Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

  “One bottle would do,” Khairul said. “It will be enough for the four of us. It is our way.”

  I took the bottle to the bathroom, saying, to prevent thoughts of pollution, “There is an opener next to the door.” I brought out one of the sanitized, cellophane-wrapped glasses and gave it to the haji, with the opened bottle.

  The journalist was fingering two newspaper clippings on the dressing table.

  I said, “That’s about the taxi driver and the African.”

  They knew the story. It had been played up in the newspapers. A taxi driver had seen a despondent African at the Kuala Lumpur airport. The African said he had lost his ticket and other papers, and his money. The taxi driver took the African home. At his own expense he advertised for the return of the papers, without result; arranged a visa extension; lent money—his own and his aunt’s—for a hotel and then for an air ticket. Now, two months later, the African, a Ghanaian, had returned to Kuala Lumpur. He had given two thousand American dollars to the taxi driver’s aunt; for the taxi driver there was the promise of a new Datsun car.

  The haji, passing the glass with the Coca-Cola to Khairul, said, “Would that kind of thing happen in your country?”

  “No.”

  “It happens every day in Islamic countries. It is news for you. It isn’t news for us.”

  But the taxi driver was Chinese and, according to one newspaper story, couldn’t get a permit to own a taxi.

  The haji, cleaning his nostrils with his index finger and then wiping the finger on the velveteen arm of the chair, said, “We must finish the story about the Jews. Before the time of Moses there was a Jewish tribe in Arabian lands. Among this Jewish tribe there is a prophet. The prophet, through revelations from God, ordered the Jews to pray on Saturday. But the Jews ignored the commands of the prophet because on Saturday there were a lot of fishes in the sea and they preferred to go out fishing rather than make Saturday a religious day.”

  I said, “I don’t know this story.”

  The haji said, “It is in the Koran. As a result the prophet was angry, and the wrath of God—”

  Khairul had some trouble with the translation here. He broke off and talked in Malay with the haji. Then he carried on. “And the wrath of God was imposed on the Jews, and God swore to convert the whole tribe to monkeys—” He broke off again, to giggle.

  “Apes,” the doctor said severely. “They were converted to apes.”

  “For seven days,” the haji said.

  The journalist said, “And then they passed away.”

  The haji said, “This story is mentioned in the Torah, the Koran, the Testament—”

  “The Old Testament,” Khairul said, commenting on his own translation. “We don’t recognize Luke and the others.”

  “These are the three books of God,” the haji said. “The people of the three books will all know this story. We Muslim people believe in the Old Testament. If you don’t believe in that book you are not a Muslim.”

  The doctor said, “Because in the Old Testament there is one part that clearly mentions the coming of Mohammed.”

  Khairul said, “There is a book written on this matter by Professor Benjamin. You can get it in the Perkim Bookstore. He is a Catholic priest converted to Islam. His new name is Professor Abu Daud.”

  The haji, who had been left out of this English byplay, said, “The story of the Jews hasn’t finished yet. As a result of being turned to apes, the moral prestige of the Jews declined. To rectify this situation, because they are already degraded—”

  “In the eyes of the world,” the doctor said.

  “—the Jews are now pulling down the whole society with them.”

  “They have that principle,” the doctor said. “If they are dirty, let others be dirty.”

  The haji, bright-eyed, plump-lipped, said, “I surprised you when I said that the Jews were the enemies of God. But this is just one of the signs that show the wickedness of the Jews. You have asked me questions. Now let me ask you some. It is the way of Islam. You ask, then I ask. I tell, then you tell. Do you believe that your great-grandfathers were apes?”

  “No.”

  The haji smiled and said (Khairul, after the Coca-Cola, burping through his translation), “That proves the wickedness of the Jews.”

  I said, “But don’t men evolve? I don’t mean this in a personal way”—and I appealed to all of them—“but you told me that your grandfathers in Sumatra were headhunters. Now you are a haji and an educated man.”

