Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

  On the wider subject of the Pakistan crisis there was an urgent leader-page article in The Muslim by A. H. Kardar, the former cricket captain of Pakistan, and an Oxford man. “We look back in shame and anger at the utter lack of homework and preparedness of political leaders and administrators vis-à-vis economic issues … shame and anger at the ever-increasing shipload of imports of foodgrains.…” What—after this passion—was his solution? Nothing concrete. Only, less politics; and a little more of what had gone before. “Clearly, the choice is between materialism and its inseparable nationally divisive political manifestoes, and the Word of God.”

  With all this there was a review in the Pakistan Times of an Arts Council art exhibition. The artist was Hameed Sagher. It was his first show; and the reviewer was at once frank and tender.

  “As one enters the aged hall of the Council’s premises, and treads the wooden floor, the eye is caught by a number of bright panels and the mind is gripped by conflicting reaction to these panels. There is a bewildering variety of techniques and styles.… To understand all that variety of styles, some of them clash with each other, one has to know a few things about the artist. Hameed Sagher was poet for some time. Then he started the vocation of art in the commercial field with a professional experience as his guide. He has no formal training as an artist.… As a poet he is fascinated by ideas. As an artist he has to capture those ideas in colours and he feels inspired by the provocative ideas of his friends. He therefore has developed a tension with which he illustrates his ideas rather vehemently and sometimes rather obviously.…

  “His ‘Intellect’ looks a head on fire. The panel captioned as ‘Struggle’ in pastels is hands with fire emanating from them. ‘The Movement’ is another rendering a political struggle in flames and smoke. Somewhere in patches the cool green tends to disturb the fiery impact of figures on fire. ‘The Pray’ is hands in supplication, with big eyes looking in between and minaret with birds around it.… The bright colours, the movement and the tension hold out a promise. With more experience, and less of economic pressures, Hameed Sagher is bound to emerge as a significant artist.”

  The exhibition was in the Freemasons’ hall. The Freemasons had been banned a few years before as a Zionist organization (and also, I was told, because they exalted Solomon above all other prophets); and their hall had been taken over by the Arts Council.

  It was in the street at the back of Flashman’s Hotel, a street of shawl-sellers and carpet-sellers and cloth-sellers. It was a solid brick building of the British period—Public Works Department style—with a lawn, a semicircular drive, arched windows, and a portico. On the pediment of the portico was still the Freemason emblem of the two dividers, like an unfinished star. (Rawalpindi was full of these usurpations, these reminders of expulsions and the cleansed land. The president’s house had belonged to a Sikh; Poonch House, one of the palaces of the Hindu maharaja of Kashmir, was due for demolition.)

  The man responsible for the Hameed Sagher exhibition was Agha Babur. He was a humorous middle-aged man, slender and attractive, with a fringe of white hair, long at the back. His office was in a room off the exhibition hall. He was busy—the vernissage was to be that afternoon—but he gave me a little time.

  A woman of some size (Agha Babur’s wife: he told me later that her health was not good) sat silent but companionable at one side of Agha Babur’s desk. A deferential man from the radio faced him across the desk. I sat at the free side of the desk.

  Agha Babur had written the short note about Hameed Sagher’s work for the catalogue card.

  “I had to write it. It is important for our artists that they should have these brochures of their exhibitions when they go abroad. They can’t just show a price list. People abroad in France and Germany and Italy wouldn’t give them exhibitions if they just show a price list. They need these brochures.”

  The Hameed Sagher prices were not high: from fifty rupees to two hundred, five dollars to twenty dollars.

  Agha Babur was in the army before he joined the Arts Council. “I came to the Arts Council because it was a sinking ship. I brought it on the map. I was able to do so because I am a man of ideas. I will give you an example. Nineteen seventy-five was the Year of Tourism. The ministry here was doing nothing about it. Tourism in the beginning didn’t do well here. I wrote letters to all the embassies here to please get me their tourist posters. I got posters from ten countries and we held an International Exhibition of touristic posters. We gave prizes. We gave the first prize to Poland, the second prize to Turkey, the third prize to Spain. We had to give it to Spain. They had a poster of a bullfight.”

