Among The Believers Part 8

So I had read the wrong papers?

"People talk about these things," Mr. Deen said, with the weariness of a hara.s.sed official. "But the people who talk expect other people to do the work."

There was an Islamic Ideology Council that met ten days a month; but that was in Islamabad, the capital, far to the north. Mr. Deen didn't know what he could do for me in Karachi. He was in his mid-fifties; he wore grey trousers and a white shirt, and the striped tie hanging on the wall behind him might, in another country, have been a club tie of some sort.

Mr. Sherwani, a colleague, came in. He was heavy, looser in flesh than Mr. Deen; his skin was smooth, and he was wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt. Mr. Deen explained what I was after, and Mr. Sherwani looked hard at me. He said to Mr. Deen in Urdu, "But he looks just like Qutub. When I came in the room I thought, 'But it is Qutub.' " Mr. Deen looked at me with a new interest and said with sad affection that yes, I looked like Qutub. Qutub, they told me, was a Pakistani painter.

Mr. Sherwani said, "How old are you?"

I said, "Forty-seven."

"I am forty-eight. And I am healthier than you. No, you can't deny it. Your eyes are tired. They are the eyes of an old man. That indicates a vitamin deficiency."

Mr. Deen said, "He wants to see Islam in action."

I thought Mr. Deen put it well.

Mr. Sherwani said, "He should read the Koran. Marmaduke Pickthall-that's the best translation for you."

"It's more an interpretation," Mr. Deen said.

Mr. Sherwani said, "You must know the philosophy."

I clung to Mr. Deen's good words. I said, "I want to see Islam in action."

Mr. Sherwani said that many people said they were Muslims, but there were very few true Muslims. Islam was a complete way of life and for that reason was too hard for most people. I mentioned Iran; Mr. Sherwani said with immense, fatherly tolerance that the Shias of Iran were a deviation.

A man came into the office with some photographs. Mr. Deen, withdrawing from the conversation, looked at the photographs and began to be vehement with the man who had brought them.

Mr. Sherwani-ignoring the row at the desk, and the running scooter outside-asked whether I had any religious faith. I said I hadn't, and to my surprise he was delighted. He said it meant I wasn't prejudiced; it was important, in studying Islam, not to be prejudiced.

The man who had brought the photographs left the office, and Mr. Deen followed him out.

Mr. Sherwani said to me, "A man like you-I am going to make a prophecy about you. When you have finished your investigations you will become a Muslim."

Mr. Deen came back and Mr. Sherwani said to him, "I've just been telling him: he is going to become a Muslim."

Mr. Deen, his handsome face still full of the cares of his office, smiled at me. And then he and Mr. Sherwani began to discuss what could be done for me. I heard "Ideology Council" a few times. I felt I was imposing on both of them, taking up their time with a nonofficial matter. But Mr. Deen said, "It makes a change from what journalists here usually want us to do for them." And so the two of them talked on. How could they demonstrate Islam to a visitor?

Pilgrims, they decided. In the morning another pilgrim ship was going to Jeddah. Officers from the department would be going to cover the event, and I could go with them. Mr. Sherwani thought it a very good idea: unless I saw and talked to the pilgrims going to Mecca I wouldn't understand the depth of their faith. And mosques, they decided. I should visit the mosques of Karachi that evening. No evening could be better, Mr. Sherwani said; because this was the night in Ramadan when in 610 A.D. the Prophet received his first revelation; prayers offered on this night were worth a thousand times more than on other nights. In Shia Iran, Ramadan was a month of mourning, full of the calamities of the Shia heroes who had failed to be recognized as the Prophet's successors. For the Sunni Muslims of Pakistan, Ramadan was a happier month, the month of the revelation and the foundation of the religion.

So that was the programme, then: the mosques in the evening with Mr. Sherwani, and the docks and the Mecca-bound pilgrims in the morning.

