte d’Ivoire, the Philippines, Malaysia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They began messaging me, even trying to video call through Facebook Messenger. In all fairness, the messages were very tame by Western standards, even timid:  

 

‘hi’ ‘salam dear?’ ‘Good mornings’ ‘Hello how are you dear, we can meet you, I am [X] from Algeria, from North Africa. I want to be my girlfriend because I saw your photos on facebook and I admired you.’ 222

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[Gifs of flowers and puppies] ‘Assalamu alaikum.may god shower his blessings upon you…it is really pleasure to be friends with you as you even belong to intellectual class…I am also asst.professor of media studies at college in Kashmir India…you are always welcome to visit our state as it is called paradise on earth…I believe in candid and transparent friendship hope to hear from u soon’ ‘j’aime beacoup votre perfil, je voudrais faire votre connaissance’ (Vous?! So formal!)

  Nothing on my profile makes it obvious that I am already married, so I deduce that this unusual flurry of attention was because of Muslim men honing in on my white, blonde, visibly Muslim appearance. Changing my profile picture to a photo of a hedge, the unhappy conclusion I came to was that, while so many of my Muslim sisters are struggling to meet a partner who fits the bill, thousands of male Muslim singletons around the world are scouring the web at this very moment for a female face in a scarf—the whiter the better. While I’m thankful that they have not succumbed to what seem to me the crass sexual advances of mainstream internet dating, the blatant Eurocentrism is infuriating.   Yet even Eurocentrism is blind to the heterogeneity of Europe itself, which includes Muslim communities in Eastern Europe and Russia that date back centuries. Bosnia could be a haven for Muslim women desperate for hijab to shed its contentiousness. I saw women in niqabs, short shorts (obviously not on the same person), chic shirt-dresses, and turban-style headscarves—and no animosity between any of them. Diversity of attire notwithstanding, extravagant displays of flesh were somewhat unusual. Apart from the intense winter cold (-20°C in Sarajevo), even in 223

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summer there appears to be certain a reticence about stripping off publicly—unless, I suppose, it’s to swim.   Beaches knock the scales of modesty sideways. The relative visibility of skin, even on a ‘family-friendly’ beach, far surpasses what is acceptable on the street, but here it passes for normal. It makes me wonder how absolute the conventions of modesty are, and how far they are contextually dependent. How different is a burkini from a wetsuit, except in connotation? And even burkinis, although they cover the body, still cling to curves when wet. One Spanish Muslim woman I know, a doctor, insists that women should wear bikinis to sunbathe, for our health and wellbeing. It’s true that after a long winter, having sun on the skin feels like an instant battery recharge. Of course, where to sunbathe is a different matter, one that is often poorly addressed in Muslim communities. In Iran I saw a long white curtain set up around a section of beach so that women could bathe there away from gawping male eyes: a hijab of the sea. * * * BUT ALL THIS TALK OF women’s attire tires. The importance of women’s clothing, like so much of women’s behaviour, has swelled to ludicrous proportions, inflated by the bellows of male projection, and used as an excuse to eclipse women’s voices. How much is written about Muslim women’s dress compared to our thoughts? The disparity rings true for women of all faiths and none, but Muslim women have been on the receiving end of an absurd degree of scrutiny—from men, and from women who have adopted a patriarchal mindset. But while hijab is often held up as an emblem of male control over women’s bodies, this same control has also been effected in quite the opposite way throughout history. 224

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  As Mohja Kahf points out, for most of the last century, the hijab was actually prohibited throughout most of the Middle East.1 Kemal Atatürk famously banned it in Turkey—to this day women wearing hijab cannot attend university there—as did Reza Shah in Iran. At late as 1982 the Baathist regime sent (unveiled) female paratroopers into Damascus, each one supported by a male soldier, to strip headscarves from every hijabi they could find. The latter had to run for cover (no pun intended). Hafez al-Assad later apologised by sending in soldiers bearing roses, but patriarchal violence disrobing unwilling females has painful echoes for women—both cis and trans— who have almost always felt the vulnerability of our sex.   When Middle Eastern women of the 1970s—educated, urbane, Europe-leaning women—did wear a headscarf, it was incorporated into Swinging Sixties–style outfits, halal-ifying Mary Quant. Their eyes could have given Twiggy a run for her money. In contemporary times, there is an abundance of halal fashionistas on YouTube and Instagram sharing their makeup tips and hijab tutorials. There’s something to be applauded about these gutsy, creative efforts to counteract the popular image of hijab as oppressive, although I can’t help but wonder if all this merely represents an Islamic version of social media narcissism, a kowtow to the consumerist culture that Islam is supposed to counter. Modesty doesn’t mean denying beauty, but that we recognise that the best of it lies on the inside—with no purchase necessary.   Of course, for women who choose to cover, there are many important reasons to wear hijab other than simply to avoid public ogling. For devout Muslim women, hijab is an act of worship, of obedience to Divine law, and therefore a necessary part of female life. Then there’s also the fulfilment of social norms or 225

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parental expectations. Conversely, some Western-born Muslims from immigrant families have chosen to wear hijab to the dismay of their mothers, who emigrated to Europe or North America partly to leave behind the traditions of their home countries. For many members of second- and third-generation diasporas, being raised in a nation that seems never to fully accept them as one of its own, perhaps even being unable to speak their parents’ mother tongues, can prompt a personal quest to reconnect with their roots. Covering the head can be an expression of religious awakening, of turning down the sun to be able to see the stars. But in no way is it unique to Islam.   Orthodox Christian icons depict the Virgin Mary wearing a veil over her hair. In Korea, the jang-ot covered women from head to toe when they were in public to preserve their household’s honour. The elaborate kokoshnik headdress of Russian noblewomen dates back to the tenth century; married women wore an embroidered linen ubru. On formal occasions even now, Spanish women wear a lace veil or mantilla held up by a peineta or tall comb—still protocol for women at a papal audience. Amish and Mennonite women wear bonnets and prayer caps as an outward sign of modesty, based on 1 Corinthians 11:4–5: ‘Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonours his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonours her head—it is the same as having her head shaved.’2 There is a contemporary, American-led movement for Christian women to cover their heads for the same reason.3   The everyday practice of having hair and a head makes it clear that behind ritual applications of head coverings, there are eminently sensible ones. Uncovering hair in dusty environments with little access to water (or shampoo), or in cold climates and 226

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seasons, is the behaviour of chowderheads. Think of workingclass women in wartime London, or Afro-Brazilian women in Bahia, or peasants in rural Poland tying their hair up neatly in colourful printed wraps. I can aver, as a mother, that they are also the only truly effective protection against headlice. If you live in a climate with months of searing sunshine, it’s pragmatic to protect your head with a hat or piece of fabric; neglecting to do so is an invitation to sunstroke. And at the other end of the thermometer, covering your head in cold weather might save your life. * * * FOR YEARS I FRETTED about whether my reluctance to wear hijab meant that I was not a good enough Muslim. I started to see how being veiled to pray made sense—not because God needs my hair to be covered (He can see me in the shower, after all), but to foster in me humility and concentration. In latter years, though, I have seen, even from my limited studies, that Islamic law is made up of an almost infinite variety of opinions, making my religion far more flexible than is commonly believed.   In my understanding, the hijab as a female head covering is not even derived from the Qur’an. It is interesting that the verse that conveys an instruction to women to cover their bodies should appear in verse 31 of Surat an-Nur, the Chapter of Light; the purpose of a veil is to hinder the passage of light, and with it vision. However, the verse does not specifically mention hijab, either the word itself or our common understanding of it today. Various translations say that women should ‘not expose their adornment’ and should ‘draw their veils over their bosoms’—the term used for ‘veils’ being khumur, from khimar (a long covering garment)—while the head is not mentioned at all. Words from 227

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the root h-j-b do appear in the Qur’an, six times, but to mean a curtain, or a veil in its broadest, most abstract sense—for example, the development of the foetus in ‘three veils of darkness’ (39:6), or drawing ‘the night as a veil o’er the day’ (7:54).   So even by Islamic scriptural standards, veiling is not necessarily a physical act. In the Qur’an we read: ‘O children of Adam, We have sent down to you clothing that covers your shame and provides adornment. But the clothing of taqwa [Godconsciousness] is the best…’ (7:26). In classical Islamic government, a sultan had a hajib, from the same morphological root, who ‘veiled’ him from the public, in much the same way as a spokesperson might today. But the act of clothing oneself might have other purposes. When Prophet Muhammad was first visited by the Angel Gabriel, he was so overcome with shock and fear that he had lost his sanity that he ran back to his wife Khadijah and asked her to wrap him up. This she did, holding him and reassuring him that he was too sincere to have been tested with something like madness. A chapter of the Qur’an was later revealed that commemorated this moment, named Muzammil— ‘The One Wrapped’. In Muslim cultures men have traditionally covered too, often as much as women or even more. The most famous example is the Tuareg men of the Mauritanian Sahara who wear a turban covering the mouth, called a tegelmoust.   The LA-based lawyer and jurist Khaled Abou El Fadl is one of a handful of Islamic jurists who have opined that hijab is not essential to religious practice for Muslim women living in the West. Having been approached by a number of women in the US who were concerned for their personal safety in a society that increasingly perceived Muslims as alien, and who were experiencing a religious crisis regarding hijab as a result, Abou El Fadl issued a fatwa (a non-binding opinion) stating his belief  

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that—in the US, at least—hijab was not obligatory: ‘In my opinion, hijab is not at the core of the Islamic faith, and not the kind of arguable duty that would be worth risking one’s safety for. … In my view, humility, modesty, and personal piety are far more worthy in Allah’s eyes than any formal physical attire regardless of its sanctified appearance.’4   Abou Fadl argues that throughout the history of the ummah, the interpretation of physical modesty was far more diverse than is usually supposed: ‘The great descendant of the Prophet, Sakinah bint al-Husayn bin ‘Ali (also known as Fatimah alKubra) is reported to have invented a hairdo or style known as al-turrah al-Sukayniyyah (Sukaynah’s curls) that she wore in public. She refused to cover her hair and is reported to have been imitated by the noble women of the Hijaz.’ Thus, the matter of women concealing their adornment, as the Qur’an instructs, is one of ‘applied ethics’, which are not absolute but relative to place and time.5   That I needed to hear this from a Muslim man is perhaps evidence of my internalised misogyny, but I have always thought this was common sense. However, while Abou Fadl’s fatwa has helped me to feel confident that diverse interpretations of Islamic practice are in fact the historical norm, it should by no means be used as evidence to browbeat women who do choose to wear hijab into a more ‘progressive’ stance, or indeed to prohibit them from wearing it. For a woman who is most comfortable in public wearing hijab, to remove it by force would feel like having a policeman strip you of your shirt.   A veil is not always something you can touch. Any means of deliberately disrupting our greed for seeing is a kind of hijab. I feel that the famously British habit of ignoring passers-by or fellow travellers on public transport creates a kind of hijab between the individual and the public. A Spanish friend’s 229