  Sitting in his chair, making toreador’s gestures with his hands, he did a sudden sideways arch with the upper part of his body; and his eyes danced with pleasure.

  “Full of movement. So this got publicity in all those countries. I wrote a letter to the minister here saying, ‘This is what I’ve done. Your department is sleepy.’ And he said, ‘Agha Babur, you are a man of ideas.’ I didn’t leave it there. I got him to get the ministry to give me troph-ies.” He made the word rhyme with “toffees.” “And we gave out these troph-ies, and that was projected on the TV in Warsaw and Ankara and Spain.

  “The ideas come to me just like that. In the morning, when I shave. For example. This is the fourteenth century of Islamic Hijra. Our president said this in Havana: ‘Fourteen hundred years ago a revolution took place.’ ” (The president had said that a few weeks before at a meeting of the Nonaligned Nations, which Pakistan had just joined.) “Now that gave me an idea. You’re the first person I’m telling. You have that privilege. When we enter into the new hijra I’m going to arrange an exhibition on the calligraphy of the Holy Koran.”

  In the Hameed Sagher brochure Agha Babur had written: “Hameed Sagher utilizes a poetic atmosphere in his paintings where the retranslation of nostalgia and agony is represented in a naive style. He is searching for identity and strength.… His work represents an individualism of the artist who is confronted with half baked, mixed feelings as if closeted and couched in the treasure cave of Ali Baba.” And it was signed, in a stylish cursive type: Agha Babur.

  He was waiting for a response from me. I read out the last sentence to him. He seemed to enjoy it. Agha Babur, Ali Baba: perhaps the first (Agha Babur liked using his own name) had suggested the second.

  We talked about English in Pakistan. I said that not many people spoke it. He disagreed, but then appeared to agree. “The spoken language may be dying. But not the written language. Although I am proud of Urdu, I never forget I am also an Englishman.” He meant a speaker of English. “We have this English language now. All the Arabs and Persians would like to have it. It would be bad if we lose it. Now when our Pakistani delegate gets up at the United Nations and makes a speech for two, three hours in this beautiful English, the Arabs run to him at the end and embrace him. We can’t lose this English.

  “My teacher was Bukhari. The great Bukhari. A terror. He would fling the paper back at you. Back in your face. ‘Call this writing? Call this English?’ He said something that lodged in my head. He said, ‘Writing now is pain. All the rest is pleasure. Remember that. But the day will come when writing will be pleasure, and all the rest will be pain.’ Wasn’t that a good thing to say? ‘Writing is pain. All the rest is pleasure. But the day will come—’ ”

  He broke off and said, “You are like my friend Caro-leen in the United States. She, too, used to make notes of the things I said.”

  I was writing on the edges of the little catalogue card.

  “She was my guide in the United States. A divorcee. I was a cultural guest of the State Department. Caro-leen said to me, ‘Agha Babur, most people come to the East Line and feel they’ve seen the United States. At the most they make a trip to Los Angeles on the West Line. And then they feel they’ve seen the United States. You are the first one I know to come to Utah. What are you interested in?’ I said, ‘Being a Muslim, the polygamy.’ That was a joke. She told me about a pl
an for a theatre in a department store. I said, ‘Caro-leen, you are putting art in the window shop.’ The show window, the shop window. Whatever I said was correct. She was driving. She pulled out a pad with one hand and began to write. I said, ‘Caro-leen! What are you doing?’ She said, Agha Babur, I just have to make a note of the things you say.’ ”

  He took down an encyclopaedia. On the small map of the United States he had marked his cultural route in blue ink. He had also been to Florida, to Disneyworld.