  The haji said, “That was a wrong way of life. That is why Islam came into being, to rectify the discrepancies of the way of life. For instance, before Islam, the Caliph Omar would take his daughter and bury her alive. It was a disgrace to have a daughter. It was the practice of the Arabs at that time. The Caliph Omar used to sob and weep thinking of his past, his life before Islam.”

  The doctor said, “His friends would see him in the desert crying.”

  “And after he came into the fold of Islam he became the best of men.”

  Khairul said, “Have you read a book called The Road to Mecca? Ah, that’s a book. It’s by Mohammed Asad, an Austrian Jew.”

  The journalist, silent for long, said, “What was his name before? Pold something.”

  “Leopold,” Khairul said. “You can get that book, too, in the Perkim Bookstore.”

  The doctor said, “It’s a biography, no?”

  “Yes,” Khairul said, “it’s a biography. It’s a beautiful book.”

  The haji, left out again, re-entered the conversation. “Do you believe in a creator?”

  I said, “No.”

  “But that is the basis of Islam.”

  “It’s too difficult for me,” I said, after we had had some discussion. “I feel lost if I think too much about the universe.”

  The haji said, “That feeling of loss I would describe as contentment.”

  And I didn’t know whether he was being compassionate or critical.

  “When you were in Iran, did you talk to the religious teachers there?”

  “I saw some ayatollahs. Khalkhalli, Shirazi.”

  “Ah, Shirazi,” the haji said. “What did you talk about?”

  “About religion a little bit. I believe he was worried that I might be a communist.”

  They laughed.

  “What’s it like in Iran now?” the haji asked.

  “A mess. No law. The factories aren’t working. The mullahs don’t know how to run the country. It’s something you may have to face here, too.”

  The haji said, “If Muslims live in the Islamic way, the true Islamic way—” And again Khairul had some trouble with the translation.

  “All will follow,” the doctor said.

  I said, “What’s the difference between your life now as true Muslims and your life before?”

  They didn’t say.

  The haji only said, “You can see at a glance when you meet a person whether he is a Hindu or an animist or a Muslim.”

  How? Did it show in the face? Was there a kind of grace or contentment in the face of the believer?

  No, the haji meant something simple. Nonbelievers ate pork and weren’t fussy about food.

  I asked about their clothes. Was it necessary for religious people to dress as they did?

  Khairul answered. “There are five principles governing clothes. They are commandments of Allah. For men to cover from the navel to the knee. For women to cover everything except the face and the hands.”

  I said, “Some women in the university are covering their hands.”

  “It is better,” Khairul said.

  “Why do you wear green cloaks?”

  “To wear white and green is encourageable under Islam.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is the way the prophets lived. Wearing a batik like yours is not encourageable under Islam.”

  “Batik?” I plucked at my Marks and Spencer winceyette pyjama jacket.

  Khairul said, “A batik like th
at is only for ladies.”

  The journalist said, “For men it has to be plain.”

  “But pyjamas are Islamic. The styles and colours are Islamic. The Europeans took the idea from places like Turkey and India.”

  “They are from Islamic countries,” the haji said. “But they are not from Allah’s commandments.”

  “You don’t understand the beauty of Islam,” Khairul said. “Once you understand the five principles, you will see the beauty of it. They apply to everything. In Islam certain things are mandatory. Certain things are encourageable. That’s a technical word, a translation from the Arabic.”

  “Permitted?”

  “Permitted? No, encourageable is better. Then certain things are not encourageable, like your batik. Then certain things are haram, forbidden. Like a man exposing his knees. The fifth category is harus, discretionary.”

  “Discretionary, discrepancy—you have quite a vocabulary, Khairul.”

  He said, “I am a lawyer.” And, boasting a little, “I was educated in a Malay-language school. Let me give you an idea of a discretionary principle. A businessman who only really needs five shirts, but buys forty because he can afford forty. In the hereafter the extravagance will be accountable. These five principles cover all aspects of life. Everything—politics, economics, family life, even coughing. There is so much to learn about Islam. You can spend years and never come to an end.”

