An Unconventional Training Plan

“If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together” Anon

With my physical preparation so far restricted to carb-loading, I won’t be going anywhere fast.

But I do want to go far – nearly 3000 miles to the eastern edge of Europe.

So, I have been training by collecting voices to accompany me on my solo journey in spirit, if not in body. New ideas to meditate on during long days in the saddle, knowledge to inform, and words to give comfort and courage on the road.

In short: I’ve been reading. And I’d like to share some reflections with you.

Sarfraz Manzoor, Isambard Wilkinson, Tharik Hussain and Chris Dolan have each managed to capture both the best and the worst of us in their important and deeply personal books. At a reading in his home city of Glasgow last week, Dolan had the audience crying with laughter at his vignette on being busted busking in ‘Gaelic’ in a Spanish bar (it’s worth buying the book for this alone) and, minutes later, sobbing with grief at his beautiful rendition of Auld Lang Syne following a moving speech by his friend about the plight of oncology nurses in Gaza.

While testament to Dolan’s skills as a writer, these extremes of emotion perhaps also reflect our divided politics. The heat around identity issues seems to be intensifying. The crisis in Israel and Gaza has deepened, casting a black cloud over daily life. The escalation of hostilities has led to a global surge in both antisemitic and Islamophobic attacks. It seems to many that compassion – on display at protests or elsewhere – has become criminalised, as one charity CEO memorably put it to me recently. ‘Othering’ has taken centre stage.

I was struck by the parallel with Pakistan’s infancy in the middle of the last century, of which Isambard Wilkinson writes: “More concept than country, [it] strained under the centrifugal forces of history, identity and faith”. While Britain is built on more solid ground, it feels to me that those same forces are threatening to spin us out of control at home.

Feeling ‘othered’ can deepen a desire to belong. The racism he experienced growing up in 1970s Luton made Sarfraz Manzoor warm to his roots. He explains: “My affection was not for Pakistan as a place – which I barely knew – but for Pakistan as an idea. The idea that it was the one place in the world that would not deny me.” It is that idea, of a way or place to fully belong, that is the true destination of my own journey.

The ‘Pakistani-ness’ of my family has diluted with each generation, ethnicity forms tracing a lineage of ticks from Pakistani to British Pakistani to Mixed. Manzoor’s reflections resonate with me: “My present life is, in many ways, very White: I am the only fully Pakistani person in my own family and there are times when I feel disconnected from my Pakistani past.” He wrote his book partly to honour the journey his father made in coming to the UK and to understand his place in the world – motivations that I share and am pursuing in my own way.

Of course, we do belong here – and we (mostly) know it. Research conducted by the Aziz Foundation in 2018 found that 85% of Britain’s 4.1 million Muslims said they felt they belonged to Britain. Zooming in, I was fascinated to learn that Pakistanis felt more ‘at home’ than the English living in Scotland, according to a 2003 survey conducted by the University of Glasgow.

So far, so good: but Tharik Hussain blew me away by opening my eyes to the existence of indigenous versions of us. How did I not know about eastern Europe’s six centuries of Muslim history and its huge native Muslim population, or that there were cities in Europe where the call to prayer is such a normal part of the landscape? Hussain didn’t either, until he came upon it by chance on a family holiday.

He explains that the region’s Muslim history is remembered negatively, if remembered at all, and concludes that western Europe has “dissociated itself from the continent’s living indigenous Muslim heritage, thereby ridding itself of any suggestion Europe might have an indigenous Muslim identity. This is a falsehood pounced upon by Islamophobes across the continent today.”

If most Muslims in Europe – whether indigenous or more recently settled – feel at home, where does this leave the supposed clash between ‘British values’ and ‘other’ values? Manzoor quotes ex-prime minister, David Cameron, suggesting they can be in synergy: ‘If we want to remind ourselves of British values – hospitality, tolerance and generosity to name just three – there are plenty of British Muslim values ready to show us what those things really mean.” When Conservative party leadership contender (at the time) Rishi Sunak said last year that Christian values of tolerance, compassion and charity are British values, The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, responded that “these values are shared by people of all faiths and none”.

Sayeeda Warsi observes in her book, The Enemy Within, that “each generation asserts its own British values based on the society that makes up Britain at that time.” You only need watch Pride and Prejudice (especially the 1940 version that’s currently available on BBC iPlayer) to see the truth in this – the interpretation of values is fluid, not fixed.

My grandad’s values (my reading of them) perhaps reflected his social class as much as his religion or nationality: loyalty, independence, family, integrity, dignity, honesty, hard work. He found much to admire in British life: at the time that then 16-year-old Euan Blair was arrested for being ‘drunk and incapable’ in 2000, I remember him being astonished and delighted that even the prime minister’s son would be arrested in this country if he broke the law – a far cry from his experience of the rule of law in Pakistan.

We are all part of a story that started before us, and ordinary human values are the hero of that story: everyday decency, kindness, friendship, hope and solidarity. Those values exist everywhere and are the property of all of us. I am looking forward to getting out on the road and discovering this for myself, as others have done before me.

There’s a phrase that someone said to Chris Dolan after he refused money for helping him that stuck with me: Hoy tu, manana yo. You today, tomorrow me. These four words struck Dolan as “wise and human, the basis of a progressive political theory. Four words you could base an entire civilisation on. Words that are being ignored by our leaders today.”

Our political leaders work for us. If we want to go far, we must go together, and they must ensure no one is left behind. I for one will be taking all these inspirational voices with me on my own journey – and who knows where that will take me.

Reading list – with thanks to the following authors:

They by Sarfraz Manzoor

Everything Passes, Everything Remains by Chris Dolan

Minarets in the Mountains by Tharik Hussain

Travels in a Dervish Cloak by Isambard Wilkinson