Free The Road from Damascus by Robin Yassin-Kassab Page A

couldn’t all be right. In fact, that none of them could be.
    Belief X cancels belief Y. Leaving zero belief. Religion can’t last much longer. It had developed in deserts and villages. Here it’s an immigrant thing. It can’t survive the cosmopolitan city.
    Things looked like that then.
    Of course there were times when, because of his name, because of the expectations of neighbours and acquaintances, it became necessary to visit mosques. London mosques. This usually meant the suffocating lethargy of suburban living rooms, or maybe the neon vacancy of a disused warehouse. There were calligraphic plates on the walls instead of triple ducks in flying formation, but behind them there was mildewed wallpaper or damp pocked plaster. Instead of dry air swirled by ceiling fans, the stagnant soupy stuff of central heating. The odour of besocked feet instead of frankincense. It didn’t work. It didn’t fit.
    The mosques smelled of feet and mist and moss and wood. Wheezes and groans invited the faithful and atheists alike to prayer. Sami yawned back tears, shivering from his teeth to his anus, and settled and rocked on thin folded legs. An old man croaked the Qur’an in an Arabic deprived of a third of its consonants. Someone half coughed, like an engine failing on a frosty morning. And among the nostril noises, palate clicks and throat-clearings of older, heavier bodies, Sami in his isolation did in fact pray, blowing the time faster through a tiny hole in his puckered lips, but only for the prayer to end.
    How long it took. And Islam taking its time to die, oozing like blood in a geriatric’s hardened veins, sluggishly, soporifically, dripping and dropping away from an unseen wound.
    Accompanied by Mustafa, however, these mosque visits were also a kind of tourism, a glimpse into other people’s slightly sad, slightly exotic lives, a glimpse which reinforced the stable comforts of his own. Crouching at the back of a wintry English mosque, touching his forehead to the musty colour–bled thread of carpet, was for Sami what a stroll through dusty farmland might have been for a gentleman of the Raj, what a visit to a refugee camp would be for a portly American journalist. He was slumming it, in among cringing Old World reptiles, and Mustafa snorting quietly at his side, making him snigger, a wink and a ludic nudge after the prayers as they sat down to eat. The irony was delicious. The storing up of joke details for later in the car. The unsuspecting earnestness of the godbothered. They were – Traifi senior and junior – disguised by curling hair and thick eyebrows, by black eyes, wrapped in the mufti of their own faces. They had superior knowledge, so it seemed.
    It was an entirely different matter when the mosque invaded his home. When his mother had visitors and dared to roll out her prayer mat with them. Mustafa slammed doors and played Egyptian dance music as loud as the stereo would allow, screamed ‘For God’s Sake!’ – in English, so that it wasn’t an invocation of the supernatural but an entirely realist expression of bad humour. Sami, swirling in a vertigo of shame and self-loathing, observed his mother from the height of his disdain. The worst of it was, he felt an urge to jump.
    There was certainly something attractive about the ritual movements Nur made, standing, bowing, crouching and kneeling according to an invisible logic. Despite Mustafa, and in contrast to her usual flustered manner, she performed each section of the prayer at a leisurely pace. Bangs and crashes failed to make her flinch. It was as if she was deaf. To Sami’s eyes – sickened, fascinated –a halo of peace and slowness surrounded her. It was with incomprehension he turned from her to the window, and saw rain, cars, people scowling under umbrellas. His father’s noise, the TV, and then back to his mother looking intently in front of her, moving her lips, her back straight, her fingers outstretched. There were conflicting worlds in