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daughter emigrated to Surrey and doesn’t want to return, citing the pleasure of anonymity that English culture affords compared with Andalusian culture where everyone is in each other’s hair. Prophet Muhammad said, ‘Part of the good of a person’s Islam is not getting involved in other people’s business.’ The aforementioned Qur’anic injunction for women to dress modestly is prefaced by a command for men to ‘lower their gaze’ (which, if universally applied, would surely negate the need for a material veil). So hijab is not just a way of dressing; it is an attitude that respects privacy—one’s own as well as that of others.   By these standards, even internet privacy settings can be a form of hijab. Despite sharing a curated photographic panorama of our lives online, we have all had pause to think about the risks of our personal information being abused by unscrupulous third parties. Trolls, identity theft and cyberbullies who expose our most intimate lives to ridicule all highlight our digital vulnerability. Whatever our culture, we tread a thin line between giving away what it benefits us to give and protecting what it benefits us to hide.   Even in Western nations, supposedly liberal when it comes to dress codes, there are modesty laws. You can’t walk down the street naked or, as a woman, show your nipples on Instagram. Supermarkets and restaurants near beaches often have signs refusing entry to people without T-shirts or barefoot. And society dictates, by law or by norms, not only what you cannot reveal, but also what you cannot wear. You could walk down the street in a dinosaur costume, but you don’t. Try wearing something in public that you consider frumpy or uncool, and you’ll probably feel your flesh creeping worse than on Halloween.   When I wore hijab in Zanzibar during Ramadan and suddenly noticed how other wazungu started treating me differently, I realised how much store we set by something as 230

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seemingly superficial as a head covering. An irrational fear of invisibility kicks in, particularly among women who are conscious of the herculean and essential efforts of feminists to bring women’s issues into the public eye. But there is also insecurity. Many a time, when I have worn a hijab out and about in Europe (particularly before I had children and became too tired to worry about such matters), I have felt compelled to slap on more makeup or find flashy earrings to compensate, as though I were responsible for the public seeing Muslim women as beautiful. Why should my self-worth be predicated on strangers’ opinions of my attractiveness? Rejecting this external metric of valuation gives hijab a defiant edge.   Hijab has become synonymous with Islamic piety, to the point where a woman might not fulfil any of the Five Pillars of Islam except saying the shahadah (testimony of faith) but wear a headscarf and be deemed more pious than a woman who doesn’t wear one but prays, fasts, gives charity and goes on pilgrimage. I once attended a lecture by Martin Lings, not long before the venerable Sufi passed away, and from my position at the back, I was shocked that the woman in hijab and jilbab in front of me spent the whole lecture texting. The experience drew my attention to how often we judge women and their spirituality on the basis of what they wear.   I am not convinced, anyway, that piety is as simple as putting on a garment; as I see it, having a modest bearing itself has a similar effect to putting on a veil. The Persian Sufi Fariduddin ‘Attar described Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya as ‘that woman veiled with the veil of religious sincerity’.6 The late Sufi leader Javad Nurbakhsh wrote: A sufi wears whatever he or she likes while being in harmony with what is socially approved. ‘Ali said: ‘Wear those clothes that 231

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neither cause you to be looked down upon nor admired and envied.’ Thus, it is not the clothes that make the sufi; rather, it is the sufi’s actions and inner being.7

  Besides, there are ways to unveil that have nothing to do with what you wear. Sharing your own art or music can feel like a far greater nakedness than merely removing clothing, allowing a stranger to look deeper into you than the external insulation of your skin. * * * IF I THOUGHT I UNDERSTOOD invisibility, becoming a mother changed everything for me.   This invisibility is not just a feature of all attention suddenly being on the baby, while the mother herself is in desperate need of support, nurturing, sleep and solitary bathing. For many women, having a child spells months of loneliness, since it so often comes with withdrawing from work and spending long hours at home in your partner’s absence. Friends are too busy to spend a whole afternoon by your side, making sure you don’t bleed yourself to a faint when getting up to pee. Much less can they spare a whole forty days to care for a new mother, as is expected in Islamic custom and other traditions from all over the world, from Indonesia to South America (hence the word cuarentena, or quarantine).   But apart from the practical issues of isolation, the perinatal period is a powerful reminder of the beauty of retiring from the hectic outside world—and not only because your baby screams blue murder when you take them to a shopping centre. We all started this way, in the sanctuary of the womb. Islam itself was revealed to the Prophet in meditative seclusion, a practice still espoused by many Sufis, while Western vacation-style retreats 232

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cater to people (usually those with a disposable income) who are feeling burnt out and in need of tranquillity.   Those first few days, weeks and months with a helpless newborn give many a first-time mother not only plenty of external problems to solve, but also hours without adult conversation, forcing her to mull over all the suppressed thoughts and feelings that suddenly rear up to fill the mental void. Although having children forces you to think creatively—how to get them to stop crying for the umpteenth time, what to make for lunch that everyone will eat—it also compresses artistic drives into concentrated pockets of time. I began writing poetry in those brief, brightly lived moments; having so few of them still gives me all the more desire to write. And having to focus on home constantly grounds me, usually so eager to run around the world instead of tending my own backyard. Motherhood has been a hijab for me, a womb for myself, a sphere in which to grow.   Islamic spirituality could be seen as a reaffirmation of the qualities usually associated with femininity. Modesty, humility, caring only for others’ wellbeing… to a modern feminist mindset this could sound like a recipe for subjugation, and it is, if it’s a man enforcing it on a woman. But Islam honours these qualities, encouraging men to develop them, too. Bismillahir-RahmanirRahim (‘In the name of Allah…’), the phrase that begins every surah of the Qur’an but one, cites two Divine qualities, Rahman and Rahim, Merciful and Beneficent. Both words derive from rahmah, ‘mercy’, one of whose linguistic cousins is rihm, or ‘womb’. The Qur’an describes Muhammad as a ‘mercy to the worlds’.8 While the English word ‘mercy’ sounds to me a little like ‘tolerance’, an insipid substitute for cruelty or antagonism, interestingly the German word for mercy, Barmherzigkeit (with its correlating terms in Dutch and Swedish), literally means ‘breast-hearty-ness’. 233

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  Sufism provides ample material on the virtues of invisibility as a means of attaining sincerity, echoing the Prophet’s statement that: ‘God loves those whose righteousness and piety are hidden, those who, if they are absent, are not missed, and if they are present, they are not invited or acknowledged. Their hearts are lamps of guidance and they get out of every trial and difficulty.’9 The early Egyptian Sufi Ibn ‘Ata’illah al-Iskandari wrote: ‘Bury yourself in the earth of being hidden, for what grows without being buried doesn’t come to fruit.’10 The Spanish mystic Ibn ‘Abbad of Ronda commented: ‘There is nothing more harmful to the disciple than popularity and the spread of his reputation.’11   Perhaps the spiritual value of obscurity is embodied in Uways al-Qarni, an obscure, saintly man whom the Prophet described as ‘unknown among the dwellers of the earth and known among the dwellers of the sky’.12 When the future caliphs ‘Umar and ‘Ali tracked the man down while he was herding camels, he refused to admit his identity, grudgingly admitting it only when they worked it out by an identifying mark below his left shoulder. But when asked by ‘Umar to meet regularly, Uways replied, ‘I don’t know you and you don’t know me after this day.’ Even in death he was obscure: when a few of his admirers wanted to return to his grave to pay their respects, they could not find it anywhere.   Interestingly, considering our discussion of dress and modesty, Uways al-Qarni stopped sitting with a certain scholar as he didn’t have enough clothing to cover himself. The scholar gave him something to wear, but Uways returned it, saying that people had accused him of stealing clothes. Indeed, in most places worldwide before the mechanisation of textile production, fabric had to be laboriously woven from hand-spun fibres, which meant that the poorest people could not afford it. In the Prophet’s time, the noblewomen of the early Muslim commu234

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nity wore long robes—which Indian American novelist Samina Ali compares to a ‘Burberry trench’13—while a mark of being a slave meant wearing nothing on the upper half of the body. One couple of this period apparently only had one garment between them, taking turns to wear it.   References to invisibility and veiling, in metaphysical rather than literal terms, are abundant in Sufi literature. It is said that there are 70,000 veils between the human being and God, but that most of these are parts of the ego; we are gazing into a pool of water and only seeing our own reflection on the surface. It is no coincidence that ‘revelation’ means the removing of a veil. Veiling can be a metaphor for the separation between the mundane world and the Divine, or Creation and the inchoate world that pre-existed it. As the Turkish Sufi poet Bibi Hayati writes, describing the Divine desire to be perceived:14 From Invisibility’s domain, utterly veiled your face, brilliant as any sun, sought revelation Thus these atoms of representation, these particles of things’ phenomena, were cast into vision.15

  One of the ‘subtle veils’ is spiritual pride, as pointed out by Abu’l Hasan al-Tustari in the following verse: Don’t linger in any spiritual station. It’s a veil, but strive in the journey and ask for help. Every time you see a rank revealed to you, Be apart from it, since we have left its like. And say I do not want anything besides You…16

  The ego’s zeal for self-assertion makes it intensely dislike invisibility, whereas the soul craves freedom from the strictures of individuality. We have become addicted to social media as a means of gaining recognition, which is, according to the Sufi 235

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scale, the last aspect of the ego to be overcome. Yet invisibility can also be a protection. How will your attacker land an arrow if he cannot see you? Retreat can mean stopping the hamster wheel in search of the pivot around which the whole circus of persona and dunya (the earthly world) spins. We are back to our cave, this time not to take refuge from the harsh elements, but to be ‘alone with the Alone’.   To take the metaphor to its logical conclusion, Sufis strive to break down the Veil between the individual soul and the Infinite. While it may seem out of a mere mortal’s reach, fana’— annihilation, the dissolution of the ego into the Reality of which it is a fractalesque mirror—is held up as the Sufis’ ultimate goal, the true meaning of self-sacrifice. The image often given is that of a drop of water being dissolved into the Ocean, one that is so all-encompassing that we don’t notice it. ‘He is only veiled [from you] due to His being too obvious and He is hidden from physical sight due to the tremendous light [of His Entity].’17 Hiding in plain sight. * * * THERE ARE PRIVILEGE Veils that prohibit access to safety, survival, opportunity, knowledge, respect; hermetic Veils that breed prejudice like anaerobic bacteria; suffocating Veils that deserve to be torn down to let the air rush through and lungs breathe. But there are also Veils behind Veils, barriers between subjectivity and objectivity that require more than just mechanical action to be drawn aside. For these Veils, greater leaps of imagination— that essential ingredient to compassion—are necessary, trusting that there is more to the world than our limited provinces, and banishing fear of what is found beyond them.   Post 9/11, Muslims everywhere are wrapped in Veils of others’ making, struggling to prove ourselves to a public that has 236

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been primed to see us through a negative filter. Remaining invisible only leaves room for the shouters, the self-appointed representatives, but constantly explaining ourselves is draining. So rather than retreat to an island of our own kind—an impossible task, when ‘us’ can mean so many things—the Invisible beckons, that place beyond all differentiation.   Engaging with the myriad Veils around and within us is a process that brings its own revelations. The closer you get to the forest, the less it looks like an undifferentiated blur and the more its nuances become clear. What happens when you are the forest, when you are not only observing the wood that is the whole, but also the wood that lies beneath the bark?   I have tried to offer a small glimpse into the rich diversity of the ummah, in ethnicity, culture, language and identity, but there are so many more stories to be told, stories that overlap, interlace. The Veil between Us and Them is not the wall that certain politicians would like to materialise in breezeblock and razor wire, but a semi-permeable membrane, a theatrical scrim that turns transparent when a light is shone through it from the other side.

