Among The Believers Part 12

"Why do you say that?"

"You've told me yourself that Islam and the hereafter are the most important things to you."

"How small you make us feel."

I had momentarily-a number of irritations coming together: the political virulence of his paper, his wish both to remain Islamic and to exploit the tolerance and openness of the other civilization-I had momentarily allowed myself to be aggressive with him. I felt guilty.

But his rebuke was not all rebuke. He believed in the ideal of the Islamic state; he felt that Pakistan fell short of that ideal and deserved the disregard which he had read into my words. The Islamic ideal was the theme of a 1951 book, Pakistan as an Islamic State, which he had brought as a gift for me. It would help me to understand Pakistan, he said. And the book showed me that thirty years before, the Islamic ideal had been as vague, as much a statement of impracticable intent and muddled history (with interim worldly corruption), as it was now. The Islamic state, I read, was like a high-flying kite, invisible in the mist. "I cannot see it, but something is tugging."

Remember Nusrat. Six months later, when I returned to Karachi and wondered whom I should look up, I thought first of Nusrat. I found him changed. That bubbling, intelligent man had gone grey. The Islam he wished to serve had pushed him deep into paranoia; and I regretted more than ever that momentary impulse of aggression towards him, who after all knew only Pakistan.

NUSRAT had spoken to the black-capped man in the registry about Islamic laws. I thought they were laws that had yet to be brought in. I didn't know that seven months before, a set of ten Islamic laws had been pa.s.sed by the military government: laws about Islamic courts and Koranic taxes on wealth and agricultural produce, together with laws about drinking, theft, and illicit s.e.x. These last were hardly laws; they were more about punishments.

Drinking was to be punished by eight stripes. The punishment for illicit s.e.x, for an adult Muslim, was to "be stoned to death at a public place"; for a non-Muslim, a hundred-stripe public whipping, with the possibility of death for rape. "The punishment of stoning to death awarded under section 5 or section 6 shall be executed in the following manner namely: Such of the witnesses who deposed against the convict as may be available shall start stoning him and, while stoning is being carried on, he may be shot, whereupon stoning and shooting shall be stopped."

For theft-above a certain amount (above the value of 4.457 grams of gold), and not theft by a close relative, a servant, or a guest, and not theft of "wild gra.s.s, fish, bird, dog, pig, intoxicant, musical instrument, or perishable foodstuffs for the preservation of which provision does not exist"-for theft outside these circ.u.mstances the punishment for a first offence was the amputation-"carried out by an authorized medical officer"-of the right hand "from the joint of the wrist"; for a second offence, the amputation of the left foot "up to the ankle"; for a third offence, imprisonment for life. There was to be no amputation "when the left hand or the left thumb or at least two fingers of the left hand or the right foot of the offender are either missing or unserviceable."

Generally, for many offences, there was to be a lot of whipping, and "The Execution of the Punishment of Whipping Ordinance, 1979" laid down the rules. "The whip, excluding its handle, shall be of one piece only and preferably be made of leather, or a cane, or a branch of a tree, having no k.n.o.b or joint on it, and its length and thickness shall not exceed 1.22 metres and 1.25 cm. respectively." Whipping, if it was likely to cause death, was to be spread out or postponed. A pregnant woman was to be whipped "two months after the birth of the child or miscarriage, as the case may be." The weather had to be considered. "If ... the weather is too cold or too hot, the execution shall be postponed until the weather has become normal." The decencies were to be observed. "Such clothes of the convict should be left on the body of the convict as are required by the injunctions of Islam to be put on." Men were to be whipped standing, women sitting.

From the 1951 book Nusrat gave me, it seemed that almost as soon as Pakistan had been established, pious people had begun to chat about stoning to death and cutting off hands: "cla.s.sical" punishments to be worked towards as part of a far-off Islamic ideal, when men became again as pure as (in this fantasy) they had been at the beginning of Islam. It couldn't be said that that had happened in Pakistan; but from Hamid Ali, M.A., M.Ed., LL.B., the editor of Combined Set of Islamic Laws, 1979 (the book I have used here), there was a more than legal welcome for the new laws. They made the nation "proud." Outsiders had "wrong notions" about Islam. "Islam is a system aimed at bringing about a welfare, progressive and forward looking society." It ensured "fair play"; its principles were for all time; its penalties were meant "to purge the society as a whole."

