By Uttama
I don’t usually begin with the end. But the last few pages of this book are a letter to Shehzad Tanweer, one of the 7/7 bombers (who grew up in Bradford, where the story begins).
Zaiba Malik, in her memoir We are a Muslim, please (2010) questions this young man, who grew up on the same streets as she did, at the end of each chapter.
While exploring her own conflicted childhood as a British Muslim attending a Christian school in a town with deep racial undertones, Malik wonders what it was that made Tanweer—who perhaps had almost the same upbringing—go on to kill innocent lives and perpetrate terror.
Malik’s best talent is her ability to combine insight with humor, adding comfort to some of the painful things she has endured.
She starts off the book with her time being interrogated and detained in a Bangladeshi prison, and describes details that kept her going—memories of her Mother (Umejee)—in particular, the letters she would make Malik write, asking the dear Queen if she would hire her to work at Buckingham Palace: “You are like my family. You are very decent people. I want to help you. I will do what you need, cook, clean, iron.”
Malik describes in amusing detail the way in which her identity as a teenager was torn; dancing secretly in her bedroom, jumping off the dinner table to switch off the telly when nudity was hinted at, and taking the trousers she was forced to wear underneath her skirt off before entering school. Given special permission to not partake in Christian hymns at assembly, Malik found herself sitting alone in the library, humming to the very tunes from which she was forbidden.
Although Malik wanted desperately to fit in with her peers (mostly White), she was also deeply attached to her Muslim identity—reading the Quran every day with her father, balancing her sins and good deeds based on the judgment of two Angels she carried on her shoulders, and living in quiet fear of acting in contradiction to “the good Muslim way”.
The most entertaining parts of the book are the first chapters on her childhood, and the latter pages take on a more serious tone, addressing the plight of modern Muslims who simply want to practice their faith without being judged by the parameters of extremists.
In much the same way that an identity has no clear beginning, middle, or end, We are a Muslim, please is not a chronological, or even logical for that matter, journey. It reflects on the complexities of our culture, childhood, and faiths—and the way in which they somehow work together to make us who we are.
“When people ask me that question, as they often do: ‘What’s it like to be a British Muslim?’, I forage around for some profound remark, some succinct yet heartfelt statement. And I never get there, I never find it.”
Inside We are a Muslim, please:
“I knew I was Muslim long before I knew I was British. And I knew I was Pakistani long before I knew I was English. It’s hardly surprising…There was the way Umejee always referred to Pakistan and not England as home…The way our food smelt and tasted so different to English people’s…The way that Dad treated all white people with the utmost respect and deference…’Mr Police Officer sir,’ ‘Mr Plumber sir’…The Aunties, a network of women all about my mother’s age or older…We always had to show the utmost respect to these women, for a start referring to them all as ‘Auntie’ even though they weren’t (thankfully) blood relatives and ensuring an endless supply of sweet tea and coconut biscuits whenever they turned up at our house, always unannounced and always for bloody ages…”
“Dear Angel Gabriel, I know that you can hear me right now on this holy night. I have been a decent person and I do my very best to obey God and Prophet Muhammad…Can you please take care of our family in Pakistan and give them food and money…Please will you look after Princess Diana’s baby William and make sure he grows up a healthy boy…please please I beg you can I please please have a flute…”
“Two lives. Each glaring distrustfully at the other and then turning its back on it. Neither party had proclaimed against the other as such, but there had been a breakdown in communications and I was supposed to be the broker…but after numerous failed attempts, I had run out of options and patience…I had no choice. I had to do what I could to get white English school life to get on with Pakistani Muslim home life…’If you two lives can’t be bothered to make an effort with each other, why the hell should I try,’ I thought. ‘Just watch, I can be difficult too.’ I ended my role as diplomat and started my own campaign, my Year of Silence.”