  THE vernissage was to be at 5:30. But this was Pakistan, and the man who was to make the opening speech and cut the ribbon was the ambassador of Iraq. I thought I could get there at 6:00. But, because the hall was so near the hotel, and because I dawdled to look at the shawls and carpets, I arrived at 6:05. There was a policeman at the gate. In the lawn, for the refreshments, there was a shamiana, a decorated canvas enclosure. And I was hopelessly late. The speeches had already been made.

  Agha Babur, with his military background, had started on time. He had asked the ambassador to arrive seven minutes after the official opening time, at 5:37; and the ambassador had done precisely that. When I went into the hall with its bare old floorboards, the official group was going round the paintings: the ambassador in a dark three-piece suit, Agha Babur in a light-grey lounge suit, the artist in a white Pakistani costume with a fawn-coloured woollen jerkin. The ambassador, thickset, looked earnest and pained and listened with his head to one side; the artist was small, shy, overwhelmed by the occasion, and altogether winning; Agha Babur was courtly and distinguished, and artistic with his long white hair.

  The hall was full. Agha Babur had done it again. In the social desert of Rawalpindi he had created another occasion. And the exhibition was a success. Twelve of the paintings had already been sold. The Iraqi ambassador had bought five (including the head on fire, Intellect); the man from the Indonesian embassy had bought two; the East German ambassador or his representative had bought one, as had the Russian ambassador (who couldn’t speak Urdu, but understood Persian, and had felt the long fingers of the artist and pronounced them “artistic”).

  I met a friend of the artist. He was a teacher; and the small young man with him was also a teacher. The young man—black hair sprouting from his narrow chest—had been in the army, but had left to become a teacher. Now he wanted to go to England to do a thesis. Like many Pakistanis, he claimed to be more than a Pakistani. He said he was of Persian origin; his ancestor had come to India after the Indian Mutiny of 1857. (But that ancestor would only have been one out of sixteen.) He wanted to go to England to do a thesis on the political novel: E. M. Forster, Conrad, Graham Greene.

  “Greene?”

  “He wrote those three novels about Africa.”

  “Three novels?” I tried to think.

  “He wrote that novel about Africa. Heart of something.”

  “The Heart of the Matter. I wouldn’t call that political.”

  “It is political. There is some dialogue there about natives being liars. But nobody said that it was because of colonialism that people called natives liars. People were made by colonialism. By history. But nobody says that.”

  “But if you think like that, then everybody is a political writer.”

  The young man—pale, thin—hadn’t thought deeply about his thesis; that little idea was all that he had. Changing his tack, he said, “What about Kipling?”

  I said, “Nobody has written as accurately about Indians. You can’t fault Kipling there.”

  But he didn’t really know Kipling; he knew only the name. He became confidential. He said, “I didn’t want to do the English political novel. It was their idea. I really wanted to do Shakespeare’s sonnets. But they said that was too much on the beaten track.”

  “There’s been a lot about the sonnets. What did you want to say about them?”

  “I feel that Shakespeare was attracted to a young man. But people considered it unnatural.”

  I thought that it might be better for him to leave the sonnets alone.

  “And because they considered it unnatural—you see, I’m Persian. Do you know Hafiz, Saadi? People in Europe are very naïve about homosexuality.”

  He was thirty. But he had read little; he knew little; he had few ideas. I don’t think he wanted to do a thesis, really. He wanted a job; he wanted a visa and a no-objection certificate; he wanted to go away.

  How could he read, how could he judge, how could he venture into the critical disciplines of another civilization, when so much of his own history had been distorted for him, and declared closed to inquiry? And how strange, in the usurped Freemasons’ hall of Rawalpindi, to talk of the English political novel and the distortions of colonialism, when in that city in a few weeks, in the name of an Islam that was not to be questioned, the whipping vans were to go out, official photographs were to be issued of public floggings, and one of the country’s best journalists was to be arrested and photographs were to show him in chains.

  10

  The Salt Hills of a Dream

  The evenings were getting cooler in Rawalpindi; the summer was nearly over. But to take the short bus ride down from the Himalayan foothills to Lahore in the plains of the Punjab was to go down to where it was still very hot. It was also to go down from where farming depended on rainfall to where it depended on irrigation, fed by the rivers of the Punjab.