But if I hadn't so far been aware of these laws, it was because in the seven months they had been in force they hadn't been applied. One case had caused a scandal. A pir or holy man in a provincial town had been charged with raping the thirteen-year-old daughter of one of his followers. The case against him couldn't get far in the sessions court because the new Islamic law under which he was tried required four eyewitnesses to the act.

Why four eyewitnesses? This went back to a famous incident in the Arabian desert during one of the Prophet's early military adventures, in 626 or 627, when the new faith was just about establishing itself, reducing small hostile communities one by one. The Prophet's favourite wife, Aisha, then perhaps thirteen, had for some reason been left behind by the caravan one evening. She didn't join it again until the morning, and then in the company of a handsome young soldier. There was an uproar among the Prophet's companions. Ali, the Prophet's cousin, thought that the Prophet should get rid of Aisha. The Prophet-now in his mid-fifties-was distressed for days. But Allah intervened; the Prophet had a revelation that Aisha was innocent; that four witnesses were needed to prove adultery; that people spreading unfounded rumours about adultery deserved eighty lashes.

For a writer in the Pakistan Times-defending the government against accusations of Islamic slacking, and criticizing the mullahs who had advised the government about Islamic laws-the law about rape was faulty and absurd ("because the act is never performed in public") and was based on a misreading of the Koran. The Prophet's revelation was about "lewdness" and feminine lewdness specifically. It couldn't be said to refer to rape. So it didn't require the four eyewitnesses. Ordinary witnesses would have sufficed; even medical evidence might have been offered.

Who, Islamically speaking, was right? The mullahs, sticking literally to the most applicable revelation in the Koran? Or the Pakistan Times man, bending that revelation a little to make it fit the case, and giving a modern extension to the idea of witness? It was easy to state the Koranic punishment; it was another matter to work out law. To work out law, with only the historical, geographical, and cultural (and sometimes folksy) particularities of the Koran as a guide, was to become entangled in textual-religious-sectarian disputes of this kind, and very quickly to get away from the idea of equity.

The Pakistan Times man could not hide his rage about the mullahs. They were politically ambitious; they had "shrewdly entrapped" the government by framing laws that couldn't work and then blaming the government for not operating these laws; they had divided Islam into conflicting sects and made Islam a mockery. The answer was to bypa.s.s the mullahs, do away with the sects, and go back to the holy book. Do that, and "we find light all around. But once we wriggle out of the Koran, there is nothing but darkness and confusion in store for us."

But was it as easy as that? To raise just one point: how old was Aisha when she married the fifty-year-old Prophet? Was she six or nine or nineteen? Did she, as in one tender story, take her dolls and toys to the Prophet's tent? The Koran doesn't help; Aisha's age has to be worked out from other sources. The question was gone into at length one Friday sabbath in the Pakistan Times; and the question is of more than historical interest, because Aisha's age at marriage-and there are nine different opinions-can fix the legal marriage age for girls.

In Islam, and especially the Islam of the fundamentalists, precedent is all. The principles of the Prophet-as divined from the Koran and the approved traditions-are for all time. They can be extended to cover all disciplines. The Prophet was reported to have said that the best Muslims were going to be his contemporaries, the second best the generation after, and so on, the decline continuing till the end of time. Can that be read as a condemnation of "Darwinism"? It is what the new, educated fundamentalists say. And it is at once sound faith, and part of their rage against the civilization that encircles them and which they as a community despair of mastering.

In the fundamentalist scheme the world constantly decays and has constantly to be re-created. The only function of intellect is to a.s.sist that re-creation. It reinterprets the texts; it re-establishes divine precedent. So history has to serve theology, law is separated from the idea of equity, and learning is separated from learning. The doctrine has its attractions. To a student from the University of Karachi, from perhaps a provincial or peasant background, the old faith comes more easily than any newfangled academic discipline. So fundamentalism takes root in the universities, and to deny education can become the approved educated act. In the days of Muslim glory Islam opened itself to the learning of the world. Now fundamentalism provides an intellectual thermostat, set low. It equalizes, comforts, shelters, and preserves.

