Among The Believers Part 23

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 b.u.t.toned-up tunic and had a b.u.t.toned-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 h.o.m.os.e.xual; 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 s.e.x 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 quant.i.ties 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 compet.i.tively; here they didn't worry about the Chinese; they didn't have the problems of Malays in other areas.

It rained and rained. We went to have dinner at a Malay restaurant, run by a Malay organization. The restaurant was grander than anything Shafi would have known as a child. Its decorations were a bit neglected, but Rahman was pleased to show it off as an example of Malay enterprise. He said, "You see, we aren't all going back to Islam."

The philosophy teacher was still with us. He had apparently forgotten about dinner with his wife and his death duties. But that piece of storytelling had been no more than a signal to me not to press him about Al-Azhar or philosophy or any other contentious matter.

And-it was part of their contentment-they all had large families. Rahman had five children; the b.u.t.toned-up registrar, who was very young, had three; the philosophy lecturer four.

"We are optimists," the philosophy lecturer said. "My father was a poor man. Yet I'm all right. It will be all right for our children."

The registrar said, "Allah has said that no living creature will be unprovided for."

I said, "But what about a place like Cambodia?"

"They have brought that punishment on themselves," the registrar said. "Allah has said that about unbelievers."

Rahman said, "One ant bites you on the leg. But you don't kill that particular ant. You get rid of the lot."

I asked about an item in the morning's paper. A story had gone around that forty heads were needed for the completion of the port, and village people were keeping their children away from school.

They said it was an old story. Rahman said that when he was a child there was a similar story about forty heads being needed before the railway could be completed. Stories like that had a simple explanation. Parents wanted their children to stay at home and not wander too far, because it was dark in the village, with only a light here and there. It was also said when he was a child that if you climbed a banana tree your private parts rotted away: that was just to keep children from climbing the tree. If you sat on a pillow you got boils on your bottom: that was to keep the pillows clean.

"But now people are more educated," Rahman said. "They simply tell the children they will dirty the pillows if they sit on them."

We talked; and it rained; and my chest tightened in the damp air; and I thought of my little room in the hotel where the central air conditioning blew very chill and couldn't be regulated.

Shafi grieved for the village life he had known; he spoke about it as something in the past, something he could revive for himself only in a commune. But that life-of community, old ways, and peace-still existed for these men, in spite of the cars and the new kinds of job. It was Shafi who had changed. The Islam of these men was part of their contentment. Shafi's Islam-Islam the energizer and purifier of Malays, the destroyer of false ways and false longings-was revolutionary, serving no cause these men could understand.

It was odd for me to be regarded as an emissary of that revolution. But so I was, and after that dinner I was abandoned. Rahman telephoned the next morning to say that he had to go to the mosque at eleven and then he had a "programme" with his wife until three. He couldn't take me out anywhere, not even to a batik factory. He couldn't even take me back to the airport.

It rained. I had to stay in the hotel. The sheet of newspaper the hotel "maintenance man" taped over the air-conditioning vent didn't lessen the chill in my little room. To be warm I had to open the louvres in the bathroom, and that let the rain spatter in. The lobby was very small. Between lobby and dining-room and bedroom I divided my time until late afternoon, when I went through the floods to the airport. The sun came out for a while; then it poured again. On the runway, water fell on water, the big drops splashing high and white.

PENANG was a hop away on the west coast. The west coast was the developed coast, more colonized, with the British plantations, the factories, the energetic Chinese. It was where Anwar Ibrahim of ABIM came from, and for that reason Shafi had arranged a visit there for me. But after Kota Bharu I was uncertain. The plane that stopped at Penang went on to Kuala Lumpur, and it was tempting to go on. But I got off.

A short hop, but it was like being in another country. Penang had an international airport; there was no rain; and Abdullah, a man of thirty-four from the university, was waiting for me.

Factories with famous names, a busy town, elegant in parts. Abdullah, as he drove me in, spoke neutrally at first, feeling his way with me, but then his pa.s.sion came out: international companies, low wages, the casualness of Malays, their inability to compete, the need for Islam. Abdullah was a pale-complexioned Malay, with Caucasian features. He was not content; he was a man saddened by his pa.s.sion. Through him I met Mohammed, two years younger, more Chinese in appearance. Mohammed was a teacher; he, too, carried the Malay cross.