Mr. Sherwani said to me, "I will tell you a story. Listen. An English lord had two sons. They started just like you. They thought they would travel and find out about Islam. So they travelled. They went to Ajmer in India, to the famous Muslim shrine there, and they began to study with a Muslim teacher. The teacher had two daughters. The two sons of the English lord became Muslims and married the two daughters of the teacher. When you become a Muslim you will remember this story."

English lords, double marriages, Arabian kings with five hundred servants for one month: in Karachi-already with camels, dwarfs, and Africans-the Arabian Nights came easily.

Mr. Deen gave me a lift in the office van back to the hotel. Mr. Deen came from India; he had migrated from Delhi just after the part.i.tion. He had had many opportunities, official and unofficial, of seeing Delhi again. But for a reason he couldn't explain he had preferred not to. He had left India; the past was over; the wound was not to be reopened.

In the evening Mr. Sherwani came for me with a junior colleague from Information, and we went in the office van to some of the mosques of Karachi. The junior colleague was silent; Mr. Sherwani did the talking, and I felt that for him it was a good way of easing himself into the long night of prayer: going from mosque to mosque, and in between talking of the faith to someone who had volunteered to listen.

The mosques were crowded, and lit up. Fluorescent tubes were used decoratively, sticks of blue-white glitter; and strings of coloured bulbs were hung over walls like illuminated carpets. Breathless recitations in Arabic from the Koran-some of the mullahs showing off how well they knew the book, how fast they could recite, how little they needed to draw breath-were followed by expositions in Urdu. And at every mosque, like a bee sipping from every flower, Mr. Sherwani prayed and, whenever the opportunity offered, joined in the responses of the congregation.

In the mosques in the better-off areas there was a feeling that men were separate, engaged in private devotions. In the poorer areas there was a feeling of community. At one mosque in a poor area sweets were distributed while the mullah chanted, and children so besieged the distributor of sweets that he seemed to lose the use of his legs and to be propelled about the courtyard, holding aloft his cardboard box, by the busy little legs of many children, like a dead c.o.c.kroach being carried off, as though on hidden wheels, by ants. The scrimmage didn't affect the sanct.i.ty of the occasion; the occasion was also a communal one, and the children and the sweets were part of it.

Islam was each man's salvation; it was also the faith itself, the Prophet's story; it was also the community, st.i.tched together by innumerable communal acts and occasions. Unity, faith and discipline: that was the theme of Islam, Mr. Sherwani told me, and it was only later that I learned that he had borrowed the words from Mr. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Something else underlay the feeling of community: anxiety about the hereafter. It was important, it was fundamental, it locked all the components of faith together: the anxiety whether, on doomsday, one was going to torment or to bliss. Mr. Sherwani said that by his own pious exercises he had been given the merest glimpse of the hereafter; the truly pious could see further.

Mr. Sherwani was steadily losing his joviality, his wish to explain. The prayers were holding him more and more; and soon, like a man who grudged the time, he took me back to the hotel and hurried away. On this night of revelation, when prayers were so precious, Mr. Sherwani intended to pray right through until the morning fast began. To be a devout Muslim was always to have distinctive things to do; it was to be guided constantly by rules; it was to live in a fever of the faith and always to be aware of the distinctiveness of the faith.

But the world was going on. Another revelation was being prepared that night, and in the morning it burst on us, in a big front-page story in the government paper, the Morning News: PLOT TO MAKE PAKISTAN A FOREIGN STOOGE-Ben.a.z.ir's bid to arrange US-backed coup-Photostat copy of letter to Murtaza released.

What was reproduced, in six full columns of the paper, were letters from Mr. Bhutto's daughter, Ben.a.z.ir, to her brother in London. They were written from that house the taxi driver had shown me; one letter had been written nine days before the hanging of Mr. Bhutto, another four days before the hanging. They were family letters, and it was a violation to expose them; they were suggestions-in the circ.u.mstances, extraordinarily lucid-from a sister to a brother about what might be done in the way of pet.i.tions and pressure to save their father. The burden of the Morning News story was that, in return for American help in saving her father, Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto was offering to give up the Pakistan nuclear programme. The handwritten letters were presented as evidence; but they were poorly reproduced and no transcription was given. And, in fact, the newspaper story was a fabrication.

