Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

  The American in this white Muslim line-up was Mohammed Alexander Russel Webb, “Diplomat, Author and Journalist,” editor of the St. Joseph Gazette and Missouri Republican, who was born in 1846 and died at the age of 115 in 1961: a Mark Twain-like figure from Hudson, “Columbia country,” who rejected “the drippings, or more properly perhaps the drivelling, of an orthodox Presbyterian pulpit” for Islam and spent his immensely long life in Islamic missionary work.

  IT was through Mr. Salahuddin that I got in touch with Khalid Ishaq. Khalid Ishaq was one of the leading lawyers of Karachi. He was successful enough to give much of his time to public work. He was a member of the Islamic Ideology Council that met for ten days a month in the capital, trying to work out what should be done in the way of Islamization; he was also a member of a government commission that was looking—somewhat despairingly, I felt—into corruption.

  He, too, was a migrant from India. He was a tall, heavily made man in his early fifties. He had the lawyer’s manner, the slow, dry humour, the eye for human quirkiness, the fondness for little anecdotes. The manner went easily with his passion for his faith. Islam, I felt, was more than a private belief for him; to him, a Muslim from the subcontinent, still insecure in Pakistan, Islam was his civilization and culture; it was fundamental to his idea of what he was; it was something that, as a man and a lawyer, he had to serve and protect.

  Mr. Salahuddin had told me that Khalid Ishaq had a prodigious library and spent twenty thousand rupees a month, two thousand dollars, on books. This didn’t prepare me for what I saw in Khalid Ishaq’s house.

  I said, as we drove into his yard, that he had a big house. He said in his precise lawyer’s way that yes, it was a big house, but it wasn’t big enough. And it wasn’t. Books filled room after room; case upon case, case in front of case; yards and yards of shelves, and cupboards in front of the shelves. One big room was devoted to many-volumed commentaries on the Koran—hefty Arabic tomes. “And,” he added, “commentaries on the commentaries.” He bought everything.

  Did his devoutness match his collector’s zeal? He had a sense of humour: I thought I could put the question to him. He said, “I wouldn’t say I am very devout. I haven’t missed a prayer for the last thirty-three years.” Since 1946, that was, the year before the creation of Pakistan; and he meant the five-times-a-day prayers.

  We sat in his office, a clearing in the book stacks, a large room with a large desk and with seating at one end that would have done for a board meeting. We sat below fans; the whirring muffled the noise of the scooters and scooter-taxis in the street.

  His explanation of his Islamic passion was simple. “Our people emotionally reject the West. Materially, we may be dependent on the West. Our people may go abroad to better themselves. But however long they stay, they always want to come back, if only to die.” And it was out of that emotional rejection of the outside world that Khalid Ishaq conceived the need for specifically Islamic institutions—institutions not of the West, and not socialist, but institutions in keeping with the people’s emotional needs.

  To understand those needs, it was necessary to understand the idea of equality in Islam. “The servant here brings us tea and sweets. That is his job. But he also knows that on another occasion we can be men together and he can sit with me.” And there was the role of the mosque: every Friday every man, whatever his condition, heard from the mullahs that the laws of men were not to be obeyed if they went against the teachings of the Koran.

  So the Islamic enterprise was stupendous: it was the deliberate creation—with only the Koran as a guide—of a state mechanism that would function in the modern world and would be unlike anything else that had evolved. It was a high intellectual enterprise. Did Pakistan have the talent? Was there an intellectual life in Pakistan? Not much, Khalid Ishaq said; books were expensive, and television was putting paid to whatever intellectual life there was.

  What had been achieved so far by the Ideology Council? Not much, Khalid Ishaq seemed to indicate. They were still trying to get around the problem of interest in banking. There was an idea they had put up to the government for getting everyone to wear the same clothes and drive the same make of car; but nothing had come of that.

