Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  Ehsan saw a lot of violence ahead. He saw trouble for his friend. His attitude to the movement began to change. And then one day, at a meeting in the house of one of his ideologue friends, they were all asked to take oaths on the Koran to be loyal to the movement and the leader. The leader, of a kind created by great distress and need, was now an immense public figure, conducting six-hour rallies that ended at midnight, and moving millions, as Ehsan said.

  Still, Ehsan didn’t like the idea of the oath of loyalty; but he didn’t have to say no. He was able at about this time to leave Pakistan, and he was away for five years. When he came back the MQM were no longer ruling the city. The army was there, and the MQM had become an underground organization. It still obeyed its leader; he was now far away, in exile in London; but distance added to his magic. Ehsan’s friend was one of those who had gone underground. On the telephone later he told Ehsan that he had been falsely accused of killing another MQM man and was on the run. And when they met—strangely, in the family house—everybody cried, Ehsan, his friend, the friend’s mother.

  The friend still had the thick hands, but he had lost weight. He said he was willing to swear on the Koran that he hadn’t committed murder. What had happened had happened when the police were hunting him. He had had during this time to move from house to house. And then somehow he had got a job on a merchant ship. They must have had some idea of his situation, because they asked him to clean the toilets and the deck; and he had to obey. With all his mohajir caste sense he hated the degradation of the job and even now he complained about it to Ehsan. He said he wanted to go to London and start a new life. He had become critical of the MQM, and he knew that if he stayed in Pakistan he would be arrested or killed. He wanted Ehsan to find a lawyer for him in London, so that he could apply for political asylum.

  The mother, the firebrand with the AK-47, had changed. She said that the army and the police and the government were bent on destroying her son. She said to Ehsan, “Please do something to help him.” Her own opinions and feelings were not what they had been. She had become even a little critical of the MQM. She said they were not doing enough to help the families of boys who had been killed or were underground, like her son.

  But it was to be all right for her. Her other sons had, in spite of everything, got started on reasonable professional careers. And the fighter was eventually to get to the safety of London.

  What had happened in five years was that the movement, fostered in the beginning by families like hers, had changed. The movement had ceased to be a middle-class movement. It had gone down to the bottom, and there the bitterness had turned to outright rejection. The fighters and organizers came now from the poor of Orangi and Korangi, who had nothing or very little to lose. At that level—whatever had happened to the family of Ehsan’s friend—the flames were unquenchable.

  The army was in Karachi for nearly two and a half years. During this time the MQM was declared a terrorist organization and its leaders absconding terrorists. Army control produced even more mohajir bitterness, and this bitterness grew when the semi-military border force, the Rangers, replaced the army. Whole localities continued to be sealed off and searched. Then the intelligence agencies engineered a split in the MQM, and anarchy was added to terror. No one could now be sure who was killing whom.

  Hasan Jafri, a journalist, himself descended of mohajirs, was covering the troubles at this time. He said, “What I and other reporters saw were a lot of dead bodies. Almost every day.”

  The ambulance service was the first source of information. The reporters would then check with the MQM to find out if the dead men belonged to them. If the men were theirs, the MQM would say that they had been tortured to death by the police. The police would say they had been killed in “encounters.”

  “There have been eighteen hundred people killed this year. So every day there are dead bodies on the street. One and two, two and two, three and three. When I began it was disgusting. You would see a dead body carelessly thrown in a hospital morgue. About five months back there was a shootout in Korangi. It happened in the morning. I think it was five guys who were killed. They were in the Jinnah Hospital morgue. They were lying on these concrete slabs. They were naked, all of them, and the bodies had begun to smell. The area between the heart and the shoulder of one man was completely blown off. Another one had taken a burst on his hand, and the principal bone was jutting out. One of them had an expression, as if it were frozen on his face, of shock. His eyes were wide open and his mouth was also open. Because the bodies were brought quite late to the hospital, about six hours after the incident, the expressions were very frozen. It appeared that the moment when they died was written all over them.”

