Iron bars of rain enveloped Ishaq. Running for cover, he felt their weight batting at him. Looking to the horizon he took in heady cumulus clouds laden, ready to dump their load onto an already dank university campus. The sky spread a grey-blanketed pall over already leaden buildings. Ishaq found this most London of hues a comfort; far preferable to those rare, hot, and somehow inappropriate summer days. No, London was better in a nice restrained grey, like a regal elderly statesman. Less of a stygian gloom than the palette of the estate but nevertheless muted and understated. Ishaq liked grey. He lived in grey. There was contentment in grey.
He reached the entrance of his university’s administration building. Standing in the portico, within the shadow of one of the giant Doric columns, Ishaq fumbled around in his backpack for a hastily-scribbled post-it note. Once retrieved, he checked the room number of his final year tutor.
Ishaq had gained admission as they raised tuition fees. With the money saved from living at home, and summers working at a call centre, he could just about make ends meet. Get through the years, keep the plates spinning without a crash or smash. His parents had always talked about university. It was a given. An article of faith that education solved all problems. It was the match that lit the generator of material wellbeing and security. When they had come to the UK higher education was free and it made their struggle worthwhile, knowing their children could work their way up. Now he felt like the drawbridge was being raised.
He made his way to the east wing, climbed the winding terrazzo stairs and located his tutor’s door. On first inspection it looked like an impressive hardwood, in accordance with the grandeur of the building. On closer scrutiny, Ishaq noticed that the door was blistering and cracking in places, and in fact peeling away in others like chapped skin. He pulled on one strand of the hardwood veneer, felt it ease away and reveal cheap chipboard. Ishaq caught at another section. The door opened. Professor Harrell saw Ishaq looking slightly abashed, with a sliver of hardwood veneer in his hand.
‘I do wish you students would just come in, rather than insist on stripping my door of all its dignity. No time for gawping, come on.’
A harassed-looking man, constantly pushing his unkempt hair one way then the other, Professor Harell always acted like he was late for his own funeral. He had been Ishaq’s tutor for a while, although they met intermittently. This suited them both fine. Don’t bother them and they won’t bother you.
The door opened onto a room a little bit larger than Ishaq’s bedroom. Just enough to hold a wooden desk, a couple of haggard chairs, and a wall-to-wall bookcase haphazardly packed with papers. A likely indication of this tutor’s disheveled mind; though, in this digital age, Ishaq found that musty smell of old papers reassuring. They held the ready nostalgia of recorded history and the reclamation of minds long gone. But then it was not his history and nor were they related minds. This whole institution, its architecture, its discussions, its concerns, always reminded him how the West culturally and romantically traced the total lineage of human knowledge and wisdom back to the Romans and Greeks.
The decision to study History had been a difficult one. Friends of his parents would raise eyebrows or ask abrupt questions of what their son was up to. It was axiomatic to his parent’s generation that getting a university education involved studying something of substance, something that had a direct link with job prospects. There was so much risk in migrating, and the future so uncertain, that you needed skills that were easily transferable. Abilities rooted in the real world, to do with things you could feel and manipulate. Doing, not thinking. Action, not prevarication. Competencies that were physical, not incorporeal. Ideas were too abstract and the subject of whimsy. They were beholden to extraneous judgement, and only as good as contacts, and any assurance bred-by-birth, allowed. The ability to make money from ideas fed on distant audiences and inaccesible networks was a charmed confidence trick that they did not possess the guile for.
‘Excuse the mess. Come in Ishaq. Quickly. Take a seat.’ The professor took one of the chairs and indicated another, moving a bundle of yellowing papers.
The professor settled on the other side of the desk and Ishaq went to take his seat, having to evict one final book.
‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ the professor noted. ‘Have you read it?’
‘Yea, good book. A classic,’ Ishaq said, as he mirrored the other man’s nodding. ‘Is everything ok? I don’t believe that we had anything in the normal schedule.’
Sitting with one leg over the other, the professor wrung his white liver-spotted hands. Like a spry gymnast preparing for action, thought Ishaq. Often this could look like nerves but Ishaq thought the man was the victim of an energetic and overactive mind, what with his constant fidgeting and irregular nodding while talking.
‘Yes, everything is fine, don’t worry…unless there’s something you want to tell me?’ The professor stared.