237



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PROLOGUE

1. This topic is beyond the scope of this book, but the opinions of many American Muslims in this regard can be explored in greater depth in the article by Maha Hilal, ‘It’s time for Muslim Americans to condemn Hamza Yusuf ’, Al Jazeera, 15 July 2019, https://www. aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/time-muslim-americans-condemnhamza-yusuf-190715130254222.html, last accessed 16 October 2019 and Saud Inam’s thoughtful piece in Patheos, September 15th, 2019, ‘11 Lessons from the Sh. Hamza Yusuf Controversy’: https:// www.patheos.com/blogs/sabrshukr/2019/09/11-lessons-from-thesh-hamza-yusuf-controversy/, last accessed 16 December 2019. INTRODUCTION

1. Qur’an 49:13. 2. England sometimes seems like a slightly larger version of Ellis Island, only one that the incoming migrants never left, proudly calling themselves ‘Ellisish’ after a couple of generations and booing new ships away. 3. Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania, London: I.B. Tauris, 2014, pp. 7–8. 4. Valentina Romel, ‘Ethnic minority pay gap in UK still stubbornly wide’, Financial Times, 9 July 2019: https://www.ft.com/content/ fd47bc10-a238-11e9-974c-ad1c6ab5efd1, last accessed 16 Octo­ ber 2019. 5. Haroon Siddique, ‘Minority ethnic Britons face “shocking” job discrimination’, The Guardian, 17 January 2019: https://www.the 

 

 

 



239

pp [9–21]

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 guardian.com/world/2019/jan/17/minority-ethnic-britonsface-shocking-job-discrimination, last accessed 16 October 2019. 6. Eleanor Busby, ‘Black people in UK 21 times more likely to have university applications investigated, figures show’, The Independent, 23 April 2018: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/ education-news/uk-black-students-university-applications-investigation-more-likely-ucas-figures-nus-labour-a8314496.html, last accessed 16 October 2019. In March 2019, students at Goldsmiths, University of London, began a protest against institutional racism in academia (https://www.voice-online.co.uk/article/goldsmiths-students-occupy-university-protest-racism, last accessed 16 October 2019), a criticism that poet and blogger Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (@thebrownhijabi) has also levelled at the University of Cambridge. An interesting piece about calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ can be found on the SOAS blog: https:// www.soas.ac.uk/blogs/study/decolonising-curriculum-whats-thefuss, last accessed 16 October 2019. 7. Ashley Nellis, ‘The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons’, The Sentencing Project, Washington, D.C., 2016: https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2016/06/The-Color-of-Justice-Racial-and-Ethnic-Disparityin-State-Prisons.pdf, last accessed 16 October 2019. 8. Amina Khan, ‘Getting shot by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America’, Los Angeles Times, 16 August 2019: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2019–08–15/ police-shootings-are-a-leading-cause-of-death-for-black-men, last accessed 16 October 2019. 9. Jamie Grierson, ‘More than half of young people in jail are of BME background’, The Guardian, 29 January 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/29/more-than-half-young-people-jail-are-of-bme-background, last accessed 16 October 2019. 10. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, London: Penguin, 1996 [1903], p. 4. 11.  Ibid., p. 50.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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pp [32–65]

1. ‘MZUNGU!’: KENYA AND TANZANIA

1. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Oxford: James Currey, 2003 [1981], p. 11. 2. Randall L. Pouwels, Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 199. 3. See my article in The Islamic Monthly (originally published in Islamica Magazine), ‘Sufism and Slavery in East Africa’, 2 April 2006: https://www.theislamicmonthly.com/sufism-slavery-in-eastafrica, last accessed 16 October 2019. 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubab, last accessed 16 October 2019. 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyibo, last accessed 16 October 2019. 6. Sofia Svensson, ‘Labour conditions in Qatar could result in as many as 4,000 deaths before the start of the 2022 World Cup’, International Observatory of Human Rights, 9 February 2019: https://observatoryihr.org/news_item/labour-conditions-in-qatar-could-resultin-as-many-as-4000-deaths-before-the-start-of-the-2022-worldcup, last accessed 16 October 2019.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. WHERE MANY OTHERS HAVE PRAYED: MUSLIMS IN TIBET AND LADAKH

1. See ‘The Loneliest Tearoom in India’, a poem from my book Love is a Traveller and We Are its Path, Philadelphia, PA: The Ecstatic Exchange, 2016. 2. Pascale Dollfus, ‘The History of Muslims in Central Ladakh’, The Tibet Journal, Vol. 20, No. 3, ‘Tibetan Muslims’, Autumn 1995, p. 35. 3.  Ibid., pp. 38–9. 4. Abdul Wahid Radhu (with a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama), Tibetan Caravans: Journeys from Leh to Lhasa, New Delhi, Speaking Tiger, 2017. 241

pp [66–70]

NOTES

5. Yoginder Sikand, ‘Muslim-Buddhist clashes in Ladakh: the politics behind the “religious” conflict’, Countercurrents.org , 13 Feb­ ruary 2006: https://www.Countercurrents.org/comm-sikand 130206.htm. 6.  Ibid. 7. M. Saleem Pandit, ‘Ladakh tense over Muslim-Buddhist “love jihad” marriage’, The Times of India, 12 September 2017: https:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/ladakh-tense-over-muslimbuddhist-love-jihad-marriage/articleshow/60471076.cms, last accessed 16 Octo­ber 2019. 8. Sai Manish and Khalid Ansar, ‘Why Buddhist women are marrying Muslim men in Ladakh’, Business Standard, 16 September 2017: https://www.business-standard.com/article/politics/whybuddhist-women-are-marrying-muslim-men-in-ladakh-117 091500689_1.html, last accessed 16 October 2019. 9. ‘Ladakhi Muslim community’, Facebook, 16 October 2018: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=202688 7090894173&id=1570690799847140, last accessed 16 October 2019 (edited; original without punctuation and capitalisation). 10. Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, Laughing Buddha Weeping Sufi, Philadelphia, PA: The Ecstatic Exchange, p. 11. 11. The Dalai Lama gave an interesting address to the Ladakhi Muslim community in Leh, a video of which appears on YouTube here: Dalai Lama, ‘Talk to the Ladakhi Muslim Community’, 2 August 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVq69ZvjBiU, last accessed 16 October 2019. 12. H.H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, from the foreword to Reza ShahKazemi, Common Ground Between Islam and Buddhism, Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2010, p. vii. 13. Qur’an 5:48 (translation based on M. Pickthall’s rendering). 14. See also the Ashtiname, a charter ratified by Prophet Muhammad in which he enshrines the rights of Christian minorities to protection and freedom of religion.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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NOTES

15. Marrakesh Declaration, 25–27 January 2016: see www.marrakeshdeclaration.org, last accessed 16 October 2019. 16. Rahul Tripathi, ‘Tibetan refugees down from 1.5 lakh to 85,000 in 7 years’, The Indian Express, 11 September 2018: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/tibetan-refugees-down-from-1-5lakh-to-85000-in-7-years-5349587, last accessed 16 October 2019. 17. David Palumbo-Liu, ‘The Ongoing Persecution of China’s Uyghurs’, 6 January 2019, Jacobin: https://jacobinmag.com/ 2019/06/china-uyghur-persecution-concentration-camps, last accessed 16 October 2019. 18. A.G. Noorani, ‘Article 35A is beyond challenge’, Greater Kashmir, 14 August 2015. 19. ‘Indian men who see new policy as chance to marry Kashmiri women accused of chauvinism’, Channel News Asia, 8 August 2019: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indian-menwho-see-new-policy-as-chance-to-marry-kashmiri-women-accused-of-chauvinism-11792946, last accessed 16 October 2019. 20. Jamyang Tsering Namgyal @MPLadakh, Twitter, 15 August 2019: https://twitter.com/MPLadakh/status/1161867351089958912, last accessed 16 October 2019; Asian News International @ANI, Twitter, 18 August 2019: https://twitter.com/ani/status/116269 6236941611009, last accessed 16 October 2019. 21. Jamyang Tsering Namgyal @MPLadakh, Twitter, 15 August 2019: https://twitter.com/MPLadakh/status/1161899527042764800, last accessed 16 October 2019. 22. ‘Ladakhi Muslim community’, Facebook, 8 February 2019: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=209674 8543908027&id=1570690799847140, last accessed 16 October 2019 (edited; original without capitalisation). 23. NewsClick, YouTube, ‘People from Leh and Ladakh Talk about Article 35A’, video report by Kamran Yousef, 2 September 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1dhMv-ggqc, last accessed 16 October 2019 (kindly translated by Ali Rafi).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

243

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24. The ‘People of the Book’ line argues that Muslims should protect Jews and Christians as Abrahamic cousins; in fact Zoroastrians, Hindus and other religious communities have historically been sheltered by some Muslim leaders, too. 3. SWALLOWS AND RATS: SUMMER IN A TURKISH FISHING VILLAGE

1. For more on this term, see Chapter 7, ‘The Strangers, At Home’. 4. A TALE OF TWO EYEBROWS: NOROUZ IN IRAN

1. For a detailed discussion, see Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013. 2. Al-Mu‘jam al-Awsat, 6902. 5.  DISTANT ENOUGH FOR INTIMACY: MOSTAR AND SARAJEVO

1. From April to June 1992, and again from June 1993 to April 1994. 2. See Lazuli Ventures, Facebook: www.facebook.com/lazuli.ventures, last accessed 16 October 2019.  

6. A BLESSED TREE: DIGGING FOR ANDALUSIAN ROOTS

1.  UNESCO, World Heritage Convention, ‘The Olive Grove Landscapes of Andalusia’, 27 January 2017: https://whc.unesco. org/en/tentativelists/6169, last accessed 16 October 2019. 2. Trevor J. Dadson, Tolerance and Coexistence in Early Modern Spain: Old Christians and Moriscos in the Campo de Calatrava, Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2014, p. 147. 3. Granadamap.com, ‘Brief History of Granada’: https://granadamap. com/history.htm, last accessed 16 October 2019. 4. L.P. Harvey, ‘The Political, Social, and Cultural History of the Moriscos’, in Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2nd ed., 1994, p. 210. 5. Quoted in Harvey, ibid., p. 202.  

 

 

 

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pp [131–135]

6.  George Ryley Scott, The History of Torture Throughout the Ages, London: Kegan Paul, 2004, p. 172. 7. Kim Pérez Fernández-Fígares, ‘Relación de apellidos: veintiseis linajes moriscos’: http://islamyal-andalus.es/2/index.php/historia-4291/los-moriscos/8331-relacion-de-apellidos-veintiseislinajes-moriscos, last accessed 16 October 2019. 8. Islam Hoy, two-part programme for RTVE with historian Enrique Pérez Cañamares, uploaded to YouTube by the Centro Cultural Islámico de Valencia (CCIV1), 6 January 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYHarnGtyHk, last accessed 30 September 2019; and by Balansiya Restaurante árabe en Valencia, 16 January 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfDXmX0riSY, last accessed 30 September 2019. 9. Enrique Soria Mesa, ‘Los moriscos que se quedaron: La permanencia de la población de origen islámico en la España moderna (reino de Granada, siglos xvii-xviii)’, Vínculos de Historia, Vol. 1, 2012: http://www.vinculosdehistoria.com/index.php/vinculos/ article/view/14, last accessed 16 October 2019. 10. Dadson, op. cit. 11. Mesa, op. cit., p. 208. 12.  Islam Hoy, op. cit. 13. Gran Enciclopedia Aragonesa, ‘Tema 8. La arquitectura mudéjar en Aragon’: http://www.enciclopedia-aragonesa.com/monograficos/historia/mudejares_en_aragon/arquitectura_mudejar.asp, last accessed 16 October 2019. 14. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent, Historia de los moriscos: Vida y tragedia de una minoría, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1993 [1979]. 15. Canal Extremadura, YouTube, ‘REPOR CITA MORISCOS EN HORNACHOS 5 11 2011’, 10 November 2011: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=opRVY-N187o, last accessed 30 Septem­ ber 2019. 16. Francisco Martínez Dalmases, Qandil: Lights in the Land of the  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

