Living in New York has changed my language. That, more than anything, has signified the difference between home and here. In the past few months, something has shifted; words that I have always carried with a peculiar kind of tenderness and ease have been coated by something distasteful and defensive.
Some words suffer horribly in translation; others change shape radically when they travel, and there are a few (emotional shortcuts to my home and my past) that have acquired an unnerving timbre and resonance through their Atlantic crossing.
One of these words, madrasa, seems especially charged in New York. I have said this word during public discussions, between puffs over a shared cigarette, as an afterthought in exchanged confidences about the past, and I have been repeatedly surprised by the startled response.
The reaction at one dinner party was especially strange. We were speaking about religion and childhood, the perfect space in which to pour both laughter and suffering — with a dash of guilt for dismissing old loyalties.
Everyone offered their bit; choking on the Eucharist wine, running away at the crucial moment in a cousin’s bris, inventing wildly inappropriate sins for confession. The stories were funny and moving.
Then I mentioned that I had spent my afternoons after school at madrasa. What followed was fleeting; a second of silence that seemed to hang at an awkward angle in the air, eyes darting about quickly, gratefully settling on inspecting furniture or cutlery and then a sudden burst of conversation with offers of more food and wine.
It took me days to work it out. madrasa here seems to conjure up images of young children being brainwashed into turning themselves into human bombs by unfeeling adults hell-bent on world-domination. These adults are mostly men with an excess of facial hair and zealot eyes that flash on cue; the children are generally sweet-looking tots clothed in Hamas-style gear who unnerve everyone with their un-childlike chanting.
This is not to imply that I have been surrounding myself by rabid rightwingers. On the contrary, the flinch at the word comes from people who are genuinely concerned that I might have had to resist the frothing instructions of a crazed anti-Semite who wanted to cover my hair and insert fundamentalism in my mouth.
I have stopped finding the flinch especially offensive: I have only seen madrasas portrayed in two Hollywood films, Syriana and Rendition, both works that make a concerted effort to be balanced critiques of the roots of terrorism.
In Syriana, two Pakistani boys run around in a pretty garden playing at soccer and beekeeping, only to have their idyll shattered by a teacher who shows them a large missile. In Rendition, the madrasa is a covert political cell grooming a new generation of suicide bombers. The imam shouts: ”Takbir!” and the students, whipped into an emotional frenzy chant back: ”Allahu akbar!”
I have only ever heard the Takbir chanted as a battle cry in films or footage of protests in other countries. I grew up hearing ”God is great” whispered in prayers, by people expressing gratitude at good news, or chanted through the loudspeakers at the local mosques as a call to prayer.
War and killing
The notion of madrasa being tangled up with war and killing is utterly foreign to me. It is a strange thing to see your own past refracted through a distorted lens. My experience of madrasa was for the most part quite banal. Boring, yes, but not tarnished by the same kinds of cruelty and madness of the film worlds.
Instead, it raised some crucial questions around personal identity and provided an institutionalised morality that acted as an antidote to the state-sanctioned inequality.
Coming of age in an economically schizophrenic city (grinding poverty, oppression and police brutality coupled with excessive European beach-resort-type wealth), in the midst of a low-grade civil war, in a community defined by state-prescribed ”race” (coloured, Malay, Indian) was not easy.
Going to a private, all-girl Anglican school in the day (morning chapel, hot lunch, tennis, prefects, blazers, curtsey to the headmistress) and then off to madrasa (suras, recitations, an old man who, yes, did have a beard, compulsory burkas) in the late afternoons tended to complicate things more.
For the most part, I didn’t want to go to madrasa. An hour of intense religious instruction after a full day at school is torturous for any child. I remember feeling coerced and resentful; my body, heavy from the impending boredom, felt as though it was being dragged there and that my parents (malleable in almost every other respect) were peculiarly intractable about attendance.
My attention span wondered constantly while we learnt classical Arabic, aspects of sharia law and how to make salaat. I had a constant flow of potential excuses for not going. I drew inspiration from the weather — it’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s too windy; from the instruction — the sheik expects less from the girls than boys, he smells of pipe tobacco, he isn’t very bright; and from the other students who were singularly unimpressed by my going to a private, Christian-based school. ”Don’t keep yourself white!” was a regular admonishment.
