Maudoodi had died in 1979. But the attitude of the Jamaat was still that the people of Pakistan and their rulers were not good enough. If Iqbal’s Muslim state had had its calamities, it wasn’t the fault of Islam; it was only the fault of the people who called themselves Muslim. In the fundamentalist way of thinking this kind of failure automatically condemned itself as the failure of a false or half-hearted Islam. And the Jamaat could always say—its cause ever fresh—that Islam had never really been tried since the early days, and that it was time to try it now. The Jamaat would show the way.
The Jamaat headquarters and commune was in a twenty-eight-acre site at Mansura, on the edge of Lahore, on the Multan road. Among the people in the commune were some penitents, expiating sins of varying magnitude.
One of the penitents was Mohammed Akram Ranjha. He was fifty-eight. Penitent though he was, and devout, he was not a solitary. He was living at Mansura in a rented house with his rather large family. He was a man of rough feudal background. His father was a rich man, with five hundred acres, and with some political influence even in the British time. But Mohammed Akram had received no formal education as a child. There was a reason. He had had typhoid when he was very young, and his father had vowed that, if his son recovered, he would never be sent to a secular school, but would be educated in the Koran. The boy recovered; but the father forgot one half of the vow, and the boy (though receiving simple religious instruction from a mullah) grew up like someone of an uneducated feudal family, spending his time on horses and tent-pegging and polo, and gambling and hawking, and going to local festivals.
When he was twenty-three Mohammed Akram became involved in a serious family quarrel. The quarrel was about a woman and land. The woman was a cousin of Mohammed Akram’s. She was an educated woman, the first in the family to get a degree. When her father died she inherited six hundred acres. She was twenty-three. Her uncle, her father’s brother, an old-fashioned man, wanted her to stay in purdah; he also wanted to marry her off to his eight-year-old son. She wanted none of that. She had studied in Lahore at Queen Mary College, a famous coeducational school run by Christians; and she was used to freedom. She was also in love with Mohammed Akram’s brother, her cousin. He was twenty-six and unusually handsome and spoke well. He was already married, with two sons. But she ran away with him and became his second wife.
The uncle (with the eight-year-old son) was enraged. He threatened to wipe out Mohammed Akram’s branch of the family. This was very much the local feudal way, and the uncle was a man of local power. Mohammed Akram went to the uncle and asked for pardon. “Please don’t kill us. I promise that we will find out where my brother and the girl are, and we will bring the girl back to you.”
Mohammed Akram found the runaway couple in Karachi. He asked them to return to Lahore. When they were there he and three or four other male members of the family kidnapped the woman at gunpoint. The woman’s husband, Mohammed Akram’s brother, was not cowed. He went to the police station and filed a charge against the kidnappers. This show of spirit in the husband, this bringing of the law into a rough feudal dispute about land and honor, must have been unexpected. And it was at this stage—perhaps to resolve the overlapping issues of land and honor, before the police did what they had to do—that the kidnapped woman was shot dead. It was never established who actually did the killing.
All the kidnappers were arrested and tried. The law moved fast—this was in 1960, during the rule of General Ayub—and less than two months after the killing all five kidnappers were jailed. Mohammed Akram was sentenced to fourteen years, a life term.
He was sent to the jail in the city of Multan. He was offered a choice of cellmates. He could share with a well-known Lahore thug of the Gujar tribe (and, though this wasn’t said, risk being sexually assaulted); or he could be with the secretary-general of the Jamaat-i-Islami, who was doing time as a political prisoner. Mohammed Akram chose the man from the Jamaat.
The two men talked. In a matter of months Mohammed Akram underwent a change of heart. He began to read the writings of Maulana Maudoodi. He saw the error and emptiness of his feudal ways. His jailhouse conversion to the cause of the Jamaat became famous. Soon he began to study. Matriculation, bachelor of arts—the young feudal didn’t want to stop. He became legendary as a reformed prisoner. His sentence was cut from fourteen years to six, and on the very day of his release his master’s diploma in Urdu literature arrived in the post.