  There were difficulties, Khalid Ishaq said. First, there were the “modernists” among the Islamizers. These were people who in old age or for some private reason had turned from secular life to religion. They read a few books about Islam and thought they knew a lot, but they knew very little. These people were really mystics and knew nothing about institutions. (I thought I detected a criticism there of Mr. Mirza.) And there were the mullahs. It was to the mullahs that the military government had turned when they had decided to Islamize.

  “The mullahs really had no idea what was being asked of them. They could only think of ‘the good man’ or ‘the good men’ to whom everything should be entrusted. I have met these people and I really think that many of them don’t even begin to have an idea of the need for institutions of any kind. They don’t know what we are talking about.”

  I felt, after this, that there were no Islamic experiments for me to see in Pakistan, that it was as Mr. Deen had said right at the beginning: the Islamic experiments were things people were waiting for other people to start. The great Islamic enterprise of Pakistan existed, but only as an ideal, at once an expression of the highest faith and an expression of the political insecurity in which Muslims lived in the Muslim homeland.

  The poet Mohammed Iqbal, when he had put forward his idea for a separate Indian Muslim state in 1930, had spoken of a Muslim polity or social order as something arising naturally out of the “Islamic principle of solidarity.” Such a polity existed in Pakistan. But the Islamic state of which people now spoke was more abstract than Iqbal’s. This Islamic state couldn’t simply be decreed; it had to be invented, and in that invention faith was of little help. Faith, at the moment, could supply only the simple negatives that answered emotional needs: no alcohol, no feminine immodesty, no interest at the banks. But soon in Pakistan these negatives were to be added to: no political parties, no parliament, no dissent, no law courts. So existing institutions were deemed un-Islamic and undermined or undone; the faith was asserted because only the faith seemed to be whole; and in the vacuum only the army could rule.

  Khalid Ishaq drove me back to the Intercontinental. When we were on Club Road he turned off into the grounds of the Karachi Gymkhana, the British club of colonial days.

  It was late; the lights were dim; it was quiet. There were a few elderly men in the bridge room; but the wide verandah—with an old, dark, uneven wooden floor—that ran the length of the building was empty. The British had built Karachi and the Gymkhana. The club, at this hour, still felt like theirs; but their fantasy, of empire building, had been absorbed into another.

  AHMED was taking me to dinner at his house, and I went down to the lobby of the Intercontinental to wait for him. As soon as I sat down on the sofa a young man whom I had barely noticed left where he was sitting and threw himself next to me, with a movement so sudden, violent, and intimate that I was startled.

  He wore the long Pakistani shirt and loose cotton trousers; he had the squat physique and the round face of the taxi driver who had driven me round Karachi. His English was thick and hard to follow. “Cafeteria”—was that what he was saying?

  “Cafeteria,” he was whispering, “where is cafeteria?”

  I pointed to where the coffee shop was. But he wasn’t interested. He said, “Nothing else here? Upstairs?”

  “Rooms.”

  “Rooms. Only rooms? You live here?”

  “For a few days.”

  “Only rooms, eh? Pool, where is pool? You know the pool?”

  “It’s closed.”

  “Closed. This Islamic government closed it.”

  The lobby was busy. The foreign air crews—the principal users of the Intercontinental—came and went. One tall young German girl, lusciously hipped, with her hair in a pony tail at the side, wa
s attracting the young man’s attention.

  He said, “Woman is God’s gift to man. You think?”

  “Yes. You come here a lot?”

  “My first time.”

  And it turned out that he had been in the lobby for only twenty-five minutes. He had come with a friend—that older, thinner man in a brown country outfit on the other chair.

  The young man beside me said, “We come to see the traffic.”

  He said he was a student. I asked what he studied. He said he was really a shopkeeper; he had said he was a student because he wanted to be a doctor; his family wanted him to be a doctor and do well. He was twenty-four; he came from Sukkur, which he said was four hundred miles to the northeast (it was nearer). He sold cloth in Sukkur. He had come down with his brother to Karachi “to do a little business.” He had done his business; he was a little bored; and the friend from Sukkur on the other chair, more experienced in Karachi ways, had suggested they should come to the Intercontinental to see “the traffic.”

