Capital

house on the Common, openly drinking alcohol.
    As Usman stopped to cross at a red light, he found himself looking at a man standing at a bus stop reading a newspaper. On the page facing out toward Usman was a picture of a completely naked woman, above an advertisement for a car-leasing company. The ad promised a BMW 3 series for a payment of £299 a month.
    Usman carried on. Many people were drinking alcohol in the bars beside the Common, women smoking, women and men kissing. Alcohol everywhere. Because it was only six o’clock, most of the people drinking were not yet drunk; it wasn’t the way it would be at ten or afterwards, when, especially at weekends, the whole area would be like a combat zone, a contest between man and alcohol which alcohol won, every time. No, alcohol didn’t just win, alcohol reigned: it presided over weekend evenings like a king, like a malign archangel. And although there was grumbling about this, the occasional complaint, it was the very British kind of complaint that was more like moaning, and expressed a deep accommodation with the thing being complained about; it contained no rage, no outrage, no desire for change. Whereas to Usman, this looked like a society that was turning itself into a version of hell, in the interest of people who made money through selling alcohol.
    The imam at Usman’s mosque was an angry man, but he was not stupid, and society had given him one overwhelmingly powerful advantage: the first thing he said on most subjects was true. He railed against capitalism and the cheapening of sex and the degradation of women through the pornographic imagery which was, in this country at this time, now, everywhere. He spoke about things that had become so taken for granted it was as if people literally did not see them any more. But Usman, who had after all grown up in this country, who was no alien – he saw them.
    Usman had come to believe that the imam was right: these were symptoms of decadence. Sex being used to sell things, the corruption of the fundamental human impulse to love, sex being turned into a vehicle of yet more capitalist debasement – sex was everywhere. It was never real sex, as Usman understood it to be, an ecstatic state such as that enjoyed in paradise, a transcendent experience; instead it was naked women, coupled with an attempt to sell something. Sex was fundamentally linked with money. And then the imam would start in on the subject of an intoxicated society. Here, too, he was saying something that everyone knew to be truthful. Usman had done holiday jobs as a hospital porter, and had seen with his own eyes that any A&E unit on a Saturday night was like an encyclopedia of all the different things you could do to yourself when drunk. Men and women fighting, puking, men hitting each other, men hitting their women or being hit by them, men raping and women being raped, both sexes contracting diseases, hurting their children, crashing vehicles, killing themselves, killing themselves with drink. And why did this society have such a deep need for intoxication? Because it knew it was lost, it was on the wrong path, and it had to blot out that knowledge with all the means at its disposal.
    And then the imam, having said these true things, would move on to some other truths. He didn’t care about the spies who would certainly be listening, the spies in the pay of the kafr government of Britain; he was above that. The imam simply told the truth. He was too intelligent to say that there was a global war against Islam. In Usman’s opinion, actually, there was, you could prove that there was, from Palestine to Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq, and then through the subtler examples of suppression in Egypt and Pakistan and Indonesia and everywhere else that Islam was not allowed to express itself democratically and fully – but you didn’t need to prove that. All you needed to do was ask a simple question. Was a Muslim life worth the same as a Christian or Jewish life? In the order of the world, did a dead Muslim child count for as much as a dead Jew? Was a Muslim death worth as much attention as a Christian death?
    The answer was so obvious, it barely needed to be spoken. In the scales of the West – which meant according to the value system that ran the world – a Muslim life was worth a fraction of other people’s. A war on Islam – you could argue about that. The manifest truth that Muslims counted for less – that was not possible to challenge.