Mohammed Akram’s son, telling this story of his father’s conversion (larger in this account than the dead girl’s own tragedy), said, “He went to jail as a feudal, and came back as a Muslim revolutionary.”
It was twelve years, though, before Mohammed Akram made the move to the Jamaat commune at Mansura. First he enrolled in a law college, with the help of the distinguished lawyer who had defended him at his trial in 1960.
(I met this lawyer in Karachi in 1979. He was by then very rich, quite crazed with religion, vain, and hoping for political power. It was a very religious time—Mr. Bhutto had been deposed and hanged, the Islamic whipping vans were being sent out to punish the wicked [and everybody was running to see], and everything stopped for prayers—and the lawyer thought that it was important for him to make a show of his piety. He muttered his prayers all the time I was with him and clacked his prayer beads. I didn’t respond. He said, “I suppose you’re thinking that I should be in a monastery.” I had no intention of encouraging him. I said, “I am not thinking that.” He clacked his beads and muttered and clacked his beads again and then, ratcheting his piety up a notch or two, said, “I’m God-intoxicated.”)
This man not only helped Mohammed Akram get into the law college; he also became his unofficial spiritual adviser. And so it happened that when Mohammed Akram started his law practice in his home area of Sargodha he also became politically active on behalf of the Jamaat. This was a break with the past; the feudals here had always been supporters of the people in power.
But the past was not buried. Blood feuds here never absolutely died. In 1975 scores were settled with Mohammed Akram’s brother, who fifteen years before had filed a case against the kidnappers of his wife and had caused them all to go to jail. This brother, now only forty-one years old, was killed by persons unknown. Four years later Mohammed Akram moved to the Jamaat commune at Mansura; two years after that he got his son to move there; and the year after that, 1982, he moved the rest of the family. In that year the son of Mohammed Akram’s murdered brother killed someone on the other side; and Mohammed Akram for an unstated reason gave up politics.
Security and piety and penitence and the cause of the Jamaat now ran together for them all at Mansura. It had become their world.
The killing was never discussed in Mohammed Akram’s family. Saleem, the only son, conceived in the year of the killing, and born in the first year of his father’s imprisonment in Multan jail, said, “We don’t have courage to talk about it to my father.”
Saleem was now thirty-four, and important in his own right as a senior customs officer. For him the drama—his father’s conversion and repentance, the studying in the jail—marked the beginning of the family’s intellectual rise. He came one Saturday after work (Friday now the sabbath—the hanged Mr. Bhutto’s weekly memorial—and Saturday the first working day of the week) to take me to Mansura. He was a tall man wearing a tie and a light tweed jacket (for the Lahore winter) and from certain things he said I felt he was expecting me to be surprised that a man living in Mansura should be wearing such “modern” clothes. He came in his office car, with a driver, and on the backseat were The Economist and other serious magazines.
The mistake was not to accept his offer of air-conditioning. It was early evening, and I feared a chill. But it was also the rush hour. By the time we got to Mansura, stopping and starting at traffic lights all the way, the main road misty all the way with dust and brown fumes, I was quite choked.
I had heard much about Mansura and its fortress-like atmosphere, and I had expec
ted something more hidden away. But it was just there, beside the main road, in the heat and fumes and dust, and with fluorescent strips; and just at the entrance, on the left, as if in immediate demonstration of who they were, the faithful were at their evening prayers in the Jamaat’s mosque, below a kind of netting or open frame which might have been used for a cover when it was too sunny or when it was raining.
Saleem, in sudden haste, took off his tie and threw his jacket on the car seat and went to join the prayers, first telling the driver to take the car back a little so that I could have a better look. One little boy in miniature shalwar-kameez was extremely energetic with the prayers, bouncing up and down on flexible joints.
