Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (61 page)

Saleem, in sudden haste, took off his tie and threw his jacket on the car seat and went to join the prayers, first telling the driver to take the car back a little so that I could have a better look. One little boy in miniature shalwar-kameez was extremely energetic with the prayers, bouncing up and down on flexible joints.

It was quite dark when the prayers were over. Saleem then took me on a tour. There was a board with a map of the settlement. Each of the houses on the map had a number, and a list on the right gave the names of the occupants. This kind of order was unusual in Pakistan, Saleem said; I felt it was another aspect of the modernity of the Jamaat about which people talked with foreboding.

Away from the lights of the mosque, we walked on broken paths. We came to the famous hospital. It was built at the time of the Afghanistan war. People spoke of it with awe, but the waiting room or casualty room or emergency room that Saleem showed me, opening a flimsy door from a dark lane, was dimly lit and empty. It looked roughly finished and seemed already to have fallen into something like Pakistani informality. The library and research unit, with all its modern computer facilities, was closed until the morning. But the cassette shop was open. It sold sets of Maulana Maudoodi’s speeches, and a number of cassettes about Kashmir, including one in English called
Crush India.
Saleem, like a man in a toy shop, began to buy, possibly for friends, pointing to this cassette and then that one, and at the end the man in the shop put the ones Saleem had bought in a small white modern plastic bag.

We came to the family house. It belonged to someone from the Jamaat; Mohammed Akram was renting it. It was a narrow house on two floors, and Saleem said there were two places where we could talk: the dining room or his study. His study, on the upper floor, had no furniture, only carpets and cushions.

I needed a table at which to sit and write, and I thought we should look at the dining room. It was on the other side of an open lobby or staircase area, which was very narrow and squashed. There were sacks of paddy in this area; one of the sacks had burst or had been opened and some of the golden-colored grain was on the concrete floor. The paddy came from “the farm,” Saleem said; so the family still worked land at Sargodha. The dining room was narrow and not deep. The furniture in it left no open space, and the fluorescent light seemed to press on my forehead, just above my eyes. There were altogether twenty big carved armchairs, a matching set, very much in the rustic feudal style (and also the Indonesian bourgeois style). All these chairs had their backs against the wall. Twelve were in the
reception area proper, six facing six across low wide tables, with the other eight tight and almost touching around the dining table.

Saleem said, going perhaps by the way the chairs were arranged, that visitors were expected. And so—past the sacks of rice, and with a glimpse now of the servants at the back, the thin and dingy shadow people of every Pakistani household, even here at the Jamaat—we went up the steep and narrow concrete steps to Saleem’s study and library.

It was a very small room about twelve feet square and about eight or nine feet high, or so it felt. The air was hot and dusty; the room was entirely sealed. It was carpeted and with bolsters, as Saleem had said; and there were bookshelves on the walls. Half the wall facing the door carried those Islamic sets in decorated binding which I had got to recognize at Qom. Other shelves were more informal. But I soon stopped looking at the books. I began to choke in the stale, enclosed air. I felt I was becoming ill. On the floor what looked like a pouffe or a stool was an air-cleaner; it was turned on, but it would be some time before it made an impression on the room.

I asked for a window to be opened. Saleem called down to the servant, who was bringing one of the big dining room chairs for me, and feeling his way up the narrow, steep steps behind his awkward load. The servant, coming into the room and putting the chair down, pushed at the window. It was a sliding metal-framed window, and it appeared to be stuck. Saleem lent a hand, or perhaps a finger, with the catch. The servant kept on pushing, and at last the window opened. There was a screen behind it; there was no view. The traffic roared from the Multan road. The air outside was gritty and almost as hot as the air in the room. The servant dragged the chair next to the open window, and there for a while I sat, breathing in, rather like the pious sitting beside the rails of the tomb of a saint, to take good from the emanations. The window looked over part of the flat roof above the lower floor; this explained the great heat inside and out.

Saleem said he was a cricket freak. He knew the names of minor, forgotten Indian spin bowlers from Trinidad: S. M. Ali, Inshan Ali, Imtiaz Ali, Rafiq Jumadeen. This was an offering to me, I knew; but cricket wasn’t the only thing on his mind. All the bowlers he mentioned were Muslim, and he knew more about them than I did.

The servant came up the steep steps again, this time with tea and
pakoras,
hot fried savories, and a milk-and-almond sweet, condensed and solidified, perfectly delicious and quite unexpected, as though somehow in the cramped pieties of this Jamaat house an artist had broken free in the kitchen.

Then the father came up, the penitent. He was in a pale brown shalwar-kameez, and I saw in it the color of penitence. He was shorter than his son, and heavy, and the steps had strained him. He was only fifty-eight, but in his family—Saleem was immediately deferential—he was the old man; and he filled that role.

He sat on the carpet, very close to my chair, almost touching it, and looked up at me, with extraordinary trustingness. His brown skin was clear and smooth; his forehead, unmarked, appeared to shine, as if from years of oiling. One light-colored eye was bad; a cataract had been removed the year before. Even with that, his expression was benign. Something was wrong with his hearing. He leaned forward when I spoke, and, with his lips slightly parted over small, sound-looking teeth, he appeared to smile.

Saleem explained who I was and what I had come to do in Mansura.

And in no time they were launched, father and son, speaking of their Mansura faith. They wanted an Islamic state. Pakistan wasn’t an Islamic state. It wasn’t enough that a state for Muslims had been created in the subcontinent. An Islamic state was one in which the most righteous man ruled and, as in the earliest days of Islam, led the people in prayer.

