Among The Believers Part 17

Islands (1896)

Those communities that have as yet little history make upon a European a curious impression of thinness and isolation. They do not feel themselves the inheritors of the ages, and for that reason what they aim at transmitting to their successors seems jejune and emotionally poor to one in whom the past is vivid and the future is illuminated by knowledge of the slow and painful achievements of former times. History makes one aware that there is no finality in human affairs; there is not a static perfection and an unimprovable wisdom to be achieved.

BERTRAND RUSSELL: Portraits from Memory

1.

First Conversations with Shafi: The Journey Out of Paradise

It was from India or the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent that religion went to Southeast Asia. Hinduism and Buddhism went first. They quickened the great civilizations of Cambodia and Java, whose monuments-Angkor, Borobudur-are among the wonders of the world. These Indian religions, we are told, were spread not by armies or colonists, but by merchants and priests. And that was the kind of Indian traveller who, after Islam had come to the subcontinent, began in the fourteenth or fifteenth century to take Islam to Indonesia and Malaysia.

Islam went to Southeast Asia as another religion of India. There was no Arab invasion, as in Sind; no systematic slaughter of the local warrior caste, no planting of Arab military colonies; no sharing out of loot, no sending back of treasure and slaves to a caliph in Iraq or Syria; no tribute, no taxes on unbelievers. There was no calamity, no overnight abrogation of a settled world order. Islam spread as an idea-a Prophet, a divine revelation, heaven and h.e.l.l, a divinely sanctioned code-and mingled with older ideas. To purify that mixed religion the Islamic missionaries now come; and it is still from the subcontinent-and especially from Pakistan-that the most pa.s.sionate missionaries come.

They do not bring news of military rule, the remittance economy, the loss of law, the tragedy of the Bihari Muslims now wanted neither by Bangladesh nor by Pakistan. These events are separate from Islam, and these men bring news only of Islam and the enemies of Islam. They offer pa.s.sion, and it is the special pa.s.sion of the Muslims of the subcontinent: the pa.s.sion of people who, in spite of Pakistan, feel themselves a threatened minority; the pa.s.sion of people who-with their view of history as a "pleasant tale of conquest"-feel they have ceased to be conquerors; and the pa.s.sion, above all, of Muslims who feel themselves on the margin of the true Muslim world. The Persian distance from Arabia created the Shia faith, and the Persian conviction that they are Islamically purer than the Arabs. The Indian Muslim distance from Arabia is greater than the Persian; and their pa.s.sion is as fierce or fiercer.

Every Muslim is a missionary for Islam: that was the idea of the brotherhood a.s.sembled in the waterlogged desert of the Punjab. And after four days of tent life, of ma.s.s prayers, the simple men go out intoxicated by their vision of a world about to change. Some go to Malaysia; they have been going for years; and now their pa.s.sion finds a response.

THERE are a few Hinduized architectural remains in the far north, but no great Indianized civilization grew in Malaysia, as in Java or Cambodia. The land (though touched on the coast by Europeans) was more or less bypa.s.sed and left to the Malays until the last century.

The stories of Joseph Conrad give an impression of the remoter places of the Malay Archipelago a hundred years ago: European coasting vessels, occasionally in compet.i.tion with Arabs, men of the pure faith; European trading or administrative settlements on the edge of the sea or the river, with the forest at their backs; Chinese peasants and labourers taking root wherever they can; Malay sultans and rajas, warriors with their courts; and, in the background, simpler Malays, people of river and forest, half Muslim, half animist.

Separate, colliding worlds: the world of Europeans, pushing on to the "outer edge of darkness," the closed tribal world of Malays: it was one of Conrad's themes. And in Malaysia today the Islamic revolutionaries, the young men who reject, are the descendants of those people in the background, the people of river and forest. In Malaysia they have been the last to emerge; and they have emerged after the colonial cycle, after independence, after money.

There is now in Malaysia more than coconuts and rattan to be picked up at the landing stages. Malaysia produces many precious things: tin, rubber, palm oil, oil. Malaysia is rich. Money, going down, has created a whole educated generation of village people and drawn them into the civilization that once appeared to be only on the outer edge of darkness but is now universal.

