The Chameleons is set somewhere in deepest, darkest East Anglia, where a tiny community of English folk are bringing up their children as Sufi Muslims. Sufism (‘tasawwuf’ in Arabic, after the word ‘sûf’ – wool – denoting the rough clothing early Muslim ascetics typically wore) is the spiritual or mystical aspect of Islam. In essence it means nothing more than prayer with sincerity, making a vacuum where the self is in order to allow God’s presence to fill it, but in practice it has come to involve group ‘dhikr’ (remembrance of Allâh), ‘samâ’ (music), whirling and so on.

The novel follows the children of this micro-community as kids and as adults, seeking to understand the Islam of their childhood and translate it into their own time and their own spiritual trajectory.

I am in the final stages of writing this novel and it will (insha‘Allâh) finds its way into print before too long. For any enquiries please email me at medinatenour(at)gmail.com.

Chapter 1

The sugarbeet fields are crispy with frost and the sky is a very deep blue, deep as a hole. My cheeks burn with the cold. And my nose is running. Mum holds my hand to pass her energy through to me, which never seems to work but I play along for her sake.

Mum, when are we going to get home? I’m tired.

The greater jihad is against the self, darling! Mum sings. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!

Carol has come with us on the walk. She took shahada last night, so now she’s not Carol any more but Ruqayya. She has very curly blonde hair tied inside a blue sparkly scarf, and she walks even slower than me.

You’ll need one of those nice prayer mats with the compasses stuck on, Mum is saying, don’t let me forget. And I have a spare Qur’an translation at home, you can have that, too.

Ruqayya wipes her teary face on the tail of her scarf and gazes up at Mum, who smiles down at her with eyes the colour of milky tea, underlined black. She gives her arm a bone-crushing squeeze.

You know, Ruqayya says in a wobbly voice, I know that me coming to Islam is all part of the Divine plan, but I really don’t have a clue what it’s all about. It’s a bit...well, scary.

Let me explain, Mum begins, half-closing her milky-tea eyes. This world – the dunya, the material plane – is nothing but a sumptuous reflection on the surface of a vast lake...every once in a while, a raindrop, or some sort of aquatic insect, or a falling berry perhaps, comes along and breaks the illusion of permanence, allowing us to see past the shimmering image into the depths of Pure Existence...but really, none of it has any substance but the water itself. Which is a metaphor for Allah. When you dive into that water head-first and leave the self – the nafs – behind, you achieve fanafillah, annihilation in God. That’s the whole point of being a Sufi. She smiles serenely out over the freshly-ploughed fields and over towards the windmill, spinning as slow as a sleepy thought on the hill.

So, asks Ruqayya, her eyebrows meeting in the middle and doing a little dance, where does the lake come into it?

What lake? frowns Mum. Oh. Nowhere, really. I was just being poetic.

Malik is tramping along on the other side of me and he nudges me in the shoulder. I achieved fanafillah once, he whispers. It’s amazing. All your attachment to material things completely disappears. And you go invisible.

Malik is eleven and a quarter and he has bumfluff. He’s starting real school next week. Me and Ihsan aren’t allowed to go to real school yet because Mum says they crush the spirit out of kids the moment they step through the door. Malik is alright, he’s got enough of the stuff to survive a good squishing.

Anyway, I don’t care, I like the lessons our mums and babas teach us at the Henleys’ house. My Mum is brilliant at teaching, except when she’s feeling pre-mental, and then she usually ends up shouting Get Back To Work before bursting into tears and having to sit in a corner and do ten thousand la-ilaha-illa-llahs to calm down again.

I ask Mum when Ruqayya is going home but she shushes me. Mum is very kind, she always has strangers in the house. She has a job but she spends most of her time teaching them how to pray and how to tie their scarves nicely so they don’t look like the Skegness Brethren who live in our village. They’re a bit weird, the Brethren. They cut themselves off completely from the rest of the village because of their religion and they don’t even send their kids to normal schools. Weird.

Ruqayya is getting married soon. It will probably be in our back garden, that’s where everyone seems to get married. I like weddings. I like how Mum curls me and Ihsan’s hair, even though it burns my scalp sometimes, and I like the lamb stew that Baba’s friend Mukhtar from the halal butchers brings around, and I like eating baklava until my teeth hurt and racing around the garden with all the other kids for hours and hours, but do you know what I really like?

