I’ve always considered myself a Jesus of the animals; or at the very least a cut-price Steve Irwin. I’ve got a special way with animals, a belief to which I stubbornly cling even though I once ended up with the beak of an African grey parrot crunched over my finger like a bear-trap, a painful occurrence that followed numerous warnings not to prod my finger into its cage. “It’s okay,” I remember saying, only seconds before. “Animals love me.”

I’m something of a mental case when it comes to our non-human friends. I like nothing better than to sit by the loch with seagulls perched on my head, and swans encircling me like long-necked disciples. I’ve never yet been able to walk past a dog without patting it, always holding out my hand to be sniffed like the Pope’s ring. When my eldest was two and dropped his favourite hat into the African boar enclosure at Edinburgh zoo, I was straight in there like a fleet-footed Doctor Doolittle to retrieve it, danger (and life-time ban from the zoo) be damned. If I was Noah, I would’ve had two arks.

Yes, I love all animals, except…

Well. Until recently, I’ve never had particularly strong feelings about roosters. Barely any feelings at all, truth be told, beyond the faint glimmer of recognition that accompanies the sight of a box of Kellogg’s’ Cornflakes or an old re-run of Foghorn Leghorn. I’ve never considered roosters to be particularly cuddly, but then neither have I considered them to be especially dangerous.

There’s a family who lives just off the main road on the outskirts of the next town over. They’re smallholders, with a little smattering of chickens, and a rooster to, well… rule the roost, I suppose, in a quite literal sense. Although the chickens have the run of the small public space next to their owners’ property, it’s not a stretch of land that anyone would ever pass through or arrive at if not specifically to come see the chickens, or visit the family. We’ve often stopped there with the kids. It’s nice to have a little oasis of nature on-hand among the urban squalor. The lady of the house once came out to say hello, and introduced my kids to her little grand-daughter, before letting them all feed the chickens together. Our two loved it.

Generic picture. Our two are boys, and we’d never be cruel enough to put them in dungarees

Earlier this spring I took my eldest, Jack, on a jaunt in the car. We were heading to the next town over to grab some lunch, walk by the shore, and visit a second-hand book-store for a re-up of kids’ stories. As it was a bright and sunny-ish day, I thought it would be nice to stop and say a quick how-do-you-cock-a-doodle-doo to the chickens.

We crossed the road and strolled up to the chickens, greeting them like they were old friends. The rooster, rather a big bugger as far as roosters go, came strutting over to us as we advanced up the grass, its head bopping up and down in a gesture that I interpreted as a nod of recognition – mano-a-chickano. The closest human translation is probably: ‘Alright mate?’ In any case, the rooster seemed unconcerned with our presence. It made past us and continued to strut about and peck at the ground.

At this point Jack’s ebullience got the better of him, as ebullience tends to do in four-year-olds. ‘Not so close, Jack,’ I chided him gently, as he skipped around the fringes of a flower-bed that housed a squad of squatting chickens. He skipped around a little more, and then made his way back towards me. He was less than fifteen feet away, and closing, when the rooster decided to re-announce itself.

It was coming towards us. Specifically, it was coming towards Jack. A little faster this time, but still with no obvious malicious intent. It’s hard to tell with a rooster. They don’t start belting out menacing renditions of football chants, or take to whipping out flick knives. Their angry strut is remarkably similar to their regular strut. If instead of a rooster it had been a bear, a dog, or even a parrot (shakes fist at the heavens) coming towards us I would’ve thrown myself in-front of Jack in the manner of a presidential bodyguard. I would’ve ran at it with the zeal of a star quarterback, or thrown Jack over my shoulders and rushed him towards the car like I was a human rickshaw. But I did nothing. Except, that is, laugh good-naturedly at the quasi-comical beast as it bobbed and strutted ever closer.

When the rooster caught up with Jack I was still a few feet away. Jack turned to face it, a smile smoothing its way across his face. Unbeknownst to both of us, a split-second later the bird would punish Jack for his sense of pleasant expectation, and teach me a hard lesson in child guardianship. It all happened in a flurry. The rooster jerked and flapped about at Jack’s waist, then whipped itself into the air, its wings spread wide in shrieking fury. In the slipstream of distraction, it swiped out with its feet, leaving a scratch like a tram-line on Jack’s face from cheek to chin. There was blood dripping from Jack’s lip. It happened in a flash; a finger-click of time. I grabbed Jack by his shoulders, spun him out of the way, and pirouetted myself in front of the near-rabid rooster.