245

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NOTES

Setting Sun, self-published, English ed., 2017, Appendix 7, pp. 278–80, citing Federico Tobal, ‘Los libros de Eduardo Gutiérrez: el gaucho y el árabe’, La Nación, 16 February and 2 March 1886. 17. Miguel Asín Palacios, Sadilíes y Alumbrados, Madrid: Ediciones Hiperión, 1989, among numerous other titles. 18. Patricia R. Blanco, ‘Ni España existía ni la Reconquista es tal y como la cuenta Vox’, El Pais, 12 April 2019: https://elpais.com/ elpais/2019/04/11/hechos/1554980000_022524.html, last accessed 16 October 2019. 19.  ‘[E]liminar sin escrúpulos ni vacilación a todos los que no piensen como nosotros’, quoted in Alejandro Torrús, ‘Las víctimas de franquismo no están solo en las cunetas’, Público, 15 March 2018: https://www.publico.es/politica/victimas-franquismo-no-cunetas.html, last accessed 16 October 2019 (my translation). 20.  Ibid. 21.  ‘Muchos de los conversos españoles proceden de la lucha contra la dictadura, de la izquierda o de eso que han dado en llamar “contracultura”, de toda una serie de movimientos alternativos surgidos a la búsqueda de un nuevo paradigma, pero no son esas las categorías que pueden ofrecernos una respuesta convincente.’ Abdennur Prado, from the Prologue to Hashim Ibrahim Cabrera, Párrafos de Moro Nuevo, Seville: Junta Islámica, 2002 (my translation). 22. Antonio Manuel, ‘Las mentiras de la sangre’, Portal de Andalucía, 13 June 2019: https://portaldeandalucia.org/opinion/las-mentiras-de-la-sangre, last accessed 16 October 2019. 23. ‘Estudio demográfico de la población musulmana’, study conducted by the Union of Islamic Societies of Spain, 2019: http://observatorio.hispanomuslim.es/estademograf.pdf, last accessed 16 Octo­ ber 2019. 24. Abu Madyan was an important Shadhili Sufi master who grew up as an illiterate Sevillian shepherd and orphan, eventually coming to prominence in Algeria. 25. ‘[E]l cristianismo no es tu verdadera religión, ya lo descubrirás con  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

246



pp [154–163]

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el tiempo.’ Prado, from the Prologue to Cabrera, op. cit. (my translation). 26. Traditionally Spaniards carry two surnames, the first from their father and the second from their mother—in each case, the first of their two surnames. 27. See my book, Huma’s Travel Guide to Islamic Spain, London: Huma Press, 2017, for extended harping. 28. Lit. ‘Glory be to God’—the Arabic version of hallelujah. 29. Author’s communication with permaculture teacher and researcher Rhamis Kent. 30. Qur’an 24:35 (trans. Sahih International).  

7. THE STRANGERS, AT HOME: MUSLIM AND BRITISH IN THE UK

1. Vikram Dodd, ‘Media and politicians “fuel rise in hate crimes against Muslims”’, The Guardian, 28 January 2010: https://www. theguardian.com/uk/2010/jan/28/hate-crimes-muslims-mediapoliticians, last accessed 16 October 2019. 2. Ben Quinn, ‘Hate crimes double in five years in England and Wales’, The Guardian, 15 October 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/ society/2019/oct/15/hate-crimes-double-england-wales, last acces­ sed 16 October 2019. 3. ‘How fake images spread racist stereotypes about migrants across the globe’, The Observers, France 24, 1 May 2018: https://observers.france24.com/en/20180105-fake-images-racist-stereotypesmigrants, last accessed 16 October 2019. 4. Cf. the story of the white Christian child ‘forced into Muslim foster care’, to which The Times devoted three front-page stories in 2017. The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) compelled the newspaper to publish a correction after finding that its reporting of the story contained ‘distortion’ of the facts. 5. Wes Streeting, ‘Yes, Islamophobia is a type of racism, and here’s why’, The Guardian, 15 May 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/15/islamophobia-racism-definition 

 

 

 

 

 

 

247

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 free-speech-theresa-may, last accessed 16 October 2019. See also the APPG on British Muslims’ website: https://appgbritishmuslims.org, last accessed 16 October 2019. 6. Nazneen Mohsina, ‘Political Opportunism in India: Exploiting Islamophobia’, The Diplomat, 10 May 2019: https://thediplomat. com/2019/05/political-opportunism-in-india-exploiting-islamophobia, last accessed 16 October 2019. 7. Mahdia Lynn, Medium, ‘White Muslims, We Need to Talk’, 15 January 2019: https://medium.com/@mahdialynn/whitemuslims-we-need-to-talk-8254ca2a1bc, last accessed 16 October 2019 (italics in original, edited to capitalise ‘American’ and ‘Islamophobia’). 8. In a 2019 report, 59 per cent of over 10,000 articles analysed by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring were found to associate Muslims with negative behaviours. CfMM, ‘State of Media Reporting on Islam & Muslims’, 2019, p. 5: https:// cfmm.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/CfMM-QuarterlyReport-Oct-Dec-2018.pdf, last accessed 16 October 2019. 9. Home Office, ‘Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent Programme, April 2017 to March 2018’, 13 December 2018, p. 4: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/763254/individuals-referred-supported-prevent-programme-apr2017-mar2018hosb3118.pdf, last accessed 16 October 2019. 10. Dan Sabbagh, ‘Detention at UK ports and airports “structural Islamophobia”’, The Guardian, 20 August 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/aug/20/detention-of-muslims-at-ukports-and-airports-structural-islamophobia, last accessed 16 Octo­ ber 2019. 11. Ian Cobain, ‘REVEALED: The “woke” media outfit that’s actually a UK counterterror programme’, Middle East Eye, 15 August 2019: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/revealed-woke-mediaoutfit-thats-actually-uk-counterterror-programme, last accessed 16 October 2019.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

248



pp [167–181]

NOTES

12. Tom Griffin, ‘The problem with the Quilliam Foundation’, OpenDemocracy, 7 November 2016: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/problem-with-quilliam-foundation, last accessed 16 October 2019. 13. See Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s blog, www.thebrownhijabi.com, last accessed 16 October 2019, as well as her Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts @thebrownhijabi. 14. Hope Not Hate, ‘State of Hate 2019: People vs the Elite?’, 2019: https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/ state-of-hate-2019-final-1.pdf, last accessed 16 October 2019. 15. Welsh Muslim Cultural Foundation: https://www.wmcf.wales, last accessed 16 October 2019. 16. Salim Kassam, ‘While mental health discussions are so whitewashed, is it any wonder many Muslims still turn to exorcisms?’, The Independent, 17 May 2019: https://www.independent.co.uk/ voices/muslim-mental-health-awareness-week-2019-whitewashjeremy-kyle-show-islamophobia-a8918061.html, last accessed 16 October 2019. 17. Jonathon A.C. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy, London: Oneworld Publications, 2014. 18. James McMullen Rigg, ‘Montagu, Edward Wortley’, Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, Vol. 38, p. 239: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Montagu,_Edward_Wortley_(DNB00), last accessed 16 October 2019. 19. His family have now produced several books and are working on a film about Reschid’s story. See http://robertreschidstanley.wordpress.com, last accessed 16 October 2019. 20. Maulana Yaqub Khan, Paigham Sulh, 13 February 1963, pp. 7–8: http://www.wokingmuslim.org/pers/ez_cobbold/burial.htm, last accessed 16 October 2019 (translated from Urdu by Dr Zahid Aziz). 21. Quoted in Sh. Abdal Hakim Murad, ‘Marmaduke Pickthall: a  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

249

pp [181–199]

NOTES

brief biography’, 6 January 2015: http://masud.co.uk/marmaduke-pickthall-a-brief-biography, last accessed 16 October 2019. 22.  Ibid. 23. A captivating selection of stories can be found in Michael Sugich’s highly readable book Hearts Turn: Sinners, Seekers, Saints and the Road to Redemption, New York: Telltale Texts, 2019. 24. Qur’an 50:16. 25. Runnymede Trust, ‘Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All’, 2017, p. 5: runnymedetrust.org/uploads/Islamophobia%20 Report%202018%20FINAL.pdf, last accessed 16 October 2019. 26. Ala’ Alrababa’h, William Marble, Salma Mousa and Alexandra Siegel, ‘Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? The Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Behaviors and Attitudes’, IPL Working Paper Series, 2019: www.immigrationlab.org/workingpaper-series/can-exposure-celebrities-reduce-prejudice-effectmohamed-salah-islamophobic-behaviors-attitudes-2, last accessed 16 October 2019. 27. William Barylo, Young Muslim Change-Makers: Grassroots Charities Rethinking Modern Societies, Abingdon: Routledge, 2019, p. 53. 28.  Ibid., pp. 62–3. 29. From Audre Lorde’s speech at the Lesbian and Literature Association’s December 1977 meeting, reproduced in her works The Cancer Journals and Sister Outsider, among other titles.  

 

 

 

 

8. LOVE IN A LACUNA: SEX AND MARRIAGE

1. Qur’an 30:21 (trans. from Tafheem Al-Qur’an, Islamic Foundation UK). 2. See hadith to this effect in Sahih Muslim, The Book of Zakah, 1006. 3. Habeeb Akande, A Taste of Honey: Sexuality and Erotology in Islam, London: Rabaah Publishers, p. 2. 4. Quoted in Akande, ibid., p. 10. 5. Quoted in Akande, ibid., p. 11. 250



pp [199–205]

NOTES

6. Akande, ibid., p. 2. 7. D. Herbenick, V. Schick, S.A. Sanders, M. Reece and J.D. Fortenberry, ‘Pain Experienced During Vaginal and Anal Intercourse with Other–Sex Partners: Findings from a Nationally Representative Probability Study in the United States’, The Journal of Sexual Medicine, Vol. 12, No. 4, April 2015, pp. 1040–1051: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25648245, last accessed 16 October 2019. 8. Lili Loofbourow, ‘The female price of male pleasure’, The Week, 25 January 2018: https://theweek.com/articles/749978/femaleprice-male-pleasure, last accessed 16 October 2019. 9. The Novus Project: http://thenovusproject.org/resource-hub/ parents, last accessed 16 October 2019. 10. Brian Y. Park. Gary Wilson, Jonathon Berger, Matthew Christman, Bryn Reina, Frank Bishop, Warren P. Klam and Andrew P. Doan, ‘Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports’, Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2016: https://www.mdpi.com/2076–328X/6/3/17, last accessed 16 Oct­ob­ er 2019. 11. For more on this topic, see Hussein Kesvani, Follow Me, Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims, London: Hurst & Co., 2019, pp. 55–62. 12. From Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore’s poem ‘Talking to God’, The Match that Becomes a Conflagration, Philadelphia, PA: The Ecstatic Exchange, 2011. 13. Qur’an 24:30: ‘[Prophet], tell believing men to lower their glances and guard their private parts: that is purer for them. God is well aware of everything they do’ (trans. Abdul Haleem). The following verse instructs women to do the same and not to expose their ‘adornment’ (zinatahunna) except to males they cannot marry. 14. ‘The percentage Muslim [in a country] appears to reduce the odds of reporting premarital sex for all ever married residents, regardless of religious affiliation.’ Amy Adamczyk and Brittany E. Hayes,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

251

pp [205–208]