Onions.

Baba, are we nearly home?

Baba walks really fast, leaning forwards as if he has a heavy backpack on. He turns around to look at me and calls Nearly there, Not far to go, and he trips up on a lump of earth and his glasses fall off. Baba has a pointy black beard, not like all the other babas. They all have quite bushy beards with patches of grey in them. I saw a photo of him when he was younger and he didn’t have a beard. He didn’t look right without one.

The other funny thing about Baba is his name. I don’t know why he chose such a difficult one to pronounce, even he can’t say it the way Arabs do. But he says it’s the meaning of it that’s important, and anyway it was his teacher who chose it for him. I asked him what it means in English and he said, Slave to the Absolute Truth. I’m glad he didn’t call himself that. It would take forever to call him for dinner.

I’m really excited because Mum bought biscuits from an actual shop today. She said it was a special occasion, seeing as Ruqayya had just become Ruqayya instead of Carol. I asked her if her parents knew she was Ruqayya and not Carol any more, but she said Not yet. She was waiting for the right moment.

It’s just as well I’ve always been Iman. Otherwise I’d have to choose a right moment, and I would never be able to decide what moment was righter than all the others.

We’re barely inside half a minute before Baba starts calling the adhan, and I wrap my jumper around my head by the arms and Mum throws a big Kashmiri shawl over her head and shoulders.

Baba prays quickly. Sometimes you’ve barely gotten through the Fatihah and he’s already got his forehead on the ground, and you end up bouncing your head up and down on the prayer mat so fast you give yourself a headache. Ihsan stands next to me when I start praying, even though she’s too little to know how to do it properly, and when we kneel down and put our heads on the floor I can see her looking at me sideways with her big round eyes.

Ihsan, I hiss at her, stop it. Allah’s watching. She blows a raspberry at me and rolls over onto her back and kicks her legs in the air giggling. She’s only three so she doesn’t know how to jihad against herself yet.

After we say salaam to the angels on our shoulders everyone sits there for a while, very very quiet. Baba’s mouth moves as if he’s talking to himself, and I can see Mum counting up her astaghfirullahs on the creases in her fingers to make ninety-nine, one for every crease and one for her heart, times by three. Then she makes a dua into the palms of her hands and runs them over her face and her heart, and she gives me and Ruqayya and Ihsan kisses on each cheek, saying Taqaballah.Ruqayya looks at me as if I was a puppy in a woollen jacket and she was the birthday girl who couldn’t have me because her parents were allergic.

You’re so lucky, she dribbles, patting me on the head.

Lucky! You only have to look at the size of the room I have to share with Ihsan, which is mostly take up by Mum’s piles of prayer mats for all the new people, to see I am clearly a very deprived child. I am still wearing the jumper Mum knitted Malik when he was my age, which is more hole than jumper now. It’s amazing that none of the people who stare in our front window as they walk past ever notice that I am shivering with cold and wearing second-hand clothes.

Ruqayya goes into the kitchen to help Mum with the tea. I get very interested in a woven wall hanging which says Barakah Muhammad which happens to be beside the kitchen door, and they just happen to be talking quite loudly, so it’s not eavesdropping, you see.

So how did you meet your husband, then? Ruqayya asks. Was it very Islamic?

Well, Mum begins, it was back in the old gang, when we were just starting out on the spiritual path and frankly wouldn’t have known the truth if it came up and bit us in the you-know-what. People living in teepees and vans, hanging out playing guitars and spoons and forks and God knows what else. We were very idealistic, you know, but what with the naked Cherokee sweat lodges and Taoist tarot and shamanic journeys across the psychic spaces of Somerset, it was all starting to get a bit crazy. Weed wasn’t enough of a mind-opener any more; we’d all just gotten too used to it. So more and more people were taking acid, doing it all together in the middle of crop circles, trying to invoke the spirits or Gaia or someone. There was a lot of fall-out...kids taking the stuff accidentally, people getting stuck in trips and being sectioned...on top of that nobody had any money, they were all living off inheritances or benefits or wires from their parents, and then banging on about ‘natural living’ – hah! Must’ve been off their heads! Well, I suppose most of them were.