I walked to madrasa with my sister throughout the 1980s. The steep hill tilted our bodies forward as we fought against a wind that rushed us down the sloped road as if it was propelling us faster towards god.
Our cream burkas (flung on quickly while we gobbled our afternoon tea) fell mid-knee, covering out shorts and T-shirts. The school was close, at Mrs Essop’s house. On the garage wall someone had spray-painted the command: ”Remember June 16th. Lights out!”
The graffiti stayed on Mrs Essop’s wall for five years, from the beginning of the 1985 State of Emergency until the unbanning of the African National Congress in 1990. It was an annual command to turn off the television, stop the clocks, silence the radio and switch off the lights. It was a call for darkness and quiet, a moment to mourn the uncountable dead. The neighbourhood would plunge into silence; candlelight danced at windows.
Learning
Growing up in the 1980s in South Africa had all the qualities of an unending nightmare; surreal and frightening. We would run in (always slightly late) at the kitchen entrance, shout out greetings to the aunties standing over stoves, chatting through a haze of cigarette smoke, sipping their tea.
The room upstairs was full of veiled sunlight. The afternoon light was softened by the thick, net curtains and repetitive brownness of the floor, furniture and carpet.
We crowded around a long rectangular wooden table and in the centre sat our teacher. He was a little man with a beard, a fez and a love of stories. He published educational books filled with miraculous tales about children who could recite the entire Qur’an by heart at the age of seven. For the most part, we stared at these children with cocked eye-browed scepticism — not envy.
We sat and shaped out mouths around the foreign alphabet; we made our throats murmur with a nasal intonation. The world was reversed for an hour every day; sentences ran from right to left, the text was written by spirit, not flesh; and we were costumed as though from another country.
We learned about a man called Sheik Yusuf, a prince from Macacasar, who was imprisoned on Robben Island in the 1600s for defying the Dutch.
On good days he told us stories, both terrifying and thrilling — about Moosa floating along the Nile, rescued by an Egyptian queen; about Ebrahim willingly waving a axe, ready to chop off his son’s head in a sacrifice to God. But mostly we sat immobile, memorising lists of what was haram and what was fardh, which prayers matched which occasion, and taking turns to stare at the clock, willing the hands forward Jedi-style.
Did the old man shout at us? Certainly. Was he violent? I remember him hitting the boys, but even this was not especially shocking. Corporal punishment was legal and the violence in classrooms often reiterated the violence in the streets. In the midst of reciting suras I would often look up and see a boy leaning against the wall, trying to hide his snot and tears, pulling at his fez, wiping his eyes with the edge of his shirt.
Muslim school was not without fear and darkness, but there were no moments of frenzied Takbir, or declarations of any earthly enemies except for the ones sitting in the South African Parliament. My sheik was not terribly inspiring or child-friendly. He was a serious scholar who wrote books about the importance of Jesus in the Qur’an. In another life perhaps he would have wiled his hours away debating theology in a mosque. I don’t think he was predisposed to teaching children, but he never taught us to judge or hate anyone for not being Muslim.
Words change as they travel. I know this. But the sense of difference between the afternoons in that brown room and the embarrassed silence that tends to follow it here are made of more than just meaning shaded by place; they were worlds apart, unrecognisable to each other.
These stories are not to deny that there are madrasas used for propaganda and violence in certain parts of the world, or to suggest that the induction of children into fanatical belief systems is not wrong or sordid. These stories are just to say that there are hundreds of thousands of rooms around the world, like the one in Mrs Essop’s house, in which children are learning about a particular faith and its traditions without hate or hysteria.
Looking back through the haze of easy boredom that cloaked those afternoons, I notice that in the midst of my young restlessness I also learned something about duty and discipline and purpose.
In affirming those ancient rituals, in believing that I was being protected by something larger and more mysterious than I could conceptualise, a small part of my fear around the constant national chaos was placated. As an adult, I doubt it would have helped as much. But as a child, seeing that same graffiti — ”Lights out June 16th!” — for five years on the same wall made me believe that God and justice were on the same side.