I’m heading for the mosque in Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. The most northerly mosque in Scotland.
I’m not going all that way because I’m particularly religious, or because there are no nearer mosques either. There’s one a mere thirty miles from home, in Dumfries, and there are plenty in the central belt between Glasgow and Edinburgh. No, I’m making Stornoway my target only because it’s far away and not easy to get to, because most Scots as well as most Muslims would consider it to be a very distant and far-flung location. I aim to go so far into Scotland that I fall off the edge.
This issue of Critical Muslim is dedicated to Scotland. And why would Critical Muslim dedicate an issue to Scotland? For several reasons. First, there is a significant Muslim community here, which makes Scotland, like almost everywhere else, a part of the Muslim world. Second, Scotland’s First Minister, Humza Yousaf, is a Muslim. This means that Scotland is the first western country (except for those with Muslim majorities, like Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo) to appoint a Muslim as its leader. The leader of the largest opposition party, Labour’s Anas Sarwar, is also a Muslim. Third, many of the issues facing Scotland have interesting echoes, reflections, and parallels in many Muslim-majority societies. These issues include competing versions of nationalism, the politics of minority language groups, arguments over land use and ownership, environmental degradation, and sectarianism – all of which (and more) are discussed in these pages.
So off I set. I live in Galloway, which is my journey’s starting point. Galloway is in the far southwest. Therefore, I head north, with the Southern Uplands rising to the west of the road and endless sheep fields rolling to the east. It’s a depopulated landscape which still bears traces of a more densely peopled past. In almost every field there’s the ruin of a house once inhabited by subsistence farmers. There are ruins in the misty hills too, but those fallen stones are well hidden by the closely packed plantations of brooding Sitka Spruce. The summits bear mainly Gaelic (or Brythonic) names, though nobody around here has spoken any version of that language for at least a few hundred years.
Visitors from cities tend to assume that this is a natural landscape, but it’s almost completely man made.
Some centuries ago, the lairds exported the subsistence farmers and imported the sheep, which gobbled up tree saplings to create a grass desert. The land became a workshop producing mutton, lamb, and wool. More recently, venture capitalists and the Forestry Commission took over the wilder pastureland and planted Sitka Spruce instead. Sitka comes from Alaska, and grows very fast in Scotland’s comparative warmth. A forest can be cropped after a mere 40 years. The wood is low quality, and goes mainly for palettes and pulp to make cardboard, but the landowners benefit too from government grants for ‘carbon capture’. Planting trees is rewarded, whatever the trees, however they are planted. Sitka don’t root deeply, so in a gale they topple like dominos. You can’t walk through them, they’re planted so wrongly. Nothing much can live beneath them. And they acidify the soil and water.
Northwards as the hills rise, huge wind turbines turn. Then the road winds down through crumbling slopes all the way into Ayrshire. Into what used to be coalmining country. The landscape is flatter, with fewer trees. Depressed, grey, partially boarded-up towns string between decades-old slag heaps. One town is called Patna. So called after the capital of India’s Bihar state, where William Fullarton, the founder of this Scottish Patna, was born. First, farmers were expelled from their land. Next, the dispossessed and landless congregated in mining and industrial towns, where they could at least find brutal work. And the mines, factories, and ship building yards in which they labored were funded by profits made from the British colonies.
The marks of all this are seared on the landscape and into the people in a way that they aren’t quite in England, at least not in the south. There are lasting signs of traumatisation, of the violent renewal, and then the long decline.
The nexus of empire and industry shaped modern Scotland and made it more British. The end of empire and the death of old industry sets the context for Scotland’s contemporary reality, which is increasingly less identified with Britain, or at least with the United Kingdom.
South of Ayr, I can see the Irish Sea in the distance. North of Ayr, my route joins the coast. Water shudders on the left, green and silver in scudding sunshine. Overlooking the beaches are holiday and retirement homes, and little palm trees growing in their gardens. It’s not as cold on the west coast as you’d expect from the latitude. It snows more often in Damascus than in Ayr. And that’s because the Gulf Stream bathes western Scotland in moist warm wind brought all the way from Mexico.
I see the Isle of Arran out there, not far away, rugged and towering. Looking like the Highlands already. Arran is obvious because of the height of Goat Fell, but it’s difficult to tell the islands in the sea from the various bits of winding, curling mainland.
At Wemyss Bay I drive on to the ferry for the Isle of Bute. The boats leave at twenty-minute intervals. I lock the car and climb up to the deck. Very soon the engines are chugging us through the Firth of Clyde, the chief inlet and outlet through which Scots engaged with the world. Ships sailed through this channel carrying migrants to the New World and troops, administrators, engineers and teachers to the colonies. On the banks of the Clyde, Scotland’s great industries were built, funded with profits made in the East and West Indies – including from slavery. Scots were thoroughly involved in the slave economy, as investors, owners, and overseers. Apparently Robert Burns –who now has ‘national poet’ status – was considering a job as a plantation book-keeper, and might have taken it had he not taken off as a poet. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Scots owned a third of slaves and almost a third of estates in Jamaica. Profits from the colonial tobacco, sugar and cotton industries – all reliant on slave labour – built many of Scotland’s grand buildings. Educational institutions, and the Wee Free Church (of which more later) were founded with funds from the slave economy.
Some Scots, of course, were active abolitionists, and on occasion Scottish communities took direct action against slavery. When in the 1760s, for instance, the slave Ned Johnson’s owner brought him from Virginia to Glasgow, and then hung him up and flogged him, the neighbours cut Ned down, took him to a magistrate, and demanded he be freed.
