In the Light of What We Know (25 page)

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.

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.

Christians have something, I thought, continued Zafar. Christianity, as I say, grasped a fundamental truth of love, namely, that love cannot be earned or deserved. This idea moved me terribly, this God who loved, a break against the lonely tides and the lurking anxiety of a whole life of homelessness. When I sat in those churches and looked up at Christ on the cross, I wondered, despite myself—however much the hallmark image might repel another instinct in me—I wondered whether somewhere ahead on the journey this man might join me; the thought of a companion in him reassured me, if he was indeed what he might yet be. Yet for all the power of this idea, I already knew how far I could not go. I could never believe I had a life
in
Christ, never think to love others
through
him. Even as I saw the virtue of forgiveness, I knew that to relinquish my passionate, undirected grievances would be to abandon myself. Whatever company he, He,
*
might offer, there were lines in the sand. Practical matters stood in the way. I could never, for instance, give myself over to the ritual of Holy Communion, of eating the body of Christ and drinking the blood of Christ, not because of some revulsion at the cannibalistic barbarism but because the metaphor was never convincing
even as metaphor.
Most of all, when I touched the oak pews and ran my fingers over the knitted covers of the cushions and kneelers, when I gazed at the stained-glass images of English saints, when I considered the words of the Nicene Creed, it was as apparent to me as the alienation that made me, that kept me at the edges of things, that here was a very local rendering of a religion that had come from a part of the world that the proud Englishman could only look down upon. The Christianity before me was English, white, with Sunday roasts and warm beer and translation into the English language. Even the Bible at its most beautiful, the King James version, was in a language that asserted and reassured its readers of their power. Little wonder that schoolboys at Eton could sing of Jerusalem being builded here in this green and pleasant land. Such high praise: a pleasant land. The English Christ was of here and now, immanence on the village green, with barely a word or symbol in the liturgy and ritual transcending northwestern Europe, still less this world or universe, as partisan as the embedded journalist. He was an English God under an English heaven.