It was the other side of the life of faith. The faith was full of rules. In politics there were none. There were no political rules because the faith was meant to create only believers; the faith could not acknowledge secular a.s.sociations or divisions. For everyone in open political life Islam was cause, tool, and absolution. It could lead to this worldly virulence.

MR. Sherwani must have had enough of me; or perhaps more official duties had claimed him. I found, when I went to Mr. Deen's office in the morning, that another officer was to go with me to the docks to see the pilgrims leave for Mecca.

The officer was a young woman in a green sari. She was slender, almost thin, and her English was precise. She had, unusually, taken a degree in journalism at the University of Karachi. Afterwards she had pa.s.sed the examination for the Pakistan civil service; and after that there had been an eight-month civil-service course. She hadn't chosen Information; she had been allotted to the department, and she found it frustrating. In Information she just had to do whatever she was given to do; it wasn't good enough for someone who had done a degree in journalism and wished to do proper writing.

She said all this quite openly in Mr. Deen's office, and she wasn't speaking to impress me or Mr. Deen. She was as unhappy and tense as her thinness suggested; and I wondered why-as important as the federal civil service was in Pakistan-she kept on with the job. I asked what her husband did. She said all her family were service people, army people, and her husband, too, used to be in the service. Used? Yes; her husband was dead. "He expired in a helicopter crash."

Her husband's family gave some financial help now, but she did the job because she needed the money, especially for the education of her children. She was educating them in English as well as in Urdu, because in foreign countries-and she meant Saudi Arabia and the Muslim countries-you couldn't get a job unless you spoke English.

So, already, she was training her children to leave Pakistan, to become emigrants?

She said, "I have to. We are a minority. We are non-Muslims."

She was wearing a sari. Did that mean she was a Hindu or a Parsi?

Before I could ask, she said, "We believe in the Prophet. But three years ago we were declared non-Muslims by the government. We are Ahmadis."

"But why did they declare you non-Muslims? What were the pressures on them?"

"You must ask Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto. Ben.a.z.ir will tell you why her father declared us non-Muslims. He was very friendly with us, and then he went and did that."

The sect began, she said, with a man called Ahmad, who was born in northern India in the last century. In 1906 (she was wrong about the date; it was 1890; but I learned that some weeks later) he came to the realization, by many signs given him, that he was the Mahdi or the Promised Messiah. He was a pious man; he fought the conviction, but in the end couldn't resist it. There were Muslims who believed that the Messiah wasn't going to come until doomsday; but another interpretation of the prophecy was that the Messiah would appear when Islam had degenerated, and in 1906 Islam had degenerated.

I said, "So you are like the Bahais of Iran? They believe that the Hidden Imam or someone like him appeared in the last century."

But she had never heard of the Bahais.

She was an Ahmadi convert. And the Ahmadis themselves, she told me, were divided. Some-like herself-believed in the successor to the Messiah; others didn't.

But how had she, a Muslim, come to accept this idea of the Messiah? The idea was hateful to Muslims. Muslims believed that Mohammed was the final Prophet; this idea of the Indian Messiah came close to denying that finality, and therefore came close to denying something fundamental about the Prophet. As a Muslim, she would at one time have felt horror at the idea. How had she managed to make the jump?

Well, she said, her parentage was mixed. She was Shia on one side, orthodox Sunni on the other. So she was ready, it might be said, for heterodox belief. And-she had married an Ahmadi. It was necessary therefore for her to become one. Heresy, then, was something that had been given to her, something she had seen approaching and had deliberately embraced. Her husband had talked to her, instructed her; and she was now so convinced a believer that she spoke of the Messiah, Ahmad, with a little tremor: the good man, the pious man who had had Messiah-hood forced on him, and couldn't deny the many signs of G.o.d.

