Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  The girl was living in Kuala Kangsar with her grandmother. Her father was in Kuala Lumpur, in the police. The girl came of an old, decayed family. At one time they had a lot of land, but they didn’t use it well, and it went bit by bit. Gambling ate it up. Gambling ran in the blood. After the fasting month all the family came together, sometimes with friends, and they played poker for two days and two nights. Nadezha grew up thinking that this was usual, that it was what people everywhere did after the fasting month.

  Nadezha said, “They were decadent. They thought it would last forever. They were not educated. That’s the problem. In my time the rich didn’t study.”

  And what Nadezha was saying touched a chord: what she was saying about Malaysia was true of Trinidad as well, up to the 1940s, when I was growing up there. At that time rich people and local white people, generally, didn’t study; it was part of their privilege. They didn’t need to study. The colonial agricultural society required few skills. It didn’t require people to be especially efficient or striving or fine.

  Nadezha said, “When I think about the colonial days, I suppose the Malays ran around and gambled and didn’t do anything constructive. While the money was made by others—the Chinese tin-mining families, the rubber plantations, usually the English. I think in those days that was it. The Chinese and the English colonial masters. Malays didn’t do business. The only option for them was the civil service or to become an academic. That required hard work. So they opted for the easy way out. They didn’t know anything else. They were coconut shell people.”

  Nadezha’s father, though, had to take his studies at Malay College seriously; it was his only way out. The girl who was to be Nadezha’s mother didn’t have that need. Girls of her background didn’t have to go to school if they didn’t want to; and Nadezha’s mother hardly went to school. She could read and write and that was enough. She didn’t think of herself as uneducated. And, indeed, she had another, more exclusive, kind of training from her family. She was trained in loyalty and what Nadezha called old-fashioned virtues. She learned how to behave in public: she learned not to show off, not to show her feelings. At the end she was quite a finished person: Nadezha thought of her mother as someone of old-fashioned, imperious style.

  Much of the family money was gone when the girl was corresponding with Nadezha’s father. When the land went, and money went, there was nothing to hold once-rich people in Kuala Kangsar; they migrated, almost like the kampung people, to the towns. So in time, in 1958, when she was eighteen, the girl left her grandmother and two aunts in Kuala Kangsar and went to the capital to live with her father, the high police officer.

  In the capital there was more freedom, and for the first time she and Nadezha’s father could meet properly. They must have come to an understanding; because Nadezha’s father went to Europe to study, and when he came back the girl was waiting for him, and they decided to get married. The girl’s family gave their approval, but they didn’t like it. They had no money, but they still had a name, and the girl’s father was now very high in the police. Nadezha’s father, in spite of the years at Malay College and the degree he had taken abroad, still in their eyes had the stigma of being a kampung boy.

  Nadezha always knew as she was growing up that her father was a kampung boy and her mother something else. It was an unequal relationship; but Nadezha thought it balanced out in the end. Her father was a quiet man. That would have helped. Though Nadezha remembered a quarrel once, when her father told her mother that her parents had never thought him good enough. But if she had married the kind of man she was supposed to marry, he said, she would have been stuck in Perak.

  Nadezha said, “It’s probably true.”

  And what was strange even to Nadezha was that, when the time came for her to think of marriage, she did as her mother had done. She, too, married an ambitious kampung boy.

  Her mother said, in warning, “You are doing what I did.”

  Nadezha was working in a stockbroking firm in Kuala Lumpur—Malaysia had been transformed—and the boy or young man worked in her office. He wasn’t good-looking, but Nadezha didn’t like good-looking men. Her father wasn’t good-looking, and she felt that subconsciously that would have influenced her. Beauty was all right in a woman, but not in a man.

  She was attracted to the young man because he was ambitious, not in a dreaming way, but in a practical and methodical way. He would say, for instance, “This person is leaving next year. So my chances of taking over that position are good.” He would know whom he would be competing against; he would work out his moves long in advance. He was quite cold about it.

  Nadezha said, “I was directionless, and I thought he would take over, and I might end up doing something.”

  I asked Nadezha, “Was there nothing else that attracted you, apart from the ambition?”

  “He liked nice clothes.”

  The boy’s kampung background didn’t worry Nadezha. She thought he was at ease with himself. But she didn’t like his politics. He supported the government and the Malay ruling party because he thought they had done a lot for people like him. At that time the judges were under attack from the government, and Nadezha was concerned about that.

  The young man said, “I don’t care about that. What people really care about is money, food in their bellies, house, shelter.”

  Nadezha was repelled by his argument, but she thought she had had a comfortable upbringing, and he hadn’t, and it would be wrong for her to blame him. She understood, too, that he was not interested in concepts; he was interested more in tangible things. Later all of this was to scratch at her. But she decided at the time, in spite of her misgivings, to marry him because of his directness. She saw him as a kind of new Malay man, a new model. They became engaged.

  “I really think I did want to get married. All my friends were getting married, and I thought this was the way. It was my turn to get married. It was just part of life.”