These young people do not always like what they find. Some have studied abroad, done technical subjects; but not many of them really know where they have been. In Australia, England, or the United States they still look for the manners and customs of home; their time abroad sours them, throws them back more deeply into themselves. They cannot go back to the village. They are young, but the life of their childhood has changed.

And they also grow to understand that in the last hundred years, while they or their parents slept, their country-a new idea: a composite of kingdoms and sultanates-was colonially remade; that the rich Malaysia of today grows on colonial foundations and is a British-Chinese creation. The British developed the mines and the plantations. They brought in Chinese (the diligent, rootless peasants of a century back), and a lesser number of Indians, to do the work the Malays couldn't do. Now the British no longer rule. But the Malays are only half the population.

The Chinese have advanced; it is their energy and talent that keep the place going. The Chinese are shut out from political power. Malays rule; the country is officially Muslim, with Muslim personal laws; s.e.xual relations between Muslims and non-Muslims are illegal, and there is a kind of prying religious police; legal discriminations against non-Muslims are outrageous. But the Malays who rule are established, or of old or royal families who crossed over into the new world some generations ago.

The new men of the villages, who feel they have already lost so much, find their path blocked at every turn. Money, development, education have awakened them only to the knowledge that the world is not like their village, that the world is not their own. Their rage-the rage of pastoral people with limited skills, limited money, and a limited grasp of the world-is comprehensive. Now they have a weapon: Islam. It is their way of getting even with the world. It serves their grief, their feeling of inadequacy, their social rage and racial hate.

This Islam is more than the old religion of their village. The Islam the missionaries bring is a religion of impending change and triumph; it comes as part of a world movement. In Readings in Islam, a local missionary magazine, it can be read that the West, in the eyes even of its philosophers, is eating itself up with its materialism and greed. The true believer, with his thoughts on the afterlife, lives for higher ideals. For a nonbeliever, with no faith in the afterlife, life is a round of pleasure. "He spends the major part of his wealth on ostentatious living and demonstrates his pomp and show by wearing of silk and brocade and using vessels of gold and silver."

Silk, brocade, gold and silver? Can that truly be said in a city like Kuala Lumpur? But this is theology. It refers to a hadith or tradition about the Prophet. Hudhaifa one day asked for water and a Persian priest gave him water in a silver vessel. Hudhaifa rebuked the Persian; Hudhaifa had with his own ears heard the Prophet say that nonbelievers used gold and silver vessels and wore silk and brocade.

The new Islam comes like this, and to the new men of the village it comes as an alternative kind of learning and truth, full of scholarly apparatus. It is pa.s.sion without a constructive programme. The materialist world is to be pulled down first; the Islamic state will come later-as in Iran, as in Pakistan.

And the message that starts in Pakistan doesn't stop in Malaysia. It travels to Indonesia-120 million people to Malaysia's 12 million, poorer, more heterogeneous, more fragile, with a recent history of pogroms and ma.s.s killings. There the new Islamic movement among the young is seen by its enemies as nihilism; they call it "the Malaysian disease." So the Islamic pa.s.sion of Pakistan, with its own special roots, converts and converts again, feeding other distresses. And the promise of political calamity spreads as good news.

MALAYSIA steams. In the rainy season in the mornings the clouds build up. In the afternoon it pours, the blue-green hills vanish, and afterwards the clouds linger in the rifts in the mountains, like smoke. Creepers race up the steel guy ropes of telegraph poles; they overwhelm dying coconut branches even before the branches fall off; they cover dying trees or trees that cannot resist and create odd effects of topiary. Rain and sun and steam do not speak here of decay, of tropical la.s.situde; they speak of vigour, of rich things growing fast, of money.

The old colonial town of Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, still survives in parts. Old tile-roofed private dwellings, originally British; the rows of narrow two-storey Chinese shop-houses, the shops downstairs, the pavement pillared, the pillars supporting the projecting upper storey; Malay kampongs or villages-modest but attractive houses of weathered timber and corrugated iron brown-red with rust-in areas reserved for Malays at the time of the foundation of the town; near the railway station, the official British buildings: the Victorian-Gothic-Mogul law courts, domes and arches and staircase towers.