The Clyde valley connected the Scots to the world, for good and for ill. ‘A disproportionate number of Scots played a part in Britain’s colonial administration,’ writes Scottish-Sudanese novelist Leila Aboulela in this issue. Her essay focuses on three Scots who engaged with the Muslim world in very different ways – a colonial officer, an artist, and a convert to Islam. Their involvement with Sudan, Egypt, Mecca, complicates and in some way solidifies Leila’s involvement with Scotland. Discovering a statue in Aberdeen of one of them – a British imperial martyr – she thinks: ‘Gordon had been there, and I was now here.’
Scots and Muslims have been wrapped up together for centuries – Scots traveling to Muslim countries, and Muslims settling here. The Clyde valley, and Glasgow specifically, is where Scotland’s largest Muslim community developed. Saqib Razzaq’s, essay in these pages, describes the growth of that community in the twentieth century. She focuses on its largest component – Scottish Pakistanis – and on key figures such as Bashir Maan, Scotland’s first Muslim councilor, and Atta Ashrif, founder of Glasgow’s first Muslim Association, and eventually its first mosque.
But nothing so consequential as slavery, empire, industry, or community-building is happening on this stretch of water today. It’s just the ferry chugging me and my vehicle across as I sip on a cardboard cup of coffee, just half an hour of chugging, and then I’m driving off the ferry into Rothesay, the only town on the Isle of Bute.
Rothesay is a bit battered these days, but in its late Victorian heyday it was a busy resort serving working and lower-middle class Glaswegian tourists. Some are still here, drinking in the daytime, or promenading with friendly grins (Glasgow surely being the friendliest city in the British Isles). As well as a few boarded-up shops, Rothesay boasts a mock-Mughal pavilion, and modestly elegant hotels, and mini-golf, and bright flowers in neat beds, and jellyfish, seagulls and seaweed.
So how should we judge Bute? Is it a terrible or wonderful place? Is it an island to retire to, or to commute from (the ferries are fast enough that some who work in Glasgow live here) – or to escape?
It contains enough of the characteristics of the rest of the country to seem like a microcosm. There is the same cracked grey council housing that covers much of the central belt, as well as high-ceilinged town houses of the sort seen in Edinburgh. There’s a laird’s palatial home and gardens, and agriculture, sea, some forest. The Highland fault runs through the island, so it is both lowlands and highlands, geologically speaking.
Terrible or wonderful? Extended to cover the nation as a whole, this question has governed Scottish culture since my childhood. Some decades ago, the general assumption was that the place was pretty terrible. Many or most Scots were not proud of Scotland. Mark Renton’s monologue in the Highlands scene from Trainspotting summed up the attitude: ‘It’s shite being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low! The scum of the fucking earth! … Some people hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, were colonised by wankers.’
Some people’s language was cleaner, but this was a very common perception. Scotland was post-imperial and post-industrial, with a shrinking, ageing population, with (at one point) the highest murder rate in Europe, with high unemployment and a shockingly high rate of drugs deaths.
More recently, however, the self-perception of Scots has shifted in a positive direction. The general assumption now is that Scotland – despite the continuation of the problems listed above – tends towards the wonderful, or at least the potentially wonderful. There’s been a Scottish cultural revival, expressing itself in literature, music, and art. The Gaelic language too is taken much more seriously than it was, and studied more widely. Scots of all political persuasions are happily aware of their national and cultural distinction from their English neighbours. And in the last twenty years, the Scottish National Party (SNP) has dominated the political scene, both in Scotland’s devolved parliament, which enjoys limited powers, and at Westminster, where the SNP provides most Scottish MPs.
The party first achieved power in Scotland in 2007. In 2014, it organised a referendum on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom. The result seemed a foregone conclusion – at the start of the campaign, only about a third of Scots said they supported independence. Yet the campaign took off, and it mobilised sections of society that the SNP had never reached. These included young people, most ethnic minorities, and progressives represented by Common Weal and similar groups.
On voting day, 45 percent supported independence, despite all the big parties except the SNP, and all the media except one newspaper, urging people against it. In the days before the vote, British Prime Minister David Cameron and ex-Labour leader Gordon Brown (himself a Scot) promised ‘devolution max’ – that is, greatly increased powers for the Scottish Parliament – if Scotland remained in the union. This promise was forgotten as soon as the votes were counted. Forgotten by the English parties, but not by Scots. Shortly after the referendum, support for independence – according to opinion polls – passed 50 percent. Then in the 2015 Westminster election, the SNP won all but three of the Scottish seats.
The party’s popular success continued, and only now is beginning to tail off. In the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, the SNP won the largest share of the popular vote and the largest number of constituency seats in any Scottish Parliament election – that is, it won 64 out of 129 seats. If the Scottish Parliament used the first-past-the-post system, like Westminster, the party would have won a landslide majority, but because Scotland uses a more democratic proportional representation system, the SNP governs in alliance with the Scottish Green Party – which also wants self-government.
Apart from the growing desire for independence, one reason for the SNP’s success has been its skill at attracting disillusioned Labour voters. Once known as ‘the tartan Tories’, the SNP moved left as the Labour Party under Tony Blair’s leadership moved right. Tony Blair’s insistence on taking Britain into the 2003 Iraq War solidified the sense among many Scots that England under both major parties continued to be an imperialist power, while Scotland, at least in the new century, wanted to distance itself from its imperialist past.
