Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

by V. S. Naipaul

  There were pinpricks; there was always persecution. He had received a little shock even that morning: a man of the town had complained to the police that he had been thrown out of a house on the orders of the head of the sect. It wasn’t so; it was only a dispute between a tenant and a landlord; but people knew they could go to the police with stories about the sect. It was like the recent case he had had to deal with, of a dismissed workman who had inflicted some injuries on himself and then complained to the labour court that he had been beaten up by the sect.

  He invariably came to some little piece of bad news like this. But he liked to come to Rabwah, and it was his good fortune to come about twice a month. I couldn’t enter his faith. But in that room, as he lost his anxieties, I felt tenderer towards him. I liked seeing him relaxed on the bed, snatching at peace, carrying the stupendousness of his faith, his belief in the Promised Messiah who had come to cleanse and reveal anew the true religion. He became calmer; his face freshened. And I saw how I had been misled by his grey hair: he was some years younger than me. The great dry heat, the dream landscape to which men had only recently given significance, the site of deliverance and possible martyrdom: it was like being taken far back.

  We talked about dreams. The second caliph’s dreams had been famous even in the British time. Sir Mohammed Zafrullah Khan, one of the most distinguished Ahmadis, used to pass them on to the British viceroy, who was sceptical until he received in this way some precise information about Allied warplanes. But dreams and prophecies had to be handled with care; they couldn’t be broadcast; they could be provocative. It was better for prophecies to be made public after they had come to pass—like the prophecy about Mr. Bhutto and the breaking of both his hands.

  But how long would the peace hold at Rabwah? Had there been any hint, any dream about a new migration?

  It was like touching a nerve. That was something Idrees didn’t want to think about. He said, formally, “At the present moment this is the place which is fulfilling the purpose of God, providing guidance for the whole world and the whole human race.”

  We went out into the heat. We looked at the mosque, and the big courtyard where every year there was an assembly of the faithful. We saw the school where students from different countries were being trained—training taking from six to seven years—to go back and spread the word about the Promised Messiah. We met a twenty-two-year-old Indian Muslim boy from Trinidad, an Indonesian of twenty-six. There were two Nigerians, twelve and fourteen, at the edge of the brown playing field. “Here, here!” Idrees said to me. “I don’t want them to feel left out.” And the boys, looking orphaned, came up: nothing to say: bright eyes in sad faces, pining below the salt hills of the Punjab, in the artificial township, for the wet forests of Africa.

  The sun began to go down. We left. Abruptly, as we were talking, Idrees held his open palms together in the Muslim gesture of prayer. We were passing the cemetery. It was his custom, he said afterwards, to say a prayer for them, “that they might be elevated even higher in heaven.”

  Sunset flared in the Chenab, the Moon River. And when we were past the river, sunset flared in the still pools of waterlogged fields, irrigated land dying, turning to salt and marsh, marsh clearer at dusk (water catching the last of the light) than in the even glare of day.

  Idrees had talked all the way out. Now he was silent. It was as though the land called up and gave an anxious edge again to his own melancholy.

  Smoke rose from cooking fires. On the road smoke was black from the exhausts of unregulated vehicles. The horse carriages had no lights; and the trucks often had no lights at the back. They all had lights once, Idrees said. Now there was no law. “When the law is dishonoured by the lawmakers, how can the common man obey?”

  His high-court practice hadn’t been growing. But his wife had some property and income. He wanted to travel; he liked travelling; he was only forty-two. He never said it; but I felt that for him, as for the Ahmadi girl in the green sari I had met in Karachi, there was now some idea of migration, of getting away from some harder persecution to come.

  The lights of Lahore began to show.

  He said, “Did you make a note of that prophecy? By 1989 the world will be tired of waiting for the coming of Christ. The Iranians will get tired of waiting for the Twelfth Imam. They will then turn to us.”

  III

  CONVERSATIONS

  IN

  MALAYSIA

  THE PRIMITIVE

  FAITH

  … A half-naked, betel-chewing pessimist stood upon the bank of the tropical river, on the edge of the still and immense forests; a man angry, powerless, empty-handed, with a cry of bitter discontent ready on his lips; a cry that, had it come out, would have rung through the virgin solitudes of the woods, as true, as great, as profound, as any philosophical shriek that ever came from the depths of an easy-chair to disturb the impure wilderness of chimneys and roofs.

  JOSEPH CONRAD: An Outcast of the

  Islands (1896)

  Those communities that have as yet little history make upon a European a curious impression of thinness and isolation. They do not feel themselves the inheritors of the ages, and for that reason what they aim at transmitting to their successors seems jejune and emotionally poor to one in whom the past is vivid and the future is illuminated by knowledge of the slow and painful achievements of former times. History makes one aware that there is no finality in human affairs; there is not a static perfection and an unimprovable wisdom to be achieved.

  BERTRAND RUSSELL: Portraits from Memory

  1

  First Conversations with Shafi: The Journey Out of Paradise

  It was from India or the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent that religion went to Southeast Asia. Hinduism and Buddhism went first. They quickened the great civilizations of Cambodia and Java, whose monuments—Angkor, Borobudur—are among the wonders of the world. These Indian religions, we are told, were spread not by armies or colonists, but by merchants and priests. And that was the kind of Indian traveller who, after Islam had come to the subcontinent, began in the fourteenth or fifteenth century to take Islam to Indonesia and Malaysia.