  They hadn’t yet broken their fast on this Ramadan day (there was a sign in the Intercontinental coffee shop saying that Muslims would not be served during the hours of the fast), and the friend seemed exhausted, seemed even to be falling asleep. His eyes were half closed; he was nodding unsteadily. I said, “Your friend is falling asleep.” I thought that the young man said in reply, “My friend is blind, cannot see.” It looked true. But what the young man was saying was only, “My friend cannot speak English.”

  And the luck with the traffic came to the friend. A French group came out of the lift, a man and two women. The man was the true beauty in the group, slender, all in white, the towelling texture of his jersey contrasting with the smooth drill of his trousers. He remained standing, but one of the two women of his court sat next to the sleepy man from Sukkur.

  He woke up and, sleepy-eyed as he was, wriggled until he was touching her. He knew about the traffic in the Intercontinental; he knew that foreigners and their shameless women, non-Muslims, could be treated with contempt as open as this. The woman took out some colour photographs from her bag. The man from Sukkur leaned over the woman’s shoulder to look. But the pictures were not as exciting as he had perhaps expected; and sleep began again to get the better of him. He stared vacantly ahead, too exhausted to consider the traffic moving in and out of the lifts.

  I introduced Ahmed when he arrived. This was a misjudgement. Ahmed was of Pakistan, not a visitor, and he wasn’t amused. He said, when we were in his car, that the men from Sukkur (whom he had greeted ceremoniously, thinking they were friends of mine) were villagers, rustics. People like that came to the Intercontinental to look at unveiled women and women in bikinis. There were rich Pakistanis who came for the same thing; they rented rooms that overlooked the pool. Palestinians—Muslims—had contributed to the craze. Some of them (they sounded like guerrillas living on subsidies, but Ahmed didn’t say that) had come to Karachi with European women, who had lounged around in bikinis by the Intercontinental pool; the story had spread.

  For villagers like the men from Sukkur Ahmed had no regard. These were the men—villagers who had got to know about the traffic at the Intercontinental, had the coolness to defy the doormen, and thought they had understood the world—who became communists. Politics in Pakistan could be as simple as that.

  Ahmed said, “The world is mixed up now. People are confused. There is no longer any symmetry in many people’s lives.”

  I put to him Khalid Ishaq’s point about the emotional rejection of the West. How much of that rejection was self-deception? Could a civilization so encompassing, a civilization on which people here depended for so much, be truly rejected?

  Ahmed was divided. He said he himself didn’t like being abroad. He was always “under tension.” It was because of “the time factor.” When he was abroad, in a big city, he was ruled by the need to be on time. It weighed on him; it tormented him; he ceased to feel master of himself. Then he said, “But when people here talk about the emotional rejection of the West, they usually mean one thing. Women.”

  On the subject of women Ahmed was touchy. He saw himself as a liberal; but his liberalism was shot through, more than he might have acknowledged, with Muslim anxieties. Having grown devout in middle age, he had become oppressed by the Muslim idea of accountability. I believe he feared some retribution for his own womanizing past; and his daughters, lovely girls, liberally educated, were at the centre of his anxieties. During the Bangladesh crisis, reports that Pakistani soldiers were raping Bengali women had caused him unspeakable anguish. Rape, for a Muslim, was more than a physical assault on a woman; it destroyed her honour, and so destroyed her life; it destroyed the honour of her family. Ahmed said, “For two months, while that was going on, I couldn’t sleep.”

  His house was in one of the many new housing colonies of Karachi. It was a big concrete house. But Ahmed, important as he was, lived simply. The drawing/dining-room, lit by a dim ceiling light, felt bare: it had only essential furniture and two television sets, one of them broken.