The heresy-to which only Muslims could fully respond-now ruled her life; it might even take her out of the Muslim homeland. A government office with flaking distemper and shaky furniture: a girl in a green sari with a degree in journalism from the University of Karachi, a woman civil servant in a Muslim country: that was arresting enough. But just below appearances in Karachi, below what was easily graspable, was the faith, and the fever of the faith, which took many forms, and nearly always gave a phantasmagoric quality to an encounter.

Phantasmagoria continued. I went out to the corridor to wait for the girl in the green sari. And I was so full of what I had just heard, and so confidently expecting to go with her at some stage to the pilgrim docks, that I paid insufficient attention to where I was being led by men who spoke no English, failed to see that I had been separated from her, missed the point of a short van ride, failed to see that I was being taken to another department and another office, and found myself at the end in a big enclosed room, a much grander office than Mr. Deen's, where an elderly man faced two or three other men across a crowded desk, and I was made to sit in a corner, in the draught of an air-conditioning unit, on a chair of a sofa set which was upholstered in PVC rather than Mr. Deen's simple cotton.

This was Ahmed's office (another Ahmed, not Ahmad, the long-dead visionary I had been hearing about). There was a shelf at the side of his desk with five telephones, and even Ahmed had trouble telling which one was ringing. By some bureaucratic intermeshing which I was in no position to follow, the Ahmed of this office had taken me over. Mr. Deen and Mr. Sherwani, hara.s.sed men, had quietly surrendered me-and with them had gone the Ahmadi girl in the green sari.

And it was with two men from Ahmed's office that I went to the docks. But their English was not good; they preferred to talk among themselves in Urdu; at the docks they were so taken up with their departmental duties, and so awed by the high official nature of the pilgrim send-off (the governor of Baluchistan was to attend), that I saw the whole scene without language, as it were, and as from a distance: the white ship that turned out to be British-built, old, and grubby where not painted white; bunks and bundles in the packed hold, elderly men and women at once like refugees and pilgrims, penitential and expectant; rubbish already being swept up into little piles; on the narrow upper deck, some old men-indifferent to the fussed officials, and piling piety upon piety-doing their ritual wash before prayer, devotion in Islam always also a correct and rea.s.suring physical deed.

General Rahimuddin, the governor of Baluchistan, arrived. On the wharf the bagpipe band, in tartans, paraded and skirled: the inherited British military style, appropriate to a general with a peaked cap, dark gla.s.ses, stars, and baton, imposed on this pilgrimage to Mecca, a pilgrimage older than Islam, rooted in old Arabian tribal worship, and incorporated by the Prophet into the practices of Islam: layer upon layer of history here.

A port official made a speech, and loudspeakers took his words to all parts of the ship and also to the wharf below, where, outside the canopied, festive-looking enclosure with the pipers and soldiers, a small crowd of workmen had gathered. The general made a slightly longer speech. The official farewell to the pilgrims, as ordered by the president, was then over (the government hand-out made nine inches in Dawn two days later); and I was taken back to Ahmed's dark, air-conditioned office.

I never saw Mr. Deen or Mr. Sherwani again. I never saw the girl or widow in the green sari again. I was nagged by her story. But her Ahmadi sect was outlawed, held in horror by many; and it was only at the end of my time in Pakistan that I was able to learn more about them.

Ahmed took me over. His interest in me in the morning might have been an official interest-there was martial law in Pakistan, and a nervousness about foreigners and Pakistan's nuclear programme-but that changed almost as soon as I had been taken to his office. Sitting at his desk, facing his subordinates, he had looked at me carefully; and I had pa.s.sed his scrutiny.

It would have been reported to him that there was a visitor asking about Islamic inst.i.tutions. A strange story; but when he found it to be true he became more than interested. There was a reason. Ahmed, who was in his late fifties, was a penitent. By his own account he had lived loosely as a young man, and was still teased by the flesh. He had come late to religion and was now consumed by it. He was awed by his own faith. He wished not only to talk about it, like Mr. Sherwani; I believe he also wanted to have a witness to it, someone from the other side, the side he had left behind.