They took me to the E&O Hotel and left me for a while. The E&O was a grand hotel of the British time, and it was still grand. To enter its great hall was to be refreshed. My sitting-room opened onto a terrace with shrubs and palms; the sea was beyond, but I couldn't see it in the dark. And what a relief just then-sympathetic though I was to the unhappiness of Abdullah and Mohammed-to be away from Malay Malaysia and the contentment and unreliability of the folk at Kota Bharu! The constriction in my chest slackened; and in the big dining-room, where the tablecloths were crisp and the waiters were Chinese and brisk and experienced, my spirits lightened so far that I had most of a bottle of Australian Riesling.

I was still a little hazy with the wine when, punctually at ten, as they had promised, Abdullah and Mohammed came back to see me. They came to the room. I ordered tea and coffee. The Chinese room-waiter, previously friendly, even inquisitive, with me, a stranger, went blank-faced when he saw the Malays, as though he sensed what I had already gathered: that the two Malays with the handsome, melancholy faces were men with a racial and religious mission.

Momentarily I saw them-sitting in the rattan chairs-as from a distance. And after the waiter had gone, I put to Mohammed and Abdullah the thought that had come to me in the dining-room: that in an old colonial hotel like this, half desired, half rejected, a village Malay might feel that he had become a stranger in his own country.

Mohammed, the younger man, with the Chinese features, said, "You got the term."

"We feel strangers," Abdullah said.

"Did you feel like this when you were children?"

"Especially when we are brought to town," Mohammed said. "I received my primary education in the kampong. After that I was sent to school in a little town. b.u.t.terworth." He p.r.o.nounced the English name in the local way: "But 'worth." "Just across the channel from here. And already for me it was a little like feeling like a stranger." He was eleven then.

"I can still remember the first time I got to see my teachers. They were fathers and brothers, as you say. My uncle took me to the school. It was situated next to a Christian cemetery. So always next to the school is this graveyard and chapel. So there was always this atmosphere, this Christian and alien atmosphere. And of course in the morning we had to sing one of those songs."

"Hymns. Do you remember any of them now?"

"I don't remember them." But he remembered bits of the Christian religious knowledge he had been taught. "Not Islam. Islam was never taught to us. This would have been about 1957. It was the time we were about to obtain our independence. This is the background that probably led to the confusion of our youth, people of our generation. You are a Muslim and you come from a Muslim and a kampong background, and you are brought-transplanted-into that environment. That's why I think until very recently my world view was very un-Islamic."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Your idea of life in general. What do you think of man and society? What is your idea and conception of Nature? Is it part of you? Do you have to confront it, or to conquer it, or do you have to live side by side with it? And finally, what is your idea of the supernatural? Is it powerful?"

"What is your own idea of Nature? As a Muslim and a Malay."

"We'll come to that later."

"What idea of Nature would you say was being given to you at the school?"

"At that stage?" He was puzzled; yet it was he who had raised the subject. He thought for a while. "Those ideas were not absolutely Christian. It was really a mixture of Christian and secular ideas. One idea-as it was put to us at the time-was that Nature was to be exploited and conquered. Wait-that first of all, Nature was something without soul, that only by conquering Nature you can be at peace."

I thought about my own school days in Trinidad, which was also a British colony, with plantations. Had those ideas been given me?

I said to Abdullah, "Do you agree with what Mohammed is saying?"

"He got it right," Abdullah said.

"Did you feel this at the time, while you were a child? Or do you think it now?"

Mohammed said, "We realize it now that we are looking back to Islam."

"But didn't they teach you at school about Wordsworth and English nature poetry?"

"That was not the focus. That was taught only when we were in literature cla.s.s. And the qualification was that these people were all Romantics. It wasn't the essence of their thought. Because all the while the stress was how to develop the tin mines, how to cut down trees, how to build factories."

And Mohammed was right. British Malaysia, on this west coast, was a plantation and a mine. Chinese and Indians and even some Javanese were brought in to work the mines and plantations, while the Malays, unsuitable for this kind of barrack labour, stayed in their green villages beside the rivers. Those Malay villages were enchanting even now, controlled woodlands with fruit trees and shade, banana plantings, pillared timber houses with breezy inner rooms for sleeping and half-walled verandahs for chatting. Not like the regimented plantations, where rubber trees were made to grow in rows and blocks and were regularly cut down and replanted, and the labourers lived in ranges; not like the mines, or the openness of the little towns with their rows of concrete shop-houses. As a kampong child Mohammed would have been aware of two worlds, two landscapes-more than I would have been in Trinidad. But how much had he really noticed? How much had his instinctive Malay village life permitted him to see?

"What was your own idea of Nature?"

