Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

One day my mother wanted to go and see a film at the cinema but my father didn’t. They argued about it and instead my mother went with Grusha and her husband. I didn’t like that: to stay a whole long evening with my father all by ourselves. He didn’t speak to me. There was a power cut so we sat in the moonlit garden. He with his drink and radio and I with nothing to do but look at our tall metal door and will my mother to walk through it. There was talk coming from the radio and military music among the static. My father didn’t walk indoors to the bathroom. Instead he stood up and peed into the flower bed. This upset me and he laughed, saying it was good for the plants. He gave me a sip of his drink and it tasted like perfume. I didn’t understand what the radio was announcing but it couldn’t have been anything cheerful because he became sullen again. It was as if I could read his thoughts and this made me anxious. I wanted to help him but at the same time I wanted to move away. I wanted to be her daughter, not his. Yet I empathised with him, I knew that he was uneasy about my mother and this, in turn, made me worry that she would not come back from the cinema. I went and stood by the door, leaning on the warm black metal, aching to run out and search for her. Years later, when Tony appeared on the scene, I spent many such evenings alone with my father. We never spoke about her but she was the tension between us, the new meaning of shame, a restrained lurid excitement. I felt that I was her accomplice because that metal alphabet on the walls of Tony’s villa beckoned me to a better life, the first rung on the ladder of opportunity, and my father was the one we both kicked away.

These dips into the past guzzled time. Three cupcakes for lunch and I drank my last mug of tea without sugar and milk. More people were coming into the café carrying their Christmas shopping; I should leave to make room for them to sit. Instead I looked out of the window and saw the girl in hijab who had come with Oz to my talk on Monday. She was crossing the street with the calmest of expressions. Most likely she had not heard yet about Oz’s arrest. The belt of her coat was undone and her purple Uggs looked like they were brand new. She saw me and smiled a little, like there were no hard feelings between us, like there could be a beginning. Behind her two bearded men walked in the same direction. This was a higher than usual rate of Muslim sighting for our small town. It was Friday of course and they were heading to the mosque. I thought of Oz missing this prayer and of Malak praying for his release.

On the way out of the café, I threw the pro-life leaflet into the bin. A friend once said to me, ‘You’re not the first or last woman to have had an abortion. Get over it.’ But I was a Sudanese woman or at least, when I learnt the facts of life, I was preparing to be one. No matter how much I changed when I came to Britain, changed my behaviour and my thoughts, there would be layers of me, pockets, membranes and films that would carry these other values and that other guilt.

The thought of guilt led me back to Oz. What if he wasn’t innocent? How could I be sure of anything? Sit on the fence and be neither this nor that, believe in everything, believe in nothing. Know only excess and hunger. Too much sugar in my blood and a need for a roof over my head. The repairs to my flat were likely to take weeks, delays because of Christmas, delays because it was winter. Until then I would be a nomad, living in temporary accommodation and on the weekends with Tony or friends. The afternoon sun was hidden behind more snow clouds. It was time for me to head back to the university.

Iain walked into my office and closed the door behind him. He said, ‘I’ve just had two officers in my room interviewing me about Oz Raja.’

Why Iain? Because even though he was head of the department, he was Oz’s tutor too. I should have expected this.

‘What did they want?’ I wanted my voice to sound casual. Business as usual, as if this was another administrative issue, serious and urgent, but not out of the ordinary. I noticed that Iain’s hair was even bigger than usual today. He must have been a Duran Duran fan back in the eighties.

‘They wanted to know if Oz had been behaving suspiciously. They wanted to know if he drinks alcohol.’

‘He doesn’t.’

‘They wanted to know if he has a girlfriend.’

I paused for a second and then I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ Why drag the girl into this?

Iain shifted his weight. He pressed his back against the door. ‘They wanted to know whether he had always worn a beard.’

On another day, on another occasion we could have been laughing. All of this was the stuff of jokes. ‘Yes,’ I replied. I noticed Iain’s shirt was striped and his tie was striped, navy bars straight and slanting.

His voice rose a pitch higher. ‘They wanted to know why in the reports we submitted about the students vulnerable to radicalisation, Osama Raja’s name never showed up?’

I had written these reports. Two of them. I had written them well and I had written them with care. But I had not written them about Oz.

‘I had everyone backing out of this saying they won’t spy on their own students.’ Iain spoke more softly. ‘You volunteered for the training course. You wrote these reports. So what happened?’

He was right, hardly any academic member of staff wanted the added task of monitoring their Muslim students. ‘This is Scotland, not Bradford,’ was one of the comments, and ‘We don’t have enough Muslim students to justify the time and effort.’ I remembered Fiona Ingram saying, ‘I will not shop my students and end up losing their trust in the process!’

But I had no qualms. I had figured out, long ago, that it paid to do what the competition found difficult, distasteful or even just a waste of time. Besides, we had to show, in addition to our publications, that we were undertaking Continuing Professional Development. Attending this training course would count as such. It was held at another university and I went by train. It was only as I gazed out of the window at the Scottish green and shimmering grey sea, that I admitted to myself that I was doing this to distance myself. From Hussein and from the titles of my papers. The two consultants who led the workshop were ‘industry specialists’ and not academics. It was assumed that we agreed with the effectiveness of the strategy to prevent radicalisation and by extension another terrorist attack. I remember thinking, ‘If you say so.’ I remember knowing that I was a hypocrite; I remember the reach to grab yet another opportunity. But the awareness was banal and familiar, like the fact that I was overweight, another fault I could live with.

Later, I applied what I had learnt at the course and referred two students. One of them was an international post-grad who was skipping classes. The UK Border Agency had already suspended one Scottish university’s licence to sponsor overseas students — so it was right that I should expose any irregularity. The other student, son of a halal butcher in Glasgow, was a nasty little number. Misogynist, anti-Semitic and homophobic, he had no qualms in sharing with me his extremist views. Instead of trying to argue some sense into him, I let him speak his mind and ended up writing a report that swarmed with details. There was no point in attending a training course if I was not going to put what I had learnt into practice.

I opened my mouth to explain but Iain went on, ‘Why couldn’t you identify Oz as being at risk, when now the police have him in for supporting websites that recruit Chechen Jihadist fighters who are linked to al-Qaeda? And what on earth were you doing in their house when he was arrested?’

The last question was the easiest to answer. To start with my research on Shamil was the sturdiest of footholds. To talk of the snow, their house, their connection to Shamil soothed me. He heard me out without interrupting.