Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

  The girl telephoned Nusrat’s house for me. Nusrat was not at home. He had already gone out, chasing some story. That was like Nusrat. I left a message for him with the girl from the children’s page. He was keen on his job, always on the go; it was strange to think that this was the room to which he brought back his hot copy.

  Later he telephoned.

  “I’ve just come in. I didn’t expect you back. I thought we had put you off for good. And now you’ve altered my life.”

  I recognized his fruity voice, his brisk delivery. The hyperbole—which was the hyperbole of Urdu poetry—was especially touching. Because I had already had some idea of his misadventure.

  THE office looked run-down. But just a few months before, there had been a drama. The Morning News had made a slip on the woman’s page. They had reprinted an article from Arab News about a great Arab woman. The woman was the great-granddaughter of the Prophet. And the article, for various reasons, had outraged the Shia community. There had been demonstrations and threats, and the government had had to act. They had closed the paper down for three days; they had ordered an inquiry.

  It was a time of danger. If the authorities hadn’t acted as they had done, and if the Morning News had had a weaker editor, there might have been a calamity. Ghauri, the editor, had taken full responsibility for what had appeared in his paper; he had acted throughout as a man of courage and honour. He was a very sick man. He was only in his late forties, but he looked much older. He had been in the hands of doctors for months; his illness did not allow him to sleep regularly. When I saw him he seemed to be in some physical pain and was hardly able to sit upright. But he had found the strength to guide his paper through its many bad weeks until the affair had been cleared up by the inquiry.

  The matter was now closed. But for Nusrat the matter was not closed. It was Nusrat who looked after the woman’s page. It was he who had made the slip, had passed the article from Arab News. For weeks and months Nusrat had lived with danger and guilt; the editor had seen him shrink into himself.

  What was the offending matter that the Morning News had published? To understand, it was necessary to go over a little of Islamic history. For the Shia Muslims, Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, should have been the first temporal successor (or caliph) to the Prophet. He was passed over three times; he was only the fourth caliph, and then (after a reign of only five years) he was murdered. Ali had two sons. Neither was granted the caliphate. The first was poisoned. The second died in battle when he tried to claim the caliphate. This second son, Husain, had a daughter—Ali’s granddaughter, the Prophet’s great-granddaughter. The offending article was about her.

  There is some controversy between the two main Muslim sects about this woman. The Arabians (or orthodox) try to suggest that she was not interested in the cause of her father, Husain, or her grandfather Ali. They say that, after her father’s death, she settled down happily in the Arabian city of Medina; that Medina, bursting with the wealth of the Arab conquests, became in the eighth century a city of luxury and culture: musicians, singers, courtesans, slaves, exquisite brothels; and that Husain’s daughter, many times married, queened over the city.

  To the Shias, grieving for Ali and his sons, this story about Ali’s granddaughter adds insult to injury. They reject it. They say that the girl never grew up, died as a child. But the article on the woman’s page of the Morning News—reprinted from Arab News—gave the Arab or orthodox version of this woman’s history, made her a beguiling, luxury-loving patroness of the arts in eighth-century Arabia.

  The article could not have appeared at a worse time. It was the month of Mohurram, when the Shias mourn the deaths of Ali and his sons for ten days. Under the martial-law regulations of Pakistan, crowds were not allowed to assemble; but the Shias were free to meet during this month of mourning in mosques or parks or playgrounds, and there they became worked up against the Morning News. Forty or fifty students marched to the paper one day; there were threatening telephone calls; there was talk of leading a procession of forty thousand to the Morning News and burning it down. At another level, there began to be talk of an international conspiracy against the Muslim world. The siege of the Mecca mosque had just taken place; the American embassy had been seized in Tehran; a Pakistan plane with pilgrims had crashed after leaving Mecca airport.

  It was a bad time for the paper. It might have been closed down for good, and many people would have lost their jobs. And there was the physical danger from the enraged Shias of Karachi. And not only Shias: in the month of Mohurram, feelings about Ali and his sons run high among the orthodox as well. Nusrat must have lived a nightmare. He wished to serve the faith above everything else; and in the land of the faith he must have felt quite alone. The world would have changed for him: the appearance of the streets, the crowds. At any moment he might have been set upon.

  Ghauri said—was it with despair or fatigue?—“There are four versions of this lady’s story. One version is as was printed. The second version is that the lady died at nine and a half. The third version is that she died at eleven and a half. The fourth, and most likely, is that she didn’t exist.”

  “YOU’VE altered my life,” Nusrat said on the telephone. But he meant something else.

  And when we did meet he was immediately recognizable. He was in a bright plaid tweed jacket, his tribute to the Karachi winter or, as the British called it, “cold weather.” I hadn’t seen the jacket before, but it was in character, bold, like Nusrat’s round tinted glasses and walrus moustache.

  He said, “I am dead on time.”

  “You are five minutes late.”

  “Yes. I’m five minutes late.”

  We took the elevator up to the Chandni restaurant, on the roof of the Intercontinental.

  “How is the paper?”

