Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples
Rahimullah said, “It’s only yesterday that somebody was killed. Four years ago a local poet was killed, and yesterday revenge was taken. His son had hired assassins to kill the murderer, and they have done it now. They waited four years. They can wait for twenty years.”
A wrinkled old man, thin and dark and white-capped, was sitting in one of the armchairs. He appeared to be listening, but I don’t know how much he understood. Rahimullah said he was a cousin; that might have been only a courtesy. The old man had a son in Dubai; the son wanted to come back to the village. The old man thought Rahimullah could help; that was why he was there.
A small, dark young man with wavy hair, and in a gray shalwar-kameez, came in.
Rahimullah said to me, “Do you know this guy?”
The young man shook my hand. His hand was wet and cold. His name was Kimat Gul. He was Rahimullah’s servant, the only one. He looked after the cattle. He hadn’t gone on the walk to the canal with us because he had gone to the sugarcane field to get fodder for the buffalos and cows. The guest house was where he lived. He slept here and he watched television here. The television set was on the big dining table; Rahimullah had bought it for him in Peshawar.
Kimat Gul was an orphan and no one knew when he was born; he could be eighteen or nineteen or twenty. His father had remarried, so Kimat Gul was absolutely on his own. He had stayed with relations before coming to Rahimullah; then he had left Rahimullah to go to Karachi. Everybody here went to Karachi. They loved the land and the village, but the land couldn’t support them. Kimat Gul didn’t stay long in Karachi; he had come back to Rahimullah.
Someone in the guest house said in English, “He is a barber.” Another nai, then. And, in fact, he was the brother of Qaim Khan, the earlier young man in blue.
Rahimullah said, “He wants to become a driver. He says, ‘I will drive your car.’ But right now I have another driver. Kimat Gul is getting six hundred rupees plus food and room and clothes and TV. He has been with us since he was very small. If he stays with us we will arrange for his marriage and provide him with a house. We have three houses, two houses here and one in the village. For the marriage he will be able to get a girl from his relations. He has to keep to his relations. He can marry, but he will have to pay for that. Clothes and household goods.”
In Karachi Kimat Gul had worked in a barbershop. It wasn’t a good job. And there was the trouble in Karachi. It was dangerous moving about to look for another job. He moved from a locality called Landhi to another called Sher Shah: Karachi for him was these names, and the memory of danger. Even going to work was risky. People were killed. A policeman he knew was killed; the policeman’s name was Ayub.
Qaim Khan, Rahimullah’s sabbath barber, the man in blue, came back from whatever he had been doing and sat down open-mouthed in an armchair. Perhaps he wasn’t even listening. He would have known the story very well.
There used to be strikes, Kimat Gul said, still talking about Karachi. Nobody came to the barbershop. There was no work. So he came back here.
He was barefooted. His wavy hair, hanging down his neck, was black and thick and shiny. He had a deep, almost booming, voice. He had a ring on the fourth finger of his left hand. If you wore a ring, the fingers didn’t get diseased. It was a silver ring and it stood out against his very dark hand. The dark white-capped man, with the son in Dubai, was also wearing a ring like that to keep his fingers healthy.
Rahimullah said, “I am the only one not wearing a ring.”
I asked Kimat Gul, “Are you happy here?”
He said in his extraordinary voice (and Rahimullah translated), “I’m happy. But where else can I go?”
There were laughs all round, and Kimat Gul laughed too, showing his big teeth. He didn’t like barbering, he said, though he knew how to do it. He preferred feeding the cattle.
It was time for the midday prayers. Rahimullah got up and, wrapping his big sand-colored chador or shawl about him, went out into the sunlight of the guest courtyard, and at the far end turned behind the small bougainvillaea bushes and small trees—one day perhaps a proper hedge and screen—into the family courtyard.
Later the two men who had been working on the house, the mason and the son of the shop assistant, came and sat on a string bed in the arcaded verandah and shared food with Kimat Gul, the herdsman and servant who lived there and watched television.