He had ducked the question before. And even now he hesitated. "At that time? I probably wouldn't have been able to say."

"But try to do it now."

"Formulate my ideas?" And with a frankness that was like Shafi's, he fell silent, trying to work out something he hadn't worked out before.

I said, to help him: "Surely the Malay idea is also to cut down the bush and plant the banana trees and the mango trees around the house and to keep the bush away. Isn't that conquering Nature?"

"I would rather put it as coexisting. That is the Malay view. There was no idea of conquering Nature as such, as the Westerners mean it today."

Abdullah said, "It is more like developing what is needed."

Mohammed said, "At the same time they take care of those that are not being used at the moment."

"Those?"

"Those natural elements. Those elements of Nature."

But now I felt that what they had begun to put forward-what they were trying to fit to a way of life without thought-were Western ideas about ecology and the environment.

And when I pressed Mohammed he said, after one or two false starts, "Currently I am still not sure what Malays have in mind with regard to man and society and supernature."

"Supernature? Do you want to use that pop word?"

"That is a word we cannot avoid if we want to understand the world view of any particular people, and in this case the Malays or the Muslims."

So I was left with only his vague feelings.

He appeared to recognize that he had been vague. He said, "I wish to add something to what I said about the tin mines. When our teachers taught us that Nature should be conquered, developed-these ideas are all in keeping with the industrial revolution."

That was the schoolboy speaking, the history student. But there was something else. I felt he was using ideas twice removed from him: ideas derived from the West which the new Islamic missionaries had taken over and simplified in their many publications: ideas about the death of the West, its spiritual failure, the waste of the world's resources.

I said, "You didn't feel any of this at school?"

He didn't answer.

Abdullah, who had been silent much of the time, answered. Abdullah said, "At least for me, when I was in school, in form five, I begin to see all these things. I mean, we do not exist by mere accident. We have a deeper meaning than that. I was trained religiously from my youngest days, because my family had a strong religious Islamic background. By the time I was seventeen this kind of feeling began to appear more within myself."

"There must have been something that started you off. Something that made you question what they were teaching you at school. Can you think of one particular thing?"

"I remember when I was doing this English literature we had a particular book. Man and G.o.d. Greek mythology. About Zeus and Ap'rodite and Milo and all these Greek G.o.ddesses. Apollo. These characters who, according to the Greeks, were G.o.ds who appeared in human form-and then indulging in all sorts of activities, no? Like rivalry, debauchery. Of course, besides the moral aspect, you know-so this is what I would find repugnant to me as a Muslim. For instance, I remember about Jupiter appearing in human form and seducing Princess-I can't remember her name. And then, apart from that, if we are studying about geography, and we have to study about land forms, say, how a volcano is formed-you would hear this and this and this. But in the religious cla.s.s we are being taught that this is being created by someone who is administering the whole universe. So I would discuss these things with my religious teacher. I also would say that I was fortunate that we came from a big family. So at home sometimes we would talk. How could it happen suddenly, this volcano, as they said in the geography cla.s.s? Surely it must be created by something."

Mohammed said, "My background was different from Abdullah's. I was probably more a Malay than a Muslim. My family was not that religious, I think, not that learned in the lore of Islam. And then I went to the mission school and the education I received there was a combination of Christian and secular." Secular was the bad word with these men: it meant worldly, atheistic, Western, non-Malay. "So when I graduated from the secondary school I was secular. In that way my life was more confused. I didn't know much about Islam. So my Islamic consciousness was less. So I began to study more when I started working as a teacher."

I said, "In what way were you confused? My background is more complicated than yours, but I am not confused. And there are many people like me. Many people in the world today have complicated backgrounds."

Mohammed said, "You are not confused after second thoughts."

I said, "After second thoughts."

He smiled. "You are not confused because you accept."

"Couldn't you accept what you were? You were a Malay who went to the mission school because it was the best school you could go to. Didn't you know who you were and what had happened to you?"

"Probably not." And he repeated, "Probably not." He thought for a little and said, "At that time I was probably not aware I was confused." After some more thought he said, "Although I say I come from a background that's not too religious, I knew I was praying and my family were all praying. And all of a sudden you are asked to sing this Christian song. Surely that must have made me confused. And another ideal which would have put me in confusion was this mingling of the s.e.xes." He had saved it for last, this big shock of the mission school. "In the school you are always with girls. You are asked to hold hands, to dance."

