Once Were Radicals by Irfan Yusuf Page B

could speak English) fighting over executive positions and halal meat income. And the few mosques I saw were often dirty and grotty and poorly maintained.
    By the end of Year 6, I was beginning to have serious doubts about whether I wanted to be a South Asian Urdu-speaking Muslim when I grew up. I wondered why I had gone through so much suffering at
madrassa
and so much teasing at school just to be a passenger in what looked like a ship of absolute fools.

    One thing I liked about the Christian religion was that it was all in English. I already knew from my previous school that Jesus and Mary were white, but I wasn’t sure what language they spoke. But at St Andrews, I learned that the Gospels were written in Greek. I assumed that meant Jesus spoke Greek and felt terribly guilty about referring to my old Greek friends sometimes as ‘wogs’.
    The New Testament may have been in Greek, but we always read the Bible in English and our church serviceswere always in English. Even the choir sang hymns in English, though it often sounded more like Latin.
    Christianity was also a religion for the downtrodden. The word ‘Christian’ was first used as a label to insult Jesus’s disciples who apparently used to get bullied a fair bit after he ascended to heaven. It felt good to be hanging around with people whose religious heritage was basically about bullied people wearing their wounds with pride.
    What impressed me most was that you could learn the Bible without getting bashed by some overweight bearded dude with a stick. This seemed most enlightened when compared with the
molvi
who taught me the Koran in Karachi. We learned Bible stories and basic Christian theology without being scarred in the process.

    In Year 6 we spent a number of afternoons watching an animated video of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
, a popular children’s novel by C.S. Lewis. It was an extraordinary story of this lion sacrificing all for his people and then being killed in the process. He then somehow comes back to life and re-establishes his kingdom. This lion was an awesome figure, and the kids around me cheered and clapped when the lion returned to life. After the final instalment, our school chaplain (and Divinity teacher) Rev Alex told us that the story was about Jesus. The lion represented Jesus who died on the cross for our sins and then miraculously rose from the dead. Jesus now sat by the right hand of God and was the son of God. Jesus was also God, his divinity proven by the act of rising from the dead.
    The idea that the son of God was also God was confusing. But I was so impressed by the awesome sacrifice that any niggling doubts about the logic of that two-thousand-year-old situation were filed at the back of my mind for future consideration.
    Jesus seemed like a far more impressive God than Allah. Although I always understood God and Allah to be the same person, I associated Allah with getting beaten up for mispronouncing words I never understood from His book. Allah also expected me to stop work or pray at five set times a day, engage in ceremonial wash and then perform prayers that involved a fair bit of effort and physical exertion.
    Of course, being in Allah’s crowd had its fringe benefits. Mum was part of Allah’s crowd, and she always boasted of having her prayers answered. Plus, instead of having one Christmas, we’d get two celebrations (
Eid
). Being part of Club Allah meant you could pick your own
Eid
presents because everyone gave money not gifts. Allah’s mob ate less bland food, and we were generally much smarter as we spoke more than one language.
    But Allah didn’t guarantee you paradise like Jesus did. To gain Allah’s reward and pleasure, you had to work hard. You had to pray and fast and give charity and even be prepared to spend thousands of dollars flying to Mecca and withstand fifty-degree heat. The price of getting into heaven was a lifelong effort.
    You also had to