He was well built, erect and energetic, and still attractive, dark, hook-nosed, with a full, curved lower lip. He was a man of Sind, and he said (perhaps over-romantically) that he belonged to the original, pre-Aryan race of Sind, the builders of the great cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, the creators of the Indus Valley civilization that the migrating Aryans had overrun in 1500 B.C. Most people in Pakistan, he said, behaved as though the world had begun in 1947, when Pakistan was created. With his Sind ancestry, he had another view of history.

And a feeling for history was at the back of his feeling for Islam. It was the world's youngest great religion and, being the youngest, was the most evolved. He didn't condemn the religions of the past; he saw them as stages in man's spiritual development. Consider the revealed religions. Moses, he said, was all law; that was too harsh. Jesus was all compa.s.sion. Ahmed said, "In a world where there are people like Africans and Negroes, that doesn't make sense. If you turn the other cheek to a primitive fellow, it annoys him." The beauty of Islam lay in its mixture of law and compa.s.sion. To see Islam at its best, to understand the charity of which it was capable, I should go to some of the old shrines in the interior of Sind-he would arrange it. There was one place, connected with a Muslim saint and mystic, that he especially wanted me to visit. There I would see a brotherhood, among them professional men, who had renounced the world to live in the desert and to serve and feed the poor.

That was how, that afternoon, in one gulp, as it were, in one excited outpouring, Ahmed outlined his faith, his att.i.tudes, and his plans for me. He drove me back to the Intercontinental and we talked in the parking lot until just before sunset. At the end, with a tenderness for which I wasn't prepared, he pressed his forefinger to the middle of my forehead. He said, "That is where it gets you. If you were a businessman you would get blood pressure. You're an intellectual. You are concerned with the truth. So it gets you there, in the eyes. You must rest your eyes. You must look at green things."

My eyes again! And what happened the next morning was that a lens fell out of my gla.s.ses and broke on the tiled floor of my room. So the first service Ahmed had to do for me was to take me to an oculist.

Our friendship was sudden, but I felt it as real; and while it lasted I leaned on it. My search for Islamic inst.i.tutions and experiments-the search that had brought me to Ahmed-was still going on; and Ahmed was the rational man to whom I returned after venturing into other men's Islams.

MR. Mirza had been represented to me as one of the most distinguished men of Pakistan, one of the country's profoundest minds, and someone who would tell me all I wanted to know about the Islamization of inst.i.tutions. But the man who told me that about Mr. Mirza, and arranged the meeting, was one of Mr. Mirza's lesser relations. And it was as a kind of family suppliant that I was received by the great man in his air-conditioned office, and addressed (when my turn came) as though I were a prayer meeting.

There were many books in the room, faded English political books of the 1930s and 1940s, indicating a time spent as a student in England. Two young men, attentive, leaning forward, bright-eyed, were seated in front of Mr. Mirza's desk, and Mr. Mirza said gently that he was exchanging a few words with "young colleagues." I thought the young men were just that, but it was only part of the great man's public humility. The young men, like myself, had been brought to receive wisdom.

And there was no exchange of words: a low, even, unceasing, uninterrupted babble poured out of Mr. Mirza. We were living in a satanic time; people were not interested in the truth; university professors were not interested in the truth. We had a lot of information now, but too much information was as bad as too little information. No one could foretell the future; the "imponderables" were too many; the Tolstoyan view of history was correct. Was Mr. Mirza the only one interested in truth? Where was all this leading? It was leading back to the satanic nature of the age, to the need for Islamic belief.

The young men stood up, dazed with pleasure, and Mr. Mirza, with extra gentleness, offered them a good-bye like a benediction. And then I began to get my dose. No Tolstoy for me, though; I got an obscure Arab. "An Arab scholar of the tenth century-he was perhaps the greatest of the Arab philosopher-scholars of the Abbasid period-he died in 1011, so his writing falls at the turn of the century and belongs more to the tenth century rather than the eleventh-he says that prophets are not like other men."