In this way the faith pervades everything, and it is possible to understand what the fundamentalists mean when they say that Islam is a complete way of life. But what is said about Islam is true, and perhaps truer, of other religions-like Hinduism or Buddhism or lesser tribal faiths-that at an early stage in their history were also complete cultures, self-contained and more or less isolated, with inst.i.tutions, manners, and beliefs making a whole.

The Islamic fundamentalist wish is to work back to such a whole, for them a G.o.d-given whole, but with the tool of faith alone-belief, religious practices and rituals. It is like a wish-with intellect suppressed or limited, the historical sense falsified-to work back from the abstract to the concrete, and to set up the tribal walls again. It is to seek to re-create something like a tribal or a city-state that-except in theological fantasy-never was. The Koran is not the statute book of a settled golden age; it is the mystical or oracular record of an extended upheaval, widening out from the Prophet to his tribe to Arabia. Arabia was full of movement; Islam, with all its Jewish and Christian elements, was always mixed, eclectic, developing. Almost as soon as the Prophet made his community secure he sought to subdue his enemies. It was during a military march in the fifth year of the Muslim era that Aisha spent that night alone in the desert.

The West, or the universal civilization it leads, is emotionally rejected. It undermines; it threatens. But at the same time it is needed, for its machines, goods, medicines, warplanes, the remittances from the emigrants, the hospitals that might have a cure for calcium deficiency, the universities that will provide master's degrees in ma.s.s media. All the rejection of the West is contained within the a.s.sumption that there will always exist out there a living, creative civilization, oddly neutral, open to all to appeal to. Rejection, therefore, is not absolute rejection. It is also, for the community as a whole, a way of ceasing to strive intellectually. It is to be parasitic; parasitism is one of the unacknowledged fruits of fundamentalism. And the emigrants pour out from the land of the faith: thirty thousand Pakistanis shipped by the manpower-export experts to West Berlin alone, to claim the political asylum meant for the people of East Germany.

The patron saint of the Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan was Maulana Maudoodi. He opposed the idea of a separate Indian Muslim state because he felt that the Muslims were not pure enough for such a state. He felt that G.o.d should be the lawgiver; and, offering ecstasy of this sort rather than a practical programme, he became the focus of millenarian pa.s.sion. He campaigned for Islamic laws without stating what those laws should be.

He died while I was in Pakistan. But he didn't die in Pakistan: the news of his death came from Boston. At the end of his long and cantankerous life the maulana had gone against all his high principles. He had gone to a Boston hospital to look for health; he had at the very end entrusted himself to the skill and science of the civilization he had tried to shield his followers from. He had sought, as someone said to me (not all Pakistanis are fundamentalists), to reap where he had not wanted his people to sow. Of the maulana it might be said that he had gone to his well-deserved place in heaven by way of Boston; and that he went at least part of the way by Boeing.

"IF we seek guidance from the Koran," the writer in the Pakistan Times said, "we find the light all around." The mullahs' laws about whipping and stoning to death had come to nothing, but an Islamic social order was still possible in Pakistan. A new "methodology" was needed. Bypa.s.s the mullahs; do away with the religious sects; give up the attempt to mix Islam, based on the sovereignty of Allah, with Western democracy, based on the sovereignty of the people; do away with the political parties.

The political advice was followed within weeks. The elections that had been promised were sc.r.a.pped. But the state had to be governed, the people had to be policed. Public floggings were decreed, and there was no nonsense this time about eyewitnesses. The army sent out whipping vans to the bazaars: instant law, Islam on wheels.

Step by step, out of its Islamic striving, Pakistan had undone the rule of law it had inherited from the British, and replaced it with nothing.

7.