NOTES

‘Religion and Sexual Behaviours’, American Sociological Review, Vol.  77, No.  5, September 2012, pp.  723–46: https://journals. sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/0003122412458672, last acces­ sed 16 October 2019. 15. ‘The prevalence of lifetime sexual intercourse among never married Muslim college students was 53.8%, with no significant difference by gender (males 57.1% and females 47.6%).’ Sameera Ahmed, Wahiba Abu-Ras, and Cynthia L Arfken, ‘Prevalence of risk behaviors among U.S. Muslim college students’, Journal of Muslim Mental Health, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2014: https://quod.lib. umich.edu/j/jmmh/10381607.0008.101?view=text;rgn=m ain, last accessed 16 October 2019. 16. Kesvani, op. cit., pp. 63–4. 17. A few of these can be found in the Brown Girl Magazine article ‘Possibly, The SCARIEST Rishta Stories You’ve Ever Heard’, 28 October 2016: https://www.browngirlmagazine.com/2016/ 10/possibly-scariest-rishta-stories-ever-heard, last accessed 16 Octo­ ber 2019. 18. Diaspora Ukhti, YouTube, ‘Black, Muslim, and Struggling to get Married’, 13 September 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =EVuEnvyupZY, last accessed 16 October 2019. 19. Rajnaara C. Akhtar, ‘Modern Traditions in Muslim Marriage Practices, Exploring English Narratives’, Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, Vol. 7, No. 3, October 2018, pp. 427–54: https:// academic.oup.com/ojlr/article/7/3/427/5075173. 20. Nafisa Bakkar, ‘“How Will You Find a Husband as an Ambitious Muslim Woman?”’, Amaliah, 5 March 2019: https://www.amaliah.com/post/11315/how-will-you-find-a-husband-as-an-ambitious-muslim-woman, last accessed 16 October 2019. 21. Faima Bakar, ‘Muslim women explain why it’s so hard for them to find a partner’, Metro, 22 January 2019: https://metro.co.uk/ 2019/01/22/muslim-women-explain-why-its-so-hard-for-themto-find-a-partner-8327509, last accessed 16 October 2019.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

252



pp [211–213]

NOTES

22. Greg Evans, ‘The worst decision you can ever make is to have a child, according to science’, indy100 from The Independent, 22 September 2017: https://www.indy100.com/article/worstdecision-you-can-ever-make-have-a-child-science-research-parentsleep-sex-money-video-7960906, last accessed 16 October 2019. 23. Akhtar, op. cit.: ‘In the most recent and extensive survey of its kinds, True Vision Aire and Channel 4 commissioned a survey of 903 Muslim women during 2016–17, and found 60 per cent of the respondents were in religious-only marriages.’ 24. In khul‘a, a woman must gain her husband’s consent for divorce; if that is not forthcoming, she can take the case to a Shari’ah court where a judge annuls the marriage (known as faskh). However, this can take years to process. 25. Ghyda Senussi, ‘Why My Husband Stays at Home and I Choose to Bring Home the Halal Bacon’, Amaliah, 6 August 2019: https:// www.amaliah.com/post/55282/rights-of-a-husband-and-wife-inislam-house-husband-dynamic-muslim-male-role-models-halalbacon, last accessed 16 October 2019. 26. Amy Walker, ‘Birthrate in England and Wales at all-time low’, The Guardian, 1 August 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/aug/01/birth-rate-in-england-and-wales-at-alltime-low, last accessed 16 October 2019. 27. Ayesha S. Chaudry also notes: ‘This disjoint between the biological and symbolic representation of Muhammad’s wives highlights the tension often found between normative thought (Islamic law and theology) in Islam and Muslim practice. … In the case of oncofertility [IVF], whereas Islamic law might have an ambivalent attitude toward the new technology, Muslim attitudes might not be as ambivalent due to their particular social and cultural contexts where womanhood is defined by reproductive capacity.’ Ayesha S. Chaudry, ‘Unlikely Motherhood in the Qur’ān: Oncofertility as Devotion’, in T. Woodruff, L. Zoloth, L. CampoEngelstein, S. Rodriguez (eds), Oncofertility: Cancer Treatment  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

253

pp [213–226]

NOTES

and Research, Vol. 156, Boston, MA: Springer, 2010: https://www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3086458, last accessed 16 October 2019. 28. ‘The results of the study revealed that financial problem[s] [were] the main stressor for majority of the single mothers. The emotional life of the single mother was also affected by their single status. Majority of the single mother[s] reported that they felt lonely, helpless, hopeless, lack of identity and lack of confidence. In [a] social sphere [a] majority of single mothers tried to avoid attending social gatherings and had changed their dressing style[;] due to depression they had develop[ed] poor food and eating habits. Majority of the single mothers found it hard to maintain discipline among the children due to absence of male members. The mothers complained about loneliness, traum[a] and depression and found it difficult to handle the responsibility of childcare and to establish a routine for [their] children.’ From Abstract for Nidhi Kotwal and Bharti Prabhakar, ‘Problems Faced by Single Mothers’, Journal of Social Sciences, 21:3, 2009, pp. 197–204: https://www. researchgate.net/publication/242143638_Problems_Faced_by_ Single_Mothers, last accessed 16 October 2019.  

 

9. HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: ON HIJAB AND INVISIBILITY

1. Mohja Kahf, ‘From Her Royal Body the Robe Was Removed: The Blessings of the Veil and the Trauma of Forced Unveilings in the Middle East’, in Jennifer Heath (ed.), The Veil: Women Writers on its History, Lore and Politics, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008, pp. 27–43. 2. 1 Corinthians 11:4–5, New International Version (NIV), 2011. 3. See Head Covering Movement on Instagram (@headcovering, last accessed 16 October 2019) and the hashtags #1corinthians11 and #headcoveringchristian; #headcoveringmovement links to Christian, Jewish and Muslim women bloggers in a fascinating interfaith crossover.  

254



pp [229–236]

NOTES

4. Shaykh Abou El Fadl, ‘FATWA: On Hijab (The Hair-covering of Women) UPDATED’, 2 January 2016, https://www.searchforbeauty.org/2016/01/02/fatwa-on-hijab-the-hair-covering-ofwomen, last accessed 16 October 2019. 5.  Ibid. 6. Fariduddin ‘Attar, Margaret Smith (trans.), The Persian Mystics: ‘Attar, London: John Murray, 1932, p. 67. 7. Dr Javad Nurbakhsh, The Path: Sufi Practices (Kindle Edition), New York: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications, 2011. 8. Qur’an 21:107 (trans. Sahih International). 9. Sunan Ibn Majah 3989. 10. Quoted by Ibn ‘Abbad al-Rundi in his commentary on Ibn ‘Ata’illah al-Iskandari’s Kitab al-Hikam, Ibn ‘Abbad al-Rundi, Sharh al-Hikam al-‘Ata’iyyah, aphorism 11 (trans. Aisha Bewley). 11. Ibn ‘Abbad, ibid. 12. Quoted in Ibn ‘Abbad, ibid. 13. Samina Ali, ‘What does the Quran really say about a Muslim woman’s hijab?’, uploaded to YouTube by TEDxTalks, 10 February 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J5bDhMP9lQ, last accessed 16 October 2019. 14. Cf. the hadith qudsi (divine hadith) that ‘I was a hidden treasure and I wished to be known, so I created the world’, and Qur’an 51:56: ‘And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me’ (trans. Sahih International). 15. Bibi Hayati, from Ghazal 6. Quoted in Dr Javad Nurbakhsh, Sufi Women, New York: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications, 2004, p. 160. 16. Quoted in Ibn ‘Abbad, op. cit. 17. Ibn ‘Ata’illah, quoted in Ibn ‘Abbad, op. cit., aphorism 165.  

 

 

 

 

 

255

INDEX

‘abayas, 29, 41, 48, 217, 221 ‘Abd al-Qadir, 14 ‘Abd ar-Rahman III, Caliph of Córdoba, 130 ‘Abdallah, Umar Faruq, 142, 182 ‘Abdalqadir (as-Sufi), 14, 143 Abdul Noor, Sukina, 193 Abkhaz, 104 ablutions, see wudu’ Aboriginal Australians, 8–9 Aboulela, Leila, 192–3 Abu Bakr, Rashidun Caliph, 173 acequias, 127, 133, 154–5 Action, The, 14 adab, 189 Adderley, Julian Edwin ‘Cannonball’, 17 adhan, 68, 171, 214 adoption, 212 Aerosol Arabic, 191 Afghanistan, 68, 178 Aghmat, Morocco, 137

Aguéli, Ivan, 181, 182 Ahl-ul-Kahf, 193–4 Ahmadiyya, 179 Ahmed, Riz, 192 ajrumiyyah, 142 Akande, Habeeb, 198, 199 Akhtar, Rajnaara, 207 ‘alam, 187 Albaicín, Granada, xv, 130, 143, 150 Albania; Albanians, 104, 180 alberca, 157 Alborz Mountains, Iran, 94, 96 Alcázar, Seville, 145 Alchemiya, 168 alcohol, xvii, xviii, 20, 68, 106, 140, 170 Alexandria, Egypt, 60 Algeria, 131, 199, 222 Alhambra, Granada, xv, 126, 130, 209 ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, Rashidun Caliph, 234 Ali, Samina, 235 257

INDEX

Ali, Mohammed, 191 Aljamiado, 147 All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims, 162 Allanson-Winn, Rowland, 180 Almería, Andalusia, 129, 145 Alpujarras, Andalusia, 126, 129, 130, 132, 154 Alsace-Lorraine, 3 Aly, Remona, 193 Amaliah, 168 Amaliah.com, 207 Amazigh, 129, 145 Amélie, 81 Amish Amnesty Law (1977), 138 al-Andalus (711–1492), xv, 126–30, 135–7, 143, 145–6, 151, 155–7, 186 acequias, 127, 133, 154–5 demographics of, 129–30, 136, 145–6 filahah, 127, 156–7 flamenco and, 136 paella and, 148 qanats, 127 silk industry, 129, 133 Andalusia, xiv–xvi, 99, 125–58, 171 Angel of Death, 60 Anjuman Imamia, 74 Antequera, Andalusia, 136 anxiety, 11 258

apartheid, 8 ‘aqiqah, 152 Arabian Nights, The, 45 Arabic, 16, 31, 40, 129, 131, 159, 171 ajrumiyyah, 142 Bilal and, 45 converts and, 178, 181, 184, 185 in Kenya, 31 in Ladakh, 74 in Spain, 129, 131, 136, 138, 147, 148, 151, 157 Swahili and, 33, 35 Aragon, 128, 132, 134, 147 Argentina, 134 Arian Christians, 117 Ark, The, Birmingham, 193 Armenia, 7 arranged marriages, 206 arropado/a, 218 Asín Palacios, Miguel, 135 Asperger’s syndrome, 4 al-Assad, Hafez, 225 Asterix, 154 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 86, 225 ‘Attar, Fariduddin, 171, 231 Attenborough, David, 156 Austen, Jane, 171 Austen, Lilian, 180 Australia, 5–6

INDEX

Austria-Hungary (1867–1918), 113 Ayat al-Kursi, 85 Azalea, Iggy, 184 al-Azhar, Cairo, 181 Azlah, Aqira, 104 Ba ‘Alawiyya, 37 Baath Party of Syria, 225 Babikir, Ahmed, 159, 160 Bahá’í Faith, 163 Bahia, Brazil, 227 Bahrain, 222 baibuis, 48, 53, 54 Baker, Anthony George, 179 Bakkar, Nafisa, 207 Ball, Michael, 43 Baltistan, 62, 64 Bamyan Buddhas, 68 Bananaman, 172 Bangladesh, 222 bao, 47 baqiyyah, 148 baraka, 157 Barbados, 7 Barbie, 172 Barcelona, Catalunya, 152 Barcha, Ashraf Ali, 74 Barmherzigkeit, 233 Barylo, William, 193 Basque country, 145 batik, 47, 48, 185 Beat Generation, 69

Behjatabad, Mazandaran, 101–9 Belgium, 8, 80 Belgrade, Serbia, 122 belonging envy, 12 Belt and Road initiative, 71–2 Ben Ibrahim, Sliman, 181 Berkeley, California, 15, 69 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 73 Bhoyroo, Farah, 191 Bhutan, 62 Bilal, 45 Bin Bayyah, Abdallah xv Birmingham, West Midlands, 168, 193 Black Lives Matter, xv Black Star, 171 ‘blackamoors’, 145 Blagaj, Herzegovina, 119–20 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 105 Boabdil, Sultan of Granada, 130 Bödrum, Turkey, 78 Bogomil Christians, 117 Bön, 61 Bongo Flava, 49 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 111–23, 171, 223 Bosnian War (1992–5), 112–16, 171 Bosnians, 104 Bradford Literary Festival, 167