  Hasan Jafri said he went himself to the morgue, to get the body count, and to see what condition the bodies were in. He had, “at a certain level,” become immune to sights like this. But he felt that as a reporter he had to go and see for himself, because it was important to see “the face of violence.”

  “Another killing I remember was that of Inspector Bahadur Ali. He was ambushed, and he and about six other policemen in that vehicle were killed. Bahadur Ali had close to two dozen bullets in his body. He was a big man and his body was totally destroyed.

  “The ideas and the talk—it has nothing to do with that. All there is at the end is a dead body. Someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s husband.”

  Fear was the biggest thing people now lived with, Hasan Jafri said. The MQM people were frightened; the police might come knocking at any time. The police were frightened; they knew they were targets. The taxi drivers were frightened.

  The police were overworked. They were brutal because they were frightened. Most of the rankers were from the Punjab and the interior of Sindh; they were far from their families. They risked their lives every day and were paid very little, twenty-six hundred rupees a month, sixty-five dollars.

  Hasan Jafri used to do the evening rounds with the police in their APCs, armored personnel carriers. One evening in the Liaquatabad area, a hot MQM area, a constable from the Punjab, about thirty, haggard, and clearly on duty for a long time, said to Hasan Jafri, “Serving in District Central is worse than living in hell.” And then it became even worse. The terrorists began using rocket launchers. When that happened Hasan Jafri stopped going on the evening police rounds.

  The war had got down to the bottom, and now whenever an MQM fighter died another took his place. The authorities said there were only two thousand fighters; that was foolish, Hasan Jafri said. The names of new fighters began quite suddenly to appear in police reports; they remained names, faceless, until they were arrested or killed; then there were new names. People were recruited at first to do very little things; then the things they did became bigger, and at last they were sucked in. Hasan Jafri knew a boy or man of twenty-one who already felt that he was marked for death. He had stolen so many cars, killed so many people, robbed so many businesses; he couldn’t be normal again.

  “He came from a very educated family. The unlikeliest terrorist you could think of. You see, the cycle is endless. The birth and the rebirth, one after the other. My biggest fear now is that we might end up as a basket case. There are many people like myself now, educated, conscious, who are not afraid of detaching themselves from Pakistan. But I don’t want to end up as a mohajir in another country. My parents were born in one country; I in another; I don’t want my kids to be born in a third.”

  The words were a fair comment, some generations later, on Mohammed Iqbal’s Pakistan proposal of 1930: poets should not lead their people to hell.

  Iqbal is buried in the grounds of the Shah Jehan Mosque in Lahore; and soldiers watch his tomb. Rhetoric or sentimentality like that is invariably worrying; it hides things. And the tomb, with its Mogul motifs, would be a kind of artistic sacrilege if, just across the way, the great Mogul fort of Lahore (the emperor’s window there recorded in some of the finest Mogul pictures) wasn’t falling into dust; if, in that same city of
Lahore, the Mogul Shalimar Gardens and the tombs of the emperor Jehangir and his consort were not in absolute decay; if, going back four centuries, the delicately colored tiled towers of the thirteenth-century tombs of Uch in Bahawalpur, one of the finest Islamic things in the subcontinent, were not half washed away; if, going back further still, the land just around the Buddhist city of Taxila, known to Alexander the Great, and with once fabulous remains, wasn’t being literally quarried; if Pakistan, still pursuing imperialist Islamic fantasies, hadn’t been responsible for the final looting of the Buddhist treasures of Afghanistan.

  In its short life Iqbal’s religious state, still half serf, still profoundly uneducated, mangling history in its schoolbooks as well, undoing the polity it was meant to serve, had shown itself dedicated only to the idea of the cultural desert here, with glory—of every kind—elsewhere.