Basics

Six or seven hundred miles northeast of Karachi-after Sind and the plains of the Punjab, at the end of the wide valley watered by the Indus and its tributaries-the Himalayas began. In the foothills were the small "twin cities" of Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

Islamabad, "the city of Islam," the capital of Pakistan, was new. It had been built about twenty years before by a military government for no apparent reason except perhaps that a new, well-laid-out city, separate from the messiness of Asia, appealed to the military mind, and the sudden setting down of a Western-style city (like the importation of United States arms) gave the illusion that the twentieth century had been finally dealt with on its own terms, and that both Islam and Pakistan were on the march.

Rawalpindi, twenty miles away, was the older city. In one direction it sprawled towards Islamabad; but in the centre little had changed. In the bazaar there were still the high, dark-timbered, verandahed and latticed houses of the Sikhs and Hindus who had predominated in the little town before part.i.tion and had then been displaced. The old British Rawalpindi club was still in business-the ceiling lights a little dimmer, the walls a muddier yellow, the uniforms of the waiters a little grubbier, the atmosphere at mealtimes more highly spiced.

The British had ruled here for under a hundred years, and more than thirty years had pa.s.sed since they had left, but old Rawalpindi remained a town of British India: in the Mall, a street of hotels and gardens; in some of its old-fashioned shops on the Kashmir Road; in its military and administrative residences.

In one such residence lived the doctor. He was the chief medical officer of a small oil company that operated in the Himalayan foothills to the west. The company, once British-owned, was now Arab-controlled; but old dignity adhered to the company's senior residential "compound." The house of the chief medical officer had a big lawn, a semicircular drive, a chunky-pillared portico. The sitting-room, with thick walls and a very high ceiling, was kept cool only by fans and open doors, which gave glimpses of the green just outside.

The doctor, a man of fifty, small and fine-featured, was aware of the dignity of the house. But he was not dwarfed by it: such dignity as had come to him, he said, had come to him because of his faith. The doctor was a Shia. The Shias-supporters of Ali and Ali's defeated cause (in its beginnings a political cause, an anti-Arab cause within the expanding Arab empire)-the Shias were the minority sect in Pakistan. And it was of his "internationalist" faith, as he called it, that the gentle doctor (as though wishing to play down the excessive dignity of his residence) began to talk to me on this Friday sabbath morning.

One of the doctor's two sons was there; he was a medical student of twenty-three and, the doctor said, a "rebel" and a rationalist. There were two journalists and their wives; they, too, were Shias. The sabbath gathering was more than the social occasion I had been led to expect. For these Shias it was an occasion for serious-and that meant theological-discussion.

The doctor said he had been strengthened, even in everyday matters, by his faith as a follower of Ali. There were five points in his faith: the oneness of G.o.d, justice, a belief in prophethood, a belief in imam-hood (the reign on earth of an imam as G.o.d's regent and spiritual successor to the Prophet), jihad or holy war. Not the holy war the mullahs spoke about, the doctor said; the holy war he had in mind was "the constant struggle in yourself to fight evil."

I asked how articles of faith as abstruse as prophethood and imam-hood strengthened him in day-to-day matters.

He said, "I'll tell you. I am now chief medical officer of the company. I wasn't that always. I used for some time to be the a.s.sistant. Then the chief medical officer retired. For six months the post was vacant. But no appointment was made. The appointment should have come to me. I had done a lot of work. My work on bites was well known to my old superior, and I knew he had written a favourable report about me. Bites-it was my field. Snake bites, scorpion bites, dog bites, donkey bites, dog bites on donkeys-all these things I had done work on. Poor people suffer from these things, and I had done a lot of work among the poor. Rich people don't go about barefooted and get bitten by scorpions. They don't have to worry about dogs biting their donkeys or camels. So I had done all this work. I had treated so many people who had got bitten by snakes. They come with the blood pouring out of their nostrils and mouths. You can cure these things. That is the viper bite I'm talking about, I should say. The cobra and the krait are different.

"So I went to the GM, the general manager, and told him about the position, about this vacant post and my qualifications. He didn't give me any satisfaction. He suggested that what I really wanted was the salary and this big house. Well, these things are important. But not that important. And besides, a doctor can make a living anywhere. It was my faith that comforted me at that moment, in the GM's office. And when the GM said to me that if I wasn't happy I should resign-and he pa.s.sed a sheet of paper across the desk to me-I wrote out my letter of resignation. He thought he was frightening me. But I had my faith. If I didn't have my faith I wouldn't have written that letter. The GM saw that. He rejected the letter I had written. That is why I am here."

