Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (69 page)

That had happened six years before. And, by chance, just four days before I arrived in Bahawalpur, justice of a sort was done. The landlord, the abuser of his serf women, was shot dead. Not by a serf, not by someone avenging the man’s lifelong brutalities, but by a sectarian militia, a religious gang, staking out new territory for themselves: another kind of fiefdom in the making, an aspect now of the internal warfare of this area of southern Punjab and Sindh, between the sectarian militia, the Sindhi extremists, the mohajirs, and the long-established feudals: jihad upon jihad, holy war upon holy war.

The sectarian militia had begun to move into the landlord’s area. He wished to warn them off. When they met him they fired their guns in the air, to show their disregard, and as a gesture of their power. He had one of them killed later, in revenge. And now he had been killed in return. So many bullets had been fired into him—from the Kalashnikovs, inevitably—that he had been left “more holes than man.”

The words were used by the old woman who told me the story. Her own life had been half destroyed by the sexual obsessions of the Nawab’s court. Her husband had been one of the old courtiers; he, like some of the others, kept his boys. Old hysteria showed in the old woman’s face. She had a fine house; it was savorless to her. And now, talking of the feudal who had been killed, that man who had been part of the viciousness by which she felt herself surrounded, she laughed at the words she had used—“more holes than man”—and showed her teeth.

Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century Muslim traveler who wanted to visit all the Muslim territories in the world, spent about seven years in Muslim India from about 1335. He passed this way (in what was then the province of Sindh) at the start of his Indian time.

As a traveler Ibn Battuta depended on the bounty of the various despots whose lands he visited. He knew the form; he knew how to give gifts to
get bigger ones in return. (He gave the local governor of Sindh a white slave, a horse, some raisins and almonds.) Rulers honored him as a religious scholar. And, like a good mullah who knew his place, he looked to them to be only defenders of the faith. He did not look beyond that, though the barbarities of Delhi—executions and tortures every day in the ruler’s public audience—became too much even for him; especially when four court slaves were deputed to be with him all the time, and he thought, knowing the forms of the court, that he was himself now soon to be executed.

In India he talks constantly about slaves and slave girls; he says at one place that he can’t travel without them. Slaves are part of the view. (In Aden he had seen slaves being used as draught animals; he records it only as a novelty.) But it is in almost casual sentences that we get an idea of the nature of the countryside, and the serfdom on which the glory of the Sultan in Delhi and his local officials depends. For a few months, and as a courtesy to him as a visitor, Ibn Battuta was granted the revenues of a village in this Bahawalpur area by a local official. He made five thousand dinars. The dinars didn’t fall out of the sky; they would have come from the fields and the serfs who worked them. They are the people never mentioned by Ibn Battuta, but always present. (“We then prepared for the journey to the capital, which is forty days’ march from Multan through a continuous stretch of inhabited country.”) Later, in Delhi, at the murderous court, he was to be granted the revenues of five villages. In his book there is a constant reckoning in crops; the endowment of a mausoleum, for instance, is reckoned in crops.

So in an extraordinary way in Bahawalpur and the neighboring area—where time beyond people’s memory is an unmeasured and unmeasurable flow, and where serf structures, untouched during the British time, have been reasserted with independence and the isolated Muslim polity of the poet Iqbal’s dream—in Bahawalpur we can get close to the fourteenth century and perhaps even to the eighth, at the start of Muslim dominion. It was for those serf revenues, after all, that the conquest was undertaken.

Ibn Battuta knew the town of Uch. It was built around an old fertility shrine which still drew devotees. I went there one morning. The road out of the city of Bahawalpur, shaded for many miles with
shisham
(or rosewood) and wild acacia, led through rich irrigated land: cotton, sugarcane, mustard; a sugar mill; cotton-ginning factories. Before the irrigation there would have been only desert here; and occasionally, amid the flat green
fields, gray-and-dun humps of sand showed what the land would have looked like. Trucks going to Karachi, five hundred miles to the south, traveled bumper to bumper, in slow convoy, because of the
dacoits
or bandits in the great desert of Sindh.

Uch was a mud-walled city on a big mound beside a dead river. The mound hinted at its antiquity: the debris of the centuries would have lain there, many previous Uchs. The roads went up and down. Ibn Battuta had found “fine bazaars and buildings” in 1335; but he had his own way of seeing, his own references, and perhaps what he saw was only a version of what I was seeing: palms, donkeys, the up-and-down streets, children, rubbish, wet open gutters, and the tomb-shrines.

