Ibrahim & Reenie Read Online Free PDF Page B

accident, why do such things happen? If there is no reason why they happen, what then? His doubt, and the absolute terror it gave birth to, was a cancer to his faith, and he began to wonder if he had ever truly believed.
    Yes, he had proclaimed that God is great, and done so at the top of his voice, but it was said as a chorus, with a dozen of his friends. They spoke loudly, as if volume added credence, or took away the need to question what was being said. Now that he was left with none of those friends and just the sketches of his faith he realised they could have shouted anything, any choice of words, in any order. It wouldn’t have mattered.
    Of course, they had never questioned the substance, the character and the mind of Allah. When their discussions were over, and they’d finished poring over another passage, reciting it in their faltering, East London Arabic, Allah remained as faceless and unknowable as He was before they began. His words, so the sheikh told them, were there in the book. There was nothing more to know. It is the word and the law of God. Even thinking about what He might look like, or how His mind might work beyond those pages, was haraam .
    So in losing God, or his faith in God, he often felt he had lost nothing at all. The God who allowed his accident to happen, or turned a blind eye when it did, was the same unknowable, monolithic God who shrouded Himself in scripture and defied all questions and inquiries, who demanded nothing more substantial than that His name be shouted by a dozen men with a limited command of the chosen language. The God who wasn’t there at all was almost indistinguishable from the one he had sworn to fight and die for.
    Reenie passed him a mug of coffee and took to her own deckchair. The sky was getting darker still and the lights at the roadside flickered to life with a sickly, peach-coloured glow. Rush hour was ending, the traffic thinning out until the sound of each passing car and van became a pulse, almost metronomic, rather than a constant hiss of white noise.
    â€˜It was a car crash,’ said Ibrahim.
    Reenie peered at him through the steam rising from her tea, and it had been so long since her question, he wondered if she remembered asking it.
    â€˜The accident, I mean,’ he said. ‘It was a car crash.’
    She nodded and glanced down at his leg, her expression almost placidly unmoved. ‘Broke your leg, did you?’
    â€˜Leg. Pelvis. Fractured skull.’
    â€˜Were you in hospital long?’
    â€˜Six months.’
    Reenie drew a sharp breath, as if she’d stubbed her toe, and she slurped her tea noisily.
    â€˜Six months,’ she said. ‘That’s a long time to be cooped up. Can’t stand hospitals. My husband worked in one. Couldn’t even bear popping in to see him when he was in work. Can’t stand them.’
    â€˜Me neither.’
    â€˜Don’t blame you. Six months. And half the time you come out with more wrong than when you went in. All these super bugs they have nowadays and what have you. Can’t stand hospitals. Full of sick people. And there’s no dignity in it. In any of it. I was in, couple of years ago. Overnight stay. One of them mixed wards, so there was me, some old dear in her eighties, some lad who must have been thirty, and this one man. Well. I don’t know what the politically correct word for it is, but he was a bit funny…’ She tapped one finger against the side of her head. ‘You know. Up there . And the old dear in her eighties, she spent most of the night screaming. And the lad who was a bit… you know … in the head… Well, he’d get up and walk about the place with his smock all hitched up so you could see his bits. And there’s me just trying to get a good night’s sleep.
    â€˜By the time the old dear stopped screaming and the funny boy went back to sleep it must have been three o’clock, and then they wake you up at