But the doctor hadn't mentioned the afterlife or hereafter as one of the articles of his faith. Wasn't that essential for a Muslim?

"I don't know about the afterlife. Sometimes I believe. Sometimes I lose my belief. But I feel I must believe. I'll tell you. My elder son-not the boy here: his older brother-he was studying chemical engineering. We are that kind of family, scientifically inclined. Well, this boy had done very well in the 'matric,' but in the 'inter' he began to do badly. It worried me. It worried me a lot. How could a boy who had done so well in the matriculation do so badly in the inter? That was a serious business; it was going to affect his future. I thought some minister was responsible. It's the kind of thing they do here. They want something for their own son and they get people to throw away the papers of other people. It happens.

"One night during this time I dreamt I was below a big and beautiful tree. There was a musical instrument. I remember only the black wood of the instrument-when I woke up I couldn't remember any more. Out of this came music of a sort I had never heard before. And my father appeared before me. But he appeared in the form of my uncle. Because my father died when I was two, and I had been brought up by my uncle. He said he had come to solace me. In the dream I began to cry, and when I woke up I found that my pillow was wet with tears.

"I went to my son's school that day. I met his teacher. And he told me that although my son had lost so many marks in the earlier papers, he had done all right in the examination as a whole. He had made seventy-eight percent. And just at that time, out of the school building there came a man who was absolutely like my uncle in the dream. I ran to him and embraced him and said, 'You don't know how happy I am to see you. I met you in my dream last night.' "

That incident-and others like it-made the doctor believe in the afterlife. But he was at the same time proud of the rationalism of his younger son, the medical student, who also wrote poetry in English (some of which was, at that moment, being shown to one of the journalists). In what way was the son a rationalist? The son-called over by his father to speak for himself-said that his att.i.tude to the Prophet was historical. The great and good man existed; people added the divinity later.

The son, Syed, was taller and heavier than his father. Gla.s.ses made him look like a student; with his father's guests he had the manner of a privileged student son. He was more socially secure than his father, intellectually more adventurous, but he was conscious that he was building on the achievement of his father.

Syed said he felt isolated from his friends at the medical school. They just wanted to pa.s.s the examinations, to become doctors; they weren't interested in intellectual matters. They just wanted the skill; they weren't interested-as Syed was-in the civilization that went with the skill. (But Syed didn't put it like that.) How had he arrived at his intellectual interests? Well, he had the advantage of his father's medical background-that put him a generation or two ahead of most of his fellows. He had spent a year in England. And he had read a lot in English.

It was about his English reading that I got him to talk. And I was so taken by his account of his approach to the outer civilization-a pioneer journey in many ways, and a contrast with the blanket dismissal of "the West" by people who often, even after travel and a picked-up profession (a single, isolated skill), had the thinnest idea of what they were dismissing-that I asked for paper and noted down Syed's words.

He was twenty-three, and he thought he had so far read about two hundred fifty English books-apart from the Enid Blyton, which he had read until he was twelve, and the "Biggies" books, which he had moved on to from the Blyton and had read until he was fourteen. The reading breakthrough came then, at fourteen, when his father gave him The Good Earth. That got him onto adult books: James Hadley Chase, Harold Robbins, Ian Fleming. Did he enjoy those books? Weren't they too strange? He said he couldn't follow the Ian Fleming; but he had read the books because they were famous, and the same was true of the Harold Robbins. He wanted to read; he was told it was good to read; the problem for him was finding things that made sense. He used to go through the best-seller list in Time, hoping that there might be something for him. But it wasn't always easy for him to know what the books were about.

At this period-he was fifteen or sixteen-Steinbeck was a find. East of Eden made a great impression. "I loved it. This girl wanted to break away from her family, and a house burned down. That is all I remember now. It was a revolutionary book to me." Then came his year in England. He saw the Perry Mason series on television, and read twenty of the Perry Mason books. Wasn't the background too hard for him, too far away from what he knew? No; he understood the books completely.