After lunch—thick whole-wheat roti, vegetables, chicken, mutton pilau, apples, and grapes—we went the short distance to Rahimullah’s ancestral village of Shamozai. Just outside Rahimullah’s gate a young girl was playing in the dust: the first girl, the first female, I had seen since I had arrived. Purdah was soon going to fall on her; the rest of her life was going to be spent in that void where time was without meaning.
In a half-open hut not far away some men were making coarse brown sugar, and we stopped to watch. The cane was crushed in a simple steel grinder worked by bullocks. The cane juice simmered in a big, shallow, saucer-shaped iron pot; the fire below, in a kind of tunnel, was fed by trash and wood and dried cane husk. The sun was bright outside, and the heat here was great. A man used a long-handled ladle to skim off the cream-colored scum and to lift this waste into wicker baskets; from time to time he used a rake to scrape the upper wall of the black pot. It took about two and a half hours to make the sugar, crumbly and aromatic, delicious on its own when fresh, and quite unlike the refined product.
It was left to Rahimullah to tell me that though the area was poor, the men making the sugar came from outside. Local people, with their own idea of what was fitting, wouldn’t want to do that hard and very hot job.
Shamozai was spectacular. It was surrounded on three sides by rocky, abrupt, sharp-edged mountains which were part of a mountain range. In the foothills of this range the settlement lay: from a distance, flat-roofed, flat-walled, a pattern of rock and wall and sun and shadow, cubist in appearance. The house where Rahimullah’s father had been born in 1918 was high up. A narrow lane wound down the steep hill; near the bottom, next to the mosque, was the house Rahimullah’s father had established as his own. Not far away was the circular stone-stepped pool or tank fed by the spring that ran down the mountain.
The site, with the mountains and the spring and the pool, was clearly special. It felt even sacred, like the hot springs of Pariyangan in Sumatra, where the Minangkabau people were said to have come out of the earth; like the volcanic ground at the foot of Mount Merapi in Java which the poet Linus felt to be sacred, suffused with the emanations of the Hindu and Buddhist monuments a few feet below the surface. There would always have been a settlement at Shamozai; below the surface here, too, would be ruins that would take the human story back and back.
The main lane was crowded. There were children and more children everywhere, lank hair and smudged faces and dusty little limbs, as though the village houses could no longer hold them in. It gave a touch of fantasy, almost, to the shut-away setting, considering how desolate the abrupt mountains looked from not very far away. A nai, in his mid-forties, already had ten children; a farmer had eight. All the families who could afford it had moved out of the village. But the village was still full of Rahimullah’s relations. He shook hands all the time; the narrow lane (with its twelve or thirteen shops, small and dark and low, some of them dirt-floored) was like one extended family hall.
On the way back we passed Rahimullah’s wife’s family house: a tube-well at the end of the lane, a blank brick wall before that, with a half-open gate revealing the cow pens at the back of the living quarters. The family were originally better off than Rahimullah’s, with more land (and they too had moved out of the old village); but they were not as well educated, and Rahimullah and his brother were able to buy some land off them.
Rahimullah’s father had arranged the marriage, though Rahimullah chose his bride. She was a distant relative and used to come to the house, and he used to go to her family house, the blank-walled one we were looking at now. She was in purdah, but since th
e families were on visiting terms they could see each other; though they didn’t actually meet and talk. The most he said to her, when she came to his house, was “Welcome.” They met properly only on the third night of their wedding. They were both very shy. He didn’t know what to say. He could only say, “How are you? Are you happy? How do you feel in your new house?” She didn’t reply. Now she lived just a short distance away in the new house Rahimullah and his brother had built, her life completely defined.
A splendid white-capped figure was waiting for us in the guest house. This was Mutabar Khan, another cousin of Rahimullah’s. He had spent all his working life outside the frontier, and now he had come back for good, to the twenty acres that his family had, in different pieces. He was born in Shamozai in 1930 and he had left the village and gone to Karachi when he was sixteen. Now, a little like an actor who had made up for the last act, he had a great parted yellow-black-gray beard. When he spoke of his life outside, he compressed it; it was as if it had occurred in a kind of parenthesis.