This was like what I had heard in 1979, at the time of General Zia, who had tried to Islamize; but, like others before him, hadn’t known how to convert a personal faith into the apparatus of a state; and had in the end settled for a personal tyranny. He was now dismissed as a hypocrite. But, after all that had happened, the dream was still here at Mansura, the dream of restoring the golden age at the very beginning of Islam, when the manageable, pure congregation was at one with itself and the ruler.

And now father and son spoke together in a kind of duet, exchanging ideas about that golden Islamic age. After the talk in the car about the modernity of the Jamaat in matters of dress and organization, after the tweed jacket and the tie and
The Economist
and the talk of cricket, it was strange to see Saleem, the customs officer, matching his feudal father phrase for phrase.

Did I know, Saleem’s father asked, about the time one of the early caliphs was rebuked for wearing an extravagant cloak? And he, the father, asking the question, looked up at me and brought his face very close. Saleem, more casual, sipping tea, picking at a pakora, and half lying on the carpet, propped on a cushion, took the story about the caliph forward. The caliph told his questioner that a relation had given his ration of cloth to make that cloak. Imagine that, Saleem said. And imagine that, his father said after him. Imagine the ruler of an empire stretching all over the world;
and yet, Saleem said, completing the thought, a member of the assembly could ask him that question. (So, in this vision of the golden age, the cards could be shuffled, and the simplicity of the single, manageable Islamic congregation could be set beside its reward: a world empire.)

No, no, Saleem said, a Muslim state wasn’t an Islamic state; many people made that error. No, no—

He was interrupted by the servant, one of the Pakistani shadow men, bringing up fresh pakoras, this time pieces of fresh cabbage fried in chickpea batter, hot and crisp and then soft and delicious. Behind the servant was Saleem’s young son, Mohammed, thin, used to attention, forward and then shy and clinging, with big dark eyes and the Mansura pallor. His father fondled him; his grandfather fondled him; he was offered pakoras. But he didn’t want to stay, and he went down again with the servant.

I asked them about General Zia, the Islamic terror of 1979. Hadn’t he done enough? What remained to be done?

There was a great deal, Saleem said. There was still Hindu influence to be got rid of, and (this was perhaps Saleem’s
Economist
reading) remnants of British colonialism. And there was the question of marriage, the father said. The Koran said a man could be married four times; now there were these women’s groups trying to tamper with the Muslim family law. He spoke like a man aggrieved, denied his due; he looked up at me with his sweet expression and complained as though he knew I would want to help him. And there was the question of usury; something had to be done about that.

Still, the father said, Pakistan and Iran, as countries, were closest to the Islamic ideal; that had to be given them. Saleem agreed about Iran, saying that the only thing wrong about Iran was its quarrels with its neighbors. There was Sudan, too; that had to be considered as a country working towards Islam; but Saleem wasn’t sure about Sudan.

I asked whether he wanted something like the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Pakistan. Lying against the cushions, Saleem said with some severity that a religious state had to encourage the good and deter the bad. All countries had police forces to do that. I said that this would be interfering with people’s liberty. Saleem said that there was no free will in Islam. And his father, smooth-skinned and benign, said that the very word
Islam
meant obedience, submission.

I asked how the state would define what was Islamic. That had given General Zia a lot of trouble, in spite of his Islamic Ideology Council. There would be debate, Saleem said. He added, surprisingly, that everybody didn’t have to agree. He, for example, didn’t always agree with his father.
His father, again suprisingly, said, “There is freedom in Islam.” What they wanted, the father said, was a state where everyone accepted Islam voluntarily, with all his heart. And I began to understand how freedom and submission could run together.

Salim said, “Islam hasn’t been tried.”

I was half expecting to hear this. I said, “Is vanity or pride wrong in Islam?”

Saleem said, “Yes.” His eyes became uncertain, as liquid and melting as his son’s.

“How can you cast this slur on all the millions who have gone before you? How can you say they have not been good? How can you make this claim for yourself?”

I had touched something.

His father said, “We can only be as good as we can be.”

The boy Mohammed, Saleem’s son, came in again. Saleem said the boy had begun to go to school.

Saleem’s father said, “He is learning the Koran already.”

They asked him to recite the opening
suras.
He was pleased to be asked, but he clung and pressed to his grandfather and had to be coaxed a little more before he began to speak the words in his child’s voice. Saleem’s face was full of pride; and there was pride, too, in the old man’s good eye.

Saleem said, “He is going to learn the whole Koran by heart.”

“The whole Koran,” the old man said, picking up the duet with his son.

I asked, “How long will that take?”

Saleem said, “Five or six years.”

I couldn’t stay. My breathing had become very bad. Downstairs, the servants, thin and dark and dingy, behind the sacks with the spilt golden paddy. Outside, the fumes and grit of the Multan road. Saleem’s driver drove me back to the hotel. Saleem didn’t come with me.

On Friday, poor Mr. Bhutto’s sabbath, I went to Mansura again. I went this time in daylight and saw that the compound, which had a kind of parking-lot barrier at the entrance, and was full of idle bearded men in Friday clothes, was bigger than I had thought, a little campus. The place was also much dustier. The main road outside was absolutely broken, unpaved, and a cloud of dust and brown motor smoke hung over it.

Saleem’s family house looked more informal in daylight, a rough village building, with a shed or garage to one side, and other little added-on areas.
Many servants, thin and poor and on call, quite separate from the bearded exhibitionists at the entrance in proper Friday clothes, were standing about outside and inside; it was hard to imagine where they all slept.

A handsome man with well-groomed wavy hair was so friendly and open that I thought he might be a relation of Saleem’s. He was one of the house servants, and he was friendly because he had seen me six days before. He told me that Saleem and his wife were still at the prayers, and he led me—the sacks of paddy from the “farm” still in the lobby, one sack torn—up the narrow concrete steps to the study.