‘You are already away from me,’ he said as if he could hear the future whining, as if he could see the future pulling at her hand. He watched her, he looked at her more than she looked at him. Cups of tea held her attention, smooth flawless plastic spoons.
‘No. No, I’m still here.’
They were together at this uncomfortable time of the day to wring whatever time they could, what was left. In an hour they would be engulfed by work and the voices of people, they would be part of a bigger churning whole, projects for her to hurry up and finish before she left, classes for him and the visit of Dr Fareed Khalifa from Stirling. They were writing a paper together which meant hours of discussion.
She said, ‘Yesterday when I spoke in Arabic to Fareed, I felt that home was close.’ Yesterday, she had met him in Rae’s office. He was short and energetic-looking with a beard and the habit of asking one question after the other. But she had not minded answering his questions, the curriculum vitae of her life. He had in turn told her about his wife who was a student, his three children who were in school. She had enjoyed talking in Arabic, words like insha’ Allah, fitting naturally in everything that was said, part of the sentences, the vision. How many times had she over the past days said in English ‘I’m leaving on Friday’, and the sentence normal and natural as it was to the people who heard it, had sounded in her ears incomplete, untruthful without insha’ Allah.
‘You were patient with all his questions,’ Rae said. ‘Most people aren’t.’
‘You’re not?’
‘No.’
‘Because you are secretive.’
He laughed and said, ‘What makes you say that?’
She said, ‘Something you said once. You and Yasmin were talking about how schoolgirls in France were not allowed to wear hijab. Do you remember? Yasmin was angry…’
‘Yes, I remember.’
She remembered the November afternoon and feeling glad that Yasmin, who was giving her a lift home, was talking to Rae, not in any hurry to leave. Not in a hurry to go home because Nazim was off-shore and it had struck Sammar then that the three of them had no one expecting them at home, only voices that came out of radios and television sets.
She talked about that day, finding a new past that was not shrouded in sleep. A recent past that could be pulled out, silk from a drawer, to admire and touch. ‘You said you liked hijab and I asked you why. It was the only thing I said the whole time…’
‘Yasmin doesn’t give you much chance to speak, does she?’
She frowned, ‘That’s not fair, she does… Anyway, I asked you why you liked it and you said because it is secretive. That is what you said.’
‘And that made you think that I am secretive?’
‘Yes…’
‘I was complimenting you,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you realise?’
She shook her head and looked out of the window at the winter sun on the dome of the Engineering building. The noise of the room, cutlery being moved, set out, the ventilator fan from the kitchen. If things were different, she would have smiled and asked, ‘Complimented me on what?’ and enjoyed the things he would have said. But she was afraid of confessions, emotional words. Uneasy. Meeting him, talking to him had become a need she was not comfortable with. Yesterday she had wondered if Fareed had sensed, had guessed from the way Rae looked at her, from the way she spoke. She envied Fareed because he was married and she was not, and marriage was half of their faith.
When she turned away from the window, one of the catering ladies was walking around spraying the tables with polish and wiping them with a cloth. There were more people in the room, vaguely familiar, reading newspapers, eating breakfast before they started work.
Something light to say. The tea is hot. Yasmin has a cold and she can’t take anything for it because she is pregnant. Diane’s mother is up from Leeds for a visit. Talk of work. Ask about his students, his best student, the man from Sierra Leone. He is finishing up his thesis. Does he have a date set for his viva, yet?
She spoke about the Azhar thesis that she was working on. She had promised him that she would finish the introduction before she left. She said, ‘A lot of the hadiths that are quoted have already been translated before, so I am working faster than I thought I would be. I am learning a lot, things I didn’t know before.’ Here in Scotland she was learning more about her own religion, the world was one cohesive place.
‘What things haven’t you come across before?’
‘One hadith that says, “The best jihad is when a person speaks the truth before a tyrant ruler.” It is not often quoted and we never did it at school. I would have remembered it.’
‘With the kind of dictatorships with which most Muslim countries are ruled,’ he said, ‘it is unlikely that such a hadith would make its way into the school curriculum.’
‘But we should know…’
‘The good thing,’ he said, ‘the balance is that you could know, that the information is there. Governments come and go and they can aggressively secularise like in Turkey, where they wiped Islam off the whole curriculum, or marginalise it like they did most everywhere else, separating it from other subjects, from history even. But the Qur’an itself and the authentic hadiths have never been tampered with. They are there as they had been for centuries. This was the first thing that struck me when I began to study Islam, one of the reasons I admire it.’
‘Why did you begin to study it?’
He said, ‘I wanted to understand the Middle East. No one writing in the fifties and sixties predicted that Islam would play such a significant part in the politics of the area. Even Fanon, who I have always admired, had no insight into the religious feelings of the North Africans he wrote about. He never made the link between Islam and anti-colonialism. When the Iranian revolution broke out, it took everyone here by surprise. Who were these people? What was making them tick? Then there was a rush of writing, most of it misinformed. The threat that the whole region would be swept up in this, very much exaggerated. But that is understandable to some extent because for centuries there had been a tense relationship between the West and the Middle East. Since the seventh century when the church denounced Islam as a heresy.’
Time was not generous. They looked at their watches at the same time. Only a few minutes to nine. People were leaving the room, from the window she could see students walking towards the buildings, going indoors. She said, ‘What are the other reasons that you admire Islam?’
‘It will have to be one reason for now, because there isn’t much time. There are a number of theories,’ he began and she thought, he is talking to me now like he talks to his students. She sometimes wished that she was one of his students, then she could listen to him for hours at a time.
‘… these theories explain why capitalism developed ultimately in Europe and not in other earlier civilisations which were more sophisticated. Civilisations like Muslim Spain or the Ottoman empire. One theory is that for capitalism to grow there must be an accumulation of wealth through inheritance that comes from dynasties and families surviving over a long time. But the sharia’s laws on inheritance and charity fragmented wealth so much that the necessary accumulation never took place. There was a blocking effect, like an internal thermostat or switch that stopped this excess. I think of it as a balance, something that kept things reasonable, steady. And now I have to rush because I have a class.’
After he left, she sat for a few minutes playing with the plastic spoon in her empty cup. Why was it that even though he said such positive things, she was not completely reassured. Months ago Yasmin had asked, ‘Are you hoping he would become a Muslim so you could get married?’ Hope that he would become, fear that he wouldn’t and then what? On the table there was scattered sugar melting in tea stains, particles bouncing towards the anonymity of the carpet or staying to cling gritty and sweet on her fingers and clothes.