It was strange, the popular English reading that had given order to Syed Hussain's expanding, shaken-up world: mechanical fantasies for the most part, making the foreign manageable, offering a mixture of the modern and the archaic, disorder and ritual: Enid Blyton, the Biggies books, Pearl Buck, James Hadley Chase, John Steinbeck, Perry Mason.

And s.e.x. Out of the two hundred fifty books he had read, he would say that about thirty had been s.e.x books. He read them "to become stable." People who didn't know s.e.x books became overexcited when they ran across one; and they wanted to look at Playboy. His literary s.e.x course cured him of that. "I also read s.e.x books of the academic sort. Married Happiness. That kind of thing."

But nine years after he had read The Good Earth, Pearl Buck remained the charmer for him. He had read about six or seven of her books-and he regarded that as serious reading. "Then I liked a lot Graham Greene's The Wall Has Two Sides."

"Felix Greene, you mean?"

"Maybe. Greene something. No, Graham Greene was The Ugly American. I get the names mixed up. I'll tell you a story. One time I was travelling to Lah.o.r.e on the train. It was at the time of the revolution in Iran. There was an American missionary on the train. He asked me to sit down, and we began to talk. He wanted to know what I thought about Iran. And I told him-I am like that-that the Americans were going to get out of Iran, that they were going to go to China instead now. He didn't like what I said. Maybe he was an agent."

I didn't follow the story. But it was important to him, perhaps for that vision of the dangerous American: life answering literature, literature clearing up the world.

When he was done with the story of the American on the train he said: "In between all these books I got into pop songs and Western music. I really went for them. Not the rock-and-roll noisy types. But the ones which really carried a message. Not only the Western ones, but the local Urdu ones. I liked very much the Carpenters, a brother-and-sister group. They sing about the basic innocence. That's how I get it. There are lots of songs I get which carry a message about religion, a mention of G.o.d, beliefs."

"Beliefs?"

"Like doing something because you really believe in it. Like love. Basics."

"But I thought you weren't a religious man."

"In a way I'm not religious. But everything has got to have a message."

"What was the last book you read?"

He couldn't say. It was six months ago; he couldn't remember. To keep the conversation going, he said, "The best writer I have read is still Pearl Buck. She writes about the poor. I won't say Chinese or communists-just the poor. She writes about the poor and the basics in human relationships."

"What are these basics?"

"Relating to people. The innocence. People are always trying to trick people. The victims and the hypocrites. Everywhere you see the big-fish-small-fish thing. Big countries trying to dictate to the small countries. Not Pakistan only, but small countries everywhere. They tried to do it in Iran."

His family was Shia. Iran was the Shia heartland; there had recently been a family wedding in Iran, in the holy city of Mashhad. I said, "Do you think it's all right now, after the revolution?"

"No. It's just a vicious circle. Something keeps going wrong all the time in Iran. So much killing can't be right even in the name of G.o.d." He was thinking of the executions decreed by the Islamic revolutionary courts. "A sort of eternal punishment-that is what death is-can't be right if G.o.d is so great. It can't relate to G.o.d if G.o.d is so great."

Hypocrisy was the theme of the poem he had been showing visitors that morning-and he had spoken to me about the victims and the hypocrites.

The hypocrite sounds like a lark

the bite is worse than the bark.

A hypocrite may appear fearless and bold

all that glitters is not gold.

Cruelty, injustice, slander: these were also among his themes (and in his own language, Urdu, the play on words, the twisting of idioms, would have been more unexpected and violent). Closest to him (and containing the point he had made about his isolation at the medical school) was the poem about a surgeon friend of the family who had died from a viral infection contracted during surgery: His skills just anyone cannot learn

if a flame of love does not burn

for his was not a magic art

but a beating healing heart.

He said, talking of his poetry, "I am empty for three, four months. I am occupied-empty from the angle of the poetry. Then it just comes. It happens. I can write two or three poems then. I don't want to do anything else. Even if I'm supposed to study I don't feel like studying after this thing happens. And then I'm empty again."

The poem he had just written was "The Big Black Man." Strange theme. Who was he? Muhammad Ali the boxer, ... who wouldn't break a twig