Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

by V. S. Naipaul

  “I don’t know about the afterlife. Sometimes I believe. Sometimes I lose my belief. But I feel I must believe. I’ll tell you. My elder son—not the boy here: his older brother—he was studying chemical engineering. We are that kind of family, scientifically inclined. Well, this boy had done very well in the ‘matric,’ but in the ‘inter’ he began to do badly. It worried me. It worried me a lot. How could a boy who had done so well in the matriculation do so badly in the inter? That was a serious business; it was going to affect his future. I thought some minister was responsible. It’s the kind of thing they do here. They want something for their own son and they get people to throw away the papers of other people. It happens.

  “One night during this time I dreamt I was below a big and beautiful tree. There was a musical instrument. I remember only the black wood of the instrument—when I woke up I couldn’t remember any more. Out of this came music of a sort I had never heard before. And my father appeared before me. But he appeared in the form of my uncle. Because my father died when I was two, and I had been brought up by my uncle. He said he had come to solace me. In the dream I began to cry, and when I woke up I found that my pillow was wet with tears.

  “I went to my son’s school that day. I met his teacher. And he told me that although my son had lost so many marks in the earlier papers, he had done all right in the examination as a whole. He had made seventy-eight percent. And just at that time, out of the school building there came a man who was absolutely like my uncle in the dream. I ran to him and embraced him and said, ‘You don’t know how happy I am to see you. I met you in my dream last night.’ ”

  That incident—and others like it—made the doctor believe in the afterlife. But he was at the same time proud of the rationalism of his younger son, the medical student, who also wrote poetry in English (some of which was, at that moment, being shown to one of the journalists). In what way was the son a rationalist? The son—called over by his father to speak for himself—said that his attitude to the Prophet was historical. The great and good man existed; people added the divinity later.

  The son, Syed, was taller and heavier than his father. Glasses made him look like a student; with his father’s guests he had the manner of a privileged student son. He was more socially secure than his father, intellectually more adventurous, but he was conscious that he was building on the achievement of his father.

  Syed said he felt isolated from his friends at the medical school. They just wanted to pass the examinations, to become doctors; they weren’t interested in intellectual matters. They just wanted the skill; they weren’t interested—as Syed was—in the civilization that went with the skill. (But Syed didn’t put it like that.) How had he arrived at his intellectual interests? Well, he had the advantage of his father’s medical background—that put him a generation or two ahead of most of his fellows. He had spent a year in England. And he had read a lot in English.

  It was about his English reading that I got him to talk. And I was so taken by his account of his approach to the outer civilization—a pioneer journey in many ways, and a contrast with the blanket dismissal of “the West” by people who often, even after travel and a picked-up profession (a single, isolated skill), had the thinnest idea of what they were dismissing—that I asked for paper and noted down Syed’s words.

  He was twenty-three, and he thought he had so far read about two hundred fifty English books—apart from the Enid Blyton, which he had read until he was twelve, and the “Biggies” books, which he had moved on to from the Blyton and had read until he was fourteen. The reading breakthrough came then, at fourteen, when his father gave him The Good Earth. That got him onto adult books: James Hadley Chase, Harold Robbins, Ian Fleming. Did he enjoy those books? Weren’t they too strange? He said he couldn’t follow the Ian Fleming; but he had read the books because they were famous, and the same was true of the Harold Robbins. He wanted to read; he was told it was good to read; the problem for him was finding things that made sense. He used to go through the best-seller list in Time, hoping that there might be something for him. But it wasn’t always easy for him to know what the books were about.

  At this period—he was fifteen or sixteen—Steinbeck was a find. East of Eden made a great impression. “I loved it. This girl wanted to break away from her family, and a house burned down. That is all I remember now. It was a revolutionary book to me.” Then came his year in England. He saw the Perry Mason series on television, and read twenty of the Perry Mason books. Wasn’t the background too hard for him, too far away from what he knew? No; he understood the books completely.

