Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  Still, the father said, Pakistan and Iran, as countries, were closest to the Islamic ideal; that had to be given them. Saleem agreed about Iran, saying that the only thing wrong about Iran was its quarrels with its neighbors. There was Sudan, too; that had to be considered as a country working towards Islam; but Saleem wasn’t sure about Sudan.

  I asked whether he wanted something like the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Pakistan. Lying against the cushions, Saleem said with some severity that a religious state had to encourage the good and deter the bad. All countries had police forces to do that. I said that this would be interfering with people’s liberty. Saleem said that there was no free will in Islam. And his father, smooth-skinned and benign, said that the very word Islam meant obedience, submission.

  I asked how the state would define what was Islamic. That had given General Zia a lot of trouble, in spite of his Islamic Ideology Council. There would be debate, Saleem said. He added, surprisingly, that everybody didn’t have to agree. He, for example, didn’t always agree with his father. His father, again suprisingly, said, “There is freedom in Islam.” What they wanted, the father said, was a state where everyone accepted Islam voluntarily, with all his heart. And I began to understand how freedom and submission could run together.

  Salim said, “Islam hasn’t been tried.”

  I was half expecting to hear this. I said, “Is vanity or pride wrong in Islam?”

  Saleem said, “Yes.” His eyes became uncertain, as liquid and melting as his son’s.

  “How can you cast this slur on all the millions who have gone before you? How can you say they have not been good? How can you make this claim for yourself?”

  I had touched something.

  His father said, “We can only be as good as we can be.”

  The boy Mohammed, Saleem’s son, came in again. Saleem said the boy had begun to go to school.

  Saleem’s father said, “He is learning the Koran already.”

  They asked him to recite the opening suras. He was pleased to be asked, but he clung and pressed to his grandfather and had to be coaxed a little more before he began to speak the words in his child’s voice. Saleem’s face was full of pride; and there was pride, too, in the old man’s good eye.

  Saleem said, “He is going to learn the whole Koran by heart.”

  “The whole Koran,” the old man said, picking up the duet with his son.

  I asked, “How long will that take?”

  Saleem said, “Five or six years.”

  I couldn’t stay. My breathing had become very bad. Downstairs, the servants, thin and dark and dingy, behind the sacks with the spilt golden paddy. Outside, the fumes and grit of the Multan road. Saleem’s driver drove me back to the hotel. Saleem didn’t come with me.

  On Friday, poor Mr. Bhutto’s sabbath, I went to Mansura again. I went this time in daylight and saw that the compound, which had a kind of parking-lot barrier at the entrance, and was full of idle bearded men in Friday clothes, was bigger than I had thought, a little campus. The place was also much dustier. The main road outside was absolutely broken, unpaved, and a cloud of dust and brown motor smoke hung over it.

  Saleem’s family house looked more informal in daylight, a rough village building, with a shed or garage to one side, and other little added-on areas. Many servants, thin and poor and on call, quite separate from the bearded exhibitionists at the entrance in proper Friday clothes, were standing about outside and inside; it was hard to imagine where they all slept.

  A handsome man with well-groomed wavy hair was so friendly and open that I thought he might be a relation of Saleem’s. He was one of the house servants, and he was friendly because he had seen me six days before. He told me that Saleem and his wife were still at the prayers, and he led me—the sacks of paddy from the “farm” still in the lobby, one sack torn—up the narrow concrete steps to the study.

  For some reason a sheet or cloth was hung over the window, and the air-cleaner was working away. I asked the friendly servant to put on the air conditioner, and he did so.

  Saleem, when he came, was in white koortah-shalwar, a loose cotton outfit, a man at rest. We went over the details of his father’s kidnapping case. The case obsessed Saleem; it had marked his life. As a child, for his first six years, he had gone once or twice a year to a Multan jail to see his father. Then, when his father had come out, the whole family had lived together in Sargodha for twelve years, before the father had moved to Mansura. Saleem was twenty-two when he had joined the commune. For three years as an adult, no more, he had been on his own.