259

INDEX

Brazil, 227 Breakthrough Media, 167 Brent, London, 193 Brick Lane, London, 24 Bridget Jones (Fielding), 18 Bristol, England, xi, xii, 193 Bristol Gardens, London, 15, 143 Brit(ish) (Hirsch), 37 British Empire, 8, 31–3, 39 British Muslim Society, 180 Brown, Jonathan Andrew Cleveland, 170 Brunton, Thomas Lauder, 180 Brutus Albinus, Decimus Junius, 78 Buckingham Palace, London, 191 Buddhism, 15, 57, 60–63, 64, 65, 66–70, 71, 74–5 Buenos Aires, Argentina, 134 buibui, 29, 34, 48 Bukhara, 60 al-Bukhari, 171 bukhoor, 185 Bulgarians, 104 ‘Burberry trench’, 235 Burckhardt, Titus, 181 burkinis, 224 Burton, Richard, 45 Byzantine Empire (395–1453), 77, 78 Caesar, Julius, 78 260

Cairo, Egypt, 181 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, 173, 191 Canada, 151, 217 cannabis, 87, 140 cante jondo, 136 Cardiff, Wales, 169 Carroll, Sydney, 6 Caspian Sea, 94 Cassel, Halima, 191 Castile, 128, 130, 132, 134, 142, 145 Catalunya, 145, 149 Catholicism, 47 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 112, 116–17, 118 in Spain, 128, 130, 135, 137, 143, 144–5, 149 in United Kingdom, 200 Caucasus, 104–5 caves, 194 Celtiberians, 126, 130 Cement Weekly, 6 Chalus, Mazandaran, 101–9 Chapman, Tracy, 17 Charter of Medina (622), 70 Chaudry, Ayesha, 213 Chebel, Malik, 199 Chefchaouen, Morocco, 134 China, 61, 62, 71, 153, 154 Chishtiyya, 15 chortens, 60, 62, 74 Christchurch mosque shootings (2019), 161

INDEX

Christianity, 47 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 112, 116–17, 118 in Middle East, 163 in Spain, 128, 130, 135, 137, 143, 144–5, 149 veiling practices, 226 Christmas, 68, 105, 155 Churchill, Winston, 180 Chushot, Ladakh, 66 Circassians, 104–5 Cobbold, Zainab, 180 Coca, ‘Abdal-Nour, 143 colonialism, 8, 31–3, 39, 54 Coltrane, John, 171 Common Ground Between Islam and Buddhism (Shah-Kazemi), 69 Comoros Islands, 35 converts; conversion, 2, 14, 22, 23, 178–86 in France, 181–2 hijab, wearing of, 219 in Ladakh, 63, 64, 65, 67 in Spain, 131, 133, 139–44, 149–53, 154, 219 ‘turning Turk’, 14 in United Kingdom, 24, 164–5, 178–81, 182 in United States, 22, 179 Cordoba, Andalusia, 126, 136, 147, 152 Cornwall, England, 38

corsairs, 134 Côte d’Ivoire, 222 Cox, Jo, 165 Crescent, The, 179 Croatia, 113, 114, 116, 117, 123 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, 171 cuarentena, 232 Cuba, 82 Cuesta del Chapiz, Albaicín, 143 cultural appropriation, 13, 184–5 Cultural Revolution (1966– 76), 62, 71 Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, 95 da‘wah, 23, 179 Dakhouch, Fouad, 149 daladala, 51 Dalai Lama, 62–3, 64, 65, 69 Dallas, Ian, 14 Damascus, Syria, 225 Danger Mouse, 171 Dante Alighieri, 135 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 39 dating, 205–6 Davis, Miles, 171 De La Soul, 17 Debussy, Claude, 172 Decolonising the Mind (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), 31

261

INDEX

deen, 197, 210 Delaware, United States, 16 Delhi, India, 58–9 depression, 11 dhikr, 15, 26, 44, 86, 127, 142, 171, 173, 189 Diana, Princess of Wales, 83 Diaspora Ukhti, 206 Diawara, Ahmedou Bamba, 149 Dinet, Alphonse-Étienne, 181 Divine Comedy (Dante), 135 divorce, 211–12, 213, 215 Djalili, Omid, 100 djembes, 140 Dogra kingdom (1846–1952), 65 Doi, Abdur Rahman, 199 Dolezal, Rachel, 13 Don Quixote de la Mancha (Cervantes), 133 drugs abuse of, 11, 170 cannabis, 87, 140 lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), 69, 178 Movida Madrileña and, 144 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 18 du‘a, 172 Dughlat, Mirza Muhammad Haidar, 64 dunya, 81, 187, 236 262

Earl’s Court, London, 127 ego, 32, 70, 185, 187, 189, 195, 236 Egypt, 60, 69, 178, 180, 182, 222, 234 Eid, 68, 72, 159, 183 Elephant and Castle, London, 159 Emirate of Granada (1230– 1492), 128–30, 132, 145, 199 English Defence League, 167 English language, 31–2, 40, 41 ‘Englistan’ (Riz Ahmed), 192 Escudero, Mansur, 142 Essex, England, xvii–xviii, 54 Eurocentrism, 223 European Union, 152 Evans, William ‘Bill’, 171 Exchange and Mart, 6 Extremadura, Castile, 132, 134, 145 eye contact, 122, 204 eyebrows, 93, 94–5, 102–3 Facebook, 168, 193, 203 el-Fadl, Abou, 228 fajr, 96 far-right terrorism, 9, 161, 165 Farah, Mohamed, 192 Farsi, 66 Fatimah al-Kubra, 229 feminism, 189, 231

INDEX

Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, 128, 130 fesenjun, 97 Fetuga, Rakaya Esime, 193 Fez, Morocco, 134 filahah, 127, 156–7 fiqh, 203 First Nations, 3, 8, 22 First World War (1914–18), 122 fitrah, 70 Fitzgerald, Ella, 17 flamenco, 136 Flanders, 105 Follow Me, Akhi (Kesvani), 205–6 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), 138 Forodhani Gardens, Zanzibar, 52 Forster, Edward Morgan, 181 fostering, 212 France, 3, 7, 8, 128, 151, 181, 182 Franco, Francisco, xv, 135, 137–8, 142, 144 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este, 122 Freeview, 168 Gabriel, 228 Galicia, 145 Gambia, 38

gender segregation, 122, 203–4, 217–18 Georgians, 104 Germany, 3, 7, 8, 25, 77, 119, 150 al-Ghazali, 172 Ghazi Mir, 64 Gibraltar, 129 Gil, Gilberto, 17 Gitano people, xv, 136–7, 146 Google, 73 Goon Show, The, 172 Granada, Andalusia, xiv–xvi, 125–6, 132, 142–3, 150–53, 157, 216, 219 Albaicín, xv, 130, 143, 150 Alhambra, xv, 126, 130, 209 architecture, 151 Emirate of (1230–1492), 128–30, 132, 145, 199 houses in, 99 marriage in, 207 Puebla de Don Fadrique, 149 silk industry, 133 sunnah in, 148 Great Depression (1929–39), 4 Greeks, 104 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 9 grockles, 38 Guaraní people, 134 Guénon, Réné, 181, 182 Guidance for Married Life Based on the Islamic Religion, 199

263

INDEX

Gulliver, ‘Abdal-Rahim, 143 Gya Kha-Che Chinese Mosque, Lhasa, 66 habba, 157 Habib ‘Umar, 156 Habib Swaleh, 34, 35–7 Habibiyya, The, 15 Habitat, 16 hadiths, 159, 172, 199–200 Haeri, Fadhlalla, 15 Hafez, 106 Haggadah, 119 hajj, 15, 45, 180, 193 Hajjaj, Hassan, 191 Hajji Firouz, 105 halal dating, 206 halal fashion, 98, 225 halal food, 17, 62 Hamdani, Mir Syed Ali, 64 Hamilton, Abdullah Archibald, 179–80 Hanafi madhhab, 104, 200 Hancock, Herbert, xv al-Haqq, 69 haram, 99 Haramayn, 99 harim, 99 Harris, Emmylou, 171 Harrow School, Middlesex, 180 haya, 204–5 Hayati, Bibi, 235 Hemingway, Ernest, 138 264

Hemis Monastery, Ladakh, 67 henna, 58, 152, 208, 219 Henry, Richard, 192 Herbenick, Debby, 202 Herzegovina, 111–16, 119–20, 123 hijab, 18, 21, 60, 205, 218–37 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 119, 121, 223 in Iran, 225 in Kenya, 41 marriage status and, 222 in Spain, 151, 154 in Syria, 225 in Turkey, 225 in United Kingdom, 18, 24, 161, 164, 218–19 in United States, 228–9 in Zanzibar, 48, 50–51, 53, 54 Hijaz, 136, 229 Hill, Lauryn, 17 Hindi, 59, 97 Hinduism, 163 Hirsch, Afua, 37 Holocaust (1941–5), 8, 119 Holst, Gustav, 171 Holy Week processions, 143 Home Office, 167, 169 homosexuality, 144, 168 Hornachos, Extremadura, 134 horror vacui, 99 Hostel Majda, Mostar, 111–12, 118

INDEX

House of the Far-Reaching Arrows, Lhasa, 62 huerto, 157 Hui people, 62 Humayun, Mughal emperor, 58 Hurchu Khan, 64 husn adh-dhann, 109 Hyderabad, India, 181 Ibn ‘Abbad al-Rundi, 135, 234 Ibn ‘Arabi, 135, 181, 182 Ibn ‘Ata’illah al-Iskandari, 69, 234 Ibn Hazm, 198 iftar, 159, 177 Igbo people, 38 ijtihad, 170 ‘ilm al-bah, 198–9 IlmFeed, 168 imposter syndrome, 11 Inca Empire (1438–1533), 134 Inclusive Mosque Initiative, 191 India, 7, 57–61, 62, 63–8, 72–5 Article 370 abrogation (2019), 72–4 Hindu nationalism, 72–4, 163 Ladakh, 57–61, 62, 63–8, 73–5 Indiana University, 202 indigo, 49 Infante Pérez de Vargas, Blas, 136–7 Inquisition, Spanish (1478–

1834), 130–31, 133, 135, 138, 148 Instagram, 168, 225, 230 Iran, xiv, 5, 7, 36, 61, 64, 66, 93–109, 118, 171, 214 beaches in, 224 beauty treatment in, 101–3, 105–6 cosmetic surgery in, 93, 102 eyebrows in, 95, 102–3 fashion in, 98–9 hijab in, 225 homes in, 99 instructions in, 100 Islamic Revolution (1979), 95 khariji, 38 marriage in, 207 Norouz, 94, 96, 105, 107 poetry in, 16, 96, 106, 215 polo, 66 pyjamas in, 97 Qajar dynasty (1796–1925), 95, 105 rusari, 101 Shi‘a Islam, 214 skin tone in, 103–5 Solar Hijri calendar, 96 taarof, 94 television in, 107 Iraq, 159, 184 Ireland, 3 Isabella I, Queen of Castile, 128, 130