  It was strange, the popular English reading that had given order to Syed Hussain’s expanding, shaken-up world: mechanical fantasies for the most part, making the foreign manageable, offering a mixture of the modern and the archaic, disorder and ritual: Enid Blyton, the Biggies books, Pearl Buck, James Hadley Chase, John Steinbeck, Perry Mason.

  And sex. Out of the two hundred fifty books he had read, he would say that about thirty had been sex books. He read them “to become stable.” People who didn’t know sex books became overexcited when they ran across one; and they wanted to look at Playboy. His literary sex course cured him of that. “I also read sex books of the academic sort. Married Happiness. That kind of thing.”

  But nine years after he had read The Good Earth, Pearl Buck remained the charmer for him. He had read about six or seven of her books—and he regarded that as serious reading. “Then I liked a lot Graham Greene’s The Wall Has Two Sides.”

  “Felix Greene, you mean?”

  “Maybe. Greene something. No, Graham Greene was The Ugly American. I get the names mixed up. I’ll tell you a story. One time I was travelling to Lahore on the train. It was at the time of the revolution in Iran. There was an American missionary on the train. He asked me to sit down, and we began to talk. He wanted to know what I thought about Iran. And I told him—I am like that—that the Americans were going to get out of Iran, that they were going to go to China instead now. He didn’t like what I said. Maybe he was an agent.”

  I didn’t follow the story. But it was important to him, perhaps for that vision of the dangerous American: life answering literature, literature clearing up the world.

  When he was done with the story of the American on the train he said: “In between all these books I got into pop songs and Western music. I really went for them. Not the rock-and-roll noisy types. But the ones which really carried a message. Not only the Western ones, but the local Urdu ones. I liked very much the Carpenters, a brother-and-sister group. They sing about the basic innocence. That’s how I get it. There are lots of songs I get which carry a message about religion, a mention of God, beliefs.”

  “Beliefs?”

  “Like doing something because you really believe in it. Like love. Basics.”

  “But I thought you weren’t a religious man.”

  “In a way I’m not religious. But everything has got to have a message.”

  “What was the last book you read?”

  He couldn’t say. It was six months ago; he couldn’t remember. To keep the conversation going, he said, “The best writer I have read is still Pearl Buck. She writes about the poor. I won’t say Chinese or communists—just the poor. She writes about the poor and the basics in human relationships.”

  “What are these basics?”

  “Relating to people. The innocence. People are always trying to trick people. The victims and the hypocrites. Everywhere you see the big-fish-small-fish thing. Big countries trying to dictate to the small countries. Not Pakistan only, but small countries everywhere. They tried to do it in Iran.”

  His family was Shia. Iran was the Shia heartland; there had recently been a family wedding in Iran, in the holy city of Mashhad. I said, “Do you think it’s all right now, after the revolution?”

  “No. It’s just a vicious circle. Something keeps going wrong all the time in Iran. So much killing can’t be right even in the name of God.” He was thinkin
g of the executions decreed by the Islamic revolutionary courts. “A sort of eternal punishment—that is what death is—can’t be right if God is so great. It can’t relate to God if God is so great.”

  Hypocrisy was the theme of the poem he had been showing visitors that morning—and he had spoken to me about the victims and the hypocrites.

  The hypocrite sounds like a lark

  the bite is worse than the bark.

  A hypocrite may appear fearless and bold

  all that glitters is not gold.

  Cruelty, injustice, slander: these were also among his themes (and in his own language, Urdu, the play on words, the twisting of idioms, would have been more unexpected and violent). Closest to him (and containing the point he had made about his isolation at the medical school) was the poem about a surgeon friend of the family who had died from a viral infection contracted during surgery:

  His skills just anyone cannot learn

  if a flame of love does not burn

  for his was not a magic art

  but a beating healing heart.

