Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

  Her husband’s family gave some financial help now, but she did the job because she needed the money, especially for the education of her children. She was educating them in English as well as in Urdu, because in foreign countries—and she meant Saudi Arabia and the Muslim countries—you couldn’t get a job unless you spoke English.

  So, already, she was training her children to leave Pakistan, to become emigrants?

  She said, “I have to. We are a minority. We are non-Muslims.”

  She was wearing a sari. Did that mean she was a Hindu or a Parsi?

  Before I could ask, she said, “We believe in the Prophet. But three years ago we were declared non-Muslims by the government. We are Ahmadis.”

  “But why did they declare you non-Muslims? What were the pressures on them?”

  “You must ask Benazir Bhutto. Benazir will tell you why her father declared us non-Muslims. He was very friendly with us, and then he went and did that.”

  The sect began, she said, with a man called Ahmad, who was born in northern India in the last century. In 1906 (she was wrong about the date; it was 1890; but I learned that some weeks later) he came to the realization, by many signs given him, that he was the Mahdi or the Promised Messiah. He was a pious man; he fought the conviction, but in the end couldn’t resist it. There were Muslims who believed that the Messiah wasn’t going to come until doomsday; but another interpretation of the prophecy was that the Messiah would appear when Islam had degenerated, and in 1906 Islam had degenerated.

  I said, “So you are like the Bahais of Iran? They believe that the Hidden Imam or someone like him appeared in the last century.”

  But she had never heard of the Bahais.

  She was an Ahmadi convert. And the Ahmadis themselves, she told me, were divided. Some—like herself—believed in the successor to the Messiah; others didn’t.

  But how had she, a Muslim, come to accept this idea of the Messiah? The idea was hateful to Muslims. Muslims believed that Mohammed was the final Prophet; this idea of the Indian Messiah came close to denying that finality, and therefore came close to denying something fundamental about the Prophet. As a Muslim, she would at one time have felt horror at the idea. How had she managed to make the jump?

  Well, she said, her parentage was mixed. She was Shia on one side, orthodox Sunni on the other. So she was ready, it might be said, for heterodox belief. And—she had married an Ahmadi. It was necessary therefore for her to become one. Heresy, then, was something that had been given to her, something she had seen approaching and had deliberately embraced. Her husband had talked to her, instructed her; and she was now so convinced a believer that she spoke of the Messiah, Ahmad, with a little tremor: the good man, the pious man who had had Messiah-hood forced on him, and couldn’t deny the many signs of God.

  The heresy—to which only Muslims could fully respond—now ruled her life; it might even take her out of the Muslim homeland. A government office with flaking distemper and shaky furniture: a girl in a green sari with a degree in journalism from the University of Karachi, a woman civil servant in a Muslim country: that was arresting enough. But just below appearances in Karachi, below what was easily graspable, was the faith, and the fever of the faith, which took many forms, and nearly always gave a phantasmagoric quality to an encounter.

  Phantasmagoria continued. I went out to the corridor to wait for the girl in the green sari. And I was so full of what I had just heard, and so confidently expecting to go with her at some stage to the pilgrim docks, that I paid insufficient attention to where I was being led by men who spoke no English, failed to see that I had been separated from her, missed the point of a short van ride, failed to see that I was being taken to another department and another office, and found myself at the end in a big enclosed room, a much grander office than Mr. Deen’s, where an elderly man faced two or three other men across a crowded desk, and I was made to sit in a corner, in the draught of an air-conditioning unit, on a chair of a sofa set which was upholstered in PVC rather than Mr. Deen’s simple cotton.

  This was Ahmed’s office (another Ahmed, not Ahmad, the long-dead visionary I had been hearing about). There was a shelf at the side of his desk with five telephones, and even Ahmed had trouble telling which one was ringing. By some bureaucratic intermeshing which I was in no position to follow, the Ahmed of this office had taken me over. Mr. Deen and Mr. Sherwani, harassed men, had quietly surrendered me—and with them had gone the Ahmadi girl in the green sari.