  “Tell me about the coughing and the five principles.”

  “I will give you an example. If you are in a gathering and you are ashamed to cough and three days later you wake up with a pain in your side because you didn’t cough, that is wrong. It is mandatory to cough, if not coughing is going to damage your health. Coughing is encourageable if you cover your mouth and say, ‘Grace be upon Allah.’ It is not encourageable to cough without covering your mouth. But to cough in somebody’s face”—he turned towards the doctor and made as if to spit in the doctor’s face—“to do that is horrible. It is haram. It is forbidden. It is un-Islamic and sinful.”

  “What about the discretionary cough?”

  “Harus. When you are by yourself and it doesn’t offend anybody. Then you can stand up and cough or sit down and cough. It becomes entirely discretionary. All these things are regulated.”

  Then it was time for them to go. The haji had a meeting; they said he was a great traveller and preacher. The doctor had his clinic.

  “You must see his clinic,” Khairul said. “It is so Islamic and beautiful. You are not well; I can see you are not well. He would have treated you beautifully. He would treat you now.”

  I said, “I am in the hands of another doctor. I can’t change.”

  The doctor, oddly professional now, said, “That is so.”

  THE commune was on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, in a hilly wooded area. There was a signboard on the roadside some distance before. I wasn’t expecting a signboard. But—though the commune had the reputation of being secretive—there was no point in dressing up like an Arab and hiding.

  The land was perfect for a Malay settlement, for wooden houses on stilts or pillars, for green gardens and tall shade trees. But the forest had been cut down for a wide street; and the street was lined with modern Malay houses—modern because they had glass louvres instead of windows and because the downstairs, pillared part of the houses had been walled around to provide more space.

  Rain had turned the dirt street to mud. Many young people were about, with green cloaks or gowns and white turbans. At the far end of the street a stalled car was being pushed in the mud. Among the pushers I thought I recognized the haji; anything seemed possible here. I was wrong; it was only that the white turban gave a mulatto cast to some Malay faces. Other costumed figures (waiting for prayer time, like actors waiting for a stage call) were lounging about the verandah or porch of the shop at the corner, where—as part of its independent Islamic way—the commune sold little things to passing motorists.

  I bought a few ounces of fried shredded sweet potato. It came in a stapled plastic packet. It tasted less of sweet potato than of the frying oil.

  The taxi driver said, “You see the kind of bullshit we are getting these days?” He pronounced the word “bu’shi’.” I heard it as “bushy,” and thought at first it was his word for a village Malay: “You see the kind of bushy we are getting these days?”

  I offered him some sweet potato.

  He said, angrily, “No.”

  5

  The Spoilt Playground

  Shafi came from the undeveloped northeast, from Kota Bharu. I wanted to see the village for which he grieved—unpolluted once, the people pious, dignified, and not materialist. And Kota Bharu was the first stop in a trip to the interior that he arranged for me.

  It began badly. The gap-toothed Tamil driver, the man of misfortune, was to drive me to the airport. He ran up happily to me in the Holiday Inn lobby the evening before and told me that my airport job had fallen to him; having involved me over many drives in all his anguishes, he now regarded himself as my friend. And, as I half expected, something went wrong. His car was smashed during the night (but he said he was going to get the insurance), and in the morning I had to hunt around for another driver.

  An hour’s flight took us to Kota Bharu, and the monsoon. (For Shafi, seventeen years before, it had been a journey of a day and a night from Kota Bharu, through rubber estates and then jungle, to all the shocks of Kuala Lumpur.) The plane made two tries at the Kota Bharu runway. We landed in a downpour and the passengers went out to the little airport shed in small groups, under gaudy umbrellas. And Rahman wasn’t there to meet me, as Shafi had arranged.

  I got the name of a hotel and took a taxi there. Kota Bharu was flooded: a rickety colonial town of the 1920s and 1930s—little low shops, little low houses, tiled roofs, corrugated iron—out of which new money was causing a new town of concrete and glass to grow. The hotel was new, small, with modern pretensions. And I found—it was like a little miracle, but there was only one hotel in Kota Bharu—that Rahman had booked me in for the night.

