Aatish Taseer writes about meeting a group of Norwegian youths during his travels in Syria. One man who was studying to enter the church in Norway was on the verge of converting when the cartoon frenzy erupted and he was airlifted out of Syria by the Norwegian government along with many of his compatriots.
Over the next few days I spent a lot of time in this curious milieu with Chad and his circle, discovering the hamams and souks of the city that I was to live in for the next two months. It took me a few days to realise that there was an Islamic current running through many in the group. It was hippy Islam, if such a thing is possible. The gatherings of Chad and his friends were inter-religious, multi-ethnic and tediously respectful, but Islam was always present. It was in the sparseness of people's flats, the fondness for facial hair in the boys, the studied, serene voices and the abundance of fruit juice.
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I spent several days meeting privately with some of the people I had met at the mosque, trying to understand what had made them give up their lives in the west and turn to Islam. Simplicity, clearing away the clutter of modern life, was a big theme. Completeness was another: a single divine philosophy managing every aspect of life and conduct. Routine was another still: praying and fasting ordered the mayhem. And identity: feeling part of a universal brotherhood where other identities had failed. There were brothers like Fuad, a British Asian from Doncaster who had escaped his corporate job in Bristol to come to Abu Nour. "It was so grey," he said. "The drive to work every morning, operating on mechanised time, arriving to find you have 200 emails. I realised that to succeed in that world, in the corporation, you had to serve the corporation. And for what? For money? Instead I chose to submit to something true, something with meaning." There were many like Fuad.
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