During his last sayings before he died, on Mount Arafat in Saudi Arabia, the Prophet Muhammad exhorted his community, his umma, to see each other as family. “Learn that every Muslim is a brother to every Muslim and that the Muslims constitute one brotherhood."

*

The smile is friendly, imprinted with shining white teeth. The face behind it is open but determined. I have seen him face down gangs, boys with switchblades and machetes, barely-men who see in me the enemy.

I have watched him with his son, seen him chase giggling young daughters; heard wisdom beyond his years, his hand butterfly-light on mine as he talks; seen him with the ‘Hajji’ – old men – as they stumble uncertainly on the scummed sidewalks. After these many months in the ghetto, he is the nearest thing to my friend.

“It’s simple,” he explains. “All you have to do is say these words. Just repeat after me:

"Ashhadu Alla Ilaha Illa Allah Wa Ashhadu Anna Muhammad Rasulu Allah…”

My lips form soundlessly, mimicking the phrase. I have heard it thousands of times: guttural, sung, whispered, murmured, shouted.

“There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his Messenger…”

It is one of the five tenets of the faith. Companion to Jihad (struggle) and Zakat (charity); to pilgrimage and to fasting. To prayer. Sung in the original Arabic, it is beautiful. The words become lilting, hypnotic. It lies in the shining eyes of the converts I have met. It sits in the faith itself:

Islam: 'Submit'.

How strange to hear it now, echoing in my head, as I look into those soulful brown eyes.

“Perhaps you should convert,” he says, then laughs. Tension, perhaps expectation, laces his smile. He smoothes an oil-brown hand through his beard. “Or revert, as we call it. We all of us are born to Allah...some of us will revert to him.”

He's serious. Here it is, the Umma, opening before me. The worldwide brotherhood, the death-bed legacy of Muhammad. It stretches the globe, reaching even these tortured streets:

It is in white Abdullah’s breath, leaning in close and telling me of his divorced wives and alcoholism.

It lies behind Jemel’s hooded smile, reminiscing after life in Dahab and the hashish and the girls, the blue seas unfurling as he talks.

I sense it in Hassan’s tales of civil war and clans, enjoying the mild narcotic buzz of the ‘khat’, marvelling at his elfin fingers, hearing his love of 2Pac and the tales of war from back home.

For The Copt, it is the reason he stole an identity and fled from his village near the Nile, his sorrows drowned in the chemical dreams peddled to eager City folk.

A sorrow the masjid cannot heal sits beneath MC Ratty's fluttering eyes, chasing the dragon in the back of a car in the backstreets of the gentrified ghetto, his dead friends haunting waking dreams.

They tell me that you never forget it. That when it enters, your understanding changes forever. They tell me this, these bright-eyed men with their first beards and wives seeming-ghosts.

Yet if only they knew. God has always been close here. Because this is the Abyss – and if He won't help you, who will?

***

Nick Ryan ©2008 extracted from forthcoming book