Among The Believers Part 6

"He did. But we were not gambling."

"The man from the komiteh wouldn't have known that."

"He knew. Of course he knew."

My own sense of shock was developing. The appearance of the man in khaki had altered the journey, given irrationality to a land which, while the light lasted, I had been studying with an interest that now seemed inappropriate and absurd: trucks, roads, pylons and villages were not what they had seemed.

Behzad said, "You see what I've been telling you. The power has to belong to the people. The workers and the farmers. The upper cla.s.ses are all just wanting to show their power."

I thought that the power now did belong to the people, that what had just happened was a demonstration of that power.

I said, "Was the man from the komiteh an upper-cla.s.s man?"

"He is upper-cla.s.s. The army always serves the upper cla.s.ses. That is why I call him an upper-cla.s.s man."

We didn't argue. Neither of us wanted it; and his dialectic would have been as difficult for me as Ayatollah Shirazi's had been in Qom.

He hadn't wanted to play cards; his girl knew only the one simple game. Now they were like children forbidden to play. The cards lay on the seat between them, still not gathered up. The girl had simply dropped hers, with a gesture that was like a sigh. Her face, already closed, was hardening. I thought that it might have been easier for both of them if they had been alone together, and much easier for Behzad if I hadn't been there as an extra witness. I was nervous of his pride.

I said, "The komiteh man is not important. Forget him. You don't have to fight every battle. Fight only the important ones."

It was a calming thing to say. He said, "It isn't the cards I mind about. I'm not going to make a fuss about that. But if it comes to books-if they ask my girl why she is reading that book-" He didn't finish the sentence.

The unread booklet still lay face down on the seat. It had struck me, even when she had put it down, that she was displaying the yellow cover with the red star and the hammer and sickle, that she intended it to be noticed by people pa.s.sing in the corridor.

Still saying nothing, and with a gesture of feminine weariness, she gathered up the cards.

Behzad said, "You know what they object to, don't you? They see that my girl"-still, out of old constraints, avoiding the name-"doesn't wear the chador. That is why they want us to feel their power."

She stood up, nodded towards the corridor, and she and Behzad went out and moved away, to be alone, as I thought, and also to challenge people who mightn't approve of a veilless girl in slacks and shirt on this day sacred to Ali.

They were away for some time.

When they came back Behzad said, "The man who brought the bedding-I believe he reported us. He saw us playing cards and reported us."

He loved the people. But who, in Iran, were now the people?

Less than an hour later the girl said she wanted to go to sleep. Behzad asked me to suggest the arrangements. I suggested, thinking of her privacy, that she should sleep on one of the bunks above; that I should sleep below her; that Behzad should sleep on the lower bunk opposite mine; and that the bunk above his should be pulled down, so that there would be no reflection in the mirror.

She understood what I had said, and almost immediately began to climb up the ladder.

Behzad said, "But-"

And, following his eyes, for the first time I saw, as she stood on the lowest rung of the ladder, that her left foot was bad, that her left leg, which I had thought too restless, was shorter than her right, that her left hip was slightly shrunken.

She insisted on climbing up. And Behzad didn't sleep on the lower bunk across from mine. He slept on the upper, with his girl near to him. He wore no pyjamas; he had none or carried none in his little briefcase. He was amazingly daring, in Iran.

It had been desert and mountain late at night. In the morning there were earth-rimmed wells, irrigation channels, the mud walls of groves and gardens, people at work in the neat, rich fields; villages; the outskirts of Tehran. An attendant brought tea, served in gla.s.ses and meant to be drunk in the Persian way, through a lump of sugar held in the mouth.

Behzad hadn't slept well; he remained tormented. When we were almost in the city-air-conditioning units set into the backs of the unlikeliest houses-we saw the komiteh man in the corridor: boyish, very small, unfussed, with no apparent memory, when he looked into the compartment, of his intrusion the night before.

