Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

When people say that religion is only a crutch, I have to wonder what the only means, for I can’t imagine anyone would dispute that a crutch allows us to carry on the business of living, half hobbling but better than without it, while taking the weight off the wound to aid the process of healing. I know that it is invoked only as a metaphor, but it seems to me that metaphors are never only anything.

When I eventually turned to religion, after the long draw, when I sought out a god, I did so because I needed practical help right away. Religion was never far from me, but it was the defects and deficiencies of my relationship with Emily that finally sent me reaching for the love of God. I found in him, because I wanted to find it in him, what I could not find in Emily, what I had not found in England, in my home there, but what I had known once as a child in my village in Sylhet. Love that is earned or deserved is always suspect; the great observation on which Christianity is founded is that the greatest love cannot be earned or deserved. That is not an ethical rule but an empirical observation, a scientifically testable proposition, and on that rock an entire religion has been built, a magnificent cathedral of hope.

But you say it was Emily that drove you to God?

Do you know what a tug-of-war is?

Of course I know what a tug-of-war is! We did it at school, I replied.

Do you have to hesitate every time you say school?

What do you mean?

Don’t Etonians refer to school as college? he asked.

They call it school, just like everyone else, I replied.

Just like everyone else?

Come on. You were talking about coming to God, I said, ignoring the jibe.

Something rather puzzled me when I was a boy. On the title page or somewhere in the front matter of a book, they used to tell you a bit about the author. More often than not, included was the fact that the author went to this or that school. Mentioning university, I thought, was fair enough: In those days I had the notion that university was where education began and that school was disastrous. Today, mention of anything about an author seems to me to be an act of vanity or a concession to human curiosity. But to mention what school a child or an adolescent went to seemed very strange indeed. Take Down and Out in Paris and London. It says at the front that Eric Arthur Blair went to Eton. The man changed his name for the book cover, but you were told where he went to school.

I was very slow, continued Zafar. I don’t think it was until I got to college — to Oxford — that I began to understand that those chaps who mentioned their school weren’t talking about education in the sense I understood it, the stuff in books or the stuff you figure out yourself with pencil and paper and a pocketful of axioms. I got wind one day that some people thought I’d been a scholar at Winchester. When someone asked me directly, I remember the look of disappointment on his face when I said I hadn’t, that I’d gone to a state school. Why was he disappointed? After all, I’d got to Oxford and he knew I was doing well there.

I did not offer Zafar an answer. Instead, perhaps out of embarrassment, I reminded him that we’d been talking about what turned him to God and before that about Emily.

In a tug-of-war, he said, two teams of men — teams of boys — pull on a rope against each other.

I know.

You know this, but let’s fix the image. What you see is the whole assembly, a line of boys and rope, moving in one direction or the other. When you see the handkerchief, the red handkerchief, in the middle of the rope move in one direction, all you know is that the total pull is greater on that side than on the other. But what you can’t tell is which of the boys on that side is pulling the hardest. You can’t even tell if one or another of the boys is not doing a thing, is unnecessary. You can’t tell whether the winning side would still be winning with one fewer boy.

My first instinct is to say Eton, I interjected, but that sounds like I’m calling attention to the school I went to, so I say school instead.

Understood. My point is that a given effect can be overdetermined by causes. A number of things all together sent me looking for religion and I can’t parse them out.

But why Christianity and not Islam? Actually, I don’t want you to lose your thread — I still want to hear about meeting Emily.

Did you know, asked Zafar, that relationship counselors advise that the time to work hard at a relationship is when the going is good? The time to work on the roof is the summer.

Paying into the bank now to draw down later?

Ah, the banker speaking.

Is that what Meena and I should have done? I asked.

I don’t know the answer to that, replied Zafar. But I do know that I didn’t make much of an effort to discover Islam. It would have been a huge effort, of course. For one thing, I’d have had to get past all the drivel that’s published in those books that line the walls of East End shops selling Islamic materials, the shops adjoining mosques in London and elsewhere. Finding interlocutors who could actually speak in a language I understood, whose written word demonstrated a familiarity with the same questions I had, putting aside the matter of answers — that in itself would have required a great labor. Where were they? All this before 9/11. Nowadays, it’s easier. People who know a thing or two about Islam but can also write in English — modern intermediaries — they’re everywhere, and their books can be found , and the Internet makes it easier to find things out. But before 9/11, what did someone like me do? Which, by the way, raises the possibility that some of the young men and women now returning to Islam in droves might be doing so at least in part because Islam has become more accessible through better books and better speakers and not just, as everyone seems to maintain, because they’ve been politicized by the war on terror.

If you had your time again, you’d go deeper into Islam for answers?

If I had my time again, I’d believe in reincarnation.

I chuckled at that and so did Zafar. Religion has never preoccupied me, I have to say. My father’s faith, as I said, was a private affair, my mother abhorred all religion, though she reserved a special venom for Islam, and while I attended Anglican services at Eton, in the end I grew up like many, I think, without acquiring the taste for religion, organized or otherwise. It is perhaps this business of God that I struggle hardest to measure in Zafar’s story and that leaves me contemplating the prospect either that my aptitude for grasping such matters is lacking or, less pessimistically, that such matters as another man’s God and perhaps another man’s love inherently surpass understanding.

Zafar continued his account, returning to those days at Oxford, though not at first to that evening in the University Church of his first encounter with Emily.

He explained that in the beginning Christianity was convenient. At Oxford, he said, the Christian Union was organized, reliable, and always welcoming. I used to scan the Daily Information sheet on the college notice board for visiting speakers hosted by them, and I’d go along to some or other church or chapel to hear a Christian speaker. Yet for all the lectures I heard, what I took away was the simplicity of the Christian message of love. I was primed for it, of course — I knew that even at the time — for love had been in short order as I grew up and most of it compressed into a few years in a village in Bangladesh from a woman whose connection to me was denied until it was too late to be acknowledged, too late for the fact itself to give pleasure, not to mention the relief that could come from the explanation.