But I hadn't come to hear that from Mr. Mirza. I had come to find out about the applications of Islam to inst.i.tutions, to government, to law.

"Let me finish," Mr. Mirza said; he couldn't bear to be interrupted. And he went on. Prophets were the ones through whom G.o.d expressed his will; Islam was dedicated to the idea that the time would come when prophets would cease to be necessary.

Where had that got us, or Pakistan? It had got us to this point: that the law and inst.i.tutions of Pakistan, as they were, were not divine. In spite of his reputation and his books, Mr. Mirza had not thought beyond that point. His education was part of his vanity; but he was like the simplest mullah. And in fact, as an Islamizer as pure as any, Mr. Mirza had political ambitions. With the disappearance of Mr. Bhutto and the suppression of Mr. Bhutto's party, with an Islamizing military government, Mr. Mirza was hoping to be lifted to the heights.

I said I was going. Mr. Mirza was disappointed; he had more to say to me. He offered me his car. I accepted. Waiting for the car, he attempted to organize his own interview. He said, "I suppose you are thinking that I should be in a monastery and shouldn't be in business."

"I am not thinking that."

"But in Islam, you see, there is no separation. It's a complete way of life."

He took out some prayer beads and began clacking them, muttering. I looked past his left ear and then past his right ear. Clack-clack, went the beads, and he said, "I am G.o.d-intoxicated." I looked over his left shoulder and then over his right shoulder. Clack-clack, went the beads; and I let him mutter on until the car came.

MR. Salahuddin the newspaper editor had the reputation of being an Islamic "hard-liner," like Mr. Mirza. But he was without Mr. Mirza's mystical or intellectual bent, and I preferred his directness.

In Pakistan, with its 15 percent literacy, newspaper circulations were low. The English-language Dawn (a journalist from the rival Morning News told me) had a circulation of thirty thousand; the Morning News itself, having dropped to four thousand in Mr. Bhutto's time, had bounced up again and was now ticking away quite nicely at ten thousand. So Mr. Salahuddin, editing an Urdu-language paper with a circulation of thirty-five thousand, was a power in the land. The editorial a.s.sistant who met me told me that Mr. Salahuddin had spent three years in jail in Mr. Bhutto's time. Mr. Salahuddin, the a.s.sistant said, was a man of principle.

The office was at the top of a newish concrete building of four or five storeys in central Karachi. A broken, b.u.mpy dirt road off a bazaar street; black-skinned children playing soccer; a human derelict of some sort left out in the sun in a home-made box cart. A rubbled, uneven yard, a lift door opening directly onto the yard. Odd that lift, being just there, slightly surreal.

But it worked. And at the top of the building, in the verandah, as in a parody of a waiting-room (and a continuation of the modern urban parody of the street), there were three cane-bottomed chairs, all without bottoms. The rooms were divided by half-part.i.tions into little cubicles, one leading into another. Doors on either side of the editor's cell opened into offices, in one of which the calligraphers were at work, penning out edited copy onto transparent slips that were later to be offset. Flies buzzed on the panes of the small windows; there was a pencil drawing of Mr. Jinnah on the wall.

Mr. Salahuddin was a small man in his early forties. He had a grey-streaked spade beard, a precise mouth, and bright black eyes. I tried to think of him in jail: I thought that jail would not diminish his fire. He was born in India and had come to Pakistan when he was twelve.

Muslims were free to worship in India, he said; it wasn't just for the freedom of worship that Pakistan was established. Pakistan was meant to be an Islamic state, run on Islamic principles. What did that mean? Had there been such a state? He said, "The state that existed for thirty-two years at the time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs."