Behzad's girl said good-bye without seeming to see me. Through all the hours we had been together she had never looked directly at me. I let them walk ahead on the platform at the Tehran station: she small and limping, he tall and athletic, protective, slightly inclined towards her. Friends were waiting for her; they took her away from Behzad. Young people of the revolution, people carrying danger with them; but the city they had come back to was for them that day a city of calamity.

THERE had been riots over the weekend, between Muslims and people of the left, and the left had suffered badly.

A week before, when Behzad and I were driving back from Qom, we had heard on the car radio about the closing down of Ayandegan, the newspaper of the left. Leftist protests had built up during the week; and Muslim groups had begun to counterattack.

After the prayers at Tehran University on Friday-which Behzad, out of his own revolutionary emotion at the sight of the mult.i.tude, had seen as a political occasion, not a religious occasion-hundreds of Muslims had marched on the offices of Ayandegan. Thirty of the paper's press workers had refused to leave the building; now they were ejected by Revolutionary Guards. Five of the ejected Ayandegan men were injured and had to be taken to the military hospital; twenty were arrested. On Sunday, at a leftist demonstration at Tehran University, there had been serious fighting with sticks and knives; many more people had been injured. On Monday-while we were getting ready to take the train from Mashhad-Muslim groups had stormed the headquarters of Behzad's communist organization, thrown everybody out, thrown doc.u.ments out, seized all the arms-grenades, mortars, tear-gas canisters, Belgian and Russian rifles.

This was the news Behzad and his girl returned to. They heard about it-as I learned later-from the friends who had come to meet the girl. But Behzad, after his humiliation of the previous evening, told me nothing. He saw me back to the hotel and-his own obligations to me then over-left me to find the news out myself, from the Tehran Times.

Newspaper items: set language, set phrases, that left everything to the imagination. But just a little while later, when I was on my way to the Intercontinental Hotel for their buffet lunch, the news items took on an actuality that was scarcely believable.

A skysc.r.a.per, with a garden and sculpture; a side road barred by a car with a flashing roof light; men in camouflage battle dress with guns; sandbags at the corners of the skysc.r.a.per plot, with mounted machine guns. And across the busy road, the dispossessed communists, young men looking like city workers, in trousers and open shirts. A Persian battle arrangement; both sides waiting and intently watching; the life of the town flowing around, as peasants in the old days attended to their peasant tasks while the armies fought, to decide who was to rule.

That afternoon on Firdowsi Street, the street of the moneychangers, I heard a siren, and an open truck with Muslims with guns raced by, followed by a police-style car. Later, on the Avenue of the Islamic Republic, formerly Shah, the siren sounded again, and again I saw the Muslims with guns. No emergency had called them out. They were just driving fast round the town, the siren their battle horn; and they were doing it, as Behzad might have said, to show their power.

Two days later, on my last evening in Tehran, I saw Behzad for a few minutes. He was dark with sunburn. He had been standing with the dispossessed communists across the road from the sandbags and the machine gun. He was sad but calm. He had found his battle. I asked after his mother, who had come to Tehran and was staying with him. But-old constraints still-he said little about her; and he said nothing about his girl.

Such emotion, such bravery; and, unavoidably in Iran, his cause was as simple as his enemy's, and in the end really no more than a version of his enemy's. Both sides depended on revealed truth and a special reading of historical events; both required absolute faith. And both were fed by the same pa.s.sion: justice, union, vengeance.

I was going on to Pakistan. My first plan had been to go by bus, to drop down south and east in stages, through old towns with beautiful names: Isfahan, Kerman, Yazd (important to Zoroastrians, Persians of the pre-Islamic faith, long since expelled, their descendants surviving in India as Parsis, Persians), Zahedan. But Qom and Mashhad had given me enough of desert travel in midsummer; I didn't want now to run into komitehs in out-of-the-way places; and I could get no certain information about transport across the Pakistan border. I decided to go by air, straight to Karachi.

There were not many flights. The one I chose left at 7:30 in the morning, and Pakistan International Airlines said it was necessary to check in three hours before. I was on time, and I thought I had done the right thing. I was quickly through, with my little Lark bag. Half an hour later, when dawn was breaking, the queue was long and moving very slowly.

