Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (73 page)

Hasan Jafri said he went himself to the morgue, to get the body count, and to see what condition the bodies were in. He had, “at a certain level,” become immune to sights like this. But he felt that as a reporter he had to go and see for himself, because it was important to see “the face of violence.”

“Another killing I remember was that of Inspector Bahadur Ali. He was ambushed, and he and about six other policemen in that vehicle were killed. Bahadur Ali had close to two dozen bullets in his body. He was a big man and his body was totally destroyed.

“The ideas and the talk—it has nothing to do with that. All there is at the end is a dead body. Someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s husband.”

Fear was the biggest thing people now lived with, Hasan Jafri said. The MQM people were frightened; the police might come knocking at any time. The police were frightened; they knew they were targets. The taxi drivers were frightened.

The police were overworked. They were brutal because they were frightened. Most of the rankers were from the Punjab and the interior of Sindh; they were far from their families. They risked their lives every day and were paid very little, twenty-six hundred rupees a month, sixty-five dollars.

Hasan Jafri used to do the evening rounds with the police in their APCs, armored personnel carriers. One evening in the Liaquatabad area, a hot MQM area, a constable from the Punjab, about thirty, haggard, and clearly on duty for a long time, said to Hasan Jafri, “Serving in District Central is worse than living in hell.” And then it became even worse. The terrorists began using rocket launchers. When that happened Hasan Jafri stopped going on the evening police rounds.

The war had got down to the bottom, and now whenever an MQM fighter died another took his place. The authorities said there were only two thousand fighters; that was foolish, Hasan Jafri said. The names of new fighters began quite suddenly to appear in police reports; they remained names, faceless, until they were arrested or killed; then there were new names. People were recruited at first to do very little things; then the things they did became bigger, and at last they were sucked in. Hasan Jafri knew a boy or man of twenty-one who already felt that he was marked for death. He had stolen so many cars, killed so many people, robbed so many businesses; he couldn’t be normal again.

“He came from a very educated family. The unlikeliest terrorist you could think of. You see, the cycle is endless. The birth and the rebirth, one after the other. My biggest fear now is that we might end up as a basket case. There are many people like myself now, educated, conscious, who are not afraid of detaching themselves from Pakistan. But I don’t want to end up as a mohajir in another country. My parents were born in one country; I in another; I don’t want my kids to be born in a third.”

The words were a fair comment, some generations later, on Mohammed Iqbal’s Pakistan proposal of 1930: poets should not lead their people to hell.

Iqbal is buried in the grounds of the Shah Jehan Mosque in Lahore; and soldiers watch his tomb. Rhetoric or sentimentality like that is invariably worrying; it hides things. And the tomb, with its Mogul motifs, would be a kind of artistic sacrilege if, just across the way, the great Mogul fort of Lahore (the emperor’s window there recorded in some of the finest Mogul pictures) wasn’t falling into dust; if, in that same city of Lahore, the Mogul Shalimar Gardens and the tombs of the emperor Jehangir and his consort were not in absolute decay; if, going back four centuries, the delicately colored tiled towers of the thirteenth-century tombs of Uch in Bahawalpur, one of the finest Islamic things in the subcontinent, were not half washed away; if, going back further still, the land just around the Buddhist city of Taxila, known to Alexander the Great, and with once fabulous remains,
wasn’t being literally quarried; if Pakistan, still pursuing imperialist Islamic fantasies, hadn’t been responsible for the final looting of the Buddhist treasures of Afghanistan.

In its short life Iqbal’s religious state, still half serf, still profoundly uneducated, mangling history in its schoolbooks as well, undoing the polity it was meant to serve, had shown itself dedicated only to the idea of the cultural desert here, with glory—of every kind—elsewhere.

PART FOUR
 

1
 

I
N
K
UALA
L
UMPUR
in 1979 I shifted for some days from hotel to hotel before settling in at the Holiday Inn. It was quietest place I could find, and I liked the setting. To the left was the racecourse, with a view in the distance of the Kuala Lumpur hills. Around the racecourse and in front of the hotel was the rich greenery of the wet tropics: banana fronds, flowering frangipani, the great, branching saman or rain tree of Central America: the mingled vegetation of Asia, the Pacific, and the New World that spoke both of the great European explorations and the plantation colonies. It was the very vegetation I had known on the other side of the world in Trinidad.

And then what was familiar became strange. Just around the corner from the Holiday Inn was a little yellow box set in a wall or hedge. I was told it was a Chinese shrine. It had offerings; it might have been used by the Chinese taxi drivers who did hotel work.

And the racecourse wasn’t really a racecourse. Sometimes I saw horses being trained there in the early mornings, before the sun came up; but I never saw a race. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons Chinese people (for the most part) came in their cars and filled the grandstand. The racecourse itself, green and sun-struck, with still, black shadows, remained empty. Every half hour there was an amplified race commentary and the grand-stand
crowd worked itself up to a frenzy, as if at a real race. The races were real, but they were going on somewhere else. The people in the grandstand were looking at television screens; and they had come to the racecourse to do so, in a strange mimicry of a day at the races, because it was the only place in Kuala Lumpur where gambling was permitted. Malaysia was racially divided: Malays, Chinese. The government was aggressively Malay and Muslim. Gambling was un-Islamic, and this weekend racecourse excitement was only a humane concession to the Chinese. They were the great gamblers.

I had got to know Shafi. He was a Malay of thirty-two, originally from a village in the still pastoral and poor northeast. Though it could be said that Shafi had done well, had risen in a way his father and grandfather could not have imagined, he was full of rage as a Malay. Shafi, and Malays like him, felt they had almost lost their country. They thought the Malays had slept for too long in their villages. Things grew too easily in the warm, fertile land; the old life of river and forest was too rich and full. You could throw a seed, Shafi said one day, and it would grow; you could put a bare hook in the water and catch a fish. Used to that idea of the land, the village people hadn’t seen or understood to what extent in the last hundred years they had been supplanted by Chinese and others. They had awakened now, late in the century, to find that Malays had become only half the population, and that a new way of life had developed all around them. They were not prepared for that new way.

To be a Malay like Shafi, half in and half out of the old ways, was to feel every kind of fear and frustration. It was too much for a man to bear on his own, and in 1979 Islam was being made to carry that general rage. Malays of Shafi’s generation had become passionate believers; and their belief was given edge by Islamic missionaries, who were especially busy in 1979, with the revolution in Iran and the Islamizing terror of General Zia in Pakistan. The missionaries were spreading stories of Islamic success in those countries, and promising similar success to people elsewhere, if only they believed. The Islamic missionary world existed in its own bubble. The extension of the faith was its principal aim; and—as for the fourteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta—once the faith ruled, the conditions of the faithful didn’t matter.