265

INDEX

Islam adhan, 68, 171, 214 adoption and, 212 Ahmadiyya, 179 ‘aqiqah, 152 converts, see converts da’wah, 23, 179 deen, 197, 210 divorce and, 211 du’a, 172 Eid, 68, 72, 159, 183 fajr, 96 fiqh, 203 fitrah, 70 hadiths, 159, 172 hajj, 15, 45, 180, 193 halal food, 17, 62 Hanafi madhhab, 104, 200 al-Haqq, 69 haya, 204–5 hijab, see hijab husn adh-dhann, 109 ijtihad, 170 jumu’ah prayers, 62, 67, 159, 174 khulafa’, 156, 187 khutbah, 68, 160, 181 Maulid, 35 mu’adhdhin, 45 music and, 25 racism and, 45–6 Ramadan, 50–53, 54, 68, 147, 159, 168, 174, 177, 195, 230 266

salat, 131 seerah, 172 shahadah, 23, 181, 231 Shari’ah, 162 Shi’a Islam, 62, 64, 66, 118, 214 suffering, approach to, 186 Sufism, see Sufism sunnah, 147–8 Sunni Islam, 62, 104, 118, 214 taqiyyah, 131, 138, 147 tawakkul, 186 ummah, 25, 26, 44, 45, 153, 199, 206, 237 ‘umrah, 175 violence in the name of, 11, 161, 163, 164 wudu’, 122, 131 zakat, 186 Islam Expo, Earl’s Court, 127 Islamic Society, 177 Islamic World, 179 Islamophobia, 161–7, 181–2, 190, 192, 193 Isle of Wight Festival, 15 Israel, 118 Istanbul, Turkey, 78, 84, 86, 88, 104, 178 Italy, 34 Ivy, The, London, 7 Jaén, Andalusia, 129, 132

INDEX

Jaffa, Palestine, 181 al-Jahiz, 198 Jam-dbyangs rnam-rgyal, King of Ladakh, 64 Jama Masjid, Leh, 66 Jamaica, 7, 159 James VI & I, King of Scotland, England and Ireland, 3 Jammu and Kashmir, 12, 17, 57, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66–7, 72–4, 223 Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir, 66 jang-ot, 226 Japan, 7 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 22, 217 Jeeves and Wooster (Wodehouse), 171 Jemaa el-Fnaa square, Marrakesh, 23 Jeronimo order, 135 Jerrahi dhikr, 86 Jewish people, 118, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135 jilbab, 221, 231 Jim Crow segregation laws (1877–1965), 4, 8 John of the Cross, Saint, 135 johnnycakes, 4 Johns Hopkins University, 4 Jones, Rickie Lee, 171 Judaism, 118, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135

jumu’ah prayers, 62, 67, 159, 174 Kahf, Mohja, 225 Kahlo, Frida, 95 kangas, 48–9, 52, 54 Kant, Immanuel, 81 Kapalıçarşı bazaar, Istanbul, 88 Kargil, Ladakh, 60, 64, 74 Kashmir, 12, 17, 57, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66–7, 72–4, 223 kataks, 68 katb al-kitab, 207 Kaytaz, Amina, 116 Kenya, 29–37, 41–4, 54 Kesvani, Hussein, 205–6 Khache Phalu’s Advice on the Art of Living, 65–6 Khadijah, 213 Khan, Guz, 192 Khan, Hazrat Inayat, 15 Khan, Humera, 204 Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali, 171 Khan, Pir Vilayat, 15 Khan, Sadiq, 192 Khan, Saira, 205–6 khariji, 38 Khayaal Theatre Company, 167 Khidr, 168 khimars, 176 Khokhar, Amber, 191 khul’a, 211 khulafa’, 156, 187 khutbah, 68, 160, 181

267

INDEX

Kierkegaard, Søren, 185 kilim rugs, 81, 171 Kizimkazi Mosque, Zanzibar, 51 kokoshnik, 226 kora music, xv Korea, 226 Koutoubia Mosque, Marrakesh, 23 Ku Klux Klan, 8, 143 kufi hats, 42, 47 Ladakh, 57–61, 62, 63–8, 73–5 Ladakh Buddhist Association (LBA), 66–7 Ladies’ Kennel Association, 6 Lagos, Nigeria, 6–7 Lamu Island, Kenya, 29–37 Lang, Kathryn Dawn, 171 language privilege, 40 Lanjarón, Andalusia, 154 Laughing Buddha Weeping Sufi (Moore), 69 Lavapiés, Madrid, 145 Layla, 106 Lebanon, 128 Leh, Ladakh, 62, 66, 67–8, 74 Leiden, Netherlands, 178 Leigh, Vivien, 6 León, 128 lesos, 34, 48 LGBTQIA+ people, 168 Lhasa, Tibet, 61, 62, 65, 66 268

Libya, 128, 212 Lings, Martin, 181, 231 Liverpool, Merseyside, 178, 192 Lô, Cheikh, 17, 171 Lopchak caravan, 65 Lorde, Audre, 195 Losar, 68 ‘love jihad’, 67 Lowkey, 191 Lozang Gyatso, Dalai Lama, 62–3, 64 Lynn, Mahdia, 165 Maasai people, 29, 33, 39 madha, 147 madhhabs, 104, 200, 211, 215 Madinah, 99 madrasas, 31, 34, 36, 172 Madrid, Spain, 145, 152 Mahfouz, Sabrina, 193 Majnun, 106 Makkah, 15, 45, 99, 153, 167, 168, 173, 180 Málaga, Andalusia, 129, 136, 142, 145 malaria, 35 Malaysia, 104, 151, 153, 222 Malcolm X, 18, 45 Mali, 168 Man Like Mobeen, 192 Manali, Himachal Pradesh, 59 Mancha, La, Spain, 132, 145 Manhattan Transfer, 172

INDEX

mantilla, 226 Manzoor-Khan, Suhaiymah, 167 maqam, 136 Margarit, Yamila, 148 Maria, Tania, 17 Marrakesh Declaration (2016), 70 marriage, 24, 67, 118, 153, 159, 169, 197–9, 203–16, 222 Mary, mother of Jesus, 226 Maryland, United States, 3, 10–11 matanza, 148 matatu, 42–3 Mathnawi (Rumi), 106 Maulid, 35 Mauritania, xv, 45, 141 Mayan civilization, 134 Mazandaran, Iran, 101–9 Mecca, 15, 45, 99, 153, 167, 168, 173, 180 Medina, 172 Medinat An-Nur, xv, xvii meditation, 15, 84–8, 232 Medium, 165 mehndi, 208 Melbourne, Australia, 5–6 Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar (Ruete), 105 Mennonite, 226 mercy, 233 Methodism, 200 Mezquita of Cordoba, 126

microaggressions, 9 middle path, 51, 70, 187 Midnight Express, 162 migas, 148 Mighty Baby, 14–15 Milošević, Slobodan, 116 Minder, 205 Misquoting Muhammad (Brown), 170 miswaks, 152 mkate wa ufuta, 52 Modi, Narendra, 73 mojar, 148 Mola, Emilio, 137 Mombasa, Kenya, 29, 30, 41–4, 47, 206 monfíes, 138 Mongolia, 62 Monk, Thelonious, 17 Montagu, Edward Wortley, 178 monto, 98, 101 Moore, Daniel Abdal-Hayy, 69, 203 Moors, 125, 130, 131, 133, 134, 137, 148, 149, 151 Morcheeba, 82 Moriscos, 131–5, 149 Mormons, xvii Morocco, 14, 23, 44, 69, 141, 149, 159, 177, 178, 219 al-Mu’tamid’s tomb, 137 Quilliam in, 178 Spanish Muslim migration to, 130, 134

269

INDEX

Umayyad period (661–750), 128, 129 Morrisette, Alanis, xviii Mortadelo y Filemón, 154 Mostar, Herzegovina, 111–16, 123 motherhood, see under parenthood Mount Hira, 168 Movida Madrileña, La, 144 Mr Bean, 17 mu’adhdhin, 45 al-Mu’tamid ibn Abbad, King of Seville, 136, 137 Mudéjars, 129, 132, 133–4 Mughal Empire (1526–1857), 59, 64, 66 Muhammad, Prophet of Islam, 107, 147, 172, 173, 193, 197 on beauty, 107 caves, retreat to, 168, 173 children, 213 on deen, 197 divorce, 213 Gabriel, meeting with, 228 hadiths, 159, 172, 199–200 laughter, 69 madha on, 147 Maulid, 35 meditative seclusion, 232 on mehndi, 208 as ‘mercy to the worlds’, 233 on middle path, 70  

270

on privacy, 230 on al-Qarni, 234 on race, 45 seerah, 172 on sex, 199–200 Muhammad (Lings), 181 Muhammad ibn al-Habib, 14, 171 mulberries, 129, 133 Murad, Abdal Hakim, 182, 191 Murcia, Spain, 133, 152 Murray, Evelyn, 180 Muscat, Oman, 46 music, 14–15, 17, 24, 160, 171, 173, 177, 178, 184, 185, 192 Andalusian, 134, 137, 151 cultural appropriation, 13, 184 Movida Madrileña, 144 taboos against, 25, 192 Muslim Brotherhood, 143 Muslim Vibe, 168 muungwana, 35, 36 muzmatch, 205 Myanmar, 72 mzungu, 37–44, 47, 48, 49, 53, 54 Nahdi, Fuad, 30, 32 Nang Ma, 65 Naqshbandiyya, 150 narcissism, 11 nasta’liq calligraphy, 95

INDEX

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 13 Natural History Museum, Zanzibar, 50 Navarre, 128 Nazi Germany (1933–45), 8, 119 Negm, Mo, 191 Neighbours, 171 Netherlands, 8, 105, 178 New Christians, 131, 133 New Zealand, 161 NewsClick, 74 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 31 Nigeria, 6–7, 38, 159, 198 nikah, 207 niqab, 223 an-Nisa, 204 Norberg-Hodge, Helena, 68 Norouz, 94, 96, 105, 107 North Korea, 5 Northern Ireland, 3 Not Without my Daughter, 162 Nour, Tico, 143 Nungwi, Zanzibar, 51 Nurbakhsh, Javad, 231 Nyi-marnam-rgyal, King of Ladakh, 64 olive trees, 125–8, 157–8 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 101 Olivier, Lawrence, 6

Olympic Games, 116 Om mani padme hum, 75 Oman, 36, 46, 105 OOMK, 168 Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, 6 Oran, Algeria, 131 orphans, 79, 88, 212, 213, 246 Orthodox Christianity, 116, 117, 118, 226 Ottoman Empire (1299– 1923), 14, 104, 105, 112, 116, 178, 179, 182, 199 Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, 207 oyinbo, 38 Padum, Ladakh, 59, 61 paella, 148, 157 País, El, 146 Pakistan, 1, 23, 38, 60, 62, 159, 163, 164, 199, 204, 206 Palestine, 171, 181 Pampas, 134 parenthood, 210–11, 213, 232–3 Passage to India, A (Forster), 181 pastels de nata, 152 peineta, 226 People of the Cave, 193–4 Perry, Katy, 184 Persia, see Iran Persian language, 16

271

INDEX

Philip II, King of Spain, 131 Philip III, King of Spain, 133 Philippines, 222 Phoenicia (c. 2500–539 BC), 126 Phrygean scale, 136 physical touch, 120–21 Pickthall, Marmaduke, 180–81 Plantation of Ulster, 3 Plato, 195 Plaza Nueva, Granada, xv Plymouth Brethren, 219 Poetic Pilgrimage, 193 Poitiers, France, 128 Poland, 7, 193, 227 polo, 66 polyandry, 67 pornography, 201, 202 Portugal, 8 Prado, Abdennur, 144 prayers, 62, 67, 131, 159, 174, 176–7 Prevent scheme, 166 Private Eye, 16 privilege, 7–13, 24, 40, 54, 165 Puebla de Don Fadrique, Granada, 149 Puente del Tajo, Ronda, 138 Puertollano, Castilla–La Mancha, 142 puritanism, 198–200

qanats, 127 al-Qarni, Uways, 234 qasidahs, 14, 173 Qatar, 45, 222 qitara, 137 Quakers, 6 Quant, Mary, 225 quarantine, 232 Quilliam, Abdullah, 178–9 Quilliam Foundation, 167, 179 Qur’an, 24 Ahl-ul-Kahf, 193–4 Bismillahir-RahmanirRahim, 233 on eye contact, 204, 230 on interfaith relations, 70 invocations, xii on khulafa’, 156, 187 on modesty, 204, 227–8, 229, 230 on nations/ethnic groups, 1, 186 Pickthall’s translation of, 181 recitation of, 34, 96, 137, 172 on sex, 198 Surat an-Nur, 158, 227 talismans, xvii on veiling, 227–8, 229, 230 Quraysh tribe, 173