The SNP, according to most perceptions, governed both well and in a manner which distinguished itself, and therefore Scotland, from England’s very different political culture. As a result, unlike the English, Scots enjoy free medical prescriptions, free sanitary products, and free university tuition. The party is certainly to the left of both Blair and the current Labour leader Keir Starmer. And unlike the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, it has been able to pursue leftist and socially liberal policies without collapsing into populism or support for authoritarian regimes abroad.
Yet for most of the years of SNP strength, England has been dominated by the Conservative Party rather than Labour, and the Conservative Party has moved ever more to the right. English politics has increasingly appealed to petty nationalist and xenophobic impulses which don’t really operate in Scotland, at least not in the same way. Nigel Farage and his United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) set the agenda for English politics, but never took off north of the border. Two thirds of Scots voted against Brexit (but had to swallow it anyway). And most Scots are not frightened by immigration. It’s true that only two percent of the Scottish population consists of minority ethnic people – as opposed to 15 percent of England – and therefore that Scots may become more xenophobic in the future if the proportion rises, but for now the country is much more welcoming than England. Or it would like to be – if it could control its own immigration policy.
Unlike all the major English parties, the SNP happily talks up the economic and cultural benefits of free movement and immigration. So in 2019, Nicola Sturgeon, then party leader, said: ‘In Scotland, we know … that the Westminster approach to migration – as well as being deeply inhumane – poses an existential threat to our future prosperity.’
This goes some way to explaining why Scottish Muslims are more likely than not to vote SNP, and for independence. This often surprises members of minority groups south of the border, to whom the SNP sounds like the BNP – the British National Party, an anti-immigrant and blatantly racist outfit. People in England sometimes assume that any party with ‘National’ in its name must be based on an exclusivist ethno-chauvinism. But it should be remembered that two competing forms of nationalism are at work in Scotland. The independence-seeking Scottish version, at least under its current leadership, is an inclusive civic nationalism, whereas the unionist British version is much more likely to be exclusionary. A week before the 2014 referendum, the Orange Order – the Protestant identity group known for its provocative anti-Catholic and anti-Irish marches in Northern Ireland – organised an enormous unionist demonstration in Glasgow. On the day after the referendum, as the result came through, the same people celebrated in Glasgow’s George Square. They painted ‘Obey Your Queen’ on the road, waved Union Jacks, and abused passing Pakistani-Scots.
But back to Bute – which hosts a new community of Syrian-Scots, 24 families to be precise. I knew about this before I visited, though I had no contacts in the community. I knew it because the story has been featured in the media. The apparent contradiction of ‘refugees’ and ‘remote Scottish island’ marks the topic for repetition (though Bute is not really remote – as already mentioned, it’s commuting distance from Scotland’s largest city).
Because I had no contacts, I wrote to the Argyll and Bute council before I left home, asking for an introduction to some of the Syrians. I was surprised by the council’s negative response: the Syrian community on Bute has had a bad experience with the media, and has therefore made a collective decision not to engage with journalists or writers, whoever they are. I did a little research, and discovered that the bad media experience was related to that aforementioned standard Scottish question, usually asked by Scots themselves: is it (Bute, in this case) a terrible or a wonderful place?
Early media attention had stressed the happy aspect of the story. The Syrians had been warmly welcomed, and had fitted in well, and were happy on the island. But then a journalist found a couple of Syrians who dissented. Bute, they complained, was full of ‘old people waiting to die.’ The weather was miserable, there were hardly any jobs, and in the absence of a larger Arab or Muslim community, the Syrians felt isolated. This story wasn’t much of a story. If a journalist were to stop ‘native’ Scots and ask them if their town or region or country was terrible or wonderful, about half would answer ‘terrible’, depending perhaps on the weather that day. But because a couple of incomers had answered ‘terrible’, the non-story was reprinted by several right-wing newspapers to make the implicit points that refugees are ungrateful, that they refuse to adapt, and that immigration is therefore a bad thing.
So the Syrians didn’t want to talk, and I respected their desire. If I’d stayed longer I’m sure I would have met them anyway. I passed a Syrian barbershop, and a Syrian patisserie, but both were closed that evening.
In any case, I had another reason to spend the night in Bute. That is, it cut out the tedious part of my journey. In the morning I took a ferry from the northern tip of the island into Argyll, thus arriving immediately in the Highlands, and avoiding the traffic-packed trudge around Glasgow.
Back on the road. A long and wonderful day of driving ensues. I’m traveling alone. It’s difficult to pick up the radio because of the mountains in the way. I prefer the noisiness of my thoughts anyway, or silence when I overcome them. Sometimes I listen to Finnegans Wake. Sometimes I sing.
And drive northwards, past Inverary, on the banks of Loch Fyne. I’m not stopping now but I’ve visited before with my wife, and I hope we visit again. The finest sea food is fished from Loch Fyne, and Inverary – home to the chiefs of Clan Campbell, now calling themselves the Dukes of Argyll – is a lovely place. The town is small but monumental, beneficiary of the royal favour that fell upon the Campbells once they’d defeated more unruly clans. Apparent from the road is the kind of well-tended castle that might decorate a shortbread box. Some miles further, on the edge of Loch Awe, is Kilchurn Castle. It’s a dramatic ruin dating from an age when Clan Campbell needed strongholds more than frills.
I take a back road through the Glen of Orchy to avoid the traffic, and for half an hour the only other road users are two cyclists and three brown pigs. I wind on the river bank through Silver Birch and bracken. There are wading birds on the water, and no doubt salmon and plenty of trout beneath the surface. The water is copper-coloured over rocks, and black where it deepens. I have many more miles to go, but the glen makes me want to stop and make a fire, perhaps catch a fish for dinner. It reminds me of various mountain journeys and nights spent under the stars in this country and others – not least in the far north of Pakistan.