It leapt towards me like something out of a 2-player beat-em-up, using its wings to steady itself before unleashing a mighty two-footed kick to my stomach. It bounced back to its starting point like some demented little Mr Miagi, ready to strike again. And it did. It struck again, and again, and again, and again. I wasn’t the main target, though. Just a lumpy obstacle. It was obvious the maniac bird was trying to bypass me in order to take another bite and a scratch at Jack. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to keep angling myself and jumping from side to side to keep its gut-booting focus on me. Thankfully, it had no interest in my ball-sack, else I might’ve been forced to consider more extreme tactics.

At one point I hunkered down in a coiled squat like Chris Pratt when he was herding velociraptors in Jurassic World. I waved a hand behind me to direct Jack to safety. “Go, and keep moving,” I told him. “Go slowly, get to the pavement and wait for me.”

Poor Jack was still crying, but I couldn’t offer him much in the way of comfort without breaking my defensive pose, which would have put him at the mercy of more butts and scratches, more vicious ones this time for sure. What if its talons caught Jack’s eye this time? When the spirit of Chris Pratt didn’t prove effective I switched to Begbie from Trainspotting, spitting, swearing and kicking at the bastard beast.

All the while this scene was unfolding the rooster’s elderly and infirm owner sat on the porch on the stoop of his house about thirty or forty feet away, looking increasingly concerned, especially when he saw me booting the rooster’s chest, kicking at its face and calling it a ‘f***ing c***’ at the top of my voice. Eventually, the bird backed off, but not because of the sound and fury I’d subjected it to. No. It looked like it had just grown bored. What the hell was the old guy feeding these chickens? Cocaine?

As I was buckling my bloodied son into the back seat of the car, the rooster’s pyjama-clad owner shuffled over with his stick, swift as a ninja in his canvas slippers, and began offering heart-felt apologies. I told him not to worry about it, and apologised for turning the air a few thousand shades of blue. He insisted we come back to his house with him so Jack could have some juice and crisps and play with his grand-daughter; you know, spin a positive out of the negative. I said that was a kind offer, but thought that Jack would probably appreciate some distance between him and the rooster, at least for now. Besides, we had to clean his scratches.

Jack was understandably shaken, and shy to boot, but the old man’s persistence – his zeal to make amends – wore us both down. We got out of the car and started heading back towards the house – and the chickens. The old man clasped Jack’s hand tightly as we walked, a gesture of affection and restraint. I could tell Jack still wasn’t entirely sold on the new course of events. He looked like he was being arrested.

I kept telling Jack how brave he was, and explained that the rooster – though I was still quite angry at it – had only acted aggressively because it had perceived us as a threat. It wasn’t Jack’s fault, and it wasn’t strictly the rooster’s fault, either. It was just an awful accident, and, really, daddy should’ve been more careful.

But I promised him that the rooster probably wouldn’t attack again, but if it did, I’d be ready for it. Moments later, Jack and the rooster passed within twenty feet of each other, and I was relieved to see that they were wholly indifferent to each other’s existence. Some juice, crisps, and anti-septic wipes later, and it was as if none of it had ever happened.

The old man’s grand-daughter, of similar age to Jack, came outside to play. As Jack and the little girl ran around the garden laughing and conspiring, jumping this, leaping that, investigating here, applying their imaginations there, I spoke with the old man. I asked him about his life, his family. He’d come from Pakistan to the south of England, living there for a time, before branching off from his brothers and settling in Scotland. He’d raised his family here, three generations and counting.

I found him a pleasant, cordial and earnest man, measured in his speech, warm in his sentiments. He looked at his grand-daughter and my son laughing together, and he smiled. He told me how important it was for this sort of thing to happen, these sorts of friendships, especially these days. I knew what he was getting at. I agreed with him. I’m an atheist, and the old man was a Muslim, but the children in our lives were oblivious to the cosmetic and cultural differences that might exist between them and us. As it should be. They were having fun. They were happy.

They were children.

And we were all human beings, after all.

I’ve discussed grand topics like God, creation and evolution with Jack, but so briefly that I’m sure he doesn’t remember a thing about them. He certainly doesn’t know what Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, or even atheists are, or what they believe (or don’t). He’s never once remarked upon the skin colour, make-up or ethnicity of another human being – black, white, brown, Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese – not because he hasn’t noticed, which surely he has, but because he’s never been encouraged to care. My views and those of his mother’s on religion and politics will undoubtedly filter through to Jack and his brother, but it would be unfair of us to implant any of these notions in either of them at such crucial stages of their mental and social development.