Just as, at London airport, the flight pen for Iran had been full of Iranians who had done their shopping in Europe and the United States, so now Tehran airport was full of Pakistani migrant workers who had done their shopping in Iran. They were taking back a lot: boxes, trunks, big cardboard suitcases tied with rope, brown cartons stamped with famous names, Aiwa, Akai, Toshiba, National, names of the new universal bazaar, where goods were not a.s.sociated with a particular kind of learning, effort, or civilization, but were just goods, part of the world's natural bounty.

The plane that was to leave at 7:30 didn't arrive until 10:00. We began to taxi off at 11:25 but then were halted for a further hour, while American-made Phantoms of the Iranian Air Force took off. I thought they were training. They were in fact taking off on Khomeini's orders to attack the rebel Kurds in the west. Later, in Karachi, I learned that two Phantoms had crashed, and the news was curiously sickening: such trim and deadly aircraft, so vulnerable the inadequately trained men within, half victims, yet men that morning obedient to the will of G.o.d and the Twelfth Imam and full of murder.

To Kurdistan, following the Phantoms, went Ayatollah Khalkhalli, Khomeini's Islamic judge, as close to power as he had boasted only ten days before in Qom. In no time, moving swiftly from place to place in the August heat, he had sentenced forty-five people to death. He had studied for thirty-five years and was never at a loss for an Islamic judgement. When in one Kurdish town the family of a prisoner complained that three of the prisoner's teeth had been removed and his eyes gouged out, Khalkhalli ordered a similar punishment for the torturer. Three of the man's teeth were torn out on the spot. The aggrieved family then relented, pardoned the offender, and let him keep his eyes.

It was Islamic justice, swift, personal, satisfying; it met the simple needs of the faithful. But we hadn't, in the old days, been told of this Iranian need. This particular promise of the revolution had been blurred or fudged; and we had read, mostly, Down with fascist Shah. Only Iranians, and some foreign scholars, knew that when Khomeini was a child-while the Qajar kings still ruled in Iran-Khomeini's father had been killed by a government official; that the killer had been publicly hanged; that Khomeini had been taken by his mother to the hanging and told afterwards, "Now be at peace. The wolf has attained the fruit of its evil deeds."

In his advertis.e.m.e.nt in The New York Times in January 1979, when he was still in exile in France, Khomeini had appealed to "the Christians of the world" as to people of an equal civilization. It was a different Khomeini who said in August, on Jerusalem Day (the day the Phantoms were sent against the Kurds): "The governments of the world should know that Islam cannot be defeated. Islam will be victorious in all the countries of the world, and Islam and the teachings of the Koran will prevail all over the world."

That couldn't have been said to the readers of The New York Times. Nor could this, spoken on the last Friday of Ramadan (and a good example of the medieval "logic and rhetoric" taught at Qom-certain key words repeated, used in varying combinations, and finally twisted): "When democrats talk about freedom they are inspired by the superpowers. They want to lead our youth to places of corruption.... If that is what they want, then yes, we are reactionaries. You who want prost.i.tution and freedom in every matter are intellectuals. You consider corrupt morality as freedom, prost.i.tution as freedom.... Those who want freedom want the freedom to have bars, brothels, casinos, opium. But we want our youth to carve out a new period in history. We do not want intellectuals."

It was his call to the faithful, the people Behzad had described as lumpen. He required only faith. But he also knew the value of Iran's oil to countries that lived by machines, and he could send the Phantoms and the tanks against the Kurds. Interpreter of G.o.d's will, leader of the faithful, he expressed all the confusion of his people and made it appear like glory, like the familiar faith: the confusion of a people of high medieval culture awakening to oil and money, a sense of power and violation, and a knowledge of a great new encircling civilization. That civilization couldn't be mastered. It was to be rejected; at the same time it was to be depended on.

II.

PAKISTAN.

THE SALT HILLS.

OF A DREAM.

GONZALO Had I plantation of this isle, my lord,- ANTONIO He'd sow't with nettle-seed.