  “Not so good. I closed it down for three days. But you must have heard.”

  He spoke jauntily. He might have been speaking of some trade-union activity, some victory over the management. And I was prepared to leave it at that.

  And it was only in the bright rooftop restaurant, when we were going around the Intercontinental buffet, a little more meagre than I had remembered it in August, it was only then—Karachi browning all around us, the cold weather burning away fast, the February sky already very bright, the restaurant door open, the air already warm—that I saw that Nusrat had gone grey. In five months he had changed.

  “You’ve gone grey.”

  “You’ve noticed? It happened,” he said. “There is no reason. Don’t think there is any special reason. I like grey hair. I like to look grey.”

  “It looks nice on you. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-three. I was grey before, when you saw me. You mightn’t have noticed, but I was grey then.”

  When we were at the table he said, “I didn’t intend to go to the office until four that day. The day I got your message. So it’s a bit of luck that I am here. I could have been out of Karachi. I could have missed you. Doesn’t that make you believe in a chain of events?”

  “You are working too hard.”

  “I work very hard. There is pressure on me. The other day, on the entertainments page, do you know what I did? I put in a picture of an Indonesian actress in her national dress. It would have gone to the printers if someone hadn’t pointed it out to me. It showed up the outlines of her body. I didn’t see that. I just saw the national dress. What am I to do? I don’t know how far I can go on the entertainments page. I don’t even know whether an entertainments page is desirable in an Islamic society.”

  He broke off, waiting for me to give an opinion. I didn’t say anything.

  He said, “This is serious. This is something that has to be discussed in our society. And what about the position of women? Should they do jobs? Or should they stay home? Should men teach women? Should women teach men? These are important questions.”

  “Why are they so important?”

  “Because we have to create an Islamic society. We cannot
develop in the Western way. Development will come to us only with an Islamic society. It is what they tell us.”

  We had talked of this in August. He knew where I stood. For a second or two I wondered whether he was speaking ironically. But he was in earnest. The jauntiness suggested by his round cheeks, his moustache, his man-about-town jacket was false. He was grey and tormented. In five months he had changed as much as the Karachi landscape.

  In August, in the gardens at the back of the Intercontinental, I had seen men using a bullock-drawn grass-cutter to cut the grass. Now there was no grass to cut; but the men were still at work, pulling a heavy roller over the heathlike ground.

  I said, “When will it rain?”

  “In June. Or July. Next month it will start getting hot. Then there will be a water shortage. Everybody talks about Afghanistan now. But when it gets hot and there is a water shortage, people will talk of that first.”

  This was more like the journalist, the columnist. But then he said, “There’s the question of banks and interest. That’s what the economists should be thinking about. That’s what we have to work out, how to create a banking system without interest. Right now, when I get my two hundred and forty-eight rupees from the bank I get so happy, getting this money for nothing. And my wife says, ‘I don’t know why you should be so happy.’ And she is right. It is wrong. My wife is a good Muslim. And, as you know, I am a bad Muslim.”

  “You can’t say that. When we met you said that Islam and the hereafter were the most important things to you. Do you remember?”

  “But I was educated in a secular school. I don’t always say the prayers.”

  Later he said, “I feel they must feel I am all right.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “Civil servants, bureaucrats. They change, I know. But the file remains. So I meant the file—my file—must be a good file. God has his own ways of being kind. When certain things happen you have to believe. Think of my luck, meeting you the last time, getting your message this time—I didn’t intend to go to the office until late that afternoon. And now having lunch with you and talking with you. Think of all the links in that chain.”

  I looked at his distressed face. I said, “I think you should go away for a little. Go to another country for a little. You are beginning to fight phantoms.”

  “No, no. If I go, I should go for good.”

  “You should take a rest.”

  “You are right. I am doing too much. Only this morning I thought, ‘If you go on like this, you’ll fall ill.’ What’s worrying me now is that I don’t like people. I don’t see anyone, you know. I came here only because it’s you. I can hate people. Get irritated by them. Like the other morning. I went to a slum colony in Clifton, not far from the Bhutto house. For a long time I’ve wanted to write about them. I should have been sympathetic to those people. I wanted to be sympathetic to them, and I am sympathetic to them. But I found myself getting irritated with them. How could they live in those conditions for thirty-two years? Just two minutes from Mr. Bhutto. Why didn’t they march to his house? So I got irritated and I didn’t like myself for getting irritated. That was the mood I was in when I went to the office and got your message. That was why getting your message just then was to me a piece of luck.”

  He had brought a file of the columns he had written over the last few months. He did a kind of gossip and comment column once a week for the Morning News. He wanted to make a book of the pieces and wanted me to look them over. He thought they were a record of an important period.

  They were not that. But they were the work of a professional. There was nothing in the columns that referred to his own troubles during this time. He wrote of social events; he wrote of his pleasure in the Karachi cold weather, getting out his tweed jacket; he wrote of the sugar shortage. There was something about “girlie” magazines—unsuitable in “these changing times”: that was the closest he came to his own troubles.