Mohammed was thirty-two. He was a teacher, with friends at the university. But after twenty years this violation of village taboo was still unsettling to him. And, as with Shafi at the Holiday Inn in Kuala Lumpur, it was hard for me to reconcile what was being said with the elegant man who was saying it: a man apparently at ease in a rattan chair, in a room that opened onto a terrace, with palms and shrubs and a pool, beside the sea.

He said, "We've been talking for an hour and a half. And we haven't talked about the things you said you wanted me to talk about. The restructuring of the society."

That was true. But I had preferred to stay away from that. I knew, from our short conversation earlier in the evening, that the dismantling of the society excited him more than the restructuring; that the restructuring he was interested in meant only Islam, and the abstractions of Islam. And so it turned out now. Malaysia-with its painful problems: the casualness of the Malays, the energy of the Chinese, the racial politics, the corruptions of the new money, the technological dependence of the small, uneducated country-vanished, became an abstraction itself, a land of pure belief, of total submission to Allah. In that submission everything was solved.

At midnight they had to leave. They were nervous about driving back later than that. Mohammed left two doc.u.ments for me to look at. One was an essay he had written, "Modernism Defects: The Trend of Nahdah (Renaissance) in the Muslim World." It was in the style of Islamic missionary writing. One section was headed "The Bankruptcy of the West" ("vice and l.u.s.t, alcohol and women, wild parties and tempting surroundings"); another was headed "The Perfectness of Islam." There was a logic in this. The West, which had provided Mohammed with academic learning, was open to the criticism it had trained him in. Islam, which had not provided this learning, which provided only the restoring faith, was exempt from criticism.

The second doc.u.ment Mohammed left with me was a pencilled paper he had prepared for our meeting. It was an outline of what he had said about the restructuring of Malaysia; and it was just as abstract. His "belief system" called for the worship of Allah; for the "social system" he wanted freedom, "no corruption or malpractices in departments," the protection of women and family life, "no prost.i.tution and gay quarters"; the "economic system" insisted on "moral earnings, no corruption, no gambling, exploitation of the poor and the low." But there was a sting at the end of the paper. Mohammed's last paragraph, on the "political system" of his ideal state, called for "Imam-like leadership: Khalifah is G.o.d's representative on earth." It called, in fact, for someone like Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini ruled in Iran as G.o.d's representative. It was Mohammed's wish that someone like that should rule in Malaysia. It was his only concrete proposal.

That was where his Malay and Muslim pa.s.sion, his knowledge of history, the beginning of self-awareness and intellectual life, had led him. He had no idea of reform or any ameliorative process. He didn't deal in the concrete. It was hard for him-dependent on other people's words and thoughts, fitting those thoughts to his own wordless emotions-it was hard for him to be concrete. He wished only for the world to be remade and repossessed as suddenly as (in his memory, the village boy going to the mission school beside the cemetery) it had been taken away from him. This was the promise of his Islam.

THE news from the Muslim world was not encouraging. The new century of the Islamic era-from which so much was expected by the faithful-had begun with a series of calamities. A Pakistan plane carrying pilgrims who had completed the pilgrimage had crashed after leaving Mecca airport. In Mecca itself there had been a gun battle over many days in the Great Mosque, and many people had been killed. In Pakistan, martial law had been strengthened. The elections had been called off; public whippings had been inst.i.tuted; a well-known Pakistani journalist had been arrested and photographs had shown him in chains. In Iran the American emba.s.sy had been seized by students and more than fifty Americans taken hostage, for no reason except that of drama: the Islamic revolution had turned sour, wandering, pointless.

But Mohammed and Abdullah didn't believe in bad news from the lands of the faith. Mohammed thought that the news from Pakistan meant only that the country was at last being restructured. Abdullah didn't think that the news from Iran was being correctly reported by Reuter's or a.s.sociated Press. We had talked about it earlier in the evening, and Abdullah had said, "We need our own news services."

I went back to Kuala Lumpur, to the Holiday Inn.

The woman telephone operator said on the telephone, "How are you? How's your chest? You know, you shouldn't take ice if you have asthma. And you should use bats."

"Bats?"

"Bats. B-a-t-s. It's what the kampong folk do. You get the bats. You take out the hearts, you roast it until it is crisp, really crisp, then you pound it and mix it with your coffee and drink it twice a day. It is what the kampong folk do. And it really works."

"But a bat's heart would be very small."

"Perhaps they use two or three, I don't know. But it really works."

I said to Shafi, when he came to see me to find out how the trip had gone, "But you didn't tell me about the rain at Kota Bharu. It's like telling me about Greenland without mentioning the ice."