Ishaq shook his head slowly and frowned, embarrassed by the ensuing silence, feeling that he was at a confession, prompted by a preceptor rather than a pedagogue. ‘Uhh…no…nothing that comes to mind. You called me in…’
The professor continued with an attempt at an appraising stare. Something about the way the man was trying to look grave whilst lost in an oversize orange jumper, pilling from age, made him want to laugh.
Professor Harrell said ‘Ok…well…Look, I’ve been meaning to have a chat to you about your future plans. Do you know what you want to do after you graduate?’
Now this sounded like Mum or Dad talking. What about the future? Yea, what about it? He had romantic ideas of university as the opportunity to think and analyse and explore; they saw it as more of a passport to a secure livelihood, but this was all guesswork. This journey was just an idea that had never been tested. One part conjecture, another part founding mythology. He did accept the need to be more calculating. Be responsible, earn money. Cold decisions were required, not quixotic ideas. When applying for degrees he had flirted with the sciences and engineering, but had no interest in becoming a doctor or staring down at people’s manky teeth. The prohibition on usury ruled out banking. He even looked at pharmacy, but the idea of that was soul-destroying. Yea, the final choice was a bit carefree but the only opportunity to study something fascinating. One fleeting window in a lifetime, one narrow chance, that had flown so quickly that here he was now, in his final year. Resigned to applying for jobs and entering that so-called real world.
‘Well…I’m not too sure. I’ll probably go through the milk round, see what’s out there.’
‘Anything else?’ The professor’s eyes widened.
Ishaq shook his head and pursed his lips, ‘No…not really…should there be?’
‘We, the department and I, have kept an eye on you…and think you have promise. I wanted to talk to you about the possibility of staying on.’
Ishaq, slumping in his chair, straightened up. ‘To do what?’
‘Masters, Research, a Phd track maybe?’
He had mastered the art of low expectations yet this felt different, it piqued his interest, but then surprises were not always a gift . ‘Why me?’
‘Well, we are getting a lot of funding for more research on the Muslim community in Britain, and as a promising student, presumably with germane experience, I thought I would see what you think.’
If this is what patronage is, there’s always a premium to be paid, thought Ishaq. ‘So I would be the token Muslim guy? Great, what would the work exactly entail?’
‘No, no, no! You’ve been mentioned because of the quality of your work and dissertation this year. As for the work, well, that would be what we would decide together. There’s not enough that has been done on the history of Islam in Britain, reform movements, leadership, the media, mosque development, development links to activities overseas. The list is endless. I think you would find it interesting as it seems to be in line with your elective choices.’
The venerable Prof was right; it was interesting. Social and economic shifts, groups uniting and dividing, ideologies prospering and declining. It was so engrossing. He couldn’t help comparing what he had learned here to his own community. It was as if he was experiencing history at an accelerated pace, the peculiar awareness that he was both an observer and participant. Some lefty students maybe dreamt to be a part of it. He saw their romanticisation of the downtrodden, the allure of a cause. As if he had been given a mysterious gift. If only they knew the truth of it. A cocktail of race and class struggle was begetting an inchoate future, abutted by periodic violence. So many questions but no time to sit down and think. He wanted some sense of understanding. His own perceptions. Some control, even if it were illusory. Some notion of agency, even if ultimately a mirage. He felt his community, if indeed it was a community, lurched from one crisis to the next. Society clubbing with one question after another, a wall of sound so sonorous, so resounding, that many started to tune out its constant pitch, to clamp weary hands to their ears and retreat inwards. He was the same as a boy – as a man – with a slushed foundation and no guide. Every movement forward a new frontier, a naked step, knee deep into virgin snow. Pioneering yet exhausting.
He put a hand forward to make a point, but paused and retracted, took a brief look at this elderly white man, and pressed his thumb into the table, testing its solidity. Was it worth attacking that deep dive, the risk of drowning to find treasure?
‘That sounds interesting but I have to ask, what would be the point? Lots of papers passed between university and government departments. What does it ever achieve?’ said Ishaq.
‘Again that depends on you. You could use the research to help Muslim groups, it can be used to formulate government policy. It’s not an ivory tower project, Ishaq. It’s a niche area, you could make a good career. Who knows…if you are possibly interested in academia, this is a good opportunity. It’s a fascinating time and we could do with people like you researching it.’
