I was the daughter of two solitary renegades who'd met at Trinity College Dublin in the 1950s freaks pulled by the magnet of shared disenchantment into an inseparable embrace. I was not always a Muslim, but once I was led into the absorption of prayer and the mysteries of the Qur'an, something troubled in me became still. Five times a day, wherever we might be, however much we might doubt ourselves and the world around us. I can translate the forms for them before kneeling down and putting my forehead to the same ground. I exist somewhere between what they know and what they fear, somewhere between the past and the future, which is not quite the present. I'm a white Muslim woman raised in Africa, now employed by the National Health Service. My white face and white uniform give me the appearance of authority in this new world, though my experiences, as my neighbors quickly come to discover, are rooted in the old.
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