  He said his religious feelings had developed outside the commune. He said of the commune, “They don’t push you. We have a dish.” A satellite dish, which the Jamaat didn’t like. “Sometimes our ladies ‘meet.’ ” He meant they met strangers; this was something strict Islam forbade.

  His wife, Tahira, came. In the hotel the day before, when she had come to see me with Saleem, she had looked bright. Now there was something extinguished about her expression. It might have been the absence of makeup; the Jamaat didn’t like makeup. She was handsome without it; and she had the heaviness of the lower body that came to women of her class after they became mothers, from the many days of lying-in after each birth, and the extra-rich foods they ate.

  She said she was troubled when she first came here. She would have liked a better house. For the first three or four years she had been a little upset, not at all satisfied. But now it was all perfectly all right, though she would have liked a separate room for the children. She would have liked a house like the house at Sargodha, with a proper drawing room, a proper dining room, and a proper guest room.

  She said, “Here we have a lot of servants. Fourteen or fifteen. A lot of guests. Very upsetting.”

  Saleem said, “What she really wanted was a nuclear house.”

  She said, “Now it’s all right. I am used to it. I don’t wish any more.”

  The air conditioner gave a whoomph and a whine, and died. A power cut: and there was something like a silence all over Mansura, like the silence in a mountain valley just after a snowfall. An unsuspected door was pushed open to the left of the sheeted window, and we could see that the door opened on to the flat roof. It would have been very hot, perhaps unbearable, up here in the summer.

  Saleem’s sister came in. And it was an entrance. She was a big woman in a khaki-gold shalwar, and all her head and face was covered with a loosely wrapped, light-colored, lightweight cotton cloth, which had a small, scattered decorative motif; so that she called to mind the bandaged Claude Rains in the lovely old film of The Invisible Man, and perhaps, like Claude Rains, she too had wrapped herself up to conceal a vacancy.

  She had gone into purdah, Saleem said. (But this was not proper purdah. Proper purdah would have kept her away from Saleem’s study.) I could ask her anything I wanted about Mansura and religion, Saleem said; it was their way. He himself had spent the first five years here without saying the prayers. He said them now, but there had been no compulsion.

  The sister was twenty-seven; so she would have been born the year after her father had come out of jail. She couldn’t absolutely say why she had gone into purdah. She had just felt one day she should go into purdah. And she was much calmer now. She didn’t say much more; and perhaps there was nothing more to say.

  Perhaps there was no mystery, nothing to be elucidated; perhaps places like Mansura, by the prayers and outward forms of piety, and the repetition of forms, and the self-awareness that came to people through simply being here (Mansura was like Oxford in this respect: it was an endless topic of conversation to people there), perhaps places like Mansura, which could dull someone like Tahira, Saleem’s wife, could at the same time give quite simple people this possibility of constant personal theater. It was possible to imagine the drama of this sister of Saleem’s going into purdah. “Have you heard? Saleem’s sister is thinking of going into purdah.”—“She is going into purdah.”—“She’s gone into purdah.”—“It?
??s a question everybody asks me. I just thought one day I should go into purdah. I feel much calmer now.”

  Mohammed, Saleem’s elder son, who was going to learn the whole Koran by heart, came in; with Ahmed, the younger son.

  There were visitors. They were a young couple. The woman was very handsome; the man was big and strong and, young though he was, looked like a man of authority. The young woman said she came from a political family. I knew the family name, from the newspapers; Saleem was of a feudal background, and well connected.

  The woman said she hadn’t been to Mansura before. She hadn’t wanted to, because she didn’t think she would like it. She couldn’t like something that took away her freedom. And yet, though she came from a family with a name, she had given up her studies when she got married.

  Her husband, the strong man, said, “It was against the custom of the society.” And since that sounded harsh, even to him, he said, “In another society it would have been different.” As though it was all only a matter of his wife’s luck.

  We talked—the eternal subject—about Pakistan.

