Among the Believers (18 page)

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 partition. 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 cockroach being carried off, as though on hidden wheels, by ants. The scrimmage didn’t affect the sanctity 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, stitched 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—Benazir’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, Benazir, 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 circumstances, extraordinarily lucid—from a sister to a brother about what might be done in the way of petitions and pressure to save their father. The burden of the
Morning News
story was that, in return for American help in saving her father, Benazir 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 associations or divisions. For everyone in open political life Islam was cause, tool, and absolution. It could lead to this worldly virulence.

M
R.
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 passed 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 Benazir Bhutto. Benazir 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 God.

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, harassed men, had quietly surrendered me—and with them had gone the Ahmadi girl in the green sari.