So there it was again-the dream not only of the early Islamic state, the creation of the Prophet, but also of the time when Muslims were rightly guided, divinely ruled: a fusion of history and theology, the indestructible alloy of the faith. That pure time could come again; Muslims could live in such purity again. They had only to follow the rules. The rules were there; they could be found in the holy book and the traditions. The many rules of Islam were not handed down for the sake of G.o.d, Mr. Salahuddin said; they were for the good of people. Freedom came with obedience; the rules made men free.

And-in his office in Karachi, with men coming in all the time on newspaper business, some of them with bundles of rupees, and with the calligraphers at their long desks in the next room preparing their copy for the press-that was Mr. Salahuddin's cause: the Islamic state, and its special freedom. He had gone to jail in Mr. Bhutto's time; I felt he was ready to go to jail again.

He gave me some booklets to take away. Some were old-fashioned: reissues, I felt, of Muslim missionary publications first put out in the days of European colonialism, when Islam, impoverished and politically null, needed all the European support it could get.

The Koran and Modern Science, by a Frenchman, showed that the Prophet had antic.i.p.ated many modern European ideas. Islam-the First and Final Religion ("an abridged and combined edition of Charms of Islam and Islam Our Choice") proved that all the other religions, in their holy books, had prophesied the coming of Mohammed. There was also a tribute and a statement of Islamic intent from Napoleon: "I hope the time is not far off when I shall be able to unite all the wise and educated men of all the countries and establish a uniform regime based on the principles of the Koran which alone are true and which alone can lead men to happiness."

After Napoleon, there were comments from Victorian Englishmen, "statesmen and diplomats," all t.i.tled, whose names still apparently rang in the Muslim world, but were not as well known at home as they ought to have been: people like Al-Haj Lord Headley Al-Farooq (1855a?), "Peer, Author and Statesman," an army man, an engineer as well, and also editor of the Salisbury Journal; Sir Abdullah Archibald Hamilton (1876a?), "Statesman and Baronet," an army man again ("Lieutenant in the Royal Corp"); Sir Jalaluddin Lauder Brunton (no dates given), "Statesman and Baronet," no career given ("an English Baronet and a public man of wide repute"). To them was added the English scholar Professor Haroun Mustapha Leon, M.A., Ph.D., LL.D., F.S.P., an "earnest geologist" and an "able philologist," an M.A. from Potomac University (U.S.A.) who accepted Islam in 1882, when he was doing a series of articles on "The Etymology of Man's Language" for the Isle of Man Examiner.

The American in this white Muslim line-up was Mohammed Alexander Russel Webb, "Diplomat, Author and Journalist," editor of the St. Joseph Gazette and Missouri Republican, who was born in 1846 and died at the age of 115 in 1961: a Mark Twain-like figure from Hudson, "Columbia country," who rejected "the drippings, or more properly perhaps the drivelling, of an orthodox Presbyterian pulpit" for Islam and spent his immensely long life in Islamic missionary work.

IT was through Mr. Salahuddin that I got in touch with Khalid Ishaq. Khalid Ishaq was one of the leading lawyers of Karachi. He was successful enough to give much of his time to public work. He was a member of the Islamic Ideology Council that met for ten days a month in the capital, trying to work out what should be done in the way of Islamization; he was also a member of a government commission that was looking-somewhat despairingly, I felt-into corruption.

He, too, was a migrant from India. He was a tall, heavily made man in his early fifties. He had the lawyer's manner, the slow, dry humour, the eye for human quirkiness, the fondness for little anecdotes. The manner went easily with his pa.s.sion for his faith. Islam, I felt, was more than a private belief for him; to him, a Muslim from the subcontinent, still insecure in Pakistan, Islam was his civilization and culture; it was fundamental to his idea of what he was; it was something that, as a man and a lawyer, he had to serve and protect.

Mr. Salahuddin had told me that Khalid Ishaq had a prodigious library and spent twenty thousand rupees a month, two thousand dollars, on books. This didn't prepare me for what I saw in Khalid Ishaq's house.

