Free The Road from Damascus by Robin Yassin-Kassab

Islam. In silence. With immovable determination.
    By the time Sami entered high school Mustafa had grudgingly accepted that the boy needed to know something of the patriarchs. For the sake of Sami’s secular education he gulped back his discomfort. These Semitic myths, after all, were essential to the literary traditions Sami would study. So Mustafa delivered his interpretation of religious pre-history. He explained that, as with Oedipus or Achilles, there was psychopathic drama in the lives of the heroes, a drama in its essence no different from that of today’s Speakers’ Corner soapbox types, or of the schizophrenics following mysterious itineraries through the city’s streets. The scriptural heroes heard the same internal mumblings and insinuations, but as they belonged to an epic age, with epic genres, these were granted mythic status. It was pre-psychological, pre-ironic. There was high seriousness everywhere, blowing out of the desert and rolling up from the sea. There was prophetic articulation of destiny. There was the terror of God’s voice.
    This raged, for instance, in the ears of Ibrahim. Where monotheism started: in the ears of Ibrahim and at the neck of Ismail. Mustafa told the story as he thought it deserved to be told, at hysterical speed. Ibrahim and Ismail. Another father and son duo. The old man despite his barren dotage begging God for a child, and the Voice after the passage of tears and time saying Yes, and the man bringing the boy up as the apple of his glinting eye, his only heir, only to hear the same Voice ringing in his raddled brain, telling him the unsayable, the obscene. Commanding him to cross dust fields and lakes of rock to a certain craggy mountain top, there to bind the perfect child, to sharpen the stone, to cut the slim throat. To wet the rock with his son’s lifeblood.
    The Voice relented, but the man had been ready to do its murderous bidding, that was the point. The boy too. The boy who, against both instinct and logic, helped prepare the place of slaughter.
    The foundational event of three religions. Attempted murder. A proud-humble refusal of logic. It filled Mustafa with righteous anger.
    ‘The voice in my head is God, especially when it urges me to perversity. Especially when it asks me to kill what I love. From now on I will ignore human law. From here henceforward I will fuck up the world for the sake of the unseen.’
    He raised his voice when Nur was near. Let her hear! Let her learn!
    Sami heard of the prophets from this voice that vanquished them. He learnt religion through the prism of civil war. Qabbani versus Qur’an. Mustafa’s bookish noise, and the unspoken but resistant verses of the Book. These were the opposing camps of Sami’s childhood.
    It didn’t take long for him to choose his side. He couldn’t accept a supernatural truth. If he had chosen one, his mother’s for example, he’d have had to deny all the others. And there were so many others. Just on his bus route to school there were as many one-and-only truths jostling for attention as there were fast food outlets. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists. The Nation of Islam in natty suits and carved hair. Rastafarians, both black and (absurdly) white. Anglicans, sagely complacent despite the colonization of their churches. Hare Krishnas singing while lapsed Catholics wolfed their free curry. Sikhs with daggers and briefcases. Freemasons with briefcases only. A Hindu incarnated as the bus conductor bowing inwardly to the elephant god. Scientologists offering personality tests. Grinning Discordians. A Sufi roadworker at his drill, pruning the rose garden within. Rebirthers. Crystal healers. Buddhists of the latest version. To name but some. All of whom had found the exclusive answer.
    Sami smiled from the rocking top-deck seat. All these people had to do was to stop and talk to each other and listen carefully and reflect for a moment. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to realize that they