Most people wouldn’t associate Scotland with Pakistan, but there are many connections, and not just those of empire. One such is the brown trout – an iconic Scottish fish which is also native to Afghanistan, and which the British introduced to northern Pakistan. Robin Ade’s essay covers his adventures in Pakistan and Afghanistan, his fishing in lochs ‘littered with rusting Soviet military ordinance’, his brushes with the Taliban (and an angry eagle), and his friend Khalil’s fishing visit to Scotland, in turn.
But there’s no time now to catch a trout. I soon leave Glen Orchy to join the A82, the road stretching north of Loch Lomond which introduces most visitors to the Highlands. The route climbs onto Rannoch Moor. This is, for me, a dreamscape. There isn’t anywhere suitable to stop, so I’ve only ever seen it properly in dreams. I know from sideway glances that the moor runs low and flat towards the mountains which surround it, that its colours pulse chameleon-like with the shifting of the clouds, and that it holds lochans of choppy cold water which in turn hold islands of wild fertility. Neither sheep nor deer can reach these isles, so trees can grow. The red trunks and high branches of Scots Pine make poses. Something in the scene reminds me of Chinese landscape painting. I recognise it, but don’t know what it is I’m recognising. This is the same kind of recognition as when I listen and re-listen to Finnegans Wake. Some sense is made, though I don’t know of what. I see, though I don’t see at all.
Further on there are towering peaks and vast open valleys. I keep remembering Pakistan. The mountains here are small hills in comparison, though they used to be almost as high as the Hindu Kush or the Himalayas. Millions upon millions of years of erosion, including various ice ages, have worn them down, but the geology and the far northern latitude makes them as wild as mountains anywhere. All this beauty has its effects on the human soul. A person of an earlier era would have called it ‘sublime’.
Climbing again, until the road ascends to a higher plane. It’s a spiritual experience; driving feels like flight. Set to the left is Buachaille Etive Mòr. What an astounding mountain it is. What an ur-mountain. If an alien were to ask you what a mountain was, you’d show him a picture of this one.
Now the road plunges in zigzags down to Glencoe. Where, in 1692, the MacDonalds were massacred, by Campbells and others, for refusing to pledge allegiance to the crown.
After that the road runs at sea level, and always beside water – Loch Leven, Loch Linnhe, Loch Lochy, Loch Oich, Loch Ness – through Fort William, and then Fort Augustus. Why are so many towns named after forts? Fort William was established as a garrison in 1690, Fort Augustus in 1730, and nearby Fort George in 1770. The purpose of each was to pacify the road-less and still independent people of the Highlands. The last major pitched battle in Scotland was at Culloden in 1746, when the Catholic and clan-backed Jacobites were defeated by the Protestant crown.
Once vanquished, the clans were repurposed. Clan warriors became the frontline troops of British imperialism as it spread overseas, converting in turn other defeated mountain men – the Gurkhas, for instance, or the Pathans – into crack cadres of empire. The clan chieftains, meanwhile, became lairds – lordly landowners who set about ‘improving’ their realms by exporting the native people. Some of the fighting men were retained at home in order to enforce these domestic ‘clearances’.
The lairds were the same elites who had agreed to the 1707 Act of Union, joining Scotland to the English state. But before that, they, their landed Lowland peers, and the urban mercantile elites, had invested heavily in the disastrous Darien Scheme. This project was independent Scotland’s attempt to build its own maritime empire. The only step taken towards this grandiose endeavour was the short-lived establishment of a colony in Panama. The first ship load of colonists left Scotland in 1698, with high hopes. Vast amounts of wealth were committed to the project; up to 40 percent of actual capital in Scotland was invested. Yet within a couple of years, everything had been lost. Whatever could go wrong for the nascent imperialists did. They were ground down by local resistance, attacks by European competitors, and disease.
So Scotland’s nobles were very nearly bankrupted. At this point, a plan was cooked up whereby the crown would reimburse them for their losses if they agreed to pass the powers of Scotland’s parliament to Westminster. This was the context in which Scotland lost its independence and became another part of the United Kingdom. According to historian Thomas Martin Devine, ‘the Act of Union was a legislative measure agreed in Scotland by a tiny patrician elite against some internal parliamentary opposition and much external popular hostility.’
Robert Burns famously called the patrician elite ‘a parcel of rogues’. The novelist and critic, Neil M. Gunn drove the criticism home: ‘with rare exceptions, the nobles and clan chiefs of Scotland, in the tragic hours of their people’s need, showed themselves the sorriest and most treacherous crew that ever a decent land was damned by.’
As the lairds swung behind British expansion overseas, and as they cleared the people off their lands at home, poverty-stricken Scots either sailed for the Americas or populated the slums of the new industrial cities. Some eventually took pride in Scotland’s industrial development, but the slums remained violent and cursed by alcoholism until the industrial decline – when heroin joined alcohol as refuge and curse of the alienated poor. According to Gunn: ‘Altogether it is a disheartening story in a disheartened people, losing faith in themselves, growing ashamed of their Gaelic speech, of every characteristic that differentiated them from those born to the English tongue.’
I spend the night in a caravan, and the next day head westwards, where I might for the first time (other than on BBC Alba) hear the Gaelic speech spoken.
‘Over the sea to Skye’ goes the song, eternalising the flight of Bonny Prince Charlie, but these days a bridge at the Kyle of Lochalsh connects the mainland to the Inner Hebrides. So over the bridge I go.
