An Appeal From My Nigerian Friend

Dear Mr Ironist,

I write to you in great distress. I came to the UK from Nigeria with my parents as a young boy of 6, and I have been living here since then. I was never very religious during my growing-up years, and though I remember having gone to church on two occasions (once for my aunt's wedding, and then for my cousin's burial) I used to think that much of what goes on in the name of religion is childish humbug and priestly obscurantism. I used to be a strong champion of the motto Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom, and me and my mates believed that we should all celebrate Plurality instead of getting stuck up inside the suffocating attics of the religious mind. Unlike those who were dogmatically ensnared in all sorts of spiritual mumbo-jumbo, I was happy to know that I was free to enjoy my distinctiveness, my independence, and my autonomy, and to mould myself in any way I chose to.

One evening, however, when I was returning from the village pub at 11 in the night, I saw one of my mates repeatedly kick a black dog just beside the pavement for no apparent reason. I cannot explain clearly what happened to me at that moment but I think that I cracked up from within. Everything seemed to be whirling around me, and for the first time in my life the utter fragility, finitude, and frailty of my earthly existence became luminous to me in one sudden flash. I realised how deeply inter-dependent we are on one another, how much of a gift our existence is, and what a precarious life we lead as we move through this world.

Six months later, I embraced Islam at a mosque in East London and I have been a practising Muslim since then. My friends, some of whom I was very close to earlier, have now suddenly rejected me, but I really do not understand why they have turned their backs on me. If their slogan truly is Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom is not Islam one of these flowers too, and should it not therefore be allowed to bloom as well in their garden? Why should their secularised views be allowed to flourish more than my practice of Islam, if all these flowers are on par with one another as they are otherwise fond of declaring in public? True, after I have become a Muslim, I do not go any longer to their pubs, but so do they never come to my mosques. Why should I be branded as narrow-minded for not entering their pub when, from my viewpoint, they are equally so in refusing to enter my mosque? Why should I be denounced as intolerant for not accepting their claim that life is meaningless when, from my perspective, they are equally so in refusing even to consider for a moment my view that our life becomes meaningful within a context of responding to Allah's transcendent Will?

I have been informed by a friend that you have a rather delicate way of approaching (and exposing) these ironies of our multi-cultural existence, and I thought that you would publicise my adversity through your blog. I have just one question for your readers : how have we reached that stage of civilisation in which a life of trying not to believe in anything is regarded as more fashionable than a life in which an individual is passionately committed to one set of beliefs and practices that gives value, coherence, shape, and meaning to her existence?

Your brother,

Mohammed Aslam Beg (earlier John Ngugi)