  And it was with two men from Ahmed’s office that I went to the docks. But their English was not good; they preferred to talk among themselves in Urdu; at the docks they were so taken up with their departmental duties, and so awed by the high official nature of the pilgrim send-off (the governor of Baluchistan was to attend), that I saw the whole scene without language, as it were, and as from a distance: the white ship that turned out to be British-built, old, and grubby where not painted white; bunks and bundles in the packed hold, elderly men and women at once like refugees and pilgrims, penitential and expectant; rubbish already being swept up into little piles; on the narrow upper deck, some old men—indifferent to the fussed officials, and piling piety upon piety—doing their ritual wash before prayer, devotion in Islam always also a correct and reassuring physical deed.

  General Rahimuddin, the governor of Baluchistan, arrived. On the wharf the bagpipe band, in tartans, paraded and skirled: the inherited British military style, appropriate to a general with a peaked cap, dark glasses, stars, and baton, imposed on this pilgrimage to Mecca, a pilgrimage older than Islam, rooted in old Arabian tribal worship, and incorporated by the Prophet into the practices of Islam: layer upon layer of history here.

  A port official made a speech, and loudspeakers took his words to all parts of the ship and also to the wharf below, where, outside the canopied, festive-looking enclosure with the pipers and soldiers, a small crowd of workmen had gathered. The general made a slightly longer speech. The official farewell to the pilgrims, as ordered by the president, was then over (the government hand-out made nine inches in Dawn two days later); and I was taken back to Ahmed’s dark, air-conditioned office.

  I never saw Mr. Deen or Mr. Sherwani again. I never saw the girl or widow in the green sari again. I was nagged by her story. But her Ahmadi sect was outlawed, held in horror by many; and it was only at the end of my time in Pakistan that I was able to learn more about them.

  Ahmed took me over. His interest in me in the morning might have been an official interest—there was martial law in Pakistan, and a nervousness about foreigners and Pakistan’s nuclear programme—but that changed almost as soon as I had been taken to his office. Sitting at his desk, facing his subordinates, he had looked at me carefully; and I had passed his scrutiny.

  It would have been reported to him that there was a visitor asking about Islamic institutions. A strange story; but when he found it to be true he became more than interested. There was a reason. Ahmed, who was in his late fifties, was a penitent. By his own account he had lived loosely as a young man, and was still teased by the flesh. He had come late to religion and was now consumed by it. He was awed by his own faith. He wished not only to talk about it, like Mr. Sherwani; I believe he also wanted to have a witness to it, someone from the other side, the side he had left behind.

  He was well built, erect and energetic, and still attractive, dark, hook-nosed, with a full, curved lower lip. He was a man of Sind, and he said (perhaps over-romantically) that he belonged to the original, pre-Aryan race of Sind, the builders of the great cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, the creators of the Indus Valley civilization that the migrating Aryans had overrun in 1500 B.C. Most people in Pakistan, he said, behaved as though the world had begun in 1947, when Pakistan was created. With his Sind ancestry, he had another view of history.

  And a feeling for history was at the back of his feeling for Islam. It was the world’s youngest great religion and, being the youngest, was the most evolved. He didn’t condemn the religio
ns of the past; he saw them as stages in man’s spiritual development. Consider the revealed religions. Moses, he said, was all law; that was too harsh. Jesus was all compassion. Ahmed said, “In a world where there are people like Africans and Negroes, that doesn’t make sense. If you turn the other cheek to a primitive fellow, it annoys him.” The beauty of Islam lay in its mixture of law and compassion. To see Islam at its best, to understand the charity of which it was capable, I should go to some of the old shrines in the interior of Sind—he would arrange it. There was one place, connected with a Muslim saint and mystic, that he especially wanted me to visit. There I would see a brotherhood, among them professional men, who had renounced the world to live in the desert and to serve and feed the poor.

  That was how, that afternoon, in one gulp, as it were, in one excited outpouring, Ahmed outlined his faith, his attitudes, and his plans for me. He drove me back to the Intercontinental and we talked in the parking lot until just before sunset. At the end, with a tenderness for which I wasn’t prepared, he pressed his forefinger to the middle of my forehead. He said, “That is where it gets you. If you were a businessman you would get blood pressure. You’re an intellectual. You are concerned with the truth. So it gets you there, in the eyes. You must rest your eyes. You must look at green things.”