Skye is a remarkable place, and the most remarkable part of it may be the Cuillin Hills. I park the car to take a photo, and end up stumbling upwards, awestruck, for an hour, past blue rocks, blue pools, white rapids, and rearing above them the most rugged mountains anywhere in the British Isles.
I return again the next day, to Glen Brittle, where I head uphill for ‘the Fairy Pools’ – so named in the nineteenth century for the first tourist craze. A broad white path snakes upward. Walking on it is like driving on the tourist-choked single-track roads: you have to stop frequently to allow oncoming traffic to pass.
It’s the same further north at the Quirang – a dramatic set of rocky outcrops rising from smooth, ice-sculpted hills, with misty views of the sea and further wild isles beyond. Here too there’s an onrush of vehicles and bodies. German, Dutch, Spanish, American. So many tourists. I can’t complain because I am one of them, but still I’ll complain… There are too many people, and in such a place that for almost all of its history would have been properly remote.
That evening in Portree I buy a map in a bookshop, and at the counter I hear a conversation conducted in Gaelic. The first and only. There seems to be less Gaelic spoken in Skye than German, at least at this time of year. (It’s September – the last days of the tourist season. I suppose if I’d come in the winter the place would be less crowded.)
Even the small amount of Gaelic surviving is something of a miracle, following centuries of state and social Anglophone prejudice. The Statutes of Icolmkill, signed by the chiefs of the Outer Isles in 1609, were concerned that the ‘Irishe language which is one of the chief and principall causis of the continewance of barbaritie and incivilitie amongis the inhabitants of the Isles and Heylandis may be abolisheit and removeit.’ In the same Statutes, the chiefs were forced to agree to send their eldest sons to be educated in the lowlands, in English.
The tide may at last have turned. Local culture these days is something to be celebrated more than repressed. In her essay in these pages, Kirsty MacDougall examines the efforts to revive the Gaelic language since the 1970s, including the exponential growth in Gaelic-medium education. The Gaelic Language Act was passed by the Scottish Government in 2005. The Act, according to MacDougall, ‘marked a historic milestone for the Gaelic language. This legislation meant that Gaelic was recognised officially as an “official language of Scotland, commanding equal respect to the English language”.’
Up here in Skye, in any case, not just the place names but even the signs for ‘hospital’ (ospadal) and ‘town centre’ (meadhan a bhaile) are printed in Gaelic. And certainly the place and its people produce their own distinctive atmosphere. There’s a particular soft lilt in the accent when the locals speak Scots. There’s a general gentleness and air of cooperation which is common to all of Scotland, but here it may be still more intense. I tell the lady who manages the guest house that a light is flashing on my car dashboard. She sends me to her brother’s garage, which does what’s necessary at a discount price. Hostess and mechanic are Macraes. The biggest clan on the island is clan Macleod. The proportion of red-heads here is surely higher than on the mainland. Skye appears to be thriving, and one reason for that must be the tourism, which clogs the roads in the summer, sure, but provides the money to keep life going in the winter.
Next day I drive to Uig, then take the ferry for Harris and Lewis. I’m still heading for Stornoway, Lewis’s capital, and for Scotland’s most northerly mosque.
The ferry takes an hour and forty minutes, and it’s a powerful vessel, moving fast. In the days before ferries, most people would never have left their islands. I wonder at how lonely their lives must have been, or perhaps how complete, perhaps embedded in community in ways we cannot today imagine. There’s another island even further out to sea – St. Kilda, deserted by its last inhabitants in 1930. Now you can visit it only as a member of a work party. I have a friend who did just that. He says you can walk the island’s entire perimeter in a few hours. A wind-swept rock inhabited by seabirds, and once by a few humans, whose neighbours for them were the entire world.
The ferry arrives at Tarbert, on Harris. I drive off the boat and turn southwards, to explore.
Harris and Lewis sound like two islands, but in fact are only one. The divide between them is made not of water but by a line of rugged hills. The landscape is treeless, and not tame enough for fields. Not much soil. There’s more rock than anything, sometimes thinly covered with peat, and tough grass, and purple heather. Sheep wander the roads. The white sand beaches look almost tropical. The weather today is quite remarkable – hot, bright, dry. Later my landlady Margo will tell me that though she’s come down dozens of times to visit relatives in Harris, she’s never once seen the place free of cloud and mist, that she’s never really known what it looks like.
Well, it looks beautiful. And wild and alien. It feels very distant from everything else, peripheral in an obvious way. But I know from my reading that these parts are also strangely central. It’s as if events that start here build larger echoes as they reach out into the world.
Donald Trump’s mother came from Lewis. The name Donald comes from the Gaelic Domhnall, meaning ‘ruler of the world’.
Weird historical rhymes ricochet from rock to rock. The father of Arthur Balfour – he of the infamous Balfour Declaration, so an actor in the eviction of Palestinians from their land – once ordered the eviction of 27 families from Lewis. For the purposes of ‘improvement’.
In ancient times, the island – low-lying Lewis more than high-humped Harris – was full of stone circles. It must have been some kind of ritual centre, but for a religion or a way of seeing that we now know nothing about. In early Christian times, it drew hermits and pilgrims, who settled in caves and beehive huts. It’s not clear why they came. From the mediaeval Catholic culture, it retains tobraichean, or holy wells, and teampaill, or ‘temple’ chapels. From the Druidic religion (I assume) it inherits a rich folklore and a recently submerged belief in the sith, or fairies, and the sithean, the hollow hills which fairies inhabit. Harris and Lewis has been a spiritual site for all of its history, and still it is today.