  He telephoned later. He said it was strange no one had met me. He hadn’t sent just one man to meet me; he had sent three men, three head teachers. He had even told them that after my years in England I would probably have a white skin. His storytelling—the opposite of the directness of people like Shafi—was meant to be read by me as storytelling: it was Rahman’s way of letting me know that he didn’t want to have too much to do with me. Rahman worked for the government. He didn’t want to have too much to do with Shafi and ABIM and a visitor sent out by ABIM.

  The rain never stopped. Rahman came to the hotel late in the afternoon. He was a small, plump, smiling fellow in a short-sleeved blue safari suit. I was expecting to be taken to Shafi’s village or a village like it. But Rahman didn’t intend to do that; he didn’t intend to appear in public as my guide to anything. Instead, we drove through the rain in the fast-darkening afternoon—flooded fields, scattered sodden little Malay houses below dripping fruit trees—to a Muslim college where Rahman could share responsibility for me, his dangerous visitor, with two or three other people who were as nervous as he.

  They had laid out tea. The tea was sweet, milky, and cold. And they, my hosts, seemed determined to say nothing. Were these Shafi’s fellows, the fisher-boys and bird-stoners of his childhood? They were. Not Shafi’s actual friends, perhaps; but people like them. It wasn’t Shafi alone who had evolved.

  There was a man who was a lecturer in philosophy. A lecturer? A man from Shafi’s pastoral past? Yes; he lectured at the college about the attempts by Arab and Persian philosophers to synthesize Islamic thought with Greek thought. That seemed a difficult course, and the lecturer said that it was difficult, adding with some sadness that he still had to read a lot, especially in Greek philosophy. He had studied at the Islamic Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He hadn’t liked it (but few village Malays seemed to have liked their travels). He had found the Arabs undisciplined and unreliable.
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  I wanted to hear more about his time at Al-Azhar. But he said—storytelling again—that he was busy. He had to have dinner with his wife. After dinner? After dinner he had to drive around with a message about a family death; it was a Malay custom (and that was the first reminder of the village ways Shafi had spoken about).

  Prayer time came. They left me with the tea and went to say their prayers in the next room. They took their time.

  When they came out again, the registrar, who wore a buttoned-up tunic and had a buttoned-up look, opened out a little. He said he had spent three days in England, in “Queensway, WC2.” From those three days he remembered three things: people travelling underground; a speaker in Hyde Park saying that 60 percent of the men in England were homosexual; and the (somewhat contradictory) sight of men and women embracing in public.

  “This absence of manners,” the registrar said. “Here when we catch a fish we clean it, we fry it, and then we eat it. There they catch a fish and eat it straight away. We are still washing the fish, while they are wiping their mouths after eating.”

  Rahman, leaving out the village imagery, said, “Here we have a room and a time for the sex act.”

  “It’s a private thing with us,” the philosophy lecturer said. “Secret and sacred. We don’t even tell our friends.”

  “Those people are lost,” the registrar said.

  We were joined by the Arabic teacher. He was taller than the others, and wore a sarong and a white skullcap. His face was blank. He began to eat. He said that people were tired of novels and for that reason were turning to the Koran.

  “It’s more natural,” Rahman said.

  But weren’t there Arabic novels?

  Yes, the Arabic teacher said, eating. There was an Egyptian novelist. But one book went that way and another book went another way, showing that the man himself was lost.

  What were those novels?

  He couldn’t say. He said he was saying only what his pupils said. And he ate some more of the Malay cake, drank quantities of the cold tea, stood up, straightened his sarong, and clomped away.

  They were content: the word was used again and again. They wanted me to know that they were content. Rahman worked for the government and got a thousand dollars a month and had a car. He said, “I like it here.” He didn’t want to go to any other part of Malaysia. Here they didn’t live competitively; here they didn’t worry about the Chinese; they didn’t have the problems of Malays in other areas.