  He said, talking of his poetry, “I am empty for three, four months. I am occupied—empty from the angle of the poetry. Then it just comes. It happens. I can write two or three poems then. I don’t want to do anything else. Even if I’m supposed to study I don’t feel like studying after this thing happens. And then I’m empty again.”

  The poem he had just written was “The Big Black Man.” Strange theme. Who was he? Muhammad Ali the boxer,

  … who wouldn’t break a twig

  but at one blow can fell a tree. Do you dig?

  At the end of the sabbath morning at the doctor’s a religious discussion between the two journalists seemed to turn to an outright quarrel. The subject was Ali, the Shia hero, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet. The Shias think that Ali should have succeeded the Prophet as the ruler of the Muslims in 632. But Ali—stupendous though his life was: one of the earliest Muslims, one of the handful, living to see Islam become an empire—was a political failure. Three men became caliphs of the Islamic empire before him. It wasn’t until 656 that Ali became caliph; even then his rule was challenged; and he was murdered in 661. And this was the sabbath debate: Ali, as caliph, had led armies, but could it be said that he had ordered men to kill? Or had he ordered his followers to kill only in self-defence?

  The debate began calmly enough, in the doctor’s sitting-room. But soon the voices of the disputants altered: grated, quivered, became like the reciting voices of mullahs in the mosques. More than history was involved. The failure and death of Ali, the failure and death of Ali’s sons, had been worked over by the Shias into an extended agony in the garden, oddly unavenged after thirteen hundred years: an agony without the resurrection. The racial dissensions of the early Arab empire (Ali the defender of the oppressed) had turned to religion, and were the source of this sabbath-morning passion in the British-built residence in Rawalpindi.

  The dispute went on well past lunchtime. I did not stay for the end. The doctor, before I left, gave me his own copy of The Maxims of Ali. It was a small paperback booklet, locally published. It was the book that had worked wonders for him, the doctor said; it had given him the strength for that encounter with the general manager of the oil company; he thought it would do me good.

  I looked at it later that afternoon, when I got back to Flashman’s Hotel on the Mall. Ali’s sayings were famous. The first collection—a hundred sayings—had been made more than a thousand years before; thousands had been subsequently added. This was a selection, in an English translation by J. A. Chapman. At first I was puzzled.

  Trust another as you would yourself.

  How ugly is Mr. Facing-both-ways.

  Not every archer hits the mark.

  The death of one’s child breaks the spine.

  But there was another side to this folksy wisdom:

  The greatest wealth is the wealth of wisdom and judgement; the greatest poverty is the poverty of stupidity and ignorance; the worst unsociableness is that of vanity, conceit and self-glorification.

  Perfection is not of this world.

  The inhabitants of the earth are only dogs barking, and annoying beasts. The one howls against the other. The strong devour the weak; the great subdue the little. They are beasts of burden; some harnessed, the others at large.

  The world is a dwelling surrounded by scourges, and heaped with perfidy. Its state endures not, and all who come to it perish.

  The world is like a serpent: its touch soft, but its bite mortal.

  They were the sayings of a righteous man eaten up by injustice and defeat. The misanthropy, the pain! Could all this give strength? But to the defeated, and the faithful, Ali would have been the good man who had suffered more; he ennobled worldly defeat and suffering. And there was no question here of forgiveness or calm: he ennobled rage. And it became clearer to me—reading in Flashman’s, in my wide-eaved hotel room, screened by a free-standing wall of pierced concrete blocks from the glare of the little pool, decoratively planted at the corners with banana trees—it became clearer to me how much of this Shia and Muslim religious attitude had been bred into the doctor’s son, who was a rationalist, and in whose poetry, always outward-looking, I might never—without this special new knowledge—have seen anything Muslim.