Margo – my Stornoway guesthouse host – asks what I’m writing about.
‘It’s interesting that there’s a mosque up here in Stornoway,’ I say. ‘And there’s a strong Christian community too.’
‘I know a lot about it,’ says Margo. ‘I was part of it for twenty years,’ she exclaims disapprovingly, more or less rolling her eyes. There are at minimum three churches competing on the island. The Church of Scotland, the Free Church of Scotland that broke away from it, and then the church that broke away from the Free Church. The Free Church – or the ‘Wee Free’ as it’s colloquially known – has the most adherents.
Once, of course, all the Christians here were Catholics. And once before that they were something else again. While exploring Harris I’d visited, at the island’s southernmost tip, St. Clement’s, a medieval church rebuilt in the sixteenth century by the Macleod chief, despite his Protestantism. Its tower is adorned by a Sheila-na-Gig, which is a stone-carved female figure found exclusively in mediaeval Irish and western Scottish church architecture. The sculpture displays exaggerated female genitalia. We can only speculate as to why – a warning against lust? a prayer for fertility? a survival from an earlier pantheon?
Bara and South Uist, the Hebridean islands to the south of Harris, still retain their Catholicism today, which in one sense at least has cut them off culturally from their nearest neighbours. Bara and South Uist are Scotland’s only Catholic-majority areas, though most Scottish Catholics live in Glasgow. Many of the Glaswegian Catholics are the descendants of nineteenth century Irish immigrants. The human traffic went both ways – most of Northern Ireland’s Protestant population descends from Scottish settlers.
The combination of power imbalances, political positioning, and religious identity, leads to sectarianism in north west Europe as surely as it does in the Middle East. And the Scottish example proves that religious belief is not a prerequisite for sectarian hatred. Most people in Glasgow are not believers these days, but many know which sect they belong to when Rangers and Celtic are playing football. Both teams have made efforts to diversify recently, so I’m oversimplifying, but: Rangers is a Protestant team, while Celtic is Catholic. Rangers supporters are more likely to wave the Union Jack, while Celtic fans tend to wave the Saltire – the Scottish flag. But the projection goes even further. In a complex metaphorical move, Rangers supporters sometimes raise the Israeli flag, because the Israeli settlement of Palestine seems to them to echo the Protestant British settlement of Ireland. In return, Celtic fans raise the Palestinian flag…
But back to Lewis, old-fashioned Lewis, where religion burns closer to the heart even than football.
Margo says: ‘It’s only the last fifteen years that the women haven’t been obliged to wear hats. I was one of the first to go out without a hat. I had trouble for it. And you know, I once visited Morocco. And you might be surprised, but I found it quite familiar. There they were covering the women, and some of them trying to steal from you, but still they were worshipping Allah.’
‘Hypocrisy lives everywhere,’ I say.
‘Well,’ says Margo. ‘You should look up the Lewis Revival. That was pretty bizarre. Led by a character named Duncan Campbell. You look at that and you think, how could that happen? And you should look up the Gaelic psalm singing. It’s on YouTube. The singing sounds like the sound of the sea.’
I note this down, then ask: ‘What are the other signs of religious life on the island?’
‘That the Sabbath is observed. No work on Sundays. That’s changing a bit now, but it was a good thing, I think it was. It meant even the non-religious people could spend the day at home with their families. But I’m talking too much…’
I assure her she isn’t.
‘It complicated really,’ she says then. ‘Religion can control people too much, and it’s always ruined by corruption. Maybe it would be better to forget it. But then I think – what is all this? What’s this life, and this universe? There must be something behind it all. And we’re all so depressed and uncertain. We need something. And I’m still looking for it, I am still looking.’
In these last words she sums up a very common dilemma, and the last couple of hundred years of human history too.
Next morning, as she serves breakfast, Margo directs me to a stone circle which will be free of tourists. Except for me, of course. So I drive there, and park the car, and walk across sodden peaty ground, under cloud which the unseasonable sun is burning away. Each step seems to lead me a thousand paces further from human noise. I see a huge bird hovering. A Golden Eagle? Then I’m distracted by a ruined house, or church. Once a large structure, too complex for a sheep pen. A grey cat stares from between the stones. Another kind of consciousness.
The cat breaks its stare and darts down across the moor in the direction of the sea. I turn back towards the stone circle which stands against the clearing sky a little above me, up across heather. But on the way I find a miniature circle, a ring of boulders ankle-high, not big enough for ritual purposes, but too well and deliberately formed to be a random arrangement of nature. It must be a fairy cnoc, I think, a fortified sithean. Not seriously thinking it, but feeling it, out here on the moor.
I reach my destination. Five shapely upstanding stones forested thickly by lichen. The circle is a depression, boggier than its surrounds. No people there but me, it’s just a place, so I feel it. The flap of the wind. The sun breaking through. There is presence here. Or my mind is making presence from absence.
On I drive to the standing stones at Calanais, or Callanish. Here there are tourists, and no surprise – these structures are a world wonder. They were built 5,000 years ago, at least five centuries before Stonehenge. Archeologists now believe that the circle-building culture or religion began here in the north and then spread slowly south, through Ireland, England, Brittany, to Portugal. The circles, like Mesopotamian ziggurats, probably reflected in some way the movements of sun, moon, and stars. Otherwise we know nothing. Did people sacrifice their victims here, or get drunk, or sing hymns, or just tell stories?
I drive on to an iron age broch – a defensive roundhouse a mere 2,500 years old, half the age of the circles. Then on again northwards. Sometimes here the signage is in Gaelic only. This tip of the island is a high, flat shelf above the sea. Thin fields stretch between the villages. There are more churches than shops. Every clump of grey houses is supplied with a church.