That colonial town has been left behind by the new residential developments, the skysc.r.a.pers of the new city, the Korean-built highways that lead in from the airport, first through plantations (Western Malaysia from the air is dark with forest, but it is an ordered forest, with trees in rows, and the white steam rises in pillars like smoke from chimneys), and then past the factories and the a.s.sembly plants of international companies.

In public gardens and in other places in this new town can be seen young village Malays dressed as Arabs, with turbans and gowns. The Arab dress-so far from Pakistan, so far from Arabia-is their political badge. In the university there are girls who do not only wear the veil, but in the heat also wear gloves and socks. Different groups wear different colours. The veil is more than the veil; it is a mask of aggression. Not like the matted locks of the Ras Tafarian in Jamaica, a man dulled by a marginal life that has endured for generations; not like the gear of the middle-cla.s.s hippie, who wishes only to drop out; these are the clothes of uprooted village people who wish to pull down what is not theirs and then take over. Because an unacknowledged part of the fantasy is that the world goes on, runs itself, has only to be inherited.

SHAFI worked for the Muslim cause. He didn't wear Arab clothes. But he understood the young men who did. Shafi had come to Kuala Lumpur from a village in the north. The disturbance of the move was still with him.

Shafi said: "When I was in the village the atmosphere is entirely different. You come out of the village. You see all the bright lights, you begin to sense the materialistic civilization around you. And I forgot about my religion and my commitments-in the sense that you had to pray. But not to the extent of going out and doing nasty things like taking girls and drinking and gambling and drugs. I didn't lose my faith. I simply forgot to pray, forgot responsibilities. Just losing myself. I got nothing firm in my framework. I just floating around, and didn't know my direction."

I said, "Where did you live when you came to Kuala Lumpur?"

He didn't give a straight answer. At this early stage in our conversations concreteness didn't come easily to him. He said, "I was living in a suburb where I am exposed to materialistic civilization to which I had never been exposed before. Boys and girls can go out together. You are free from family control. You are free from society who normally criticize you in a village when you do something bad. You take a goat, a cow, a buffalo-somewhere where the goat is being tied up all the time-and you release that goat in a bunch of other animals: the goat would just roam anywhere he want to go without any strings."

"Is that bad for the goat?"

"I think the goat would be very happy to roam free. But for me I don't think that would be good. If goat had brains, I would want to say, 'Why do you want to roam about when you are tied and being fed by your master and looked after? Why do you want to roam about?' "

I said, "But I want to roam about."

"What do you mean by being free? Freedom for me is not something that you can roam anywhere you want. Freedom must be within the definition of a certain framework. Because I don't think we are able to run around and get everything. That freedom means nothing. You must really frame yourself where you want to go and what you want to do."

"But didn't you know what you wanted to do when you came to Kuala Lumpur?"

"The primary aim was education. That was a framework. But the conflict of this freedom and the primary aim is there, and I consider this is the problem I faced and many of my friends face."

"Other people in other countries face the same problem."

Shafi said, "Do they face the same restrictions of family life as I do?"

"What restrictions?"

"Religious restrictions. You have that frame with you. Religious tradition, family life, the society, the village community. Then you come into the city, where people are running, people are free. The values contradict.

"You see, in the village where I was brought up we have the bare minimum. We have rice to eat, house to live. We didn't go begging. In the city you can buy a lunch at ten dollars [Malaysian dollars, $2.20 to the American]. Or in a stall you can have a lunch for fifty cents. That excess of nine-fifty which the city dwellers spend will be spent by us on other purposes. To us, with our framework and tradition and religion, that is excessiveness.

"Sometimes my wife feels that we should go back to the village, and I also feel the same. Not running away from the modern world, but trying to live a simpler, more meaningful life than coming to the city, where you have lots of waste and lots of things that is not real probably. You are not honest to yourself if you can spend fifty cents and keep yourself from hunger, but instead spend ten dollars.