  No religion is more worldly than Islam. In spite of its political incapacity, no religion keeps men’s eyes more fixed on the way the world is run. And in the poetry of the doctor’s son, in his fumbling response to the universal civilization, his concern with “basics,” I thought I could see how Islamic fervour could become more than a matter of prayers and postures, could become creative, revolutionary, and take men on to a humanism beyond religious doctrine: a true renaissance, open to the new and enriched by it, as the Muslims in their early days of glory had been.

  The fundamentalists, insecure, with their unhistorical view, feared alien contamination. But fundamentalism offered nothing. It pushed men to an unappeasable faith; it offered a political desert. It violated the “basics”; it could never wall out the rest of the world. And I thought it was possible, looking not many steps ahead, to see how in Pakistan, by the very excesses of fundamentalism, Islam might be preparing its own transformation.

  8

  In the Kaghan Valley

  Just to the north the mountains began, and less than a hundred miles away were the high Himalayas. Winter came early there; snow blocked the passes for months. In September began the migration of the herdsmen and their families and their flocks from their high summer pastures to the lowlands. And to see that migration I went to the Kaghan Valley. Qazi, a professor at the University of Islamabad, arranged the trip for me. He lent me his car and his driver; they were to take me to Balakot. There I was to hire a jeep for the rough ride north, beside the Kunhar River, one of the icy, early tributaries of the great Indus.

  My companion was Masood. Masood was a science student. He had been doing degrees all his adult life and now, at twenty-seven, was at a loose end. There was no post for him in Pakistan. He would have liked to continue his research work, and had been accepted for an advanced course at an English university; but the fees were beyond him.

  He was a tall, thin, melancholy man with glasses and a walrus moustache. The moustache hinted at his military background: his father had served from 1941 to 1961 in the army, for the first six years in the old British Indian army, then in the army of Pakistan. Now his father was an accountant. The family had migrated from Lucknow in India; in Pakistan they were mohajirs, strangers.

  The mohajirs had altered the provincial or regional cultures of Pakistan, Masood said; they had brought a new style in food, music, language. Urdu, the mohajir language, was now the national language of Pakistan; and Masood said—speaking to me as to a stranger who had to be put right about the country—that Urdu was a beautiful, easy language. After we passed the site of the ancient Buddhist city of Taxila and turned north, climbing, to Abbottabad, he gave me an Urdu lesson,
and it was possible even for me to appreciate the clarity and elegance of his Lucknow accent. But then, as we climbed between the dry, bright hills, and as he became used to me, he became less of a spokesman for the mohajirs; he allowed his tone to become ironical.

  Many of the mohajirs who had migrated to Pakistan, he said, had pretended they were nawabs and aristocrats in India. He made no such claim. His father had been in the army, but he had only been a havildar, a noncommissioned officer, something like a sergeant. So, in spite of his Lucknow Urdu, his military moustache, his science degrees, Masood was—in Pakistan, more feudal than India, with less of an industrial or professional middle class—of simple origins; and a man without a job.

  At Balakot we parked our car. We had to bargain for a jeep at the government travel office. That was unexpected, the bargaining. And the office, too, was unexpected—an open room at the end of a lawn, with two upholstered chairs, two metal-framed beds with foam mattresses, two other metal beds on their sides, a couple of chairs stacked upside down at the back of the room, a little sofa at the front—an office that was at once like a waiting-room and a run-down hospital ward. But it was a working place: the jeeps on the lawn were real enough.

  Masood asked me to stay out of the way, and not to speak English, while he bargained. I sat in the verandah of a chalet at the side of the lawn, and after a while he came out of the office looking grim. He said they had asked for 750 rupees, $75; he thought they would settle for 700; but he had told them we would go and find another jeep in the bazaar.

  A man came out of the office. He asked for 650. Masood paid no attention. He said to me grimly, in English, “Let us go to the bazaar.” We walked through the bazaar—a blackened dirt road, blackened little shops. In a beaten-up, oil-blackened filling station, a man was hosing down a beaten-up jeep; he asked for 900 rupees. So we went back to the government office and settled, not for 650, but for 700.