I’m pro-people, but anti-religion. To co-opt and twist an infamous saying from Christianity: hate the sin, not the sinner. I always try to keep in mind that most people – especially in global Islam, but also in Scientology, Mormonism and Christianity in the US – are hostages to the religions into which they’re born. I was able to enjoy being around the old man and his family (more of whom came to visit later in the afternoon), because irrespective of the differing spiritual beliefs we each may have held, I recognised them as good, kind, and decent people.

The question I find myself contending with increasingly often these days is: how do I square my fondness for people, in all their multifarious, individual forms, with a wariness for organised religion? How can I square the reality of having liked, respected and loved friends, acquaintances and colleagues who were Muslim with my fear and distrust of Islam as a global political, cultural and religious force? I’m an atheist with two gay sisters. Show me any Muslim-majority country in the world where I’d be tolerated, or where Muslims within those counties would be free to advocate atheism or live their lives as gay.

I think we here in the British Isles can sometimes have a rather twee view of religion that springs from watching too many tea-sipping parsons on the TV, or inspired by the remembrance of a kindly grandmother’s sweet smile during Songs of Praise, when the reality is that we might yet have had the firm fingers of Christianity wrapped around our throats if not for several hundreds of years of protest, dissent, bloodshed, revolutions, reformations, refusals and the eventual triumph of enlightenment over darkness. Although it hasn’t been without its fair share of schisms and inter-denominational blood feuds, the Muslim world has yet to have its reformation. Attempts to soften or modify the religion’s shape and substance are usually met with banishment at best, and wars and murder at worst. While there has certainly been progress in some quarters, it is slow and uncertain.

Global Islam doesn’t appear to compromise very often.

Muslims don’t seem to express something so simple as solidarity; it’s rather as if Islam is one unbroken entity, a sheath of (thin) skin covering the planet, where pain in one part of the body is felt in every other part of the body. Touch ane, touch aw. Islam first, family and nation second.

The cycles of suffering, rage and retribution roaring in Islam’s heartlands – some of the most politically and economically fraught regions of the world – are felt in Birmingham and Berlin as much as they are in Jakarta and Lahore. Part of this connection is spiritual and ideological, but there is a physical component, too, in that rather than allow communities to settle and integrate into new host countries, the links to the heartlands are kept alive through immigration, and the importation of wives and husbands. That’s a worry when many of the countries from which the blood-lines are preserved and topped-up play host to brutal repression of women, and murderous intolerance of gay people and the irreligious.

That’s not to downplay the corrosive influence of Christianity – from creationists supplanting scientists in US public schools; to money-grubbing evangelists spewing out endless torrents of hypocrisy and hatred to the vulnerable and the uneducated; to arguments surrounding abortion, end of life and bodily autonomy; to discussions about sex, sexuality and equality across the ecumenical spectrum – but people here in Britain and across the West know that Christianity, particularly here in the UK, is a toothless force. I could dress up as the Pope and drop a less-than congratulatory rap about Jesus, I could draw a picture of God with a big pair of comedy breasts, or collaborate on a raunchy comedy movie about the life and times of Jesus, and at worst the blow-back would be a snotty letter sent into the Radio Times by disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

But if I was to depict the Muslim’s prophet on paper, or write about him in unflattering or critical terms, I – like Salman Rushdie, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and other less lucky people like Theo van Gogh – would have to prepare myself for the possibility of either a short life with a brutal end or a long life spent looking over my shoulder.

But who am I to talk of fear when bombs continue to rain down on places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan? I didn’t ask for those bombs, I didn’t put them there, but in the eyes of countless millions around the world I’m culpable and complicit in their destruction. I’m a part of the oppressive, racist, imperialist and expansionist system that sees something it wants in the Arab and Muslim world, and snatches it by force. How much of Islam’s fire, fury and ire is attributable to its holy book, and how much of it was enflamed and fanned by centuries of brutal exploitation and subjugation of Muslims by people like me? How much of what we hear about Islam and Muslims is wilfully distorted by our right-wing media and far-right assholes like Nigel Farage and ‘Tommy Robinson’?

Can the circle ever be squared? In the end, it all comes down to family. Always. Everything we do.

A loud and rousing cock-a-doodle-doo blares above the reverie. It reminds me that it’s probably time to head home. Jack is running and laughing with his new friend. It’s like they’ve known each other all of their lives. He doesn’t want to go now. He’s having too much fun.

I shake the old man’s hand. ‘It was really nice to meet you,’ I tell him.

I mean it.

Here’s another question that history might have to answer, sooner or later:

Which of us is the rooster?