"I will tell you about waste. Recently the government built a skating rink. After three months they demolished it because a highway going to be built over it. They are building big roads and highways across the villages. And whose lorries are pa.s.sing by to collect the produce of the poor and to dump the products that is manufactured by the rich at an exorbitant price-colour TVs, refrigerators, air conditioners, transistor radios?"

"Don't people want those things?"

"In the end they are going to use the colour TVs-which the people enjoy-to advertise products to draw people into wasteful living."

"Village life-wouldn't you say it is dull for most people?"

"The village? It's simple. It's devoid of-what shall I say?-wastefulness. You shouldn't waste. You don't have to rush for things. My point about going back to the kampong is to stay with the community and not to run away from development. The society is well knit. If someone pa.s.sed away there is an alarm in the kampong, where most of us would know who pa.s.sed away and when he is going to be buried, what is the cause of death, and what happened to the next of kin-are they around? It's not polluted in the village. Physical pollution, mental, social."

"Social pollution?"

"Something that contradicts our customs and traditions. A man cannot walk with a woman who doesn't belong to his family in the kampong. It is forbidden."

"Why is it wrong?"

"The very essence of human respect and dignity comes from an honourable relationship of man and woman. You must have a law to protect the unit of your society. You need your family to be protected. When the girls come from the villages to KL they don't want to be protected by the law."

SHAFI was thirty-two. He was small and slender, with gla.s.ses, a sloping forehead, and a thin beard. He had at one time set up as a building contractor. But he hadn't succeeded; and he had given up that and all other business to work full-time for the Muslim youth movement called ABIM. ABIM was the most important and the most organized Muslim youth group in Malaysia; and Shafi venerated the leader, Anwar Ibrahim, who was a man of his own age.

Anwar Ibrahim's story was remarkable. He came from the more developed west coast of Malaysia, and was a generation or two ahead of Shafi. His grandfather ran a little village restaurant; his father was a male nurse in a hospital; Anwar himself had gone to a British-founded college for the sons of local princes or sultans. Anwar had to pa.s.s an entrance examination; the boys of royal blood didn't have to.

The British had pledged not to dishonour the Muslim religion of the sultans, and in the college they were scrupulous about that pledge. But Anwar thought that religion as practised in the college was only a matter of ritual, with no great meaning. So, with the help of a British teacher (who later became a Muslim convert), Anwar began to study Islam; and he grew to understand the value of discipline, unity, and submission to G.o.d's will. By the time he was sixteen he was making speeches about Islam in the villages; he was a fiery orator. Out of that schoolboy activity his movement had developed, and it was now highly organized, with a building in Kuala Lumpur, offices, staff, even a school.

He was in touch with Muslim movements abroad-in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan. He had been to Iran and met Ayatollah Khomeini; that had added to his reputation locally. For Anwar Ibrahim, Islam was the energizer and purifier that was needed in Malaysia; true Islam awakened people, especially Malays, and at the same time it saved them from the corruption of the racialist politics of Malaysia, the shabbiness of the money culture and easy Western imitation.

His office in ABIM-with staff in outer cubicles, with typewriters and filing cabinets-was like the office of a modest business executive: modern tools and modern organization to serve the Islamic puritan cause. He was small and slight, slighter than Shafi, and even more boyish in appearance. He was attractive; and it added to his attractiveness that in spite of his great local authority he gave the impression of a man still learning, still thinking things out. His grand view of Islam gave him a security that not all of his followers had; and travel had added to his vision. He disapproved of the "faddishness" of some Malaysian Muslim groups, their religious and political simplicities. He admitted that he had not yet thought through the economic side of things; he said he was still only at "the conscientization stage." I got the impression that he genuinely believed that an Islamic economic system was something he might one day bring over from a place like Pakistan.

I would have liked to talk more with Anwar. It occurred to me, after our first meeting in the ABIM office, that I should travel about Malaysia with him and see the country through his eyes. He was willing, but it didn't work out. He was busy, at the centre of all the ABIM activity; he was constantly on the move, by car and plane; he was in demand as an orator. When the second of our arrangements fell through, he sent Shafi to see me at the Holiday Inn, where I was staying.

