Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  “Mentally they were Muslims. And since they were from poor families they had the mentality of leftist socialism. That is why the mujahidin had a good appeal: Marxism and Islam was their ideology. An irony: materialism and Allah. These people, first and second generations of people who had migrated to the cities, had links with their farmer families who were left in the farms and little towns and villages. These people were the leaders of the new movement. I knew so many of them in Kerman. So when the revolution started the leaders were already in the cities, and the masses they needed for revolt and demonstrations were in the villages and little towns.”

  Away from this, and as if in another world, were the Shah’s people. They were the sons and daughters of the older city population. Many of them were wealthy and had been educated in European or American schools. They spoke many languages; they could talk about Western philosophy and European politics. They knew the history of France and Spain and Germany better than they knew the history of Iran.

  “They were about five percent of the population. Maximum. The others, below, were the ninety-five percent, reading Koran, Arabic—the real people, the masses. They had no communication with the five percent. They were two tribes living in one country. The Shah was surrounded by this five percent. Especially later, when he married his last queen, educated in France, with complete French culture. They resented the Islamic tradition exactly as the other group resented the Western tradition that was forced on them.”

  In the 1970s there was the oil boom. Iran’s income became fifty times what it had been. This was wealth beyond imagining, and it made matters worse.

  “This new wealth came to the cities, and the majority of the people lived in the rural areas. The younger generation of the farmers who had migrated to the cities realized that they were being cheated. More and more, from 1970 on, Islamic organizations started mushrooming in universities and in every city. And especially in the bazaar. The Islamic organizations were acting as a replacement for political parties. The Shah didn’t allow political parties to take root. And these Islamic groups also expressed people’s ideas about the Shah and his group, that they were not Islamic. The Shah and the Queen and her group started having artistic festivals. They invited musicians, poets, dancers, and all kinds of artists from abroad. There was one group that was completely nude, and they danced. There were many of those occasions. It was like putting gas on fire.”

  Now, almost two decades later, the Shah and his group had disappeared. The color photographs of the religious leaders were everywhere. They, too, required absolute obedience. The country was full of Islamic rules, and the Guards and Basiji were there to enforce them, in the afternoons in the park, at night on the highways. Young people like Feyredoun’s brother had known nothing but religious rule. He had become a Nazi, in his innocent, dangerous way; he and his friends went out on some nights to mock the Guards. There was a sexual revolution among the young, and a falling away from the too-strict, too-pervasive faith. Of that falling away Emami, the talebeh, had said in Qom: “Our enemies know our weakness.” After all the pain, a new nihilism seemed to be preparing.

  Ali said, “The two tribes of Iran still exist. If there is no marriage between them, I don’t know where they are going.”

  PART THREE

  PAKISTAN

  Dropping off the Map

  1

  A CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE

  THERE WAS MUCH TO SEE in Persepolis, more than could be considered in a day. And not many visitors were ready after that to do the extra twenty-five miles or so to Pasargadae, where there was comparatively little, and what there was was bare and scattered and picked clean: the sunken tower of a fire temple, the palace of Cyrus, and the tomb of Cyrus. Mehrdad and I had the place to ourselves. The sunburnt old guide at the site entrance (perhaps also one of the watchmen), small and lean and unshaved, dressed in an old jacket and pullover for wind and dust, got on his motor scooter and, wordlessly, began to act as our outrider in the desolation, stuttering on just a few yards before us, kicking up dust and blue smoke, and—like a beguiler in a modern version of some old myth—smiling and beckoning whenever our driver hesitated.

  So we came to the remnants of Cyrus’s palace. Large sections of the white floor, made up of big, irregular, interlocking marble blocks, had remained as level and close-jointed as they had been when set twenty-five hundred years ago. At one time the palace had been quarried for its stone. Some of this—used in a mosque in another place—had been recovered in the Shah’s time and brought back to the site. These blocks, carved with Arabic letters, served no purpose now; they were just there as sacred relics, in what had been a seat of world power in the century before Herodotus, more than a thousand years before Islam. The flat land all around was full of wild grasses and flowers, dry and crisp after the summer, and alive with the song of unseen birds.

  A short time before, the guide said, about thirty or forty people from India had come here in a bus. They had stood before a pillar with a cuneiform inscription high up—I AM CYRUS, SON OF CAMBYSES, AND THIS IS MY PALACE—and they had said prayers of some kind. Then, for about twenty minutes, they had wailed. When that was done they had got back into their bus and gone away.

  The guide didn’t know who the people in the bus were. But it was an easy guess that they were Parsees, Zoroastrians, followers of the pre-Islamic religion of Persia, and descendants of the people who had left Persia after the Arab conquest and the coming of Islam. They had found refuge in Gujarat in India; Gujarati had become their language. They were a small community and had remained more or less intact until this century. Now, with the intermarriage that had come with the general opening up of the world, they were melting away. This remembering by some of them of old glory, this ritual grief in the ruined palace of Cyrus, was like a miracle; though the ancient prayers might have been ill-remembered, and the ritual made up.