  Islam went to Southeast Asia as another religion of India. There was no Arab invasion, as in Sind; no systematic slaughter of the local warrior caste, no planting of Arab military colonies; no sharing out of loot, no sending back of treasure and slaves to a caliph in Iraq or Syria; no tribute, no taxes on unbelievers. There was no calamity, no overnight abrogation of a settled world order. Islam spread as an idea—a Prophet, a divine revelation, heaven and hell, a divinely sanctioned code—and mingled with older ideas. To purify that mixed religion the Islamic missionaries now come; and it is still from the subcontinent—and especially from Pakistan—that the most passionate missionaries come.

  They do not bring news of military rule, the remittance economy, the loss of law, the tragedy of the Bihari Muslims now wanted neither by Bangladesh nor by Pakistan. These events are separate from Islam, and these men bring news only of Islam and the enemies of Islam. They offer passion, and it is the special passion of the Muslims of the subcontinent: the passion of people who, in spite of Pakistan, feel themselves a threatened minority; the passion of people who—with their view of history as a “pleasant tale of conquest”—feel they have ceased to be conquerors; and the passion, above all, of Muslims who feel themselves on the margin of the true Muslim world. The Persian distance from Arabia created the Shia faith, and the Persian conviction that they are Islamically purer than the Arabs. The Indian Muslim distance from Arabia is greater than the Persian; and their passion is as fierce or fiercer.

  Every Muslim is a missionary for Islam: that was the idea of the brotherhood assembled in the waterlogged desert of the Punjab. And after four days of tent life, of mass prayers, the simple men go out intoxicated by their vision of a world about to change. Some go to Malaysia; they have been going for years; and now their passion finds a response.

  THERE are a few Hinduized architectural rem
ains in the far north, but no great Indianized civilization grew in Malaysia, as in Java or Cambodia. The land (though touched on the coast by Europeans) was more or less bypassed and left to the Malays until the last century.

  The stories of Joseph Conrad give an impression of the remoter places of the Malay Archipelago a hundred years ago: European coasting vessels, occasionally in competition with Arabs, men of the pure faith; European trading or administrative settlements on the edge of the sea or the river, with the forest at their backs; Chinese peasants and labourers taking root wherever they can; Malay sultans and rajas, warriors with their courts; and, in the background, simpler Malays, people of river and forest, half Muslim, half animist.

  Separate, colliding worlds: the world of Europeans, pushing on to the “outer edge of darkness,” the closed tribal world of Malays: it was one of Conrad’s themes. And in Malaysia today the Islamic revolutionaries, the young men who reject, are the descendants of those people in the background, the people of river and forest. In Malaysia they have been the last to emerge; and they have emerged after the colonial cycle, after independence, after money.

  There is now in Malaysia more than coconuts and rattan to be picked up at the landing stages. Malaysia produces many precious things: tin, rubber, palm oil, oil. Malaysia is rich. Money, going down, has created a whole educated generation of village people and drawn them into the civilization that once appeared to be only on the outer edge of darkness but is now universal.

  These young people do not always like what they find. Some have studied abroad, done technical subjects; but not many of them really know where they have been. In Australia, England, or the United States they still look for the manners and customs of home; their time abroad sours them, throws them back more deeply into themselves. They cannot go back to the village. They are young, but the life of their childhood has changed.

  And they also grow to understand that in the last hundred years, while they or their parents slept, their country—a new idea: a composite of kingdoms and sultanates—was colonially remade; that the rich Malaysia of today grows on colonial foundations and is a British-Chinese creation. The British developed the mines and the plantations. They brought in Chinese (the diligent, rootless peasants of a century back), and a lesser number of Indians, to do the work the Malays couldn’t do. Now the British no longer rule. But the Malays are only half the population.

  The Chinese have advanced; it is their energy and talent that keep the place going. The Chinese are shut out from political power. Malays rule; the country is officially Muslim, with Muslim personal laws; sexual relations between Muslims and non-Muslims are illegal, and there is a kind of prying religious police; legal discriminations against non-Muslims are outrageous. But the Malays who rule are established, or of old or royal families who crossed over into the new world some generations ago.

  The new men of the villages, who feel they have already lost so much, find their path blocked at every turn. Money, development, education have awakened them only to the knowledge that the world is not like their village, that the world is not their own. Their rage—the rage of pastoral people with limited skills, limited money, and a limited grasp of the world—is comprehensive. Now they have a weapon: Islam. It is their way of getting even with the world. It serves their grief, their feeling of inadequacy, their social rage and racial hate.

  This Islam is more than the old religion of their village. The Islam the missionaries bring is a religion of impending change and triumph; it comes as part of a world movement. In Readings in Islam, a local missionary magazine, it can be read that the West, in the eyes even of its philosophers, is eating itself up with its materialism and greed. The true believer, with his thoughts on the afterlife, lives for higher ideals. For a nonbeliever, with no faith in the afterlife, life is a round of pleasure. “He spends the major part of his wealth on ostentatious living and demonstrates his pomp and show by wearing of silk and brocade and using vessels of gold and silver.”