It was only because of Anwar's recommendation that Shafi, when he came, opened himself to me. And even as it was, Shafi was diffident about putting himself forward, of appearing as a spokesman, of derogating from the dignity of the leader.

"I am not the leader," Shafi said with a laugh, when we sat in the Gardenia coffee shop. "I'm only a general."

It wasn't easy to talk with Shafi in the beginning. He spoke the abstractions of the movement, and abstractions made his language awkward. He dodged concrete detail, not because he was secretive, but because he was used only to answering questions about the faith and the movement, and not about himself.

He said he didn't like places like the Holiday Inn. I thought this was an exaggeration until he began to talk about the wastefulness of city life. And I never became reconciled to the difference between the man who was talking to me-intelligent, self-possessed, scholarly-looking-and the slack village life he said he came out of and longed to go back to.

He wanted to go back, to have again a sense of the fitness and wholeness of things; and I could see how for him Islam was the perfect vehicle. But Shafi-a professional man, an organizer-had been made by the world he rejected; that was the world that had released his intelligence. It would not have been easy for him to separate the part of himself that was purely traditional or instinctive from the part for which he alone was responsible. And his village had changed; and Malaysia had changed; and the world had changed.

It was of that changed and urgent world that, not long after Shafi left me, I heard the Malaysian foreign minister speak at a seminar at the university. The minister wore a flowered shirt: that was the only touch of traditional colour. He-and the Indian official from his ministry-spoke of the discussions at the recent Nonaligned Conference in Havana; he spoke of the disturbance on the northern borders: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam. Foreign amba.s.sadors were present. The two men from the Chinese emba.s.sy, in short-sleeved grey safari suits, made notes, holding their pens straight up in the Chinese calligrapher's way. Afterwards big cars took some of the amba.s.sadors away. It wasn't only the rich local Chinese and the builders of highways and the manufacturers of colour TV sets that had altered the world.

It was to another kind of old life that later, at dinner at the house of a distinguished Indian lawyer, the talk turned. James Puthucheary, the lawyer, had once been active in colonial politics in Malaysia and Singapore. He said, "I've been jailed by the British, the Singaporeans, and the Malaysians. The only people who jailed me in such a way that it was possible to be friendly with them afterwards were the British." The British colonial secretary-in rank just below the governor-came to see him in jail one day. Before he came into the cell he said, "Mr. Puthucheary, do you mind me coming into your room?" Afterwards, Puthucheary said, they "both went down in the world." The colonial secretary retired and went into business; Puthucheary completed the studies he had begun in jail and became a lawyer. "We used to meet and play bridge."

It was an elegant and educated middle-cla.s.s gathering, conscious, in addition, of its racial variety: Malays, Chinese, Indians. There were many cars in the drive and on the lawn. Old battles, old rules; and it might have been said that-with the help of the money of Malaysia-these men had just arrived at dignity. The world had moved fast for them. But already what had been won was being undermined by the grief and rage of the people not represented there, the people of river and forest who had stood outside the awakening of colonial days, and whose sons now made the first generation of educated village Malays. For them the world had moved even faster.

It was possible in the morning to read the newspaper with greater understanding. Shares worth $15m offered to b.u.miputras. A b.u.miputra (the word was Sanskrit, pre-Islamic) was a "son of the soil," a Malay; and Malays were to be given loans to buy the shares reserved for them. This was how the government discriminated in their favour, seeking to bring them up economically to the level of the Chinese. The method was ineffectual; it had only created a favoured cla.s.s of Malay "front men." It was against this kind of racialism that Anwar Ibrahim and ABIM campaigned, setting up against it a vision of a purer Islamic way.

