Gravel Heart(55)

My father was a religious scholar. He had been a Koran school teacher for many years before he went to teach in the government school. He would have started teaching in Koran school when he was a boy himself, once his teachers discovered that he had an understanding of the word of God and the intelligence to learn it and instruct the little ones in its power. It was not difficult to recognise the ones who were gifted in this way, and for some of them, knowledge in the word of God was a blessed route for their scholarly talents. They became local legends and were celebrated by ironic and teasing tributes as they walked the streets. My father Maalim Yahya was a young person like that. People were teasing him about his learning when he was still a teenager, and in time he became a man of renown, and someone whom others always pushed forward to lead them in prayer. It was a tribute humble people without treasure or power bestowed on one of theirs. Lead us in prayer and we will honour you. When Maalim Yahya led prayers he recited the longest and most complicated suras without a hitch or a stutter and with perfect recall, as far as anyone could tell, and when invited to do so, he would explain chapter and verse of any theological issue a member of the congregation cared to put before him, and he would do so with unanswerable fluency. Such talent could only be a gift from God.

Not only was he a scholar, he was of the generation whose entire understanding of the world was informed by religion and its metaphors, which is not to say that he was an ignorant man with a medieval cast of mind although he did believe in the existence of evil as a force that preyed on human life, in the form of malevolent spirits who roamed the air and besieged the frail and the indecisive. He knew and cared nothing, or almost nothing, about Europe’s learning and triumphs, nor was he interested in its history of frenzied wars and conflicting nationalities, and so he would not have known to turn to them for historical explanations of the world we lived in. He knew the results of Europe’s violent will, as the whole world did. Nor did he pay much attention to the doings of other religions or peoples, which to him were distant crowds of strangers going about their incomprehensible business on the twilight edges of the world. Nothing that they did mattered to anyone but themselves. When an explanation was needed for a dilemma or an event, there was always an appropriate example to be found in the life of the Prophet or his companions or in the tales of the prophets who had preceded the Nabi, sala-lahu-wa’ale. In addition there was always wisdom and illumination in the reflections of the endless stream of scholars who followed from the days of the Prophet. As my father used to say: we thank God for His gracious mercy in making such guidance known to us.

Even stories Maalim Yahya told to us his children were always ornamented by reference to religious wisdom or were episodes from the life of the Prophet. He spoke about these matters without insistence, as if these were only innocent reflections circulating in his mind or something that had just occurred to him in the course of the conversation, not as if he was trying to force something down our throats, which he was. I was absorbed by his limitless knowledge, which was capable of addressing any issue I asked him about, and doing so in unhurried detail accompanied by several examples. Sometimes I hoarded a question for a day or two, until I found a moment when my father was in the right frame of mind to answer, not tired or preoccupied or suffering one of his monstrous headaches. For then I knew I would get one of his lush detailed answers rather than something curt.

Like what? Do you mean, what kind of question? Once I asked him what his name meant. I was going through an obsession with the meaning of names at the time. My father liked questions like that because of the way they could be opened out. He told me: Yahya is the name of the prophet that the nasrani call John, your mother’s name Mahfudha means someone who is protected by God, your sister’s name Sufia means someone with a clean heart, like a sufi. He told me that I was named after Abdalla ibn Masud, the shepherd boy who became the sixth convert to Islam. He told me how that untutored shepherd boy became the greatest scholar of the Koran and its most esteemed reciter and interpreter during the Prophet’s lifetime. He told me about the time Abdalla ibn Masud spent in Kufa and about the other scholars he met there and their teachings and contributions to scholarship. That is what belief can do, he told me, it can confound and astound the ways of men, and raise the most humble to great and noble achievement. You are named after a great man, he told me.

It was strange that Maalim Yahya ended up teaching in a government boys’ primary school because he did not go to that kind of school himself and had not studied in the Roman alphabet. It was at first a matter of fulfilling his obligations to the community, which required him to undertake this duty. He would otherwise have fed his family by teaching in the Koran school for all his days and lived the ascetic life of a religious teacher without complaint, accepting the tiny amounts of money parents paid for their children to be taught the words of God and the handouts and gifts when they came from wherever they came. That is how scholars lived. To Maalim Yahya, the life of a religious scholar could only be one of dedicated vocation, one of humility and respectable poverty. In time, my father came to be grateful for the government school-teacher salary, which he collected steadily every month and which enabled him to provide unexpected decencies for himself and for us. His real work was learning and transmitting the word of God and the knowledge of His commands. It was work he was dedicated to and which gave him a sense of fulfilment. All the boys he taught in government school attended Koran school as well or had done so in the past, as we all had to. They already knew what the school syllabus required him to teach them, but he taught it to them anyway. What harm could it do? Everyone got very high marks in his class, otherwise what kind of Muslim boys were they?