SEBASTIAN Or docks, or mallows.

GONZALO And were the king on't, what would I do?- SEBASTIAN Scape being drunk for want of wine.

GONZALO I' the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too,-but innocent and pure; No sovereignty,- SEBASTIAN Yet he would be king on't.

ANTONIO The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning.

The Tempest

1.

Displacements

The rule of Ali had come to Iran: the Iranian state was disintegrating. The outsider could make the connection. But the man of faith could juggle with these great events and keep one separate from the other; and even while he prepared to run he could continue to rejoice at the victory for Islam. Pakistan could be contemplated in the same way. It could be seen as a fragmented country, economically stagnant, despotically ruled, with its gifted people close to hysteria. But Pakistan was also the country that had been founded more than thirty years before as a homeland for the Muslims of India, and for that reason was to be cherished as a pioneer of the Islamic revival.

An article in the Tehran Times linked the two countries. "The history of Pakistan and the Islamic Revolution in Iran is a reminder of the power of religion and the hollowness of secular cults. How the world works is the concern of science, and how society is to be governed is the affair of politicians, but what the whole thing means is the main concern of Iran and Pakistan. Politics is combined with religion in Islam. Iran and Pakistan can join hands to prove to the world that Islam is not just a faith of the past, practising ancient rituals."

It was the logic of the faith. The writer acknowledged, and dismissed, what was lacking in both countries-science, the ability to run a twentieth-century state; and then by a kind of intellectual wipe, a verbal blur ("what the whole thing means"), he offered the honouring of the faith as an achievement that overrode everything else. To do that-and without irony to present chaos as its opposite ("a reminder of the power of religion and the hollowness of secular cults")-the writer had to leave out a lot.

He had referred to "the history of Pakistan." But he hadn't gone into that history, and he had ignored its nature: the uprootings and ma.s.s migrations after the state had been founded in 1947; the absence of representative government; the land of the faith turning into a land of plunder; the growth of regionalisms; rule by the army in 1958; the b.l.o.o.d.y secession of far-off Bangladesh in 1971. There was no hint in the article that the army ruled once again in Pakistan, that there was martial law once again; no hint that Mr. Bhutto, the country's only elected prime minister, deposed by the army in 1977, arrested on a murder charge, tried, and sentenced to death, had been hanged after nineteen months in jail; no hint that this hanging, just four months old, had shocked, demoralized, and further divided the country.

All this history, all this secular failure and pain, had been conjured away by the logic of the faith.

THE desert of Iran ran into the desert of Pakistan. From thirty thousand feet up the wastes of Iranian and Pakistani Baluchistan showed brown and black, but pale, more glare than colour.

There was some natural gas in Baluchistan, but the desert of Pakistan was without oil. Iran was a land of oil and money; here desert was desert. Iran, with a population of thirty-five million, earned seventy million dollars a day from its oil; Pakistan, with twice the population, earned one hundred forty millions a month from its exports of rice, leather, and cotton. Iran had just won, in an American federal court, a repayment of thirty million dollars from the American Bell International company; Pakistan, in a year, could spend only twenty million dollars on the roads of Sind Province, which was vast. Iran could write off billions in military equipment-oil turned to money to water; here it was news that Pakistan was approaching Iran for a loan of one hundred fifty million dollars.

Here-the world dwindling and dwindling-it was news that one hundred forty thousand dollars had been granted to thirty Pakistani sports organizations. A bigger country than Iran, but a dwarf economy, and this was reflected in the newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nts, which were for insurance, tropical clothes, TV sets, a cotton pesticide (made in collaboration with the British firm of May and Baker), cement, a voltage stabilizer, bra.s.s and copper triangles and rods, a cosmetic soap, a brand of razor blade.

Sophisticated administrative forms, surviving in a dwarf economy, could at times suggest a people at play. In Dawn, the leading English-language newspaper of Karachi, there was a double-column, four-inch tender advertis.e.m.e.nt from the Defence Science and Technology Organization (HQ), Ministry of Defence, for the supply of one refrigerator and four cupboards ("wooden with gla.s.s panel doors fitted with hinges").