  The woman’s husband said in his blunt way that the modern state was giving way to “separate fiefdoms,” as in the past. And in his blunt way he said that it would be good for business. He spoke with no regret for the passing of the state. And I could see how for him, with his tribal background, the modern state had simply been a burden without reward, a consumer of energy, a series of snares.

  All the ideas—of freedom and the loss of freedom, religion and the state—were linked. It was where Iqbal’s convert’s dream of the pure Muslim polity had led, back and back to the death of the state in the region where the man had come from, and to Mansura here.

  After some delay the tea was brought up the difficult steps by the servants. The power came on. And soon there was nothing more to say. We had exhausted Mansura as a subject. Saleem’s sister, in her own style of purdah, had gone down unnoticed.

  6

  LOSS

  FOR MOST OF THE MUSLIMS of the subcontinent the partition of 1947 had been like a great victory, “like God,” as a man had said to me in Lahore in 1979. Now every day in the newspapers there were stories of the killings in the great port city of Karachi. That was where many of the Muslim migrants from India, townspeople, middle-class or lower middle-class, had gone after partition. Nearly half a century later the descendants of these people, feeling themselves strangers still, unrepresented, cheated, without power, had taken up arms against the state, in a merciless guerrilla war.

  In Iqbal’s convert’s scheme Islam should have been identity enough for everybody. But the people of Sindh (the province where Karachi was) didn’t like seeing their land, half empty and half desert though it was, overrun by better educated and more ambitious strangers. The land of Sindh was ancient, and always slightly apart. The people had their own history and language and feudal reverences. They had set up political barriers, some overt, some hidden, against the strangers from India, the mohajirs. And in Pakistan the mohajirs had nowhere else to go.

  Partition, once a cause for joy, had become like a wound for some of these mohajirs. For some the memories of those days still lived.

  Salman, a journalist, was born in 1952. He was tormented by, and endlessly sought to reconstruct, the events of four days in 1947 in the town of Jalandhar, now in Indian Punjab. At some point in those four days, between the fourteenth and eighteenth of August, 1947, the absolute beginning of independence for both India and Pakistan, his grandmother was murdered in her house in Jalandhar, with others of the family. On the fourteenth she was alive, protected by Hindu neighbors. On the eighteenth Salman’s mother’s father, who had been hiding somewhere else, went to the house, a middle-class Indian courtyard house, and found it empty, with blood spattered on the walls but with no corpses.

  Salman’s grandfather ran away. He must have been about fifty at that time. He managed to get on a train going to what had become Pakistan—just a short run away, along lines that until four days before had been open and busy. The train was attacked on the way. He arrived in Lahore buried under dead bodies. He was one of the few survivors.

  Salman got to know the story when he was fifteen. Until that time he had lived with the idea of the Hindu and the Sikh as the ultimate evil. But when he heard this story he felt no anger. The story was too terrible for anger. It didn’t matter then who had done the killing.

  The blood on the walls of a house he didn’t know (Salman had not been to Jalandhar or India) and could only imagine, the absence of bodies: the details, or the blankness of detail, from a time before he was born, worked on Salman, became the background to his life in Pakistan. He could spend minutes wondering, when the story came back to him, how the people in the house had actually met death. Had they been cut to pieces? Had they—dreadful thought—been abused?

  There were other stories of that time which he got from an uncle: of the uncle (and no doubt others) hiding behind oil drums and taunting the Hindu and Sikh rioters, who didn’t want India to be broken up:

  But kay rahé ga Hindustan!

  Bun kay rahé ga Pakistan!

  Divided Hindustan will be!

  Pakistan will be founded!

  In the 1960s these stories, of death and riot, began to rankle with Salman. “I would think we had lost so much for this country, and this is what we are doing to it now.”