  A column that began with a paragraph about a public flogging turned out to be a piece about the inadequacies of public transport. People couldn’t go to the flogging because there weren’t the buses. There was no irony. In Nusrat’s writing, as in Nusrat himself, in spite of the apparent jauntiness, there was a certain humourlessness. It was part of his candour, his attractiveness. There was no question, with Nusrat, of self-censorship. Nusrat was an accepter: he lived with his country and the faith of his country. Pakistan, committed now to the way of Islam, was an ideological state. Nusrat accepted the ideology. He was a citizen of an ideological state, a believer, just the kind of man who would have been tormented by being cast out. The distrust of his fellows would have been punishment enough for him.

  I told him when I saw him again that I didn’t think his newspaper pieces would make a book. He didn’t like that.

  I said, “It leaves everything out.”

  “But people like Art Buchwald bring out their articles in books.”

  I asked about his wife. I remembered that she hadn’t been well in August.

  He said, “She had an operation for an ulcer. I try to avoid discussing the negative side of human existence with her. For instance, I wouldn’t tell her what you think of the columns.”

  “They are good newspaper columns.”

  “If someone were to beat me up today, I wouldn’t go home and tell her. Of course, if I went home battered and bleeding I wouldn’t just sit in a chair and say nothing. I would have to say something. But normally I wouldn’t. She really gets a little more worried than I do.”

  So during all his crisis he had had no one at home to turn to. And yet, as his editor noted, he hadn’t broken down. He hadn’t tried to influence any of the important people he knew; he had kept on doing his work. It was only at the end that he had broken down. After the government inquiry was over, and the matter had been laid aside, Ghauri, the editor, asked him home to dinner.

  Ghauri said, “It’s all over now. The paper will continue. But tell me, did you do it deliberately? I give you my word that whatever answer you give, I will take no action against you. I just want to know.”

  Nusrat didn’t understand that the question was being seriously asked. When he did he burst into tears. The idea that the editor, who had risked so much to defend him, might have had some doubt about him was too much to bear. Ghauri didn’t press; his question had been answered. Mrs. Ghauri had to comfort Nusrat.

  I saw the offending article. It was illustrated with a nineteenth-century European painting, by an unnamed painter, of an Arab woman, unveiled but fully clothed, reclining on a settee. The illustration had been taken, with the article, from Arab News. But what could pass in Arabia now was still provocative in Pakistan. There was little in the article itself that couldn’t be found in Philip K. Hitti’s History of the Arabs, a standard textbook. But the woman in question had been the Prophet’s great-granddaughter; and there were people in Pakistan—of both sects—who felt that even to say that she was beautiful was to show disrespect.

  The faith was pushing men to extremes. With only the Koran and the traditions as a guide, no one could ever be sure that he was good enough as a Muslim; no one could ever be sure that he had completely submitted to Allah and that he was entirely selfless. Men like Nusrat made greater and greater demands on themselves. To a man anxious to submit, to be pure in heart and mind, the world was full of traps: like Nusrat’s joy in his 248 rupees interest from the bank, his irritation with his fellow Muslims in the slum colony.

  I said, “You are accident-prone, aren’t you, Nusrat?”

  I had touched something. He said, “I went to a mosque to attend a wedding last week. A friend’s sister. The bridegroom was late. It was prayer time. So my friend said, ‘Let’s go and pray.’ So I did the ablutions. It was a cold evening and the water was cold. I picked up a straw cap or hat—a topee—from the mosque and put it on my head and began praying. When I bowed down the straw hat came off and I thought: ‘God knows I hadn’t come prepared to pray.’ I saw a hand move and I
thought someone was about to interrupt me. But it was only a hand putting the cap on my head. When I bowed down again it fell off again, and I saw it roll towards the corner. I said to myself: ‘The prayer can be accepted even without the cap, if one’s intention is to pray.’ The incident went unnoticed. But why do these things happen to me? It is amazing I haven’t had a road accident And I think this is God’s mercy or blessing or whatever.”

  I asked him about the journalist in Rawalpindi who had been sent to jail for a year.

  He was cool; I was surprised.

  He said, “Perhaps he said it too often. Perhaps he shouldn’t have written it for a foreign paper. Some things can be all right in a local paper but bad in a foreign paper. And vice versa.”

  He still had plans to go abroad and study mass media. But he spoke about it differently now. He was a penitent, and he wished now to serve his country and its ideology.

  “We are building our societies anew and we have to shape the media accordingly. We have to see how far, if at all, the Western, liberated concept of the mass media integrates with the developing countries in general and Muslim countries in particular. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t.”

  But buried in that new personality was still the man who read Art Buchwald and wished to bring out books like Buchwald’s.

  The last time we met he said, “No one has noticed that I have gone grey, or mentioned it to me.” And before we separated he said, “Can you arrange for me to go to a place where I can read, write, and study for five years? Because, in five years, if you see me again, I may have become a cement dealer or an exporter of ready-made garments. Where I wouldn’t be able to have time like this, to sit and talk and share with you.”