The houses are dirty grey pebbledash, sometimes dirty brown, or dirty cream. This ugliness (to be frank) feels deliberate. It feels more connected to Protestantism’s suspicion of beauty than to poverty. Calvin, after all, called religious art ‘brutish stupidity’.
I stop near the lighthouse at Nis Point. It’s hot, and the sun is blazing. I’m delighted to spot a seal in the sea below, and then two more. I sit for a long time and watch. I think they’re watching me too. Three young, very inquisitive siblings treading water, and then their mother comes and circles them, checking they’re safe.
Cormorants perching on wave-spattered rocks, an elegant long-beaked white bird, thinner than a seagull. Birds diving into the water and swimming underneath.
I admire the rocks, which are Lewisian gneiss, the most ancient rocks in the British Isles. They contain lines of gold and black, and they fall to the sea in twisted blocks.
I go looking for stones to take home, wanting something for nothing.
I pick one up – black, with coloured bands and glittering flecks.
Then I hear something, like a hiss or a whistle or an exhalation, and glance up quickly to see whatever animal it is. But there’s nothing, nor a bird above. Yet the sound continues as I look all around. A sound which comes from the earth itself. When eventually it stops, I put the stone I’ve stolen back in its place.
How easy it’s becoming to believe in the fairies. Or something. Another consciousness.
Today is the peak of my spiritual tour. If that’s what I’m doing…
I’m moving towards a destination. So back to the car, and to Stornoway.
Stornoway is the biggest town in the Western Isles, the biggest town I’ve seen since Fort William at least. It’s a port containing a castle, a court, some council buildings, some thick-walled town houses, and some council houses. More trees in the gardens than anywhere else on the island. And plenty of churches – as well as the three Margo spoke of, there’s the Episcopal church, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (that is, the Mormons).
And, at last, there’s the Stornoway Mosque.
Which doesn’t look a mosque. It looks like the white pebbledash child of a council house and an industrial estate unit. A sign on the pebbledash reads: ‘Stornoway Masjid. Welcome/ Fáilte.’
I remove my shoes, open the door, and step in. I find myself in a kitchen. It’s a little confusing. There’s a sink, a cooker, a kettle, and some brothers at a table.
‘Wa-alaykum assalaam, brother. Come in, welcome, sit down.’
I’m offered tea as introductions are made.
Four men. Pakistanis and British Pakistanis. Two living here, two visiting from Leeds. Of the two living here, one works as a handyman and one is the imam of the mosque.
‘Pakistanis have come here to do business since the 1950s,’ the imam tells me. (Later I find an article in the Stornoway Gazette which pushes the date back to the 1930s.) ‘But most of them left as business declined.’
‘So Stornoway used to be better for business?’
‘Yes, it became worse. But now it is improving, insha’Allah.’
‘How many Muslims do you have here now?’
He thinks about it. ‘About 25 in total.’
‘We have Syrian families living here too,’ says the handyman. And he calls one up on the phone. Bilal, from Homs. He hands him over.
Bilal says he loves it here. The people are friendly and polite, you feel safe and at peace, and the place itself is truly lovely. ‘Come and stay with me and see,’ he says. ‘You have a brother in Stornoway.’
When I put down the phone I find a plate of rice and curry has been placed before me. I ask between mouthfuls how the community gets on. Do they feel isolated up here?
‘Not at all. These people are true Christians, you see, even the younger generation. It is really very good. On Sundays, no shops are open, only a petrol pump for an hour. And the churches are very busy!’
The imam beams at the attentive observance of his Christian brethren.
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ one of the Leeds brothers puts in. ‘If everyone followed their own religion as best as they could, well, we wouldn’t have all the problems we do have.’
The Stornoway mosque opened in 2018. Aihtsham Rashid, a builder from Leeds, drove the project. He organised the tradesmen to adapt the old building, and crowd funding raised the money. One local church expressed suspicions of the mosque, and of Islam in general. But most locals came round to the idea, and some even helped raise funds.
‘O relations are very good, very good,’ says the imam.
After our meal, we wash in the tiny ablutions room, then enter the hall to pray maghrib together.
And so I have done what I set out to do. I’ve arrived at the most northerly mosque in Scotland. And to reach this point I’ve gone beyond the Scotland I’m used to into something else.
For Muslims, at least for the religious sort that you find in a mosque, Lewis is wonderful because it’s less secular than the rest of the country. Less alienating. In this respect, Lewis is like the past.
‘In ruined Scottish castles and other remnants of the past,’ writes Leila Aboulela in her essay, ‘I felt connected to the believing Christians who had spent their days in worship and accepted Fate. They were more like me than modern Britons.’
Much of Aboulela’s novel Bird Summons is set in a forest surrounding a ruined monastery. The forest, even more than the monastery, is cast as a magical realm. It represents spiritual freedom – and another kind of consciousness.
I want to talk more about trees. But before that, as the early morning ferry leaves Stornoway, let me talk once more about nationalism, the SNP, and their discontents.
The ferry’s on time, and the trouble-free crossing is blessed by sun and dolphins. But the state-owned ferry company – Caledonian MacBrayne – is rarely free of trouble these days. Its fleet is ageing, and increasingly failing. There have been so many cancellations that in some cases island shops have had to ration basic foods.
It’s the Scottish government’s responsibility to solve the problem, yet the problem persists. The economic and social life of the islands depends on these ferries – without a reliable and regular service, their populations will dwindle. Quite a few residents blame the SNP – who are in government, after all – accusing them of mismanagement and incompetence. And there are grumblings elsewhere in Scotland about other declining public services, particularly education.