  My eyes again! And what happened the next morning was that a lens fell out of my glasses and broke on the tiled floor of my room. So the first service Ahmed had to do for me was to take me to an oculist.

  Our friendship was sudden, but I felt it as real; and while it lasted I leaned on it. My search for Islamic institutions and experiments—the search that had brought me to Ahmed—was still going on; and Ahmed was the rational man to whom I returned after venturing into other men’s Islams.

  MR. Mirza had been represented to me as one of the most distinguished men of Pakistan, one of the country’s profoundest minds, and someone who would tell me all I wanted to know about the Islamization of institutions. But the man who told me that about Mr. Mirza, and arranged the meeting, was one of Mr. Mirza’s lesser relations. And it was as a kind of family suppliant that I was received by the great man in his air-conditioned office, and addressed (when my turn came) as though I were a prayer meeting.

  There were many books in the room, faded English political books of the 1930s and 1940s, indicating a time spent as a student in England. Two young men, attentive, leaning forward, bright-eyed, were seated in front of Mr. Mirza’s desk, and Mr. Mirza said gently that he was exchanging a few words with “young colleagues.” I thought the young men were just that, but it was only part of the great man’s public humility. The young men, like myself, had been brought to receive wisdom.

  And there was no exchange of words: a low, even, unceasing, uninterrupted babble poured out of Mr. Mirza. We were living in a satanic time; people were not interested in the truth; university professors were not interested in the truth. We had a lot of information now, but too much information was as bad as too little information. No one could foretell the future; the “imponderables” were too many; the Tolstoyan view of history was correct. Was Mr. Mirza the only one interested in truth? Where was all this leading? It was leading back to the satanic nature of the age, to the need for Islamic belief.

  The young men stood up, dazed with pleasure, and Mr. Mirza, with extra gentleness, offered them a good-bye like a benediction. And then I began to get my dose. No Tolstoy for me, though; I got an obscure Arab. “An Arab scholar of the tenth century—he was perhaps the greatest of the Arab philosopher-scholars of the Abbasid period—he died in 1011, so his writing falls at the turn of the century and belongs more to the tenth century rather than the eleventh—he says that prophets are not like other men.”

  But I hadn’t come to hear that from Mr. Mirza. I had come to find out about the applications of Islam to institutions, to government, to law.

  “Let me finish,” Mr. Mirza said; he couldn’t bear to be interrupted. And he went on. Prophets were the ones through whom God expressed his will; Islam was dedicated to the idea that the time would come when prophets would cease to be necessary.

  Where had that got us, or Pakistan? It had got us to this point: that the law and institutions of Pakistan, as they were, were not divine. In spite of his reputation and his books, Mr. Mirza had not thought beyond that point. His education was part of his vanity; but he was like the simplest mullah. And in fact, as an Islamizer as pure as any, Mr. Mirza had political ambitions. With the disappearance of Mr. Bhutto and the suppression of Mr. Bhutto’s party, with an Islamizing military government, Mr. Mirza was hoping to be lifted to the heights.

  I said I was going. Mr. Mirza was disappointed; he had more to say to me. He offered me his car. I accepted. Waiting for the car, he attempted to organize his own interview. He said, “I suppose you are thinking that I should be in a monastery and shouldn’t be in business.”

  “I am not thinking that.”

  “But in Islam, you see, there is no separation. It’s a complete way of life.”

  He took out some prayer beads and began clacking them, muttering. I looked past his left ear and then past his right ear. Clack-clack, went the beads, and he said, “I am God-intoxicated.” I looked over his left shoulder and then over his right shoulder. Clack-clack, went the beads; and I let him mutter on until the car came.

  MR. Salahuddin the newspaper editor had the reputation of being an Islamic “hard-liner,” like Mr. Mirza. But he was without Mr. Mirza’s mystical or intellectual bent, and I preferred his directness.