  Ahmed’s son came in. He was in his twenties, and a doctor. He worked in a local hospital and didn’t intend to go abroad. He said he wanted to serve the people of Pakistan, and I believed him. He was smaller than his father, paler, more Aryan in features, a gentle man, as withdrawn as his father was ebullient. He was content to let his father speak for him.

  Like a man still making a public statement of his faith—and his voice filled the room—Ahmed said, “I wanted all my children to serve in hospitals. As doctors, nurses, even as sweepers. Because in hospitals you lessen the distress of others.”

  Ahmed said he hadn’t forced religion on his son; he had left him free to choose. And the son, with a kind of nineteenth-century earnestness, was preoccupied with the whole question of belief.

  He said, “In the beginning men worshipped stones. Then fire. Today we find those practices funny. Wouldn’t men tomorrow find the practices of today funny?”

  Ahmed let him say that. Then he spoke for his son again. “When people come around to ask for money for religious causes, you know what he tells them? He tells them it is better for people to give blood for the sick.”

  The son nodded, looking down, acknowledging what his father had said, but shrinking from the tribute.

  The dinner was brought out by Ahmed’s wife. Ahmed and I were the only people who were going to eat. The son was just going to sit with us; and so, too, was another man, who now arrived. The talk turned, as it so often did in Pakistan, to the situation of Pakistan.

  Ahmed said: “I will tell you the story of this country in two sentences. In the first quarter of this century the Hindus of India decided that everything that was wrong had to do with foreigners and foreign influence. Then in the second quarter the Muslims of India woke up. They had a double hate. They hated the foreigners and they hated the Hindus. So the country of Pakistan was built on hate and nothing else. The people here weren’t ready for Pakistan, and people who don’t deserve shouldn’t demand.”

  It was what many conservative Muslims said: that the Muslims of India, as Muslims, hadn’t been pure enough for a Muslim state.

  Ahmed said: “Then they began to distribute the property of the Hindus who had left Pakistan. So many of the people who came here from India got something for nothing. That was the attitude in the beginning. That is the attitude today. But I am too old to be unhappy now. It happens, you know. You find you are old, and you just stop worrying about certain things. It is for young people to worry. I am fifty-nine. At that age life is just death in instalments.”

  There came into the house a very big man, an overgrown peasant, he seemed, and Ahmed’s irritability vanished. He got up to greet his visitor and solicitously led him in. The newcomer was immense, well over six feet, and built like a wrestler. At the top of this bulk was an incongruous baby-face: a face unmarked by passion, rancour, expectation. He was in Pakistani country clothes, not especially fresh, and he wore a flat Sindhi cap. For a
man so big he moved very quietly, and with small steps. He spoke no English, spoke scarcely at all; and when he sat at the table—sitting well away from it—he still seemed distant.

  Ahmed said, “You remember I told you about an old shrine in the interior of Sind that I want you to visit? I told you about the people there who have given up the world to serve the poor—you remember? He comes from that place.”

  But the face was less the face of someone who had chosen to serve than the face of someone lost and patient, a man from whom some essential human quality was missing.

  Ahmed said, “I will tell you a story about this man. He developed a tumour on his leg and the doctors said he had cancer and there was nothing they could do for him. He went to the homoeopathic people. They wanted him to have an injection of snake poison: he would have to let the snake bite him.”

  I made an exclamation.

  Ahmed’s son said, “A snake bite is like an injection.”

  (Some weeks later I read in the paper that the police were looking for a man who specialized in snake-bite injections.)

  Ahmed said, “But he couldn’t face the idea of the snake bite. So he went back to his shrine and prayed. He prayed for days. And one day the courage came to him. He took a knife and cut off the tumour. And he’s been all right ever since.”

  Ahmed spoke in Urdu or Sindhi, and the big man pulled up his loose trousers to show the scar on the inside of his firm, elephantine thigh. The scar—irregularly shaped, the skin shiny and seamed—was six inches long and in places about an inch wide.