Among the Believers (40 page)

“Was there a book like that in every house in the village?”

“Each of those who attended the course would be given the book. Part One and Part Two and Part Three. The book was written by the mullah of the mosque. My impression is that he had a big cabinet by the wall, about ten feet long and ten feet high, filled up with these printed books. He gave one free first. But if you lose that you got to buy. There were teaching sessions every Friday afternoon and Saturday morning at the mosque. For the children, from nine to fifteen, sixteen.”

“Did the books have anything about masturbation or sex?”

“Basically it was teaching about cleanliness. That was one part. The other part was how to pray. What sort of water is allowed for you to use for your ablutions before praying. You must use clean water. Clean water is defined mostly as running water in a stream. The volume of water will have to be a minimum of twenty or thirty gallons. Then you can say it is clean. You mustn’t see any dirt, smell any dirt, or touch any dirt. Unless these conditions are met, then the water is dirty.

“If you didn’t attend one teaching session without valid reasons, you would be punished. And this punishment by the mullah would be acceptable to the parents. In addition there were the Friday-morning teachings by the head of the elders in the village. This was for everybody, and not only children. They taught worldly and heavenly things then. Human relations. Elders and the young, men and women. Cleanliness, prayers. During this Friday-morning teaching they referred to Koran and translation and this encouraged people to read Koran and translations. Later, every day we have to go for Koran reading, morning and afternoon.

“My village is in Kota Bharu. In the northeast. The people in my village I would consider quite enterprising. They do this cloth-weaving—my mother did this sarong I’m wearing. Not many of them are working in the government. Some of them own plantations, rice fields, coconut plantations. They get the people from the village to do the work.

“There were about two thousand people in the village at that time. Everybody had a house of their own, on their own land or the land of a relative or the land that belongs to the religious department of the government. They build their own houses. Nobody squats. And if I can remember, nobody begs. There is no beggar in our village. I would say
it was quite a prosperous village. One man and his family had to leave because the land their house was on was sold. They went to another village, and when we asked them later how they were getting on they said nothing can be compared to this village. In the village they could find work easier.

“In the village there were no pollutions of yellow cultures, yellow literatures. A school where you learned to read and write, that’s all. In Malay.”

I said, “But if you have such a simple life you can’t have intellectual pursuits?”

“Intellectual pursuits were nothing. I will give you an instance. There were not many young people who went out of the village for higher education. The only people who went out were the family of the mullahs. They only went for religious education, not secular education. They went to Mecca. The whole of the mullah’s family went to Mecca. One of them had a relative there.

“There were no foreigners in our village. But adjacent to our village is a Chinese village. They were different, that’s all. They ate pork, and we say the pig is dirty. They looked different. We didn’t think they were ugly. They had small eyes and fairer skin. They’re a lot dirtier than us. Their backyards stink. Waste water from the backyard stinks. They kept pigs, and the pigsties stinks. And whenever the pigs broke loose out of the compound into our village, then the young boys will stone them. And any stray dogs from the Chinese village will be stoned. Because it’s taboo to a Muslim to have dogs and pigs. But there were no village fights.”

“Were the Chinese rich?”

“At that time they were not rich. In education they were very strict with their children. After dinner they will see that the child attend or recite their schoolbooks aloud, in the kitchen or in the front room.”

“But you were strict, too? But with religious education only.”

“With us religious education is compulsory. Almost every young Muslim has to know it. It’s a duty. With us the human value was being emphasized more than the religious value.”

“But you fell behind intellectually.”

“Yes, we fell behind intellectually. I would say further—in terms of pursuit for material and secular education we fell behind. But in terms
of being more human, more responsible persons, being more reasonable in our conduct or way of life, I think that we are a lot better than them. Morally we are a lot better than them.”

“But you weren’t technically equipped.”

“No, we weren’t technically equipped. One of our mullahs in the village faced this problem. He started a coconut-oil mill-processing, as well as soap-making. And that was unsuccessful. Why? I consider he don’t have the technical know-how as well as the managerial ability. I wasn’t allowed to go to his factory, so I can’t say more.

“But we never thought about it, technical learning. I remember one instance. When they started to build a bridge across the river in Kota Bharu, the few of the mullahs and
hajis
[Muslims who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca] were shocked. And they said, ‘How on earth could they build such a huge structure across the river?’ When they were doing the filling work—this very much shocked them.

“Basically we are good persons, but not technologically equipped, for reasons that we are self-sufficient. We don’t need skyscrapers, the big lift, the road. We don’t need technological.”

I said, “Are you sure?”

“I don’t think so. When we were in the village we saw a calendar with a picture of a twenty-five-storey building in Singapore, and we were astonished with that. This was in 1957. In the village we feel we don’t need that sort of development. The realization of the need for all these things comes from the experiences on the visits we made out of Kota Bharu, to Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere.”

“How did you get that calendar?”

“A few of our relatives went for
haj
[the pilgrimage to Mecca] through Singapore, and they brought back that calendar. Singapore was a busy town—which they expressed in this way: when they sleep in a hotel they felt as if cars are passing by at the end of the bed. That bothered them in their sleep. I can remember only two or three cars in the village. The same person who described Singapore described the village now as more like Singapore—the sound of the car passing at the back of the bed.”

“You don’t think the old village life is gone forever?”

“No, it should be there. We need good basic amenities. We need good bus service, good school.”