  In Pakistan, with its 15 percent literacy, newspaper circulations were low. The English-language Dawn (a journalist from the rival Morning News told me) had a circulation of thirty thousand; the Morning News itself, having dropped to four thousand in Mr. Bhutto’s time, had bounced up again and was now ticking away quite nicely at ten thousand. So Mr. Salahuddin, editing an Urdu-language paper with a circulation of thirty-five thousand, was a power in the land. The editorial assistant who met me told me that Mr. Salahuddin had spent three years in jail in Mr. Bhutto’s time. Mr. Salahuddin, the assistant said, was a man of principle.

  The office was at the top of a newish concrete building of four or five storeys in central Karachi. A broken, bumpy dirt road off a bazaar street; black-skinned children playing soccer; a human derelict of some sort left out in the sun in a home-made box cart. A rubbled, uneven yard, a lift door opening directly onto the yard. Odd that lift, being just there, slightly surreal.

  But it worked. And at the top of the building, in the verandah, as in a parody of a waiting-room (and a continuation of the modern urban parody of the street), there were three cane-bottomed chairs, all without bottoms. The rooms were divided by half-partitions into little cubicles, one leading into another. Doors on either side of the editor’s cell opened into offices, in one of which the calligraphers were at work, penning out edited copy onto transparent slips that were later to be offset. Flies buzzed on the panes of the small windows; there was a pencil drawing of Mr. Jinnah on the wall.

  Mr. Salahuddin was a small man in his early forties. He had a grey-streaked spade beard, a precise mouth, and bright black eyes. I tried to think of him in jail: I thought that jail would not diminish his fire. He was born in India and had come to Pakistan when he was twelve.

  Muslims were free to worship in India, he said; it wasn’t just for the freedom of worship that Pakistan was established. Pakistan was meant to be an Islamic state, run on Islamic principles. What did that mean? Had there been such a state? He said, “The state that existed for thirty-two years at the time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs.”

  So there it was again—the dream not only of the early Islamic state, the creation of the Prophet, but also of the time when Muslims were rightly guided, divinely ruled: a fusion of history and theology, the indestructible alloy of the faith. That pure time could come again; Muslims could live in such purity again. They had only to follow the rules. The rules were there; they could be found in the
holy book and the traditions. The many rules of Islam were not handed down for the sake of God, Mr. Salahuddin said; they were for the good of people. Freedom came with obedience; the rules made men free.

  And—in his office in Karachi, with men coming in all the time on newspaper business, some of them with bundles of rupees, and with the calligraphers at their long desks in the next room preparing their copy for the press—that was Mr. Salahuddin’s cause: the Islamic state, and its special freedom. He had gone to jail in Mr. Bhutto’s time; I felt he was ready to go to jail again.

  He gave me some booklets to take away. Some were old-fashioned: reissues, I felt, of Muslim missionary publications first put out in the days of European colonialism, when Islam, impoverished and politically null, needed all the European support it could get.

  The Koran and Modern Science, by a Frenchman, showed that the Prophet had anticipated many modern European ideas. Islam—the First and Final Religion (“an abridged and combined edition of Charms of Islam and Islam Our Choice”) proved that all the other religions, in their holy books, had prophesied the coming of Mohammed. There was also a tribute and a statement of Islamic intent from Napoleon: “I hope the time is not far off when I shall be able to unite all the wise and educated men of all the countries and establish a uniform regime based on the principles of the Koran which alone are true and which alone can lead men to happiness.”

  After Napoleon, there were comments from Victorian Englishmen, “statesmen and diplomats,” all titled, whose names still apparently rang in the Muslim world, but were not as well known at home as they ought to have been: people like Al-Haj Lord Headley Al-Farooq (1855–?), “Peer, Author and Statesman,” an army man, an engineer as well, and also editor of the Salisbury Journal; Sir Abdullah Archibald Hamilton (1876–?), “Statesman and Baronet,” an army man again (“Lieutenant in the Royal Corp”); Sir Jalaluddin Lauder Brunton (no dates given), “Statesman and Baronet,” no career given (“an English Baronet and a public man of wide repute”). To them was added the English scholar Professor Haroun Mustapha Leon, M.A., Ph.D., LL.D., F.S.P., an “earnest geologist” and an “able philologist,” an M.A. from Potomac University (U.S.A.) who accepted Islam in 1882, when he was doing a series of articles on “The Etymology of Man’s Language” for the Isle of Man Examiner.