  But there had been a long serene period in the new country. The family had lost everything in Jalandhar, but Salman’s father, a civil engineer, was working for the government—he was in Baluchistan at the time of the riots in Jalandhar—and so there was money every month. In 1952, the year of Salman’s birth, his father left the government to set up on his own. For ten years and more his practice flourished. He brought up his family in a religious way. All the rituals were honored, and there were Koranic recitations. Salman as a child knew many prayers by heart. Religion was part of the serenity of his childhood.

  In 1965, when he was thirteen, Salman became aware of another kind of Islam. This was at the time of the short, inconclusive war with India. “There were songs exhorting mujahids to go to war and promising them paradise, heaven. Mobs of people from the city of Lahore, armed only with clubs, set out to fight the holy war against the infidel Hindu. They had to be turned back. They had been charged up by the mullah. The interesting thing was that the mullah was not leading those people. He was sitting safe in his mosque.”

  In this way Salman was introduced to the idea of jihad, holy war. It was a special Muslim idea. He explained it like this: “In Christianity Christ died for all Christians. He can ensure heaven for them. In Islam Mohammed can only make a submission in your favor for being a follower of his. It is only Allah who makes the final decision on the merit won by good deeds. Nothing is greater, so far as goodness goes, than jihad in the name of Allah.” Jihad was not meant metaphorically. “The word of the Koran is taken very literally. It is blasphemous even to think of it as an allegory. The Koran lays great store by jihad. It is one of the sayings of Mohammed—not in the Koran, it’s one of the traditions—‘If you see an un-Islamic practice you stop it by force. If you do not possess the power to stop it, you condemn it verbally. If not that also, then you condemn it in your heart.’ As far back as I remember I have known this. I think this tradition gives the Muslim license to act violently.”

  In 1965 he saw for the first time the idea given a public, mob expression. And though he saw people then doing “silly things,” he understood both their need to win merit as followers of Mohammed, and also their fear of hell.

  “Endless whipping with fiery flames, and fire beyond imagination. Having to drink pus. It’s very graphic in the traditions. In the Koran there’s just mention of the fires and the endlessness of punishment.”

  In 1968, when he was sixteen, and in his first year at Government Science College, Lahore, Salman found himself part of just such a mob. There was a review in Time or Newsweek of a book called The Warrior Prophet. Two o
r three copies of the magazine with the review had somehow got to the college and were passed around. No one had seen the book, but the boys decided to take out a procession to protest about it. It was during a break; the boys were sitting outside. There was no particular leader. The boys were all as religiously well trained as Salman. The idea of the public protest simply came to them, and they became a mob. Salman went along with them, though he remembered very clearly, all the way through, that he hadn’t found anything obnoxious about Islam or the Prophet in the review. The weather was good. It was winter, the best season in Lahore, and they shouted slogans against the United States and broke up a couple of minibuses.

  The mullah who in 1965 had charged up his congregation, and sent them off to the front to fight with sticks, had stayed behind quite safe in his mosque. It wasn’t his business to fight. His business was to charge people up, to remind them as graphically and passionately as he could of the rewards of jihad and the horrors of hell.

  He was like the mullah I heard about (from someone else) who had been drafted in, with other mullahs, to campaign against Mr. Bhutto in 1977. This mullah was short and fat, in no way personable, and known to be unreliable. But that didn’t matter; he was a wonderful preacher, with a powerful voice. There was a curfew at the time, but it was relaxed (as it had to be) for the Friday prayers. The people who went to the mullah’s mosque found themselves listening to more than prayers. They heard stories, from Islamic history, of heroism and martyrdom, in the mullah’s famous voice and wonderful declamatory style. He asked them to be worthy of the past, to take up jihad, and not to ignore the forces of evil around them. “Say to the enemy, ‘You test your arrows on us, and we shall test our breast against your arrows.’ ” It sounded like poetry, and authoritative for that reason, though no one could place it. The actual words didn’t mean anything, but they drove people wild; and at the end of those Friday prayers poor Mr. Bhutto’s curfew had been rendered harmless. The congregation went away full of religious hate, determined to earn a little more merit in heaven by sending Mr. Bhutto to hell.