The SNP might have been in power too long. Like any long-term incumbent, it has become sloppy – and this was highlighted recently by a damaging financial scandal. Some of the money the party had raised specifically to campaign for independence was spent on election campaigning and other party activities instead. Former leader Nicola Sturgeon and her husband were both arrested. Both were later released without charge. It isn’t yet clear exactly what’s happened. Sympathisers point out that the SNP relies solely on membership fees and small donations for its funding. It doesn’t receive union contributions like Labour, nor benefit from the largesse of corporations and billionaires like the Conservatives. Its corruption, they argue, is a minor matter of juggling funds rather than theft. But in any case, perceptions of the SNP have changed for the worse. The bitter post-Sturgeon leadership contest didn’t help either – it revealed how divided the SNP is, and that there’s a socially-conservative right wing as well as a liberal left in the party.
The greatest irony, and one which bothers islanders in particular, is that the SNP – which opposes central control by Westminster – is itself too centralising. That is, it is too focused on the services and infrastructure of the central belt, where seventy percent of the population is clustered, and not enough on the rural peripheries. Yet it is still Scotland’s most popular party, and support for independence remains at around fifty percent, wherever the SNP stands in the polls.
Around fifty percent is not really enough for a major constitutional change, at least not for a positive change which the whole society can accept. If only fifty one or fifty two percent were to vote for independence, the ramifications would be similar to those throughout Britain after the Brexit vote was won by fifty two percent – that is to say, half the country’s population would feel embittered. At the same time, fifty percent is far too high a proportion to just dissolve. In the coming years, each side of the argument will continue to try to convince the other. And I personally will continue to argue for independence. This is in part because I am horrified by English, and therefore British, politics. But even more fundamentally, I think independence is necessary for democracy to work in Scotland. The Scots haven’t voted Conservative since the 1950s, but – at the British level – they keep having Conservative governments foisted upon them. The Scots voted solidly against Brexit, but they had to have Brexit, because the English voted for it. Without democracy there can be no self-determination, and the Scots, with their very different political culture to the English, deserve self-determination.
But where was I? I was going beyond Scotland. And have I fallen off the edge? Not really. So – though I have already reached my conclusion – I will try once more, towards a different edge.
To this end, once arrived back on the mainland, I drive around the north west corner of the country, a rugged and wildly beautiful territory. This is Sutherland – so named, even though it’s in the furthest north, because it was the southern land from the point of view of the Norwegian Vikings who once ruled here and in the Orkney Islands.
I stop to climb Ben Hope, the northernmost Munro (a Munro is a Scottish mountain over 3,000 feet high – there are 282 of them). The heat of the climb reminds me of mountaineering in Morocco or Oman. It is 27 degrees in the valley. In the far north of Scotland. In mid September. I like the heat, but this is depressing. There is no climate left, only crazy weather. What damage we have done…
The land has been cleared of trees as it’s been cleared of people. I fall asleep thinking of that, and in the morning I drive onto the ferry for Stromness, in the Orkney Islands.
The Orkneys are worth visiting for their ancient remains, which are, again, older than Stonehenge, older than the Pyramids. The Standing Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar are particularly impressive.
And the Orkneys represent another kind of beyond – which is why I came. The people look more Norwegian than Scottish. They spoke Norn – a version of Old Norse – until the early eighteenth century, and today their accent still bears Scandinavian traces. The Orkney flag – similar to the Norwegian flag – is flown more often than the Saltire. Only a third of the people here voted for Scottish independence, and recently Orkney’s council announced it was considering ‘alternative forms of governance’ to remaining in Scotland, including becoming a self-governing territory of Norway. That’s very unlikely to happen, but the expression of discontent with centralising rule, whether from Westminster or Edinburgh, is significant.
So I’m glad I’ve come, but also slightly disappointed. After the high mountains and the rugged western isles, it’s a bit of a let-down to come down to the lowlands. The Orkneys are flat, plain, windy, with no trees at all. At the Scara Brae visitors’ centre I read that people were clearing and burning the woodland here six thousand years ago. This left them with no shelter from the raging wind, no easy building material, fewer birds and animals, less aesthetic pleasure. And I ask myself, so what is wrong with us? Not just in recent centuries, but since the very beginnings of civilisation. Why would we do that to ourselves?
It’s a long journey home. I break it up with a night on Loch Ness and another in Aberfeldy, and two walks in Glen Affric.
The first walk is at Plodda Falls, among a mighty forest of Douglas Fir which gently diffuses the sunlight. These trees were planted in the nineteenth century by a Lord Tweedmouth. To me now they feel like ointment on sores, or like breathing after a suffocation. The air is perfumed. Insects buzz.
Next morning – before the final drive home – I walk around Loch Affric. Here most of the land surrounding the water has been protected by a deer-proof fence. The result is quite amazing – Scots Pine and Silver Birch grow thickly, interspersed with Rowan and Willow. And so everything is beautiful even when there is no view. The landscape feels homely, although the peaks that rise above are savage. It feels that if I were stuck here, I would still survive. There are comfortable places to sit and take shelter, and nuts on the hazel trees, and birds singing in the branches.
So is Scotland terrible or wonderful? With trees, without clearances, it’s truly wonderful. When it’s a natural environment, a home for people and other creatures – and not an industrial estate, a launch pad for empire or a site of internal colonisation – then it’s as lovely as anywhere in creation. But the same could be said for many other countries too.