Eight inches were given in that paper to the announcement of a government "skill development plan for youths." What was that plan? The government was giving two thousand rupees, two hundred dollars, to a thousand village schools to buy worktables and hand tools. Eight inches for that? How? Like this: "... The training programme will be adjusted to the immediate needs of the local community and matched with the interest of the learners in order to derive maximum benefit out of this programme. The Government officials explained that this programme will be based on modular concepts consisting of well-defined community-oriented skills...."

When money was short, language took up the slack. Farm mechanisation being stepped up: that was the rea.s.suring headline in Dawn. This was the story: "Agriculture mechanisation programme is being stepped up in Sind province by deploying more machinery in the fields for their development, it was learnt here yesterday...."

But then it was less funny to read the advertis.e.m.e.nts for workers, at two hundred dollars a month, in Saudi Arabia. "Candidates will be employed on single status basis regardless of their actual marital status. Bachelor air-conditioned accommodation on a double occupancy basis equipped with necessary items of furniture and communal cooking and toilet facilities will be provided against deduction of appropriate rental charges." It was on foreign earnings like this, as much as on its exports of rice, leather, and cotton, that Pakistan lived.

And yet there was also news of a Pakistan-manufactured "Islamic" nuclear bomb; and there was a long article on the editorial page about opposition to this bomb by "International Zionism." Pakistan was poor; but it was a land of the faith, with the obsessions of the faith. Indira gets money from Israel for KGB information: this was a story from Dawn's London correspondent. The KGB had pa.s.sed on some information to Mrs. Gandhi when she was prime minister of India, and she had pa.s.sed on the information to Moshe Dayan, foreign minister of Israel, and he had given her six million dollars. The source for this story was said to be an unpublished book by a Ugandan diplomat (Uganda, under Amin, having been part of the Muslim world).

Away from this Jewish-Indian-Russian underhandedness, pious Pakistanis were preparing for the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Pan-Islamic Steamship Company had arranged twelve sailings to the Arabian pilgrim port of Jeddah ($280 for the "deck cla.s.s" return fare, including $26 for food; $420 first cla.s.s, including $57 for food); and General Zia, the president and chief martial-law administrator, had decreed that each pilgrim ship should be seen off by a different provincial governor or federal minister. General Zia himself was going quietly by air in a day or so to Arabia, to perform his own devotions without fuss (and he was to return with a modest Saudi loan of a hundred million dollars).

Off stage there were rumblings that were like a continuation of events in Iran. Various people in Pakistan were calling for stricter Islamic laws, and at the University of Karachi there had been a gunfight with Sten guns between students of the left and right-words that have to be defined in every country and here meant, on the right, people who were against Mr. Bhutto and were using Islam to discredit him, and, on the left, people who grieved for Mr. Bhutto and longed to pull down his enemies.

In Iran you felt, in spite of all that was said about the wickedness of the Shah, that the money had gone down far. Money, and the foreign goods and tools that it bought, gave an illusion of Islamic power. Seventy million unearned dollars a day kept the idle country on the boil, and fed the idea of the revolution. In Pakistan poverty had the same effect. The tensions of poverty and political distress merged with the tensions of the faith. Thirty-two years after its founding as a religious state, an Indian Muslim homeland, Pakistan remained on the boil, and Islam was still an issue: failure led back again and again to the a.s.sertion of the faith.

THE idea of a separate Indian Muslim state, once it had been formulated, couldn't have been resisted. The idea was put forward in 1930 by a revered poet, Sir Mohammed Iqbal (1876a1938), in a speech to the All-Indian Muslim League, the main Muslim political organization in undivided India.