Qajar dynasty (1796–1925), 95, 105

Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyyah, 171, 213, 231

272

INDEX

racism, 7–11, 31 in Islamic countries, 45–6 Islamophobia and, 161–5 marriage and, 206 in Spain, 10, 136, 149–50, 154 in United Kingdom, 7, 9, 32, 162–5 Radhu, Abdul Wahid, 65 rahmah, 233 Rahman, Tariq, 199 Ramadan, 50–53, 54, 68, 147, 159, 168, 174, 177, 195, 230 Rashida, Muneera, 193 Rastafarianism, 221 Raúf, Onjali Q., 193 Reconquista (718–1492), 128, 129, 134, 135 Reeves, Keanu, 121 refugees, 9 Republic of Salé (c. 1624–68), 134 Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, 225 rGyal Khatun, Queen of Ladakh, 64 rGyang mda’ khang, Lhasa, 62 rhinoplasty, 93 Rhodus, Yahya, 182 Ricote Valley, Murcia, 133 Rihanna, 107 rihm, 233 Rinchana Bhotta, 63 Riyadha mosque and madrasa, Lamu Island, 36

Riz MC, 192 Roderick, King of the Visigoths, 128 Rohingya people, 72 Rolls-Royce, 6 Roma people, 4 Ronda, Andalusia, 138, 147, 234 Rosales, Los, 139, 149 Roundhouse Poetry Slam, 193 Royal Africa Society, 7 Ruete, Emily, 105 Rumi, Jalaluddin, 81, 106, 109, 159, 164, 173, 193 Rumi’s Cave, Willesden Green, 159–60 Runnymede Trust, 190 Russia, 105, 107, 226 Saddam Hussein, 18 Saga Dawa, 68 Saini, Vikram, 73 Sakinah bint al-Husayn bin ‘Ali, 229 Salah, Mohamed, 192 Salam Swipe, 205 Salama bint Said, 105 salat, 131 Salé Republic (c. 1624–68), 134 sampa, 60 Sangaré, Oumou, 17 as-saqiyya, 127

273

INDEX

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 114, 118–22, 223 Sarandon, Susan, xvi Saudi Arabia, 18, 22, 44, 146, 175, 217–18, 222 Sayyid Mansab, 36 School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 33, 46, 176 Scotland, 7, 169, 180 Scots-Irish, 3 SeekersGuidance.org, 203 seerah, 172 Semana Santa processions, 143 Senegal, 38, 149, 171 Sengge Namgyal, King of Ladakh, 67 Senussi, Ghyda, 212 Sephardic Jews, 119 September 11 attacks (2001), xviii, 175, 176, 236 Serbia; Serbs, 104, 113, 116, 117 Serranía de Ronda, Andalusia, 138 Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, 193–4 Seville, Spain, xvi, 132, 136, 137 sex, 197–203, 205, 207 Shadhiliyya, 135 Shah Jahan Mosque, Woking, 180, 181 Shah-Kazemi, Reza, 69 274

shahadah, 23, 181, 231 Shakespeare, William, 145 Shakir, Zaid, 213 shalwar kameez, 164, 221 Shamsie, Kamila, 193 Shari‘ah, 162 Sheikh al-Bilad Mosque, Lamu Island, 36 Shey, Ladakh, 63–4 Shi‘a Islam, 62, 64, 66, 118, 214 Shining, The, 90 Shomal, Iran, 94–109 Sierra Nevada, Andalusia, 126 Sikhism, 165 Silk Road, 61–2, 64, 71–2 silk, 129, 133 single-sex schools, 203 skin tone, 103–5 Sky, 168 slavery, 8, 10–11, 35–6, 49, 104, 235 Slavs, 130 smallpox, 178 smoking, xviii sMon-lam festival, 63 snorkelling, 49, 51, 78 social media, 168, 174 Solar Hijri calendar, 96 Soma monastery, Leh, 66 Somalia, 154, 159 Sonic the Hedgehog, 173 South Africa, 8 Spain, xi–xvi, 7, 8, 10, 40, 44, 99, 119, 121, 125–58

INDEX

Aguéli in, 181 Amnesty Law (1977), 138 arropado/a, 218 blonde hair in, 220 burkinis in, 224 Catholicism in, 128, 130, 135, 137, 143, 144–5, 149 Civil War (1936–9), 138 Franco period (1936–75), xv, 135, 137–42, 144 Inquisition (1478–1834), 130–31, 133, 135, 138, 148 Jewish people in, 119, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135 mantilla, 226 Moriscos, 131–5, 149 Movida Madrileña, La, 144 Mudéjars, 129, 132, 133 New Christians, 131, 133 olive trees in, 125–8, 157–8 paella, 148, 157 racism in, 10, 149–50, 154 Reconquista (718–1492), 128, 129, 134, 135 Semana Santa processions, 143 siesta, 147 Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 119, 120 Srinagar, Kashmir, 63, 66 Stanley, Henry, 179

Stanley, Robert ‘Reschid’, 179 Stansted, Essex, xi–xiv Stari Most, Mostar, 112, 113 Stoke Newington, London, 221 Stone Town, Zanzibar, 47–53 Stone, Martin, 14 stupas, 60 substance abuse, 11, 170 Sudan, 5, 154, 159, 217 suffering, 186 Sufism, xv, xvi, 14–16, 20, 26, 35, 44, 51, 64, 164 Angel of Death story, 60 Ba ‘Alawiyya, 37 beauty and, 106–7 Buddhism and, 57, 68–70 Chishtiyya, 15 dhikr, 15, 26, 44, 86, 127, 142, 171, 173, 189 ego, approach to, 187, 236 invisibility and, 234–6 materiality, non-attachment to, 81 muhasabah, 189–90 Naqshbandiyya, 150 poetry, 106, 183, 187, 215 saints, 34, 35–7, 187 Shadhiliyya, 135 veiling, approach to, 231 sugarcane, 141 suhur, 51, 177 Sunday Times, 6 sunnah, 147–8

275

INDEX

Sunni Islam, 62, 104, 118, 214 SuperSistersMag, 167 Surat al-Fatihah, xviii Surat an-Nur, 158, 227 Surrey, England, 230 as-Suyuti, 198 Suzuki, Shunryu, 69 Swahili, 29, 30, 33, 40, 43, 49, 53, 54 swastika icon, 66 Sweden, 181 Switzerland, 181 Syria, xv, 22, 142–3, 165, 225 T-V distinction, 121 taarof, 94 Tablighi Jamaat, 142 talaq, 211 Taliban, 68 Tanzania, 30, 39, 46–54, 150 Tao Te Ching, 15 taqiyyah, 131, 138, 147 taqwa, 228 Tariq ibn Ziyad, 128 Tasmania, 9 tawakkul, 186 Teach English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), 41 tegelmoust, 228 Tehran, Iran, 7, 93–4, 98, 102 Tell Mama, 161 terrorism, 5, 9, 71, 154, 161, 163, 164, 166–7, 174 276

Christchurch mosque shootings (2019), 161 Cox murder (2016), 165 September 11 attacks (2001), xviii, 175, 176, 236 Terrorism Act (2000), 166 Teruel, Aragon, 134 Tétouan, Morocco, 134 third culture kids, 3 This Is Woke, 167 Tibet; Tibetan people, 57, 59, 60–70, 71, 74–5 Tibetan Buddhism, 60–63, 64, 65, 66–70, 71, 74–5 TikTok, 73 Times, The, 143 tingatinga, 47 Tintin, 154 Tito, Josip Broz, 113 Toots and the Maytals, 17 toubab, 38 Tribe Called Quest, A, 17 Trump, Donald, 5 Tshe-dbang rab-brtan, King of Ladakh, 64 Tshebtan Namgyal, King of Ladakh, 66 Tuareg people, xv, 228 Tunisia, 44, 130 Turkey, 78–92, 225 al-turrah al-Sukayniyyah, 229 al-Tustari, Abu’l Hasan, 235

INDEX

Twiggy (Lesley Dawson), 225 Twitter, 72, 161, 168 Tyakshi, Ladakh, 63 ubru, 226 ugali, 53 Ulfa Aid, 159 Ulster, 3 ‘Umar, Rashidun Caliph, 234 ummah, 25, 26, 44, 45, 153, 199, 206, 237 ‘umrah, 175 Unitarian Christians, 117 United Kingdom, 159–95 anonymity in, 229–30 birth rates in, 212 Cox murder (2016), 165 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 9 Home Office, 167, 169 immigration laws, xi–xiv, xvi–xvii Iraq War (2003–11), 184 Islamophobia, 161–7 Prevent scheme, 166 Terrorism Act (2000), 166 United Nations, 20, 116 Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 126 United States, xi–xii, xiii African Americans, xv, 4, 9, 13 Black Lives Matter, xv

First Nations, 3, 8, 22 Great Depression (1929–39), 4 Iran, relations with, 93 Jim Crow segregation laws (1877–1965), 4, 8 migration to, 3 Muslim ban (2017), 5 September 11 attacks (2001), xviii, 175, 176, 236 slavery in, 10–11 University of Cambridge, 173 University of Exeter, 161 University of Granada, 145 Urdu, 23, 59, 65, 66 Uyghur people, 71–2 Uzbekistan, 168 Uzunguni, Dar es Salaam, 39 Valencia, Spain, 132, 148 Vaughan, Sarah, 17 vegetarianism, 17, 62 Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom, 32, 179 Vipassana silent meditation, 15, 69 Virgin Mary, 226 Visigoths, 128, 130, 135 Vitamin D, 104 voluntourism, 40 Vox, 135 Wahhabiism, 153

277

INDEX

Wales, 169 War on Terror (2001–), 167 Warsi, Sayeeda, 192 Webb, Mohammed Alexander Russell, 179 weddings, 207–8 West Africa Magazine, 7 Wetherspoon’s, 201 WhatsApp, 168, 203 white supremacy, 9, 39 White Tara, 64 Whiteman, Alice, 5–6 Whiteman, George, 6 Whiteman, Ian, 14–15 Whiteman, John, 5–6 Whiteman, Martin ‘Kaye’, 6–7 Whiteman, Marva, 7 Willesden Green, London, 159– 60 Williamson, Adam, 192 Wimbledon, London, 16 Winter, Timothy, 182, 191 Winwood, Stephen, 15 Wird al-Latif, 37 Woking, Surrey, 180, 181 Wolof, 38 Wonder, Stevie, 171 woofing, 79

278

wudu’, 122, 131 Xinjiang, 71 Yalda, 96 Yelli, 205 Yemen, 18, 35, 36, 44, 45, 127, 156, 165 yoga, 84–8 Yoruba people, 38 YouTube, 168, 206, 225 Yugoslavia (1945–92), 113 Yusuf, Hamza, xv, 182 zakat, 186 zambras, 137 Zangskar Valley, Ladakh, 57–61 Zanzibar, 46–54, 105, 199 Zawa ben Ziri, 129 zawiyahs, 15, 69 Zaytuna College, xv Zen Buddhism, 61, 69 Zizi Khatun, 64 Zoroastrianism, 163 Zumba, 177 Zwarte Piet, 105