The first of those shrines cured bad backs, and the lower part of the outer wall, which was of brick, had been polished smooth by the scores of thousands who had rubbed their afflicted backs on it. Inside, the wooden pillars supporting the roof were like the pillars of Hindu temples: perhaps accidental, or perhaps a style now associated with the ancient magic or virtue of the site. The principal Muslim saint had a big green-covered burial mound. The lesser saints who had come after had smaller white slabs.

The second, and more important, shrine was for women who wanted children. The central feature here was Ali’s footprint: fabulous: Ali the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet: his footprint a depression on a black granite pillar. This pillar had been brought from Baghdad, the center of the world, by a Muslim saint who, with the help of the jinns, powerful spirits, had flown here to Uch on a wall. The tomb in this enclosure was of the wife of that saint. The enclosure was dark and dark-floored and with the deep smell of old oil. One part of it was like a black grotto now after the offerings of centuries, with encrustations of oil residue from the little oil-fed lights, rolled cotton wicks in small clay vessels, that the faithful still set down. Women who made offerings here and had children came back and hung cradles or wrote their names. Women who had twins hung toy ladders. There was one that morning, of new white wood.

Anyone who had traveled in the subcontinent and looked at old Hindu temples would have recognized in the granite pillar with the depression the lingam, the phallic emblem of Shiva. To hear the stories about the jinns and Ali’s footprint and the saint flying on the wall from Baghdad was like entering a still living historical moment, and witnessing the crossover from the old religion to the new.

A small mosque below a very big tree—a great trunk, many gnarled branches—was part of the shrine area. The guardians of the shrines, living
easily with marvels, said that the mosque had been built by Mohammed Bin Qasim, who had conquered Sindh in 710; and that the tree was also from that time; it would have been a tree Mohammed Bin Qasim knew.

The tree might not have been as old as that; and the mosque was certainly much later. But the mosque had been given the Mohammed Bin Qasim association to celebrate the conquest—the faithful no longer saw themselves as the conquered—and also to claim the ancient site for the new faith. Just as, in Java, six or seven hundred years later, the new faith could take over the abstract Hindu-Buddhist-Jain figure of the great meditator, the Tirthankara, the “river-crosser,” a metaphor for the achiever of higher consciousness, and spin a more literal tale for him. The river-crosser became Kalijaga, the “guardian of the river”: obeying an order from a great teacher to sit and wait, and doing so by the riverbank with unwavering fidelity until the vines grew around him, and then being released by the teacher to get up and spread the message of Islam.

The
pir
of Uch, the inheritor of the sainthood and the site, was the descendant of the saint who had been brought on the wall from Baghdad by the jinns, and had spread Islam in the conquered territory. The current pir was a man of power. He had a large religious constituency, and his sister was married to the biggest feudal landowner in the area. This was how the feudals were moving: making alliances with industrialists and with religious dynasties like the pir’s: religion and money and land locking together to rule.

The pir had gone to Sindh that day. His
murids
or followers had called him to arbitrate in a murder case. Technically there was the rule of law in Sindh, but people had little faith in the apparatus of the state, and the pir’s followers preferred his judgment.

So the women who had come to see the pir that day had to wait, and they were squatting like chickens in his courtyard in the sun. They were peasant women, serf women, chattels of their landlords and their husbands, unprotected by law or custom or religion. They lived with cruelty and their minds had half gone. The pir was the only kind of light for them, and they had come to see him because they were now possessed by demons. The pir had a reputation for dealing with demons. Demons could enter these women and for a while make them objects of dread, rolling their eyes and head and speaking filthy words in unnatural voices. The pir knew how to get at the demons by punishing the bodies in which they were lodged.

I was told by a journalist from Bahawalpur that there was a special ceremony every spring in the pir’s courtyard. His followers, who were mainly from Sindh, came to the courtyard in a kind of pilgrimage. When the time came, they lay down in the courtyard and he walked or hobbled over them. He had a clubfoot; it was a congenital deformity of the pirs of Uch; and he cured the afflicted with every heavy step.

In the big sitting room of the house, attended by contented and civil women servitors, who clearly felt themselves privileged, there was—and it was unexpected in the ragged desert town—a big Waterford chandelier. There were photographs of the pir’s ancestors, and photographs of the present pir, showing him with presidents of Pakistan, foreign ambassadors, and with the last Nawab of Bahawalpur, the Nawab seated against a bolster, dark-skinned, seemingly respectful but hard-eyed, and with his high fez.

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