  PART FOUR

  MALAYSIAN POSTSCRIPT

  Raising the Coconut Shell

  1

  OLD CLOTHES

  IN KUALA LUMPUR in 1979 I shifted for some days from hotel to hotel before settling in at the Holiday Inn. It was quietest place I could find, and I liked the setting. To the left was the racecourse, with a view in the distance of the Kuala Lumpur hills. Around the racecourse and in front of the hotel was the rich greenery of the wet tropics: banana fronds, flowering frangipani, the great, branching saman or rain tree of Central America: the mingled vegetation of Asia, the Pacific, and the New World that spoke both of the great European explorations and the plantation colonies. It was the very vegetation I had known on the other side of the world in Trinidad.

  And then what was familiar became strange. Just around the corner from the Holiday Inn was a little yellow box set in a wall or hedge. I was told it was a Chinese shrine. It had offerings; it might have been used by the Chinese taxi drivers who did hotel work.

  And the racecourse wasn’t really a racecourse. Sometimes I saw horses being trained there in the early mornings, before the sun came up; but I never saw a race. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons Chinese people (for the most part) came in their cars and filled the grandstand. The racecourse itself, green and sun-struck, with still, black shadows, remained empty. Every half hour there was an amplified race commentary and the grand-stand crowd worked itself up to a frenzy, as if at a real race. The races were real, but they were going on somewhere else. The people in the grandstand were looking at television screens; and they had come to the racecourse to do so, in a strange mimicry of a day at the races, because it was the only place in Kuala Lumpur where gambling was permitted. Malaysia was racially divided: Malays, Chinese. The government was aggressively Malay and Muslim. Gambling was un-Islamic, and this weekend racecourse excitement was only a humane concession to the Chinese. They were the great gamblers.

  I had got to know Shafi. He was a Malay of thirty-two, originally from a village in the still pastoral and poor northeast. Though it could be said that Shafi had done well, had risen in a way his father and grandfather could not have imagined, he was full of rage as a Malay. Shafi, and Malays like him, felt they had almost lost their country. They thought the Malays had slept for too long in their villages. Things grew too easily in the warm, fertile land; the old life of river and forest was too rich and full. You could throw a seed, Shafi said one day, and it would grow; you could put a bare hook in the water and catch a fish. Used to that idea of the land, the village people hadn’t seen or understood to what extent in the last hundred years they had been supplanted by Chinese and others. They had awakened now, late in the century, to find that Malays had become only half the population, and that a new way of life had developed all around them. They were not prepared for that new way.

  To be a Malay like Shafi, half in and half out of the old ways, was to feel every kind of fear and frustration. It was too much for a man to bear on his own, and in 1979 Islam was being made to carry that general rage. Malays of Shafi’s generation had become passionate believers; and their belief was given edge by Islamic missionaries, who were especially busy in 1979, with the revolution in Iran and the Islamizing terror of General Zia in Pakistan. The missionaries were spreading stories of Islamic success in those countries, and promising similar success to people elsewhere, if only they believed. The Islamic missionary world existed in its own bubble. The extension of the faith was its principal aim; and—as for the fourteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta—once the faith ruled, the conditions of the faithful didn’t matter.

  It was at the Holiday Inn that Shafi used to come to see me. He wasn’t an easy guest. He said he didn’t like places like the Holiday Inn, and he didn’t hide his worry about the food: it might have been prepared by non-Muslims, Chinese or Indians. There were other things that would have offended him: the modest little bar, where at night “The Old Timers” (city Malays, with an Indian or two) sang pop songs; the lunchtime fashion show on Friday, the sabbath, when people came to see the Indian and Chinese girls seesaw their shoulders and do their walk, in the rather stale, shut-in restaurant air; and the very small Holiday Inn pool, below the coffee-shop window, where white women exposed themselves in swimsuits.