It was quite dark when the prayers were over. Saleem then took me on a tour. There was a board with a map of the settlement. Each of the houses on the map had a number, and a list on the right gave the names of the occupants. This kind of order was unusual in Pakistan, Saleem said; I felt it was another aspect of the modernity of the Jamaat about which people talked with foreboding.
Away from the lights of the mosque, we walked on broken paths. We came to the famous hospital. It was built at the time of the Afghanistan war. People spoke of it with awe, but the waiting room or casualty room or emergency room that Saleem showed me, opening a flimsy door from a dark lane, was dimly lit and empty. It looked roughly finished and seemed already to have fallen into something like Pakistani informality. The library and research unit, with all its modern computer facilities, was closed until the morning. But the cassette shop was open. It sold sets of Maulana Maudoodi’s speeches, and a number of cassettes about Kashmir, including one in English called Crush India. Saleem, like a man in a toy shop, began to buy, possibly for friends, pointing to this cassette and then that one, and at the end the man in the shop put the ones Saleem had bought in a small white modern plastic bag.
We came to the family house. It belonged to someone from the Jamaat; Mohammed Akram was renting it. It was a narrow house on two floors, and Saleem said there were two places where we could talk: the dining room or his study. His study, on the upper floor, had no furniture, only carpets and cushions.
I needed a table at which to sit and write, and I thought we should look at the dining room. It was on the other side of an open lobby or staircase area, which was very narrow and squashed. There were sacks of paddy in this area; one of the sacks had burst or had been opened and some of the golden-colored grain was on the concrete floor. The paddy came from “the farm,” Saleem said; so the family still worked land at Sargodha. The dining room was narrow and not deep. The furniture in it left no open space, and the fluorescent light seemed to press on my forehead, just above my eyes. There were altogether twenty big carved armchairs, a matching set, very much in the rustic feudal style (and also the Indonesian bourgeois style). All these chairs had their backs against the wall. Twelve were in the reception area proper, six facing six across low wide tables, with the other eight tight and almost touching around the dining table.
Saleem said, going perhaps by the way the chairs were arranged, that visitors were expected. And so—past the sacks of rice, and with a glimpse now of the servants at the back, the thin and dingy shadow people of every Pakistani household, even here at the Jamaat—we went up the steep and narrow concrete steps to Saleem’s study and library.
It was a very small room about twelve feet square and about eight or nine feet high, or so it felt. The air was hot and dusty; the room was entirely sealed. It was carpeted and with bolsters, as Saleem had said; and there were bookshelves on the walls. Half the wall facing the door carried those Islamic sets in decorated binding which I had got to recognize at Qom. Other shelves were more informal. But I soon stopped looking at the books. I began to choke in the stale, enclosed air. I felt I was becoming ill. On the floor what looked like a pouffe or a stool was an air-cleaner; it was turned on, but it would be some time before it made an impression on the room.
I asked for a window to be opened. Saleem called down to the servant, who was bringing one of the big dining room chairs for me, and feeling his way up the narrow, steep steps behind his awkward load. The servant, coming into the room and putting the chair down, pushed at the window. It was a sliding metal-framed window, and it appeared to be stuck. Saleem lent a hand, or perhaps a finger, with the catch. The servant kept on pushing, and at last the window opened. There was a screen behind it; there was no view. The traffic roared from the Multan road. The air outside was gritty and almost as hot as the air in the room. The servant dragged the chair next to the open window, and there for a while I sat, breathing in, rather like the pious sitting beside the rails of the tomb of a saint, to take good from the emanations. The window looked over part of the flat roof above the lower floor; this explained the great heat inside and out.
Saleem said he was a cricket freak. He knew the names of minor, forgotten Indian spin bowlers from Trinidad: S. M. Ali, Inshan Ali, Imtiaz Ali, Rafiq Jumadeen. This was an offering to me, I knew; but cricket wasn’t the only thing on his mind. All the bowlers he mentioned were Muslim, and he knew more about them than I did.