That life, as he told it, was reduced to the names of places, Karachi and Dubai; to two employers, a Hindu grain merchant in Karachi, and an Arab in Dubai who owned an orchard; and the money they paid. There were no details, no pictures, no suggestion of the passing of time, the passing of life. But time here was an unconsidered flow; and to his fellows Mutabar Khan was a man who had seen the whole thing through and come back safe. He was what they wished to be, and the little crowd now sitting on the beds in the guest house were attentive. The mason and the man with him were there, work-stained; they had finished their work for the day on Rahimullah’s family house, and out of courtesy and simple fellowship were spending a little time here before going home.
Mutabar Khan talked about Karachi. He said (in Rahimullah’s translation), “I still remember with fondness the days I spent in Karachi. You could sleep safely even on the footpath. I don’t think it can return to peaceful times now.” That was what Karachi was for him.
He was worried about the Pathans there. Rahimullah had told me that there were two million, that Karachi had a bigger Pathan population than Peshawar or Kabul.
Mutabar Khan said, “They are such a huge number. They will die rather than come back.”
I asked him, “Are there too many people here, then?”
“Too many children in the schools now. No place to sit. But it is our belief that children are God-given and cannot be prevented from being born. Allah will provide for them. When a child is conceived Allah has already decided that this child is to be born.”
8
ALI’S FOOTPRINT
IN THE MORNINGS now in the countryside around Peshawar chador-draped figures stood in front of low brick houses with kindling on the flat roofs; cooking smoke mingled with mist. In the flat chill fields there were patches of tropical sugarcane next to small orchards of temperate fruit. On the edge of some fields there grew a line or two of spindly hybrid poplar that cast little shadow. This was also a crop; the poplar could be harvested after four years; the wood was used for matches. The crop was new here. And in that was a little history: until it seceded in 1971, Bangladesh supplied Pakistan’s matches.
I took a hotel car to Rawalpindi. At Attock the muddy Kabul River met the blue Indus, in a confluence about a mile wide. It was one of the great river views of the subcontinent. It was where the frontier ended, and the Punjab began. It would have been nice to stop and look, but there could be no stopping or dawdling on the bridge. And as I went on, by car to Rawalpindi, and then by train to Lahore, the land getting flatter, the views crowded always, the Pathan ideas Rahimullah had introduced me to began to feel far away. Honor and home territory, sanctuary and revenge, the hiding away of women and the strictness of religious observance: they were ideas that needed their own setting, their own enclosed world. But the Pathans had to migrate; they needed the outside world; and then their idea of honor could become warped. Few were educated or had high skills; and the clan code, which gave them protection, could also make them predators. That was an aspect of their reputation in the outside world. It was the other side of their reputation as soldiers.
In the hotel lobby in Peshawar there had been this notice painted on a board: HOTEL POLICY. ARMS CANNOT BE BROUGHT INSIDE THE HOTEL PREMISES. PERSONAL GUARDS OR GUNMEN ARE REQUIRED TO DEPOSIT THEIR WEAPONS WITH HOTEL SECURITY. WE SEEK YOUR COOPERATION. MANAGEMENT. And when I got back to Lahore it was to news of a frontier kidnapping.
I had got to know Ahmed Rashid. He was a journalist. He also owned, with a partner, a coal mine in the Punjab hinterland. The news, from him, was that three of the mine’s jeeps had been stolen, and six of the men kidnapped. The stealing and the kidnapping had occurred in stages. First a jeep and the two men in it had been taken, in the big town of Sargodha. After ten days there had come a ransom demand for two lakhs, two hundred thousand rupees, five thousand dollars. Ahmed had sent two men in a jeep to negotiate with the kidnappers. He hadn’t sent any money by these two men. This had enraged the kidnappers. They had seized the two men and the second jeep. Ahmed, taking the hint, had then sent two clerks in a third jeep with the ransom money. But the kidnappers were apparently still very angry. They held on to the two clerks and the ransom money, and made a fresh demand for twenty lakhs, fifty thousand dollars.
Ahmed, ever the journalist, was excited by the whole thing, this nice little story breaking on his own doorstep, as it were; and in his detached journalist’s way he found the sequence of events funny, the men from the mine going in two by two into some kidnappers’ pit somewhere in the frontier. He had got in touch with the army and the intelligence people; only they could help him. And he thought now—and this wasn’t going to be so funny for the kidnapped men—that negotiations could go on for many months. It was important to keep the negotiations going, and in this way to prevent the kidnapped men from being taken across the border. If that happened, it was all over; the jeeps and the men could be forgotten.