Government and its policy? There were many well-connected right-wing institutes that resolutely held them as their targets. You had shadowily-funded think tanks with Orwellian names such as the Centre for Social Cohesion, which aimed at spreading in-cohesion. One called ‘Student Rights’ that existed solely to attack the rights of Muslim students. Dog-whistle talk on how large the Muslim population will be or why the name ‘Muhammad’ is popular for babies. Questioned on why they were producing such papers, they would cower and say, ‘Just leaving it out there’ and ‘Let’s have a debate’.
‘People like me? You make it sound like paid-spying or government-lackey work,’ said Ishaq, insistent.
Professor Harrell went silent. Taking a deep breath he said, ‘Again it’s not that…but it does tie-in with something else I wanted to speak to you about. This is difficult, but…don’t know how to put this…but we have had requests for information about you.’
Ishaq felt his cheeks go warm, and struggled to push out his words ‘Re… requests for information? What does that mean? By whom ?’
‘Well, to be frank, there are not many openly observant muslims on the social sciences courses here. There was a Home Office liaison unit that wanted to gather intelligence from lecturers here on Muslim students…’
Ishaq cut the professor off. His voice raised slightly, ‘So in plain English, that means you were asked to spy on me. Is this what this is all really about?’
Harrel’s voice declined to nearly a whisper as he took an obvious gulp. ‘In plain English, yes. We were asked to…report on people fitting your profile. Although we didn’t comply. They are interested in quiet or isolated students. People who may be vulnerable.’
Ishaq stared at the man in front of him, somehow looking smaller, diminished. ‘I’m starting to feel this conversation is really inappropriate. I don’t want to be rude. But this is bollocks. What does that mean, “quiet or isolated”? I don’t drink, so avoid those circles. I also have like-minded friends like anywhere…just like anyone. “Quiet or isolated” from the perspective of who? People like you judging people like me?’ Ishaq’s tone had raised and he rose from his seat.
‘I understand, but you must admit that you’re not very active in extra-curricular matters around the department. You just turn up and go.’
Ishaq berated himself at being surprised. He should have expected it. He knew idle gossip could destroy. It was everywhere. Fear or maliciousness, it didn’ matter. Fake letters produced Trojan hoaxes. Inadequate men looked for fifth columnists under their Sunday papers and cereal. On campus, they were supposedly the best and brightest in English society, yet upon hearing of his background he had actually been asked for drugs once. During terrorist scares, he caught students’ double-takes of him and his backpack, saw their dread as they jumped out a lift. Ishaq’s response was a quiet compliance. Just endure. All these incidents; it was draining to start a long, detailed conversation every time you were at odds. There were some arguments, once even a brawl that Ishaq had felt rueful about afterwards. The other boy would not meet people like him on many occasions, so he had probably solidified a lifetime view. That kid could plead temporary dickheadedness, he did not share the burden of being emblematic of a people. No, it was best to avoid, rather than spend all your time being in discomfort or in confrontation.
‘You or most of the researchers in the department don’t take part much, either. You’re too busy with your own work. I don’t see you or them under investigation. Look, what’s the Phd got to do with all of this? The offer sounds shady now.’
Professor Harrell looked downwards and his fidgeting increased. Ishaq was placated by the man’s show of nervousness and timidity. ‘Genuinely…please…it’s got nothing to do with the other matter. Naturally, I expected you to be slightly perturbed by this all but it is an honest offer, however strange it may seem. In fact we’re telling you the whole story, because if you decide to stay, we don’t want you to find out through campus gossip. As you well know, this type of activity on the part of government has been raised higher up within the university, and by the Student Union. Please. Take some time. Think about it.’
Ishaq settled back in his seat, closed his eyes, and tried to generate some anger. That seemed to be most appropriate. That which was expected of him, right? That would be normal? In truth he didn’t feel anything. Taste, touch, feel, was numb. He was not distressed or frightened. He did not feel upset or nervous. It was this resignation that saddened him. The professor was right: he had heard the stories on campus, read the national newspapers, so in the back of his mind he had known. He had a limp acceptance of it and it had been that way for a long time.
‘They did also ask that if you knew of any vulnerable people, or people of concern, then would you come forward…’ said the professor, who looked at Ishaq expectantly.