The servant came up the steep steps again, this time with tea and pakoras, hot fried savories, and a milk-and-almond sweet, condensed and solidified, perfectly delicious and quite unexpected, as though somehow in the cramped pieties of this Jamaat house an artist had broken free in the kitchen.
Then the father came up, the penitent. He was in a pale brown shalwar-kameez, and I saw in it the color of penitence. He was shorter than his son, and heavy, and the steps had strained him. He was only fifty-eight, but in his family—Saleem was immediately deferential—he was the old man; and he filled that role.
He sat on the carpet, very close to my chair, almost touching it, and looked up at me, with extraordinary trustingness. His brown skin was clear and smooth; his forehead, unmarked, appeared to shine, as if from years of oiling. One light-colored eye was bad; a cataract had been removed the year before. Even with that, his expression was benign. Something was wrong with his hearing. He leaned forward when I spoke, and, with his lips slightly parted over small, sound-looking teeth, he appeared to smile.
Saleem explained who I was and what I had come to do in Mansura.
And in no time they were launched, father and son, speaking of their Mansura faith. They wanted an Islamic state. Pakistan wasn’t an Islamic state. It wasn’t enough that a state for Muslims had been created in the subcontinent. An Islamic state was one in which the most righteous man ruled and, as in the earliest days of Islam, led the people in prayer.
This was like what I had heard in 1979, at the time of General Zia, who had tried to Islamize; but, like others before him, hadn’t known how to convert a personal faith into the apparatus of a state; and had in the end settled for a personal tyranny. He was now dismissed as a hypocrite. But, after all that had happened, the dream was still here at Mansura, the dream of restoring the golden age at the very beginning of Islam, when the manageable, pure congregation was at one with itself and the ruler.
And now father and son spoke together in a kind of duet, exchanging ideas about that golden Islamic age. After the talk in the car about the modernity of the Jamaat in matters of dress and organization, after the tweed jacket and the tie and The Economist and the talk of cricket, it was strange to see Saleem, the customs officer, matching his feudal father phrase for phrase.
Did I know, Saleem’s father asked, about the time one of the early caliphs was rebuked for wearing an extravagant cloak? And he, the father, asking the question, looked up at me and brought his face very close. Saleem, more casual, sipping tea, picking at a pakora, and half lying on the carpet, propped on a cushion, took the story about the caliph forward. The caliph told his questioner that a relation had given his ration of cloth to make that cloak. Imagine that, Saleem said. And imagine that, his father said after him. Imagine the ruler of an empire stretching all over the world; and yet, Saleem said, completing the thought, a member of the assembly could ask
him that question. (So, in this vision of the golden age, the cards could be shuffled, and the simplicity of the single, manageable Islamic congregation could be set beside its reward: a world empire.)
No, no, Saleem said, a Muslim state wasn’t an Islamic state; many people made that error. No, no—
He was interrupted by the servant, one of the Pakistani shadow men, bringing up fresh pakoras, this time pieces of fresh cabbage fried in chickpea batter, hot and crisp and then soft and delicious. Behind the servant was Saleem’s young son, Mohammed, thin, used to attention, forward and then shy and clinging, with big dark eyes and the Mansura pallor. His father fondled him; his grandfather fondled him; he was offered pakoras. But he didn’t want to stay, and he went down again with the servant.
I asked them about General Zia, the Islamic terror of 1979. Hadn’t he done enough? What remained to be done?
There was a great deal, Saleem said. There was still Hindu influence to be got rid of, and (this was perhaps Saleem’s Economist reading) remnants of British colonialism. And there was the question of marriage, the father said. The Koran said a man could be married four times; now there were these women’s groups trying to tamper with the Muslim family law. He spoke like a man aggrieved, denied his due; he looked up at me with his sweet expression and complained as though he knew I would want to help him. And there was the question of usury; something had to be done about that.