Where there was no law, no institutions that men could trust, the code and the idea of honor protected men. But it also worked the other way. Where the code was strong there could be no rule of law. In the frontier, as Saleem Ranjha’s Pathan guest had said at Mansura, the modern state was withering away; it was superfluous. People were beginning to live again with the idea of clan and fiefdom; and it was good for business.
Three hundred miles or so to the south, where the Punjab met Sindh, in the desert, there was the old princely state of Bahawalpur. There were more than five hundred of these semi-autonomous states in the days of the British. About seventy of them were important enough for their rulers to be called Highness; Bahawalpur was one of them.
It was one of the small opportunist states or fiefdoms that came into being in the middle of the eighteenth century during the breakdown of Muslim power in the subcontinent. It was bounded for three hundred miles on the west and north by the Indus and its tributary, the Sutlej. These great rivers on one side—the Sutlej with a ravaged, meandering watercourse many miles wide—and the desert on the other side preserved the Bahawalpur territory against the Sikhs from the north and the Hindu Mahrattas from the south. In 1838 the British made Bahawalpur a protectorate; and then at last the Nawabs of Bahawalpur knew imperial security. They ruled until 1954, when the state was absorbed into Pakistan.
The Nawab had hoped that when the British left the subcontinent in 1947 his state would become independent. This was madness. Bahawalpur in 1941 had a population of less than a million and a half, and most of these people were agricultural serfs. But the Nawab, after an untroubled century of British protection, had developed a fantasy about the reach of his authority. It was impossible for him, when he had lost his state, to live on in it as a private citizen. In his concept of the state there were, almost certainly, no free private citizens; there could only be a ruler and the ruled. He abandoned Bahawalpur and went to England, taking much of his fortune with him. He bought a house in Surrey and lived there until his death in 1966.
He left behind in Bahawalpur many children, recognized and unrecognized, three palaces, an idle and disoriented harem, some schools and colleges, and the ambitious Sutlej Valley Project. That project, carried out by British engineers and with a loan from the British Indian government, had taken irrigation to the desert and opened up vast areas for agriculture. The land was offered for almost nothing to people who would cultivate it. The local people were too broken-backed to be interested in this gamble with the desert; more spirited settlers came in from the Punjab. The success of the project tripled the revenues of the state and made the Nawab a very rich man. This wealth, no doubt, was one of the things that encouraged him to think of independence.
The dynasty of Bahawalpur, through various accidents, of geography and history, had in the end lasted for two centuries. It had never been grand or (apart from the Sutlej Valley Project) creative; but romantic tales had begun to attach to it. It was said that it was descended from the Abbasids who had ruled gloriously in Baghdad until the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century. One line of the Abbasids had then fled to Sindh, which was part of the Abbasid empire; and there—in this romance—they had kicked their heels for five centuries or so, before making their play for the big patch of desert that became Bahawalpur.
The recently updated Encyclopaedia of Islam dismisses this story: it says that the Abbas of Bahawalpur is not the Abbas of the Abbasids. In a way it doesn’t matter whether the story is true or not; what matters is local belief, and the angle it puts on local history. The old Hindu kingdom of Sindh was the first territory in the subcontinent to fall to the Muslims. It was conquered by the Arabs in the eighth century. The conquest, done principally for loot, was quite a deliberate and methodical business. The first expedition was in 634, just two years after the Prophet’s death, and three years before the conquest of Persia. There were eight further attempts on Sindh, before the final conquest in 710. This last assault was controlled from Syria by the caliph himself. The thirteenth-century text that celebrates this conquest, the Chachnama, fanciful and poetic as it is in parts, is as dreadful an account of blood and loot and enslavement as Caesar’s Gallic War. But the conquest of Sindh can be considered in more than one way, and the Bahawalpur claim on the Abbasids is also a link to the birth of Arab and Muslim power in the subcontinent. It is like the primary neurosis of the converted.