Mandatory Islamic studies welcome, says Abim: Islam was to be a compulsory subject for Muslims in schools. Rahman: Don't neglect spiritual growth: that was a government man, as Muslim as anyone else. Hear the call from across the desert sands: that was a feature article, for this special day, the Festival of Sacrifice, by a well-known columnist, a good, lyrical piece about family memories of the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Only half the population was Muslim; but everyone had to make his obeisance to Islam. The pressures came from below: a movement of purification and cleansing, but also a racial movement. It made for a general nervousness. It made people hide from the visitor for fear that they might be betrayed. It led-oddly, in this land of rain and steam and forest-to the atmosphere of the ideological state.

SHAFI came in the morning, dressed in formal Malay clothes for the religious holiday, the Festival of Sacrifice. He wore a pale-orange tunic and trousers (this part of the Malay costume copied from the Chinese), with gold studs in the tunic; he had a sarong around his middle like a slack c.u.mmerbund (the sarong was the original Malay dress, and Shafi's had been woven for him, in pastel stripes, by his mother); and he had a black velvet cap that folded flat (the cap was the Indian part of the Malay costume). He looked princely. With a knife at his side he might have been a raja of a hundred years before, standing on a riverbank, with his own court. But he had driven up in his car; and we were in the lobby of the Holiday Inn.

He said, "Did you read what I said last night? Did you like it?"

"I liked what you said about your family unit."

"Do you want to ask more?" He was eager, open. The effort at autobiography, my interest in the details of his life, had excited him.

"Yes. But I know your philosophy, the ideas of your movement. I want something more personal."

We went from the lobby to the Gardenia coffee shop, pa.s.sing the bar on one side, where at night in near-darkness couples sat and "The Old Timers"-Indians and Malays or perhaps only Malays-sang amplified pop songs. In the coffee shop we sat next to the window, overlooking the small oval pool with its ancillary little oval pool for children. Everybody there was white this morning.

I said, "What do you think about that?"

He had grown a little tense, waiting for the personal questions. He turned and looked at the people around the little pool, showing me his profile, the smooth brown Malay skin, the slope of his forehead, his gla.s.ses, the dip of his nose-bridge, the k.n.o.b of his snub nose, his beard. He looked hard; his face grew serious.

He said, "I don't know what I think. They are foreign to us, that's all. They don't belong to our culture."

"You wouldn't like to be with them?"

"No. But the water's quite cooling. We have the same clear water in the village. More natural environment. You would see the riverbed. You would see the plants, creepers by the side, on the bank."

Across the pool was a woman in her forties in a black bathing suit. She was white, untanned, soft-bodied but still with a fair shape, and her legs were drawn up awkwardly rather than provocatively on the white plastic straps of the easy chair. Below us was a younger woman in blue, smaller, firmer, lying on her belly. Both might have aroused desire in a s.e.xually active man.

I said, "Do you think those white women are pretty?"

He looked at them one after the other, with the same serious expression: he was trying hard to find out what he thought.

He said, "We don't have a sense of comparing."

"But white men and others find Malay women pretty."

"I have heard that. But is it true? Is that really what they feel?"

And in the coffee shop, with the Malay waitresses in long green dresses pinned with their Holiday Inn ident.i.ty badges ("Beautiful and Homely"), we talked of the village. It was not easy for Shafi, though the effort of thought and memory excited him. The narrative that came out was shaped by my questions.

"I know every corner of my village. We used to go bird-hunting, catching some fish. Either in trousers or sarong. In the trousers, the pockets loaded with pebbles. We used those pebbles to catapult birds. We would go out about ten a.m. in the school holidays or much earlier in the fasting month. And returning about lunchtime with the whole pocket of pebbles gone and returning without any reward. Sometimes we diverted to collecting rubber seeds. We would each put some seeds in a section of bamboo, put the bamboo on supports about four inches above the ground, and try to knock it down from a distance. The boy who knocked it down got all the stakes.

"One of the other activities in childhood was to read Koran, even without knowing the meaning of the verses. We were told by our parents to do it. We were just obeying them."

I said, "Don't you think that's a bad intellectual start?"

"You're right. But it's more than that when you read Koran. We were told from various sources about reading Koran. Each time you read will bring you some goodness in life. I do feel that."

"Like magic, then?"