  Silk, brocade, gold and silver? Can that truly be said in a city like Kuala Lumpur? But this is theology. It refers to a hadith or tradition about the Prophet. Hudhaifa one day asked for water and a Persian priest gave him water in a silver vessel. Hudhaifa rebuked the Persian; Hudhaifa had with his own ears heard the Prophet say that nonbelievers used gold and silver vessels and wore silk and brocade.

  The new Islam comes like this, and to the new men of the village it comes as an alternative kind of learning and truth, full of scholarly apparatus. It is passion without a constructive programme. The materialist world is to be pulled down first; the Islamic state will come later—as in Iran, as in Pakistan.

  And the message that starts in Pakistan doesn’t stop in Malaysia. It travels to Indonesia—120 million people to Malaysia’s 12 million, poorer, more heterogeneous, more fragile, with a recent history of pogroms and mass killings. There the new Islamic movement among the young is seen by its enemies as nihilism; they call it “the Malaysian disease.” So the Islamic passion of Pakistan, with its own special roots, converts and converts again, feeding other distresses. And the promise of political calamity spreads as good news.

  MALAYSIA steams. In the rainy season in the mornings the clouds build up. In the afternoon it pours, the blue-green hills vanish, and afterwards the clouds linger in the rifts in the mountains, like smoke. Creepers race up the steel guy ropes of telegraph poles; they overwhelm dying coconut branches even before the branches fall off; they cover dying trees or trees that cannot resist and create odd effects of topiary. Rain and sun and steam do not speak here of decay, of tropical lassitude; they speak of vigour, of rich things growing fast, of money.

  The old colonial town of Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, still survives in parts. Old tile-roofed private dwellings, originally British; the rows of narrow two-storey Chinese shop-houses, the shops downstairs, the pavement pillared, the pillars supporting the projecting upper storey; Malay kampongs or villages—modest but attractive houses of weathered timber and corrugated iron brown-red with rust—in areas reserved for Malays at the time of the foundation of the town; near the railway station, the official British buildings: the Victorian-Gothic-Mogul law courts, domes and arches and staircase towers.

  That colonial town has been left behind by the new residential developments, the skyscrapers of the new city, the Korean-built highways that lead in from the airport, first through plantations (Western Malaysia from the air is dark with forest, but it is an ordered forest, with trees in rows, and the white steam rises in pillars like smoke from chimneys), and then past the factories and the assembly plants of international companies.

  In public gardens and in other places in this new town can be seen young village Malays dressed as Arabs, with turbans and gowns. The Arab dress—so far from Pakistan, so far from Arabia—is their political badge. In the university there are girls who do not only wear the veil, but in the heat also wear gloves and socks. Different groups wear different colours. The veil is more than the veil; it is a mask of aggression. Not like the matted locks of the Ras Tafarian in Jamaica, a man dulled by a marginal life that has endured for generations; not like the gear of the middle-class hippie, who wishes only to drop out; these are the clothes of uprooted village people who wish to pull down what is not theirs and then take over. Because an unacknowledged part of the fantasy is that the world goes on, runs itself, has only to be inherited.

  SHAFI worked for the Muslim cause. He didn’t wear Arab clothes. But he understood the young men who did. Shafi had come to Kuala Lumpur from a village in the north. The disturbance of the move was still with him.

  Shafi said: “When I was in the village the atmosphere is entirely different. You come out of the village. You see all the bright lights, you begin to sense the materialistic civilization around you. And I forgot about my religion and my commitments—in the sense that you had to pray. But not to the extent of going out and doing nasty things like taking girls and drinking and gambling and drugs. I didn’t lose my f
aith. I simply forgot to pray, forgot responsibilities. Just losing myself. I got nothing firm in my framework. I just floating around, and didn’t know my direction.”

  I said, “Where did you live when you came to Kuala Lumpur?”

  He didn’t give a straight answer. At this early stage in our conversations concreteness didn’t come easily to him. He said, “I was living in a suburb where I am exposed to materialistic civilization to which I had never been exposed before. Boys and girls can go out together. You are free from family control. You are free from society who normally criticize you in a village when you do something bad. You take a goat, a cow, a buffalo—somewhere where the goat is being tied up all the time—and you release that goat in a bunch of other animals: the goat would just roam anywhere he want to go without any strings.”

  “Is that bad for the goat?”

  “I think the goat would be very happy to roam free. But for me I don’t think that would be good. If goat had brains, I would want to say, ‘Why do you want to roam about when you are tied and being fed by your master and looked after? Why do you want to roam about?’ ”

  I said, “But I want to roam about.”

  “What do you mean by being free? Freedom for me is not something that you can roam anywhere you want. Freedom must be within the definition of a certain framework. Because I don’t think we are able to run around and get everything. That freedom means nothing. You must really frame yourself where you want to go and what you want to do.”

  “But didn’t you know what you wanted to do when you came to Kuala Lumpur?”