There’s something about making and enacting a life decision that is as colossal as rerooting – a decision which is so much about reckoning with your past, and projecting into your future, that will catapult you so acutely into the present. And the present is such a strange and alien domain for those of us with young families or busy lives, that are so accustomed to being preoccupied with the constant grind of life; planning for one life event after another. It is arid and hostile territory for those who are constantly chasing tomorrow.
The present is a sensory plain – one in which, like a predatory animal, your senses are so languidly heightened. You are acutely aware of the minutiae of your surroundings in a way you might not be when you are preoccupied with making sure that work deadline is met, or the dinner’s ready for the evening. You can suddenly hear the small, echoing drips of the leaking tap, you notice that discerning crack in the wall. The present gives you pause in a discomforting way – the stakes are so unnervingly high. It forces you to address some of those thoughts and feelings we tuck away from ourselves, to unpack for another day, another time somewhere in this nebulous terrain of the future. It gives you the opportunity to reflect upon and gauge the here and now, as a barometer for a future you are planning, as a moment that itself will pass into the oblivion of yesterday, demonstrating so perfectly the fleeting moments that constitute our imperfect and temporary selves. It is the antithesis of time in as far as we are supposed to inhabit it, the illusory part we are all apparently invested in but so perennially remote and absent from.
Being so cognisant of your position in this gap between your past, and future, the fleeting, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it step in the treadmill of ‘now’, grants you a strange spatial awareness too. Where you might not be so conscious of those structures you constitute as individuals – the school, the office, the neighbourhood – the ones your very being is invested in and contributory to. Being dislodged from them, understanding you are a disposable component creates a necessary kind of dwarfing. You suddenly feel so small in the grander narrative of time and history. So much of us is invested in feeling a part of that greater network, so much of it constitutes how we see ourselves, that to be so absolutely broken off, contextualises your smallness in ways that are unsettling. We are so resolutely stuck to these concepts which give us a sense of ourselves as we want to see it. Like quietly stubborn barnacles floating blissfully into a future we’ve planned as a trajectory, a part of our three dimensional nexus between time and space – the future and the past – somewhere near the local high-street and our old secondary school. The constellation of familiar that shapes our identity.
And geography is one of the key determiners in the way we identify and situate ourselves in this world.
As humans our very dye is tribalist in nature, and we tether ourselves so crudely to the material ground that we inhabit. It exemplifies the futility of our material selves and how arbitrary and superficial that national or cultural branding can be. We identify with or against the flag that we sit under, the postcode we live in, the football team we feel most proximity to. It encompasses the rosacea-red, angry, skin-headed nationalism that is so fragile and exclusionary and the achingly, melodic terracotta folk culture that focuses so much on the nostalgia of the earth and soil. It sears a loyalty that can be both belligerent and ugly, or deep and beautiful – but equally kind of senseless. It plays into all those grand narratives we are so possessively wed to, that we feel so coded in and from, that we feel bereft and formless without.
‘Home’ itself is one of those words that embodies the wonderment of language so perfectly. It is simultaneously universal and specific, you are both immediately aware of it, and so unaware of the personal implications it has for each of us. For such a small bolt of a word, it evokes so much, it has the colossal job of tethering us so completely to one concept and space. Its unassuming and monosyllabic structure is the perfect vehicle for the many personal contours of its meaning, its economic nature so well designed for its use. It is familiar and worn, like the places we impress upon and shape through our existence.
As Muslims who are watching the earth-shattering atrocity of children being killed on an hourly basis on account of the identity we share with them, because of this nullyifying concept of Muslim belonging, nothing that we deemed natural can be assumed or taken for granted any longer. Those axioms we unquestioningly carry with us in our back pockets have disappeared without warning over night, leaving a cold, gaping space in their place. We simply do not exist in the same world, and can no longer afford to be under any delusions. And as British Muslims in particular, we have known for quite some time that this sense of belonging, tribalism and nationalism comes with a strange and telling sense of discomfort.
Because of course national rhetoric concerning belonging draws the very line at the Muslim, as we’ve been so violently reminded of lately. Social anxiety is built entirely upon the identity of the Muslim on both a micro and macro level. The experience we have on the street, and the headlines we read day in and day out tell us that to belong is to NOT be Muslim, and that to be Muslim is to not belong.
Witnessing, as we are, the state of public discourse and feeling around the idea of Muslims, over the glowing embers of these recent race riots, and we are afforded a renewed sense of perspective. Hotels can be set alight, and exits blocked, if they house enough Muslims – simply existing as a Muslim is a crime punishable by death in the British Isles, apparently. Outside of the lawlessness of the streets – if Muslims merely making a mark on a ballot paper, our absolute civic right, is enough to send the whole media industry into total panic and frenzy, then really we need to interrogate the assumptions upon which citizenship, legitimacy and humanity are based. Evidently, there is a conspicuous, Muslim-shaped hole in these popular concepts.
Conversation surrounding Muslim migration has taken on a new, detached and sober tone as many Muslims witness these entirely predictable events with a kind of resignation and weariness that could only be borne from growing up in the media climate we exist in. This hate is becoming more than a mere footnote in the story of contemporary Muslim discourse and movement. It is now a relevant part of how we as British Muslims perceive ourselves and our space on earth. It also enables us to feel some semblance of what it means to be a traveller, when that’s all we really are. As Muslims we know, absolutely, that life is transitory. As Insaan, we are emotionally blinded by the here and now of our existence, which is an intoxicating place to be constantly distracted in. Making a conscious decision to change our place and time on earth, when many of us have the privilege of choice, requires an effort that is anchored in this everyday that we shroud in deflection. It involves grappling with the beast that is our current state. These recent events have created a catalyst for that kind of sobering reflection.