This vision of simplicity! But it required a bus—a road—road-making—machinery.

I said, “What was your school like?”

“In the village we had an earth floor and when it rained it was always flooded. And we didn’t have electricity.”

But in that simple school the new world had broken in, lifting Shafi without his knowing it out of purely village ways. There was the scout movement. It was part of the British system, but to Shafi it would have appeared only as part of the life of his village school. There was a scout camp-craft competition in Malaysia in 1963. It was to take part in that competition that, at the age of fifteen and as a member of his school scout troop, Shafi left Kota Bharu and came to the British-Chinese city of Kuala Lumpur for the first time. After sixteen years the nervousness and upheaval of that journey were still close to him. It showed in his language.

“We came in by train. One day and one night. We expected that. We looked forward. We were adventurous. We were in a group. On the journey we were searching for similarities. For instance, good Malay restaurants—we had them in Kota Bharu. We couldn’t find. It was difficult for us to eat; for us we have to take Muslim food.

“When we left we could see a village scene. Towards the evening we see rubber estates and jungles and at night most of it is jungle. But in the morning, on approach to KL, we realized that we are passing by a Chinese community, Chinese neighbourhood, which is quite familiar to us, and we realized the pessimism we faced about the problems of having good Muslim food and not being able to meet more Malays. We were seeing more Chinese and Indians. Quite difficult for us to communicate. Because we don’t know them. For us it’s easier to talk to a Malay who knows us. It was a shock, but not an upset. Because we expected that. But we were not in the least frightened.

“We had some ideas of certain landmarks in KL, so we get around easily. But we felt we were nowhere. We were lost in the huge community. Each time we go around, out of ten people we could hardly see a Malay. We had expected that. But we were in a group and we didn’t bother with them very much. We were staying right in the middle of a non-Muslim, non-Malay community, and that was the difficulty we had. We knew that there were Malay kampongs scattered
about the town. But we stayed where we were because of the competition.”

S
HAFI
was tired. The exercise of memory had exhausted him. And he was nagged by the inconsistency—as it had come out in our conversation—between his longing for the purity of village life and his recognition of the backwardness of Malays. Deep down he felt—he knew—that there was no inconsistency, no flaw; but he couldn’t find the words to express that.

It was now one o’clock. Too late for Shafi to take me to his brothers, which was part of his plan for me for this festival day. Because of the festival the big Holiday Inn Friday buffet lunch had been laid out here in the coffee shop rather than in the enclosed, mirrored room on the upper floor, where on normal Fridays (for non-Muslims, or Muslims not observing the sabbath) there was a fashion show, with music. The hotel depressed Shafi because it was alien, wasteful, full of strangers without belief and indifferent to the rules: I could see it now with his eyes. We walked past the bar, dark even in daylight. On the other side of the corridor were show-cases of Selangor Pewter—locally made decorative objects on show in every hotel, every souvenir shop, advertised in every local brochure, every magazine.

It was strange to think of books being written and published in Shafi’s village, books of rules like those written in Iran by ayatollahs like Khomeini and Shariatmadari, copies of which were to be found in the houses of their followers, who could consult them without shame on the most intimate matters and find out what was permitted by the Koran and approved Islamic tradition, and what was not permitted. The simple life was a rigid life. It had rules for everything; and everyone had to learn the rules.

In Pakistan the fundamentalists believed that to follow the right rules was to bring about again the purity of the early Islamic way: the reorganization of the world would follow automatically on the rediscovery of the true faith. Shafi’s grief and passion, in multi-racial Malaysia, were more immediate; and I felt that for him the wish to re-establish the rules was also a wish to re-create the security of his childhood, the Malay village life he had lost.

Some grief like that touches most of us. It is what, as individuals,
responsible for ourselves, we constantly have to accommodate ourselves to. Shafi, in his own eyes, was the first man expelled from paradise. He blamed the world; he shifted the whole burden of that accommodation onto Islam.

This thought came later. That afternoon, after Shafi had left me, I was full of his mood. In the bar that evening I at last had the Holiday Inn’s complimentary drink, “Tropical Aura.” The Old Timers dinned away; the drink tasted of tinned pineapple juice. Later, in the coffee shop—again—I had an omelette. It wasn’t good. But the young Malay waiter was punctilious and helpful. And I thought, looking at him laying the next table carefully, trying to do the right thing, “He is like Shafi, I must remember.”

  2
Brave Girls

I
awakened in the morning at half past two and couldn’t get back to sleep. During a previous sleepless night I had gone to the coffee shop at half past four and found it desolate, with a smell of cleaning chemical. So I stayed in my room. Just after five I ordered coffee. I had to telephone twice. The boy, when he came, was grubby, and not friendly. The milk was sour; it took away my appetite without lessening my need.

When I drew the curtain it was light, and on the racecourse across the road horses were training. It was for that racecourse view, with the Kuala Lumpur hills, that I had chosen the Holiday Inn. On Saturday and Sunday the crowd gathered in the grandstand in the afternoon, and every half-hour shouted, above an amplified commentary. But there were no horses, no races. The races were being run elsewhere; the crowd was watching television, and had gathered only to gamble, because—under Malaysia’s Islamic laws—gambling was permitted in
Kuala Lumpur only on the racecourse. In the phantom racecourse now there were horses: first I saw two, then six, then many more. I studied the riders’ stances over the horses’ necks, the stirrups short, the reins horizontal.