“Salaamualaikum,” I heard myself blurt by way of greeting my new form tutor Mr Bodenham. What I wouldn’t have given in that moment to be zapped away to any other place in the world.
Except I’d only just got here. Age 13, fresh off the boat (well, Aeroflot, which was practically a motorboat with wings), leaving Bangladesh behind to start my new life in England. For the past few months, my parents had tried and failed to admit me to a local comprehensive, but it was the middle of the school year and my visa status too complicated to assure me a free state education in Thatcher’s Britain, so there had been no takers. Private was the only way to go, and my parents (imagining they’d get a doctor or an engineer in the bargain, but alas got this arty farty dosser instead) ransacked their savings to send me to St Dunstan’s, a near-all white posh old boy’s school.
“We don’t say that in this country, sunshine,” said Mr Bodenham, who hated me at salaam.
At that point, I didn’t have a chip on my shoulder about being so brusquely labelled as “not from round here”. I was absolutely a foreigner. The basic English I knew was that of an average student who’d studied it as a second language in an average Bangladeshi school, my thick accent twanged with intonations gleaned from Duran Duran songs and JR Ewing – primed to have the shit bullied out of me.
“Sit down,” Mr Bodenham ordered, then peered into my file to read out this outlandish non-native name. “Muhammad…”
“That’s not my name!” I said, in a way that was less Ting Tings and entirely bud bud ding ding.
“It says here, Muhammad Shihab Salim,” Mr Bodenham looked at me the way you’d expect a man to look when faced with a kid who needed to be told his own name.
How to convey this? In Bangladesh, in fact, in most Muslim countries of the world, pretty much all males are given the first name Muhammad… or Muhammed, Mohammad, Mohammod, Mohamed, depending on the spelling quirks of their registrar. I’ve never known anyone in Bangladesh introduce themselves as such (a few who’ve emigrated to western lands do go by that name, or shorten it to Mo, presumably because they got worn down by their very own Mr Bodenhams). Back there, everyone goes by their nick name, one that doesn’t always appear on your birth certificate, but is the moniker you’re known as – by friends, family, teachers, everyone.
Mine was Joi, meaning victory, born as I was in the first blush of Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan. Any Bangladeshi man called Joi, or Mukto (meaning liberation) was guaranteed born in the early part of 1972.
One of the first crucial bit of advice I received on ‘How to Survive England’ came from my cousin Simon (I shit you not, my Bangladesh-born uncle and aunt named their Luton-born brood Phillip, Simon, Janet and Emily, presumably in a bid to help them fit in). “Joi,” said Cousin Simon, solemnly. “Don’t tell anyone at school your name is Joi.”
“Muhammad is more like a title,” I tried to explain to Mr Bodenham.
“Like sir?” Mr Bodenham scoffed.
I braced myself to be known as Shihab, a name I identified with about as much as I did with a character in a Tintin book. Familiar, but not me.
“Well, here at Dunstan’s you’ll be known by your surname anyway. It is Salim, right?”
In a few days when my father signs a permission slip for a geography field trip, Mr Bodenham will see Dad writes his name as ‘Muhammed Shelim’, and Mr Bodenham will shake his head, and keep shaking it whenever he sees me until I go off to university to be known as Shabby, Shabstar, and for reasons less to do with the country of my origin and more in relation to my lifestyle choices, Bong Boy.
Today, Muhammad is the most popular name in Britain. In fact, the most popular name in the world. Which begs the question: why do some Muslims react to the name being uttered with the same kind of foreboding as when saying Lord Voldemort’s name out loud?
You may recall the case of a seven-year-old Sudanese boy who put his own name in with his classmates’ suggestions to name a teddy bear, and saw his nomination get the most votes, only for his British teacher to get arrested, sparking an international blasphemy scandal. The boy’s name, unsurprisingly enough, was Muhammad. But to call a teddy bear that? Sacrilege!
The reasoning is, of course, that we dare not take the Prophet’s name in vain. In any article you read about him on any Muslim publication, his name is always followed by (pbuh) or (SAW), ṣallā -llāhu ʿalayhī wa-sallam, both meaning ‘peace be upon him’. Back when I was the Editor-in-Chief of Asian Woman magazine, I ran an interview with cricketer turned politician Imran Khan that passingly referenced the Prophet by name, minus brackets. We got so many complaints and a charming little death threat, we never mentioned him, nor religion in any shape or form, ever again. But we did cover a hell of lot of public figures and real-life accounts of people called Muhammad.
Here on Fallen Muslim, whenever I name the Prophet, I maintain there’s no bracket required.
I make a point of never mocking him, nor belittling his followers. It’s not like I’m out to coin the Muslim equivalent of Jesus fucking Christ! No, whenever I mention the Prophet here, it’ll be to share adages and observations about him, no disrespect intended to the man. What I can, however, do is make fun of the name, because, well, for one, it’s my name. When I told the old joke about “what do you call a Muslim with a pig on his head? Hamed. What do you call a Muslim with two pigs on his head? Mohamed. What do you call a Muslim with two pigs on his head on the dancefloor? Sheikh Mohamed” in Islam: It’s No Laughing Matter, someone sent me a polite yet chilling message advising me to mind my tongue. I’m not ridiculing the Prophet’s name, I repeated, I’m making fun of the name.
As it goes, I’m actually no longer a Muhammad. Had it officially taken off by deed poll and took on my original name Joi as my new surname. I always hated the name Muhammad, not least because I never knew how to spell it. My Bangladeshi passport (which I had until a dozen or so years ago because I left taking my British Citizenship Test due to standard stoner procrastination), had me down as ‘Muhammad’. My national security number card bore the legend ‘Mohammed’. At the bank I was registered as ‘Muhammed’. If I were so inclined, I’d have made a killing committing fraud.
The final straw came after years of bugging my parents, I got them to go through the boxes rotting in the attic to unearth my birth certificate so I could finally find out how my name was spelled. Check this out:
‘Md’. That really is how my lazy-arsed registrar spelled it. M fucking D. Ah, and look, ‘Salim’ as ‘Selim’.
And people wonder why I have identity issues…
Brilliant article - I learned and laughed. Top marks for ‘no bracket required’ too.
Great read