Ishaq, his tone deadpan, said, ‘Well if I find someone making a suicide belt to blow themselves up during rag-week then I’ll be sure to dial 999. If they want to gather people who are concerned about Muslims issues, in other words concerned about their lives, then they can round-up hundreds of random students themselves. In fact why not just report anyone who wears a keffiyeh, except of course the rich white students, because they look cool right?’
‘No, no, it’s exactly what we don’t want. That’s why we’re pushing back. But we’re a university, we don’t exist in a vacuum. We can only do our best.’ The professor slumped into his chair.
‘I appreciate your candour, but being frank and honest like you have, academia is for the rich, and theory is for bystanders. I’m neither. I hope that you’ll understand that for people like me, I need to get that piece of paper, hopefully with a First, and start earning some cash. That’s my reality. Look, I am really tempted but I don’t think it’s realistic.’
‘As I said, there is some funding available. You won’t be amazingly comfortable but you will not be in penury. You can still go for a job with a more lucrative salary, and armed with another qualification. Entering the world of economic meltdown and armageddon can wait another three years for you, Mr Tabrizi.’ He was wringing his hands again, looking to Ishaq like a moth-eaten Pontius Pilate seeking absolution.
‘Ok. Thank you, I’ll have a think about it…thank you for telling me about this.’
‘Please take your time. Please think long and hard about it.’
The professor extended his hand. Ishaq looked at it and gave it it a cautious shake. As he left the office, a conciliatory Professor Harrell said, ‘Interesting times, aren’t they?’
Ishaq gave a reply devoid of feeling. ‘Yes, just like the Chinese say.’ He opened the door, paused before stepping through and then twisted back, contorting himself to interact with his lecturer. ‘By the way. I lied.’
In the middle of gathering some papers, the professor’s body stiffened, and after some time he asked the question, ‘About what?’
‘Catcher in the Rye. I hated it. I hate that book.’
Ishaq left the building, hunched, gears of his mind in steady rotation. He had taken care when interacting with students. Obviously not enough. There had been stories of the security services hiring other students to befriend suspects. He had met one post-grad who insisted on coming to talks and fasting with them during Ramadan, yet was insistent that he was not interested in converting. The boy said he was simply practising empathy. Something that horrified Ishaq. Empathy? In London? Maybe this was a middle-class thing, that he didn’t understand. The guy had also said that, in private, he sometimes cried at the pain and suffering of the world, which wound-up Ishaq even more. He later turned out to be part of some radical Christian sect proseltysing in Egypt.
One well-to-do white girl on his course had been approached by MI5 to apply for their graduate training program. Told to tell no one, she immediately brought in the prospectus, and a group of them had a great laugh at the pictures of actual MI5 graduates. Stills of them in awkward poses where they were facing a wall, or their head was lost in a file, or so close together in discussion that their faces were never revealed. Their security upheld in a kind of photographic niqab.
He had tried the political and international organisations but found too many people who thought they were the next Gordon Gekko or Mother Teresa. Ishaq could only share details on how his summer was spent stacking shelves in the local supermarket, trying to pay his tuition fees. Others bonded over building homes in South America, or teaching English in some ramshackle Nepalese town. About villages like his parents’. How hard it was to shit in a hole while squatting, haha. Or wide eyed as they talked about how spoilt they were with their western comforts. Oh, the colour, oh the vibrancy. How poignant it was to see locals be hospitable in the most impoverished of circumstances. It was like an amazing revelation, some truth had been endowed on them.
Ishaq would sit there, astonished when they had the audacity and impudence to lecture him on the realties of those other worlds. Even if they were nice, he could not shake-off the feeling that the world was just an exotic backdrop to their own self-realisation. Their story. Hobbyists who could dip in and out. They could safely play, import the struggle of the other without real peril.
His one outlet was sports. He actually made the first/second team squads for the football team. A darting and crafty winger with a wicked right foot, he played a couple of games pretty successfully, but soon enough both sides came to realise his face just didn’t fit. A coach ride, back from a game, where a lot of the players proceeded to get drunk and strip naked, was the first sign. Then a WhatsApp trail where everyone took a picture of their penis and provided full and hilarious commentary. On excursions to nightclubs, those boys played ‘Pull a minger’ and ‘Ride a beast’. His refusal to join in the ‘banter’ and compulsory nights-out drinking meant being frozen out, until he inevitably quit. Ishaq didn’t find this behaviour shocking. He had seen and been inured by far worse on the estate. He didn’t openly show any disdain or contempt. He just found them incomprehensible. Their interaction was so foreign it was like looking at hieroglyphs without the Rosetta stone.