  Not many days later I went to Pakistan, to Lahore. I put up at the Avari Hotel. The Avaris were Parsees, part of the dispersion; the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 had left some Parsees in India, some in Pakistan. In the lobby of the hotel were large color photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Avari, the founders. At the entrance a plaque honored Mrs. Avari. It told of her life and work. It ended like this: SHE DIED ON 25TH NOVEMBER 1977 AT BOSTON (U.S.A.). MAY THE ALMIGHTY AHURA MAZDA GRANT HER SOUL ETERNAL PEACE IN HEAVEN.

  This made Zoroastrianism like a version of Christianity or Islam. Had the old Iranian religion been like that? Perhaps it didn’t matter. What mattered was what remained in the hearts of the people who had put up the plaque. The classical world had been overthrown and remade by Christianity and Islam. These were universal and not local religions; their religious and social ideas touched everyone and could seem familiar even to outsiders.

  In Iran the pre-Islamic past was irrecoverable. It wasn’t like that in Pakistan. Vital fragments of the past lived on in dress, customs, ceremonies, festivals, and, importantly, ideas of caste. Islam reached Iran just after the Prophet’s time. It was nearly four hundred years later that northwest India began to be penetrated (the conquest of Sind in the southwest is something apart). By 1200 A.D. (giving very rough dates) the Muslims were a power in the north of the subcontinent; in 1600 this power was at its peak; by 1700, with the decline of the Mogul empire, Muslim power in India was more or less broken.

  There had never been anything like an overall or settled conquest, as in Iran. In fact, the extraordinary peoples who came up after the Mogul decline—the Mahrattas, the Sikhs—were in part championing their own faith against the Muslims. It was the British, religious outsiders, who subdued both those peoples, and became, by a mixture of direct and indirect rule, the paramount power in the subcontinent.

  The British period—two hundred years in some places, less than a hundred in others—was a time of Hindu regeneration. The Hindus, especially in Bengal, welcomed the New Learning of Europe and the institutions the British brought. The Muslims, wounded by their loss of power, and
out of old religious scruples, stood aside. It was the beginning of the intellectual distance between the two communities. This distance has grown with independence; and it is this—more even than religion now—that at the end of the twentieth century has made India and Pakistan quite distinct countries. India, with an intelligentsia that grows by leaps and bounds, expands in all directions. Pakistan, proclaiming only the faith and then proclaiming the faith again, ever shrinks.

  It was Muslim insecurity that led to the call for the creation of Pakistan. It went at the same time with an idea of old glory, of the invaders sweeping down from the northwest and looting the temples of Hindustan and imposing the faith on the infidel. The fantasy still lives; and for the Muslim converts of the subcontinent it is the start of their neurosis, because in this fantasy the convert forgets who or what he is and becomes the violator. It is as though—switching continents—the indigenous people of Mexico and Peru were to side with Cortés and Pizarro and the Spaniards as the bringers of the true faith.

  A lawyer told me of the Muslim slogans he heard as a child of three, in a small town in the Punjab, at the time of the agitation for Pakistan. They had moved him as a child; they moved him still. The lawyer (whose father had been a famous liberal in pre-partition days) was presenting himself to me as someone just as liberal as his father. If people out there, the lawyer said, lifting his chin (a little hesitantly) towards the street, knew how liberal he was, he would be “strung up in half an hour.”

  But he was an old fanatic, really. He wasn’t content to possess his faith; he wanted it to triumph in an old-fashioned way. I could tell that as soon as he began to recite the slogans of 1947. His voice trembled, his eye gleamed: he was a child of three again in Lyallpur, playing with visions of sending the infidel to kingdom come.

  Darté naheen dunya mayu Musalman kissee sé—

  Ja poochh Ali-sé.

  No fear in the world the Musalman knows—

  go and ask Ali.

  The translation—liquid Urdu turning, word by word, to English stone—cooled him down. He said in half-apology, reverting to his lawyer’s manner, “As poetry not very good, perhaps. But clutching at my heart.”

  We were sitting in the lawyer’s dining room. It was much used and strangely dark, as though it had sunk a little too much below the level of the land outside. There was a bad smell from the street ditch: perhaps something wrong with a sewer pipe. The lawyer apologized for it; it seemed, though, to be something he had got used to. The refrigerator was in a corner of the room, perhaps as a check on the servants. The tall and sullen Pathan servant, in the very dirty clothes that servants in Pakistan are required to wear, came in every two minutes to get something from the refrigerator or to put something back. This was distracting to me, but not to the lawyer. His eyes were bright, far away. The Pakistan slogans of 1947 had given him a lift; I felt they were still singing in his head.

  At last we began to sip the bad coffee the dirty servant presented, and—as in so many of the houses I had been to—we contemplated the ruin of the state.

  The new state had been hurriedly created and had no true program. It couldn’t be a homeland for all the Muslims of the subcontinent; that was impossible. In fact, more Muslims were to be left behind in India than were to be in the new Muslim state. It seemed rather that, over and above any political aim, the new state was intended to be a triumph of the faith, a stake in the heart of old Hindustan. Someone (not the lawyer) remembered this taunting slogan of 1947:

  But kay rahé ga Hindustan,

  Bun kay rahé ga Pakistan.