Iqbal's argument was like this. Islam is not only an ethical ideal; it is also "a certain kind of polity." Religion for a Muslim is not a matter of private conscience or private practice, as Christianity can be for the man in Europe. There never was, Iqbal says, a specifically Christian polity; and in Europe after Luther the "universal ethics of Jesus" was "displaced by national systems of ethics and polity." There cannot be a Luther in Islam because there is no Islamic church-order for a Muslim to revolt against. And there is also to be considered "the nature of the Holy Prophet's religious experience, as disclosed in the Koran ... It is individual experience creative of a social order."

To accept Islam is to accept certain "legal concepts." These concepts-revelatory, but not to be belittled for that reason-have "civic significance." "The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim."

Iqbal, in fact, is saying in a philosophical way that in an undivided India Islam will be in danger, will go the way of Christianity in Europe and cease to be itself. Muslims, to be true to Islam, need a Muslim polity, a Muslim state. The Muslims of India especially need such a state, Iqbal suggests; because "India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best." And Iqbal's solution was simple: the Muslim-majority areas of northwest India should be detached and consolidated into a single Muslim state.

Seventeen years later (and nine years after Iqbal's death) it happened-and to the Muslim-majority northwest was added the Muslim-majority eastern half of Bengal, a thousand miles away. But that Muslim state came with a communal holocaust on both sides of the new borders. Millions were killed and many millions more uprooted. And it was only afterwards that it became clear that that plan for the creation of Pakistan, apparently logical, meeting Muslim needs, had a simple, terrible flaw.

Muslim pa.s.sions were strongest among those Muslims who felt most threatened, and they were in that part of the subcontinent which was to remain Indian. Not all of those Muslims, not a half, not a quarter, could migrate to Pakistan. The most experienced Muslim political organizations were rooted in Indian India rather than in Pakistan. Indian Muslim politicians, campaigners for Pakistan, who went to Pakistan became men who overnight had lost their const.i.tuencies. They became men of dwindling appeal and reputation, men without a cause, and they were not willing to risk elections in what had turned out to be a strange country. Political life didn't develop in the new state; inst.i.tutions and administration remained as they were in British days.

A special word began to be used in Pakistan for the migrants from India: mohajirs, foreigners. In the province of Sind, especially, where Karachi became a mohajir city, local resentment built up into separatist feeling.

In the new state only the armed forces flourished. They were seen at first as the defenders, and possible extenders, of the Islamic state. Then it became apparent that they were the state's only organized group. They became masters, a country within a country. The armed forces were mainly of the northwest, with the cultural prejudices of the northwest; in time they forced the eastern wing of Pakistan into secession as Bangladesh. It was Pakistan's luck then to get a national leader in Mr. Bhutto, a man of Sind and the country's first native leader, as it were. He was a populist; he ruled despotically for nearly six years. Then he was deposed by the army and hanged, and the fragmented country was further riven.

Calamity was added to calamity. The Bengali Muslims had Bangladesh; the people of West Pakistan had Pakistan. The Bihari Muslims had nothing. They had migrated from Bihar in eastern India to Pakistani Bengal. But by language and culture they were closer to the Muslims of the West. When Bangladesh became independent they were wanted neither by Bangladesh nor by Pakistan, and they became a lost community, cast into limbo by their dream of the Muslim polity.

The state withered. But faith didn't. Failure only led back to the faith. The state had been founded as a homeland for Muslims. If the state failed, it wasn't because the dream was flawed, or the faith flawed; it could only be because men had failed the faith. A purer and purer faith began to be called for. And in that quest for the Islamic absolute-the society of believers, where every action was instinct with worship-men lost sight of the political origins of their state. They forgot the secular ambitions of Mr. Jinnah, the state's political founder, who (less philosophical than Iqbal) wanted only a state where Muslims wouldn't be swamped by non-Muslims. Even Iqbal was laid aside. Extraordinary claims began to be made for Pakistan: it was founded as the land of the pure; it was to be the first truly Islamic state since the days of the Prophet and his close companions.

At the end of my time in Pakistan I met a middle-aged man, a civil servant and a poet. He had sought me out to give me his books. But the condition of his country was closer to him than poetry now. It was of Pakistan that he spoke, with an unfocussed rage that took him almost to tears.