But there were others. Starting at university had also been, in many ways, a massive shock . The first time that he had met relatively intelligent English teenagers who could hold a conversation. During his first year he couldn’t help stare at them. Exotic creatures from houses in the countryside somewhere outside of London, whose parents somehow earned enough money to send them to schools where you had to pay. From places where they trusted the police, who you weren’t afraid of if you called. He knew that for most them this was a period of unalloyed freedom, that could be looked back on as the best years of their lives. A time to explore, a finishing school for the scions of the well-to-do.
Even now he didn’t really understand them. He could understand working class types like him who wanted to get on, and strangely he had no problem understanding the really posh ones who generally acted like they didn’t give a crap and were killing time. It was the ones in the middle that perplexed. Like black boxes, and he could only guess at what drove or motivated them to do anything. So different from what he knew, where everyone flailed with little control and direction. Ishaq recalled that he used to wonder about this, when a child. Like children that had headaches spending hours thinking about a universe without-end, or the concept of nothingness before the big bang, or even the possibility and existence of an all-powerful deity, the twelve-year old Ishaq struggled during countless hours with how the English could have possibly procured such a gargantuan empire once upon a time. How was it possible that these people, from this small, unruly island had claimed the world as their own? He thought that his own ancestors must have been truly pathetic, if they had been conquered or subjugated by the English as represented by the crowd from his estate. At school he did study Shakespeare, poetry from the First World War, the Elizabethans, and the Victorians, so he knew there must have been capable people here at some point.
But that history was not so much of a foreign country, but of a people so alien, to the point that sometimes the young Ishaq thought it had to have been made up. Maybe it was ‘Once Upon a Time’. He would ask his white mates anything of this history and they would shrug their shoulders, or say they weren’t a swot. All the intelligent kids at school were brown. Now, those same white mates were starting to be deadened by alcohol, or drugs , or petty crime, some blaming their plight on people like Ishaq usurping them. Ishaq thought it iniquitous that he was surrounded by students who also indulged, yet somehow they made it through unscathed. These students took for granted the support networks and role models of friends and family, the fuel-of-ambition and career-hopes of which his estate mates had none. They could make assumptions of the future, were not left to be condemned by the age of sixteen for not taking chances they never had.
But he had been given a chance now. He had never considered staying on, past graduation, but now that the opportunity had been dangled in front of him, he was nearly sold. He knew that he would really miss the clarity he felt here. He had always thought of university as just a means to an end, living at home and never far away from the early responsibilities he saw closing in.
Ishaq stood in front of the neo-classical building, under its colonnade, taking sanctuary. As he edged towards the threshold, he gazed upwards at the heavens being drained. When still a child, he thought he could push rainy skies away with his mind, and now he raised a hand as if trying to nudge those heavens away. He felt a vitalising tickle of water travel down his arm and took a ponderous step outwards onto the quadrangle that was thronging with students. People without a care in the world, or at least only caring about themselves. People who, in a deluge, would have him tiptoe between raindrops and blame him if he got wet.
Many, with their self-ordained sophistication and enlightenment, merely saw the universe in ceaseless entropy; that humanity was just a chain of chemical reactions that were indifferent to right and wrong, good or bad. Ishaq could see their listless ennui as how pointless it all was and how they busied themselves trying to forget its crushing banality. And he didn’t believe this came from godlessness or a lack or faith. It came from comfort – ease. Everything had been done in their society. All the big battles had been fought, all their needs for shelter and safety sated. There was nothing left. The only challenge they could conjure was their success as an individual, their success as a lonely entity.
Maybe he was being harsh but, even though they traced the same footprints and shared the same spaces, they lived separate human realities, a vibration of different frequencies existing in the gaps of each other’s oscillations. Standing here alone as estranged crowds buffeted him, swirling and dancing, he thought of those who told him that he needed to try and fit in more. He thought of the professor’s words. He thought that he expended enough energy just to hold ground and stand still. They can’t ask anything more. He had done enough.