The last time I saw Isak Nilsen, we were eating okra and mutton in my flat near the diplomatic quarter of Damascus. The 22-year old Norwegian, who had been in Syria for four and a half months, seemed impatient to go before a sheikh and make the simple testimony—”There is no God but God and Muhammad is his Prophet”—that would introduce him to the society of the believers. Three days later he was on a plane back to Oslo, evacuated from a country where the faith put him at risk.
Isak’s Christianity was different from most of my European contemporaries. He was a theology student on his way to a career in the Norwegian church. He really believed that Christ had died on the cross for our sins and was the son of God. Yet now Isak was on the verge of converting to Islam, with its “clarity,” its “completeness” and its willingness to enter spheres of public life from which his church had long since retreated. Two days after our lunch the faith he was about to embrace did enter public life, but it was an entry far more violent than he would have liked. The same words that were to have been his conversion testimony had become the slogans of an angry mob attacking his embassy, burning his flag and threatening his friends.
For the past six weeks I had been in Damascus talking to young people about the place of religion in their lives. The Syrian capital is, to those interested in understanding Islam and Arabic, the key—what Boston is to liberal secular types. Abu Nour University, which reached its zenith under the late grand mufti of Syria, Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, is a favoured destination for students from non-Arab Muslim backgrounds hoping to gain or regain knowledge of the religion. On an average day Chechens, Indonesians, Pakistanis and British and American Muslims crowd the university’s corridors on their way to Koran and Arabic classes. The approach to Abu Nour is through a famous Damascus souk dotted with 13th and 14th-century minarets. Nearing the giant, still-new marble edifice, one begins to see bearded, robed and veiled figures from across the globe, standing out among the Syrians no less than Ella, my tall, blonde girlfriend.
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