  One day her fiancé said quite casually that he wanted to take her to the kampung to meet his grandmother. His parents were also going to be there that weekend, he said. Nadezha had met the parents many times before, in Kuala Lumpur. They were pleasant enough, but Nadezha didn’t especially like them. They were educated people who had lived in Kuala Lumpur for thirty years, but their conversation was quite ordinary, the idlest kind of chitchat. They were not the in-laws Nadezha would have chosen. But Nadezha’s primary need at that time was to get married. She felt it was something she had to do as a woman. She thought that as a woman she could have a future only with a husband at her side. Later, when she was divorced, her ideas changed.

  The kampung was in Negri Sembilan. There was a highway, and then a road off the highway that became more and more of a country road, muddier and muddier. Nadezha felt she was going deep into the interior. It was much damper than Kuala Lumpur, and more humid. The houses became simpler and simpler. She saw all this, and had an idea what it meant, but she wasn’t frightened enough to pull back. It was half familiar; it was like what she imagined her father had come from. As had been happening right through this relationship, she saw and felt with one side of herself, and acted and spoke with another side.

  The house was in a normal kampung plot. There was no drive. Her fiancé’s parents were already there. They, too, would have driven down from Kuala Lumpur. Their car had made marks in the grass, muddy marks. It was a normal kampung plot, but the house itself, though part of it was on stilts (in the traditional kampung style), was not the traditional kampung house: it had already been renovated and added to, and it didn’t have woven-bamboo walls. Nadezha saw some chickens in front of the house, and then she saw more running about underneath the older part of the house. She noticed the chickens because in Kuala Lumpur she wasn’t used to seeing chickens running around a house.

  She said to her fiancé, “Oh, she keeps chickens.” “She” was the grandmother.

  He said, “She likes the eggs freshly laid. They taste better.”

  The
words stuck a false note. They sounded defensive. She thought he had said too much: there was no need for him to talk about the taste of the eggs. For the first time she saw him uncomfortable. The moment passed; she pushed it to the back of her mind.

  There were ten people at the lunch. Two unmarried aunts did the serving; they were treated like servants. They were supposed to take care of the grandmother in her old age. The grandmother was as ugly as her grandson, Nadezha thought; but the old woman was so wrinkled that no one could really see just how ugly she was. She didn’t say much at the lunch; but she didn’t have to. She was the matriarch; they all deferred to her. Nadezha thought it was the Negri Sembilan way: the people there had migrated from Padang in Sumatra and brought their matriarchal clan customs with them. Nadezha herself, as a fiancée, wasn’t required to say very much; she just had to sit and look shy. So the actual lunch was easy for her. There were lots of little photographs on the walls: the children of the family at various stages.

  There was an uncle at the lunch. He was a member of the ruling Malay party and was involved in local politics. He led a certain amount of political talk at the table; it was about some district matter. Nadezha began to get a new idea of the Malay movement. She had always taken it for granted. But now she began to understand how her fiancé saw it. She began to understand—taking everything together: the house, the renovations, the easy political talk, the general confidence—that she was among people for whom the world had changed in concrete ways. They had seen good things happen in their village, their house, and in their own lives. They had felt themselves lifted up.

  Nadezha said, “In the old days when you went to KL you saw the club, the shops, and the only Malays who inhabited this world were the royals, the aristos. And we felt: This is our land and they have taken over.” “They” were the Chinese. “In the house I felt I understood why politics played such a big part in the life of the Malays. In our arguments at the office I talked about concepts. He talked about concrete things, things that had happened.”

  What came over to her especially was the optimism of the people at the table. Such optimism in a family was new to her. She also saw that, for that family, her fiancé embodied the idea of success, their success, Malay success.

  I asked Nadezha, “Did they look upon you as part of his success?”

  “I didn’t think of it like that.”

  “Did you fall in love with him a little bit then?”

  “No.”

  “So you were fooling yourself?”

  “Maybe I felt I was having a stake in that future they were talking about. Maybe.”

  After lunch something happened which she noted but suppressed, in the way she had suppressed her misgivings about the chickens in the yard and the talk about the taste of the fresh eggs.

  “We went to the living room. The dining room was in the old part of the house, on stilts. The living room was the new part. Three steps down—it was part of their moving up. The grandmother motioned to my fiancé to come next to her. I thought he was going to sit on the chair next to her. But he sat on the floor at her feet. There was a carpet. It was all new there; the dining room had a reed or bamboo mat, I’m not sure which. I noticed this sitting on the floor. But then I thought it was the Negri Sembilan culture. They are known for being clannish. I didn’t want to talk about it in case he thought I was upset about it. Which I wasn’t. Also I thought he was confident enough to deal with all of this. Essentially all this doesn’t matter if you don’t care about it.”

  The visit lasted about four hours, from about noon to just before four. The marriage took place two months later.

  Nadezha’s mother had her doubts. She said, “You are doing what I did.” She had no personal feeling against her son-in-law; she just didn’t see how Nadezha would fit in. She didn’t like the man’s parents. They thought that Nadezha and her family were snobs. They felt they should fight back, and just before the wedding there was something like a quarrel between the families.

