Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (52 page)

In Lahore in 1979 I met a man who tried to tell me what the creation of Pakistan had meant to him as a child over the border in India. He had to feel for the words. At last he said, “To me it was like God.” To many, or most, of the Muslims of the subcontinent the state that had been won out of India came as a kind of religious ecstasy, something beyond reason, beyond quibbles about borders and constitutions and economic plans.

And then, almost at the moment of partition, some people saw that there was a certain amount of money to be made out of the new state as well. All the land in the west—ancient and not-so-ancient seats of Hinduism and Buddhism and Sikhism—was finally going to lose, or be cleansed of, its Hindu and Sikh populations. They would leave and go to India. As communities, the Hindus and Sikhs were rich; it was said that they owned 40 percent of the wealth of the region. When they left, many debts were wiped out; and all over Pakistan, in villages and towns large and small, an enormous amount of property needed new owners. Fortunes were made or added to overnight. So at the very beginning the new religious state was touched by the old idea of plunder. The idea of the state as God was modified.

It didn’t have to pay its way. It became a satellite of the United States; its various régimes were shored up right through the cold war. It didn’t develop a modern economy; it didn’t feel the need. Instead, it began to export its people; it became in part a remittance economy.

Thirty-two years after partition there came the war in Afghanistan against the Russian occupation. This could be entered into as a kind of religious war; and, again, the loot was prodigious. American arms and Afghan drugs followed the same route for eight years; hundreds of millions of dollars stuck to the hands of the faithful all along the way. The corruption was too gross; the state was finally undermined. Public faith and private plunder made a circle. There was no point now at which that circle could be broken into, and a fresh start made. After the cynicism and intellectual idleness
of four decades, the state, which at the beginning had been to some like God, had become a criminal enterprise.

No real thought had ever been taken for the running of the new country. Everything was expected to flow from the triumph of the faith. But Islamic identity, though powerful as a cause of pre-partition protest (“a very powerful evocative factor,” as the lawyer said), couldn’t by itself hold the unwieldy, two-winged state together. Bangladesh, with its own language and culture, soon fell away; and even then everyone looking for political power in what remained of Pakistan promised to be more Islamic than his rival.

The procedural laws inherited from the British, master lawmakers of the subcontinent, were interfered with in a half-hearted and impractical way. Certain Islamic appendages were tacked on. The lawyers couldn’t always make them work; and the legal system, already damaged by political manipulation, became a little more ramshackle. Women’s rights ceased to be secure. Adultery became an offense; this meant that a man who wanted to get rid of his wife could accuse her of adultery and have her imprisoned. In 1979 provision was made for Koranic punishments; and though there had never been any amputations (the doctors said no), people had loved the public floggings and run to see them.

The Islam defined by these laws was restrictive and severe and simple. The laws might not always be implemented. Like the public floggings in 1986, they might be suspended (in spite of the public demand); or, like the laws about drinking and gambling, they might be bypassed. But the laws all remained on the books; and they changed the nature of the state. They gave encouragement to the backward-looking. They made for uncertainty. They outlined the kind of tyranny that, in a crisis, people might talk themselves into.

It was an accident that, with the breaking away of Bangladesh, the part of the subcontinent that was now Pakistan was the least educated part. It had fallen late to the British, and had had less than a century of British rule, from the mid- or late 1840s to 1947, with the disturbance of the Indian Mutiny (1857–60) near the beginning of the period and the independence movement at the end. (The British Raj here, by another accident, coincided more or less with the life of its most famous chronicler, Rudyard Kipling, who was born in 1865 and died in 1936.)

British institutions sat lightly on older local systems, the tribal systems in the northwest, the feudal chieftaincies in the half-slave south. After less than fifty years of Pakistan those older informal systems were beginning to
show through again. The inherited modern state could be felt as a recent and needless burden.

