Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

The first time ever I saw Emily, said Zafar, not just the name but Emily herself, was an evening years before the encounter at the South Asia Society in New York, before my stint as a banker, and before, still, my time at Harvard, which is to say, before I had been screened, vetted, sanitized by associations, and made presentable. It was in November 1988, during my second year at Oxford, at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin.

In those days, when I had no money for concert tickets, even for concerts given by university ensembles, I would search the notice boards for performances, and on the day before the first night, I’d go along to the venue to see the final rehearsal, which in the normal course was an uninterrupted run-through of the program and was usually scheduled in the evening, presumably in order to avoid clashes with lectures and tutorials.

On the evening I first saw Emily, I had made my way from college, down Turl Street and onto the High, in fog-soaked November darkness, and came up to the gate of the church, half expecting the doors to be closed to the public. There were not many venues in Oxford for classical music. Somewhat grander performances were held in the Sheldonian, but otherwise Queen’s College chapel, the Holywell Music Room, and the University Church were the main settings. I rather liked the Holywell Music Room, which I had read somewhere was the oldest purpose-built music hall in the world. It had struck me that the claim was the height of presumption — might there not be a music hall in the Middle East, in India, or somewhere else that was older? — until I was forced to concede my own presumption to think that the author of the claim had meant to say Europe and not the world. Most human disputes, one might speculate, ask us to choose not between arguments proceeding from empirical observations about the world but between competing sets of bare assumptions.

I knocked on the front gate of the University Church. If the vicar answered, he would let me in — he knew my face — but to anyone else I’d explain that I left my scarf on one of the pews somewhere. Once inside, I would go off to the side and the musicians would begin their business, quickly forgetting me.

I waited for an answer and then tried the door. It was unlocked. I found a seat not far from the stage, in the shadow of a stone column but with a clear view of the chancel, where the musicians would play.

If the musicians didn’t arrive immediately, I thought, I could sit and consider again the figure whose body adorns the cross, this fellow who had fascinated me ever since the first encounter in the morning assembly of an Anglican primary school in central London, so that now, more than a decade later, I often came to this church, a short walk from college, to look at him, sometimes even to attend services. The vicar, a terribly nice man whose sermons were sprinkled with the phrase in a very real sense —as if there was any other sense — probably thought I was a lost sheep taking timid steps to return to the flock. Perhaps I underestimated his wisdom. But in those days, when I sat and looked at the crucifix, it was not love that burned in my heart but growing rage. What is the beginning of rage, the beginning of anger? Not dislike, but love. It is possible that rage was always there and that his lordship, Jesus Christ, was only the focus of my rage. That would be in keeping with the fellow’s self-sacrificing character; he might have offered himself for anger, not love, for all the rage that came his way. Have you read Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair ?

No, but I’ve seen the movie.

Throughout the novel, the narrator, Greene’s alter ego, Maurice Bendrix, is angry with God, even when he doesn’t believe in him. His anger magnifies when it transpires that he’s lost the woman he loved. There is a passage — near the beginning, I think — in which he says that love and hatred come from the same gland, that they can even produce the same actions. Well, that’s a novel, a story, but it’s worth a thought that anger is no less God-given than love. That’s the appeal of Catholicism. They have a calculating honesty, the Catholics, marshaling the base resources, far from denying them; the Anglicans with their carrot cakes, their village fetes, raffles for the new church roof, and teas with the vicar — they have no respect for anger.

You’re not a Christian, are you? I asked Zafar.

Do you mean: Have I been received into the Church of Rome?

Well?

I used to think, said Zafar, that Islam wasn’t there for me when I needed God.

Zafar’s answer was less than direct. Meena had remarked on this indirectness the day of his return into our lives. An air about him left one with the sense not to pry, an understanding that he would share only what he volunteered. It was the odd politeness-cum-formality that carried this off, which in our youth I mistook, I think, merely for an aspect of the charm he had and not as a device to keep the distance. Was it not the formality of those Oxford lawns, and the intimation of design, that warned you to keep off the grass?

But there was another dimension now, something different, edgier. I had witnessed episodes of aggression before, the skinheads on the walk near Portobello Road, for instance, but they were contextual, weren’t they? What was new was the presence of something I won’t try to capture in a single phrase — it was not the threat of aggression. But one sensed it about him even if one might have intuited it in the way of an unknowing creature.

The ritual, continued Zafar, the recitation of the Koran, the ignorance of the meaning of words, the choreography of standing, kneeling, and falling prostrate, its unthinkingness, all offended my mind, which demanded reasons and explanations. The only book my parents ever gave me was on Eid when I was sixteen. My mother must have picked it up in one of those shops in the East End, where they sell tapes of Koranic recitation, books about Islam, and varieties of calendars with images of the Kaaba, and where the doors to the shops are always left open so that, as you come up the street, you cannot avoid the electrically distorted caterwaul of a Pakistani mullah. The book was written in English and it was about how Islam predicted science. In fact, I think it was actually called How Islam Predicted Science. It was full of the most idiotic assertions.

But the gift did show that my parents had in one respect understood something, that I needed words. Do you know the story of Muhammad and Mount Jabal al-Nur?

No.

About the cave called Hira?

I know that. Broadly speaking.

Muhammad was a good man who would retreat to this cave to pray and meditate. And it was during one of these periods of isolation that he was visited by the archangel Gabriel, who commanded him to read from a document. Read! exhorted the angel. Muhammad was illiterate and, trembling before this supernatural apparition, he replied, I do not know how to read. Once again, the archangel commanded him Read! and again, Muhammad answered that he could not read. And the archangel, raising his voice, commanded: Read in the name of your Lord who created, Created man from a clot of blood. Read!

And Muhammad began to read. The first miracle of Islam was that an illiterate man came to read, so it would be wrong of me to say that Islam did not value the written word. But my God would be a God I could read, one to consider and in a language I understood. Wasn’t meaning, I thought, thought once, the whole point of the divine? I believed that Islam’s response to the pursuit of meaning was not to provide answers but to drill and drum men into forsaking meaning for ritual and habit. I believed such things when I thought that meaning counted for more than the rewards of ritual.