I said, as we drove into his yard, that he had a big house. He said in his precise lawyer's way that yes, it was a big house, but it wasn't big enough. And it wasn't. Books filled room after room; case upon case, case in front of case; yards and yards of shelves, and cupboards in front of the shelves. One big room was devoted to many-volumed commentaries on the Koran-hefty Arabic tomes. "And," he added, "commentaries on the commentaries." He bought everything.

Did his devoutness match his collector's zeal? He had a sense of humour: I thought I could put the question to him. He said, "I wouldn't say I am very devout. I haven't missed a prayer for the last thirty-three years." Since 1946, that was, the year before the creation of Pakistan; and he meant the five-times-a-day prayers.

We sat in his office, a clearing in the book stacks, a large room with a large desk and with seating at one end that would have done for a board meeting. We sat below fans; the whirring m.u.f.fled the noise of the scooters and scooter-taxis in the street.

His explanation of his Islamic pa.s.sion was simple. "Our people emotionally reject the West. Materially, we may be dependent on the West. Our people may go abroad to better themselves. But however long they stay, they always want to come back, if only to die." And it was out of that emotional rejection of the outside world that Khalid Ishaq conceived the need for specifically Islamic inst.i.tutions-inst.i.tutions not of the West, and not socialist, but inst.i.tutions in keeping with the people's emotional needs.

To understand those needs, it was necessary to understand the idea of equality in Islam. "The servant here brings us tea and sweets. That is his job. But he also knows that on another occasion we can be men together and he can sit with me." And there was the role of the mosque: every Friday every man, whatever his condition, heard from the mullahs that the laws of men were not to be obeyed if they went against the teachings of the Koran.

So the Islamic enterprise was stupendous: it was the deliberate creation-with only the Koran as a guide-of a state mechanism that would function in the modern world and would be unlike anything else that had evolved. It was a high intellectual enterprise. Did Pakistan have the talent? Was there an intellectual life in Pakistan? Not much, Khalid Ishaq said; books were expensive, and television was putting paid to whatever intellectual life there was.

What had been achieved so far by the Ideology Council? Not much, Khalid Ishaq seemed to indicate. They were still trying to get around the problem of interest in banking. There was an idea they had put up to the government for getting everyone to wear the same clothes and drive the same make of car; but nothing had come of that.

There were difficulties, Khalid Ishaq said. First, there were the "modernists" among the Islamizers. These were people who in old age or for some private reason had turned from secular life to religion. They read a few books about Islam and thought they knew a lot, but they knew very little. These people were really mystics and knew nothing about inst.i.tutions. (I thought I detected a criticism there of Mr. Mirza.) And there were the mullahs. It was to the mullahs that the military government had turned when they had decided to Islamize.

"The mullahs really had no idea what was being asked of them. They could only think of 'the good man' or 'the good men' to whom everything should be entrusted. I have met these people and I really think that many of them don't even begin to have an idea of the need for inst.i.tutions of any kind. They don't know what we are talking about."

I felt, after this, that there were no Islamic experiments for me to see in Pakistan, that it was as Mr. Deen had said right at the beginning: the Islamic experiments were things people were waiting for other people to start. The great Islamic enterprise of Pakistan existed, but only as an ideal, at once an expression of the highest faith and an expression of the political insecurity in which Muslims lived in the Muslim homeland.

The poet Mohammed Iqbal, when he had put forward his idea for a separate Indian Muslim state in 1930, had spoken of a Muslim polity or social order as something arising naturally out of the "Islamic principle of solidarity." Such a polity existed in Pakistan. But the Islamic state of which people now spoke was more abstract than Iqbal's. This Islamic state couldn't simply be decreed; it had to be invented, and in that invention faith was of little help. Faith, at the moment, could supply only the simple negatives that answered emotional needs: no alcohol, no feminine immodesty, no interest at the banks. But soon in Pakistan these negatives were to be added to: no political parties, no parliament, no dissent, no law courts. So existing inst.i.tutions were deemed un-Islamic and undermined or undone; the faith was a.s.serted because only the faith seemed to be whole; and in the vacuum only the army could rule.