  The marriage customs of Malays are derived from old Hindu customs. At an early stage gifts have to be exchanged between the families. If the girl’s family sends five gifts, the boy’s family has to send seven; there always has to be a difference of two. Symbolic things are sent: sweets, money. Nadezha’s mother wanted part of the boy’s family’s gift to be in gold coins rather than banknotes. This was for aesthetic reasons: the gold coins would make a more attractive display. The mother of the boy said no; she didn’t have the time to go to the bank to change the notes for coins.

  Nadezha said, “Actually, this is quite rude. Because you should do what the girl’s side wants, and vice versa. Everybody has to be gracious. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings before you get married. As customs go, that is the Malay way: you give in, you have to be gracious.”

  But Nadezha knew, from the experience of her friends, that there was nearly always in-law trouble at weddings. The trouble came from the rivalry between the families, and Nadezha preferred to see the awkwardness about the gold coins as part of that rivalry. Her mother was more brutal. She thought it was bad manners and a sign of low breeding.

  Nadezha went to her husband’s kampung six or seven times after they were married. She never really got to like it. Kampung life wasn’t simple and idyllic, as some people said. It was competitive. The second or third time Nadezha was there the talk was all about the neighbor’s new car or jeep: the cost, the color that wasn’t nice, and “I bet it wasn’t his own money.” The two unmarried aunts who were looking after the grandmother didn’t like each other. There were few single men in the kampung, and the aunts had almost no chance now of getting married. One was resigned; Nadezha liked her. The other was malicious, embittered by the way things had turned out for her.

  There were no cultural interests in the kampung. Life was shallow. There was only religion. It was important; the five-times-a-day praying marked the passage of each day. The mosque was the only kind of social center.

  Nadezha thought that it was because there was so much complaining and grumbling and comparing in the village that her husband had become so ambitious—in order to break out. It puzzled her that her husband didn’t notice the pettiness as much as she did. He didn’t lend himself to it, didn’t sink into the gossip; but he accepted it. It was part of his kampung, which was part of him. And, after all, the whole business side of his life (though Nadezha didn’t say this) was in his stockbroking firm in Kuala Lumpur.

  They lived after their marriage with Nadezha’s parents. Nadezha later thought it was a great error. Her husband, who was ambitious, and rather spoilt by his own family, felt oppressed, not in control of his own life. Very soon all the rage began coming out on both sides. Nadezha’s mother never criticized her son-in-law personally; he never criticized Nadezha’s parents personally. He just attacked their way of life, the things they did, the people they liked. He didn’t like seeing Nadezha reading Vogue. He would say, “Why do you read this rubbish?” He himself—Malay of the new model—read books about management: Money Options, Fun Management, things about the stock market.

  “He went out with clients one day. He was drinking. Again I can’t remember the argument. By this time we just didn’t get on with each other. He hit me. I hit him back. I told him to get out. He did. And that was when we started talking about divorce. It was all done through lawyers. He never came back.”

  At the time Nadezha was pregnant. So they couldn’t get divorced right away. In Islam divorce is not permitted if the wife is pregnant: a baby has to be born legitimate. Still, they arrived at some kind of arrangement; but three weeks later he went back on that, and said he wasn’t going to divorce Nadezha. She thought he might have been influenced by his family. They had their pride, as Nadezha knew, and they might have wanted Nadezha to have a hard time. She did. For three years she lived in an in-between way, neither married nor divorced. And it was hard for her to get custody of the child.

  She thought now that she had expected too much
from marriage. She had been hoping, more than she knew, to find a replacement for what she had lost. Her mother’s family had been gamblers; when her mother’s father died all the family money finally went. A whole way of living, everything she had taken for granted, was lost. She had told this in the beginning as half a joke. But for her it was really a calamity. And after that there were further blows. Her younger brother died; her father’s business began to fail; her father and mother had marital problems.

  She, the daughter of an imperious, well-born mother, began to feel a great emptiness before she was twenty. And when, later, she went to London, she found that other Malay girls there were like her. Certain girls she knew, whom she thought were well off and happy, had joined a sect; they had a great, hidden need. The leader of the sect made them give him money; the girls treated him like a god-like figure with special powers.

  Nadezha said, “Malays like these people with special powers because they believe that things don’t happen because of your own actions. They think that by engaging one bomoh or shaman they will put everything right. Everyone I know is religious. They have a strong faith. They believe that as born Muslims they are secure. If you are born without religion you question your place, your role. If you are Muslim you are told from the start that you are part of a big group. In school when you have religious classes, the Malay girls would go off to their religious classes, and the Chinese girls had free time or play time. In that way you are already differentiating people.

  “My father’s friend is floating his company. They are involved in plastics. They began making plastic wrappers. Now they’re molding plastic chairs, and they are suddenly very rich. They’ve come from being comfortable to being rich beyond belief. And every year they do the umra”—the little pilgrimage—“without fail, to give thanks to God. They think: ‘It must be luck. I am no different from the other guy. It’s God who must be helping me.’ I am sure he realizes he’s not doing something substantial. That’s why he can’t believe his luck. In the past ten years things have been built out of air.”