Always in the background now were the fundamentalists who—fed by the ecstasy of the creation of Pakistan, and further fed by the partial Islamization of the laws—wanted to take the country back and back, to the seventh century, to the time of the Prophet. There was as hazy a program for that as there had been for Pakistan itself: only some idea of regular prayers, of Koranic punishments, the cutting off of hands and feet, the veiling and effective imprisoning of women, and giving men tomcatting rights over four women at a time, to use and discard at will. And somehow, it was thought, out of that, out of an enclosed devout society with uneducated men religiously tomcatting away, the state would right itself, and power would come, as it had come to Islam at the very beginning.

The case for Pakistan was made seriously for the first time in 1930 by a poet, Mohammed Iqbal, in a speech to the conference of the pre-partition Muslim League. The tone of the speech is more civil and seemingly reasoned than the 1947 street slogans; but the impulses are the same. Iqbal came from a recently converted Hindu family; and perhaps only someone who felt himself a new convert could have spoken as he did.

Islam is not like Christianity, Iqbal says. It is not a religion of private conscience and private practice. Islam comes with certain “legal concepts.” These concepts have “civic significance” and create a certain kind of social order. The “religious ideal” cannot be separated from the social order. “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.” In 1930 a national polity meant an all-Indian one.

It is an extraordinary speech for a thinking man to have made in the twentieth century. What Iqbal is saying in an involved way is that Muslims can live only with other Muslims. If this was meant seriously, it would have implied that the good world, the one to be striven after, was a purely tribal world, neatly parceled out, every tribe in his corner. This would have been seen to be fanciful.

What is really in the background of this demand for Pakistan and a Muslim polity, what isn’t mentioned, is Iqbal’s rejection of Hindu India. His hearers would have understood that; and both they and he would have had a concrete idea of what was being rejected. It lay all around them; they only had to look; it was an aspect of the real world. What didn’t exist, and what Iqbal’s proposal didn’t even attempt to define, was the new Muslim polity
that was to come with the new state. In Iqbal’s speech—which was momentous—this polity is an abstraction; it is poetic. It has to be taken on trust. The Prophet’s name is even used indirectly to recommend it.

The speech is full of ironies today. Pakistan, when it came, disenfranchised the Muslims who stayed behind in India. Bangladesh is on its own. In Pakistan itself the talk is of dissolution. The new Muslim polity there has turned out to be like the old, the one Iqbal knew: you don’t have to go down far before you find people who are as voiceless and without representation as when Iqbal made his speech in 1930.

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O
NE DAY
six months before, this woman’s husband and his nephew, both laborers, had got hold of her and “butchered her nose.” The husband had then fettered her. Somehow she had freed herself, and then she had run away. She went to the big city of Karachi. She had a friend there. The friend got in touch with a human rights group in Lahore that ran—with foreign subsidy—a shelter for battered women.

It was in the office of that group, in the waiting room, that I saw her. Among the very quiet women there—the passive, half-dead faces of women taken by suffering beyond shame and perhaps even feeling—she was noticeable. A veil of gauze-like material was pulled tight over her lower face, to hide the wound. Above the veil only her eyes and eyebrows showed. I thought they looked like the eyes of a child; this made the thought of her disfigurement more painful.

But she wasn’t a child. She was thirty-five. I found that out when I went back to the office some days later to see her. Her face was uncovered this time. The tip of her nose hadn’t been cut off, as I had feared; it was more as though it had been pinched with a pair of hot tongs. On either nostril there was a wound, raw pink edged with dark red; but she was now used to it and didn’t try to hide it.

She was small and thin and dark. She had got married when she was nineteen. Her father was ill at the time, and her mother thought she should get married. It was against Islam for a girl not to be married. She had got married without a dowry, “only for God”; this meant that the only dowry she could take to her husband was the protection of God. She had got married to a man who was an occasional laborer. She didn’t know the man and she didn’t know why her parents had chosen him. She had just done what she had been told; she was helpless.