  The irrigated plains of the Pakistan Punjab had been the granary of this part of the subcontinent. But the irrigation that blessed some fields cursed others. With no natural drainage in the Punjab soil, the water table had risen to within ten feet of the surface. Forty percent of the irrigated land was now waterlogged; a quarter of the land was spoilt by salt, white on the soil surface, black and more damaging below. The killer marched underground; but it was possible to see the next line of grown trees whose roots were to rot, the next area of fields where soon nothing would grow.

  The village of Raiwind stood in the middle of an area of new desert. To drive out to it from Lahore was to see (because of the flatness of the land) hundreds of blighted square miles (with, here and there, rich green patches still). There was a big gathering at Raiwind. From far away it was like a fair: people going on foot along flat, straight paths to a great tent city, trucks and buses and horse carriages, like miniatures in the distance, kicking up dust (but the ditches were full of water).

  It was a religious occasion: in Pakistan the religious excitement never abated. There had been Ramadan and the festival at the end of Ramadan; there had been the excitements of the pilgrimage to Mecca; the Festival of the Sacrifice was soon to come. In the interval there was this: the assembly of a Muslim brotherhood dedicated to the idea that every Muslim was also a missionary for Islam.

  They had come, at heaven knows what expense, from all parts of Pakistan and from many other countries as well. They were not among the poor, the people of this brotherhood; many of them were traders. For three or four days they would listen to speeches and live and pray together. Raiwind, where no crops grew, provided a perfect open space. The land was so waterlogged, the water was so near the surface, that to walk in certain places was like walking on a spring mattress.

  There were many refreshment tents with striped canvas walls. The main tented area was vast, with innumerable bamboo poles sticking out at varying angles from the hummocked white cover: lengths of white cotton hung on ropes tied to the bamboo poles, the cotton dipping and rising, loosely tacked together, so that in the immense covered area, where it was hard to see to the end, the white covering looked gashed and ripped, revealing bits of pale-blue sky and bits of the dazzling white of the top of the cotton, where the sun struck. The gashes created irregular stripes of light that fell in broken segments on the people and the ground below. The effect below the white cotton, of filtered light rather than shade, was vaguely aqueous; and the rising and dipping of the cotton strips on their rope supports did suggest a kind of sea surface above. Here and there men were fanning turbanned holy men, sometimes w
ith sheets; sometimes two men at a time lifted and dropped big white sheets, creating momentary canopies over the reclining holy men. There were mats and bedding rolls and water jars everywhere.

  It was organized; every row had a number. I was passed from person to person, snatched at one stage from a developing conversation and taken to the foreign enclave, where there were Arabs, Indonesians, and even Africans (clearly old hands at these international Muslim gatherings, unashamedly enjoying the ethnic sensation they and their costumes and their language were exciting). Snatched from a conversation there, I was led finally to the executive shamiana, where a scientist with a shaved head looked me over, before an air commodore with a wonderful white beard, sad eyes, and a tender manner came and talked to me about the afterlife. That, he said, was one of the aims of the gathering, to get people to think seriously of the afterlife.

  They squatted before me on a cotton rug on the bare ground. The scientist said he had been to England at the end of the war; he had gone on a troopship. Even then he had seen signs of the sickness of the West, but he had held his peace; now, of course, the West admitted that it was sick.

  The scientist said he didn’t want to be “divided,” as his own father had been divided in British India: a Muslim at home, a European away from home. They—he and everybody else at the assembly—wanted to be Muslim in the way the earliest Muslims had been. When I asked in what detail his new behaviour differed from his old behaviour, I could get no direct answer.

  It was hot; the scientist with his shaved head was sweating. The turbanned air commodore was cooler, more impressive, too, more tormented. He wished to purge himself of thoughts of self, to do everything for the pleasure of Allah alone. But every action raised doubts; in every action he detected some debasing thought of self.