While there is naturally a renewed sense of acknowledgement concerning this motivating factor to leave, we have seen increasingly over the past few years, a social media that is dominated by those Forex traders rhapsodising about moving to Muslim countries for material benefits – though many of us as Muslims aren’t chasing the capitalist dream. And despite the idea of the liberal ruination of the Muslim child, there are some of us that have moved for affirmative religious purposes, not defensive reactionary ones. What unites these three strands of motivation is the sometimes weak foundations of belonging for Muslims in the UK – that is not to say we don’t, or shouldn’t call it our home, but we sometimes are forced to acknowledge the precarious nature of this home.
And while much of the Muslim cultural cannon has fixated on the shared sentiment of diaspora (for those of us that are part of it), or feeling ‘other’, and the often repetitively quaint narrative it gives rise to – henna tainted finger tips and eating with your hands – our moment in history is a necessary departure from this diaspora twee. In fact, it’s about an inverting of that story. For many of those in a position to, it is this upturn of passive consequence and cultural stagnation that crystalised in those poetic sentiments.
It’s not about looking backwards at those cultural spaces we feel a strange and contradictory proximity to, despite feeling so distant from – the ‘motherland.’ It’s those geographies that we know so intimately, the streets we grew up in, the ubiquitous smell of the concrete pavement that is part of our sensory DNA, that we have a visceral connection to, but which we are made to feel alien in – that we are told time and time again we don’t belong in and to. It’s an acknowledgement of a lack of maternal homeland, an understanding you are part of that house on that street, definitely the neighbourhood, maybe the city depending on who is hosting LBC that morning, but less the Labour-run country. That chequered sense of being that is delineated by those tensions in the way you see yourself, and how others place you in the bigger picture of ‘belonging’. It is a decision looking forward into what could possibly be, not what has passed.
Leaving, so finally, a place that delegitimises your existence, despite it being the only place you’ve existed in so completely, the only language you’ve conceptualised yourself in, and the only cultural topography you’ve formed, is unnervingly deep.
It is divorcing from that space, but it’s also a stark departure from that moment in time and that sense of social and cultural connectedness. Leaving, and having to reckon with all the states of your being – who you were, what you are now, and what you want to be – forces us to acknowledge the humbling spatial and temporal dimensions of belonging, being and existing. It allows us to see ourselves both in terms of our place on earth, but also in the story of time. It is a commitment to the unknown and a total excommunication from what little sense of belonging you had, and an acknowledgement of the futility of that endeavour. It has you questioning both the narratives of reassurance that have come to define you, and those narratives of hate that people have tried to pigeonhole you in. It has you mentally juggling all those metanarratives that we, in our small elemental ways, are written into, and co-opted for as a kind of shedding and catharsis. Leaving, is disorienting not least because it renders everything you’ve ever invested in futile – it contextualises those things that were so so large and defining in your life as no more than a mirage. It takes leaving to make you realise you belong, and moreover that what you might have yearned for as ‘belonging’ is not as important as you always thought it was.
Moving to a Muslim country, and experiencing a blunted but more direct kind of ‘otherness’ that I do in a country I don’t speak the language of, don’t understand the etiquettes and customs of and don’t feel rooted in, has me thinking of the many millions that experience that spatial and temporal fluidity of ‘home’. How it forces you to reconceptualise yourself, draw on different parts, discover new internal resources.
Despite recent events, leaving, for many Muslims is not a defiant or reactionary choice, and that remains the case for many Muslims contemplating or enacting such a decision. Much like Islam is not the dark underbelly of western liberalism, our existence is whole, complete and independent of the meaning-making that wrestles with it. Leaving, as many of us are thinking about and committing to, is about the endeavour for better in-spite of the comfort of the familiarity that we know. The measure for that ‘better’ is of course personal to all of us and our values and choices. Like most decisions we make as Muslims, it can also be faith driven. Like most faith driven choices it needs to be contextualised as part of its moment and intention.
And while we often place the heart as the domain of faith, oftentimes it is the brain that mediates our relationship with Islam. We might long for something that we know, cerebrally, isn’t right for us as believers. Leaving, in some contexts, can fit this very description. Personally I have found it abjectly painful to leave a city I love as much as I do London, for its grey and everyday presence in my life. As the backdrop of every rite of passage, life experience I’ve ever had. Like a tacit, bemused and wise old friend that bears non-judgemental witness to every embarrassing quirk in the story of your life. The one that doesn’t speak back or offer critical commentary. It’s always been there as a willing backdrop to my existence. It has mediated all my relationships and developments in life, and it’s the only geography I instinctively know like the back of my hand. It’s familiar and known and embedded in my very muscle memory.Saying goodbye to that moment in space, and that place in time has granted me a new sense of awareness, a sense of historic and geographic context, and allowed me to inhibit a new consciousness. It’s enabling me to be more purposeful in who I am, while I try to figure out how the new resources that constitute my environment can bolster that. It is something I hope will be pleasing and accepted by Him, and something I hope to renew my intentions upon every day. It is also testing in a daily way. But it’s a new chapter, and I hope to make the most of it.