Anyway, come November it starts freezing. People are getting sick. Somebody contracts hepatitis and everyone get shaken up. A lot of them went back to living nice suburban existences and working for the council. The rest of us dug our heels in and refused to go, but we were really demoralised, I mean, desperate for something meaningful. The summer of love was well and truly over.
It was right at that moment that these three men appeared – just like the three wise men. They’d come back from the desert in the south of Morocco where they’d been hanging out at this zawiya – that’s a Sufi sheikh’s place – and basically seeing the light. They didn’t understand a word of what the sheikh was talking about, but something happened to them there, some sort of illumination, and they became Muslims right then and there. They swept into our miserable huddle of tents like a ball of lightning, turbans on, jelabiyah robes, kohl in their eyes, tasbih beads hanging from their fingertips...they were floating, radiating light and love and beauty – and not like any of the doped-up twits we’d seen before. They’d seen the Real Thing.

And they showed it to us, that same night. Sat us down in a circle in the community tent and starting chanting, this hypnotic, deep, rhythmic song they’d learned whose words we couldn’t understand – at least, not with our brains. But we’d just about had enough of our brains by that point anyhow. What we did that evening cut through the gloop of our selves like lemon juice through fat. The bickering that was going on suddenly faded to nothing, and the worries about what would happen next in the community – nothing at all mattered. We just sung, partly to ourselves, but mostly to our deepest element – not us, at all, but our Divine Source. I wept like my world had been torn to shreds and built up fresh again in a split second, wept like that for a week. By the end of that week I was married to one of those three wise men.

Ruqayya sniffs wistfully. Were you...physically attracted to him?

Physically attracted to him? Mum snorts. Good grief, no. I had already been married twice and was pretty bored of all that by then. Physical attraction is just another of the veils between humans and Allah, anyway. You have to fight your nafs, Ruqayya – fight your lower self! That’s the only way to perfect your – hey, Iman! Is that you?

No...

What do you mean, no? Stop earwigging and come help us get the tea ready.

I help Mum put all the cups onto the brass tray – I trace the patterns with my finger beforehand, I always do that – and then the biscuits, on a plate. I get orange juice in the teacup with the blue stars on it, because it doesn’t have a saucer, and Ihsan gets milk in a plastic mug. Mum gives the nice Chinese cup to Ruqayya as she’s the guest. Baba and Malik sit together and sip their tea at the same time, like twins born thirty years apart.

So, when do you think the wedding will be?

The twentieth, inshallah.

This tray actually has lots of Arabic letters written around the edge.

Inshallah.

They all overlap one another, some higher than the others.

He’s a wonderful man, he’s got the most amazing adab.

It’s amazing that anyone can read them.

I know. Alhamdulillah.

There are also loads of lines in the middle criss-crossing to make stars.

He’s building an extension to his house for me.

It could do with a polish, though.

Really?

That way we’ll get more guests because everyone will be so impressed.

That way his first wife can have the other half.

I think I need to go to the loo.

Marriage is half of the deen, isn’t it?

May I be excused?

I find Baba in the hallway on my way back from the toilet. He is staring at a picture on the wall which is made up of Arabic letters, all bent and curved over to make the shape of a horse running. He looks a bit peaky so I hold his hand to give him some energy. I ask him if he is ill, and he says no, just tired from the walk.

I think there’s more to it than that, though. Sometimes I wake up in the night when he calls the adhan for Fajr, and I creep down wrapped in my duvet to watch him and Mum and Malik pray, and then even after the others have gone to bed he’s still there, just reading Qur’an under his breath, almost invisible under the hood of his burnoose. He hardly sleeps at all, although maybe it’s just his age. Grandma gets up at five o’clock in the morning, too.

I’m not sure if Mum has noticed, as she is such a busy lady. She has lots of important things to do, like buying prayer mats and tasbihs for new people and doing her evening classes in Shiatsu and running the stall at the market in Cambridge.
I wish she’d give that job to someone else. I’m sick of eating all the organic produce she sells.