  But Shafi had stopped seeing—perhaps had never seen—what he rejected. He couldn’t even tell, for instance, as I found one day when I asked him, whether the sunbathing women at the poolside were attractive. When he had first come to Kuala Lumpur as a schoolboy he had been nervous; he had felt a stranger. Now he held himself aloof from it, and was strong in his self-righteousness. His ideas were sometimes confused; his Islam was being made to carry too many things. There was purity in his village in Kota Baru, for instance, purity in the life he had known there, which he had now lost; yet he wished to be like a scourge in those villages, to convert them fully, to cleanse them of what had survived of old Hindu customs. That had become part of his cause. The missionary Islam he now fed off had given him an impossible dream of Islamic purity. Out of this purity there was going to come power, and accounts would be settled with the world.

  Sixteen years later, the Holiday Inn was surrounded by towers of concrete and steel. Land was precious here. The racecourse view I had known could not now be reconstructed; it was half mythical, like the Roman hills before the building of Rome. And all over Kuala Lumpur there was much more building to come. At the back of the hotel where I was staying, an immense hole was being dug across the road. The hole had the area of a large city block; it dwarfed men and machines; ramps led down from level to level, from red earth to dry pale earth. The composite tropical greenery of colonial days was overshadowed now by an international style in steel and glass and stone and concrete and marble; and the very climate seemed to have altered. Air-conditioning made the big buildings cold; the weather outside was always a little surprise; it was pleasant for the visitor to play with these temperature shifts. In 1979 Malaysia had been rich; not it was extraordinarily rich.

  I wondered about the effect on Shafi. I knew that, before he had begun to work full-time for the Muslim youth movement, he had worked as the managing director of a Malay construction company. He was very young for the job, but there were not many business-minded Malays at the time. The firm hadn’t done well; there were big players in the construction business in Malaysia. And then Shafi had set up on his own. He had failed. He thought this was because his Chinese workers and almost everybody else had let him down. The failure grieved him, I knew; it had got mixed up with his religious ideas. And I wondered whether, with the great new wealth of the country, and all the encouragement the government had been giving to Malays to go into business, Shafi hadn’t been tempted to try again. He would now be forty-eight, in middle life. His career, whatever it was, would have been more or less marked out.

  But I couldn’t find out about Shafi. The people who had known him in the old days had lost touch with him. He was a preacher, I was told; he was on the move; he wasn’t easy to reach.

  And then one morning I was taken to an Islamic commune on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur to meet a man who said he
was Shafi and said he remembered me. The commune was a solid settlement of two-storied concrete houses. The houses were painted and the roads were paved, and there were gardens and cars. Whatever the commune people might say about their self-denying way of life, they were part of rich Kuala Lumpur.

  We had to look for the house of the man who said he was Shafi. When we found it I found I didn’t know the man. He pretended for a little, but only for a little, and only in a half-hearted way, that he remembered me.

  He was in his forties and he looked happy and idle, enjoying the commune life. His house, on two floors, had a big, open, well-furnished hall downstairs. And he was playing there, in the middle of the morning, with a kind of village serenity, with a sleepy-eyed, unsteady, young child of his. It was a form of display: in this kind of commune simple things could be paraded as religious or virtuous acts that gave especial pleasure to the believer, as reward.

  He said in a mechanical way that the big highway the government had built was wrong; it was opening up the country to vice. He said that the official language of the country should be Arabic; English was not the language of Muslims. But he had said these things so many times before that now—he was on the floor and trying to get the child to play with one of its many toys—he was speaking by rote, without energy.

  I felt that it was out of pure idleness that he had said he was Shafi. He wanted only to get a little attention. There was no point in being fundamentalist and dangerous and living in a commune if no one noticed.

  And, in fact, Shafi, whom in the end I never met—because no one among his former associates particularly wanted me to meet him—had become like that idle man in their eyes. Once he had been at the center of the Muslim youth movement in Malaysia, the movement using Islam to wake up the Malays. He had no other career. Now, though he had remained true to those early beliefs, he was on the outside. It embarrassed people to be reminded of him; he was a man who had taken the idea of the religious life to extremes.