  As surely as Hindustan will be divided,

  Pakistan will be founded.

  In Lahore in 1979 I met a man who tried to tell me what the creation of Pakistan had meant to him as a child over the border in India. He had to feel for the words. At last he said, “To me it was like God.” To many, or most, of the Muslims of the subcontinent the state that had been won out of India came as a kind of religious ecstasy, something beyond reason, beyond quibbles about borders and constitutions and economic plans.

  And then, almost at the moment of partition, some people saw that there was a certain amount of money to be made out of the new state as well. All the land in the west—ancient and not-so-ancient seats of Hinduism and Buddhism and Sikhism—was finally going to lose, or be cleansed of, its Hindu and Sikh populations. They would leave and go to India. As communities, the Hindus and Sikhs were rich; it was said that they owned 40 percent of the wealth of the region. When they left, many debts were wiped out; and all over Pakistan, in villages and towns large and small, an enormous amount of property needed new owners. Fortunes were made or added to overnight. So at the very beginning the new religious state was touched by the old idea of plunder. The idea of the state as God was modified.

  It didn’t have to pay its way. It became a satellite of the United States; its various régimes were shored up right through the cold war. It didn’t develop a modern economy; it didn’t feel the need. Instead, it began to export its people; it became in part a remittance economy.

  Thirty-two years after partition there came the war in Afghanistan against the Russian occupation. This could be entered into as a kind of religious war; and, again, the loot was prodigious. American arms and Afghan drugs followed the same route for eight years; hundreds of millions of dollars stuck to the hands of the faithful all along the way. The corruption was too gross; the state was finally undermined. Public faith and private plunder made a circle. There was no point now at which that circle could be broken into, and a fresh start made. After the cynicism and intellectual idleness of four decades, the state, which at the beginning had been to some like God, had become a criminal enterprise.

  No real thought had ever been taken for the running of the new country. Everything was expected to flow from the triumph of the faith. But Islamic identity, though powerful as a cause of pre-partition protest (“a very powerful evocative factor,” as the lawyer said), couldn’t by itself hold the unwieldy, two-winged state together. Bangladesh, with its own language and culture, soon fell away; and even then everyone looking for political power in what remained of Pakistan promised to be more Islamic than his rival.

  The procedural laws inherited from the British, master lawmakers of the subcontinent, were interfered with in a half-hearted and impractical way. Certain Islamic appendages were tacked on. The lawyers couldn’t always make them work; and the legal system, already damaged by political manipulation, became a little more ramshackle. Women’s rights ceased to be secure. Adultery became an offense; this meant that a man who wanted to get rid of his wife could accuse her of adultery and have her imprisoned. In 1979 provision was made for Koranic punishments; and though there had never been any amputations (the doctors said no), people had loved the public floggings and run to see them.

  The Islam defined by these laws was restrictive and severe and simple. The laws might not always be implemented. Like the public floggings in 1986, they might be suspended (in spite of the public demand); or, like the laws about drinking and gambling, they might be bypassed. But the laws all remained on the books; and they changed the nature of the state. They gave encouragement to the backward-looking. They made for uncertainty. They outlined the kind of tyranny that, in a crisis, people might talk themselves into.

  It was an accident that, with the breaking away of Bangladesh, the part of the subcontinent that was now Pakistan was the least educated part. It had fallen late to the British, and had had less than a century of British rule, from the mid- or late 1840s to 1947, with the disturbance of the Indian Mutiny (1857–60) near the beginning of the period and the independence movement at the end. (The British Raj here, by another accident, coincided more or less with the life of its most famous chronicler, Rudyard Kipling, who was born in 1865 and died in 1936.)

  British institutions sat lightly on older local systems, the tribal systems in the northwest, the feudal chieftaincies in the half-slave south. After less than fifty years of Pak
istan those older informal systems were beginning to show through again. The inherited modern state could be felt as a recent and needless burden.

  Always in the background now were the fundamentalists who—fed by the ecstasy of the creation of Pakistan, and further fed by the partial Islamization of the laws—wanted to take the country back and back, to the seventh century, to the time of the Prophet. There was as hazy a program for that as there had been for Pakistan itself: only some idea of regular prayers, of Koranic punishments, the cutting off of hands and feet, the veiling and effective imprisoning of women, and giving men tomcatting rights over four women at a time, to use and discard at will. And somehow, it was thought, out of that, out of an enclosed devout society with uneducated men religiously tomcatting away, the state would right itself, and power would come, as it had come to Islam at the very beginning.

  The case for Pakistan was made seriously for the first time in 1930 by a poet, Mohammed Iqbal, in a speech to the conference of the pre-partition Muslim League. The tone of the speech is more civil and seemingly reasoned than the 1947 street slogans; but the impulses are the same. Iqbal came from a recently converted Hindu family; and perhaps only someone who felt himself a new convert could have spoken as he did.