Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

by V. S. Naipaul

  “My village is in Kota Bharu. In the northeast. The people in my village I would consider quite enterprising. They do this cloth-weaving—my mother did this sarong I’m wearing. Not many of them are working in the government. Some of them own plantations, rice fields, coconut plantations. They get the people from the village to do the work.

  “There were about two thousand people in the village at that time. Everybody had a house of their own, on their own land or the land of a relative or the land that belongs to the religious department of the government. They build their own houses. Nobody squats. And if I can remember, nobody begs. There is no beggar in our village. I would say it was quite a prosperous village. One man and his family had to leave because the land their house was on was sold. They went to another village, and when we asked them later how they were getting on they said nothing can be compared to this village. In the village they could find work easier.

  “In the village there were no pollutions of yellow cultures, yellow literatures. A school where you learned to read and write, that’s all. In Malay.”

  I said, “But if you have such a simple life you can’t have intellectual pursuits?”

  “Intellectual pursuits were nothing. I will give you an instance. There were not many young people who went out of the village for higher education. The only people who went out were the family of the mullahs. They only went for religious education, not secular education. They went to Mecca. The whole of the mullah’s family went to Mecca. One of them had a relative there.

  “There were no foreigners in our village. But adjacent to our village is a Chinese village. They were different, that’s all. They ate pork, and we say the pig is dirty. They looked different. We didn’t think they were ugly. They had small eyes and fairer skin. They’re a lot dirtier than us. Their backyards stink. Waste water from the backyard stinks. They kept pigs, and the pigsties stinks. And whenever the pigs broke loose out of the compound into our village, then the young boys will stone them. And any stray dogs from the Chinese village will be stoned. Because it’s taboo to a Muslim to have dogs and pigs. But there were no village fights.”

  “Were the Chinese rich?”

  “At that time they were not rich. In education they were very strict with their children. After dinner they will see that the child attend or recite their schoolbooks aloud, in the kitchen or in the front room.”

  “But you were strict, too? But with religious education only.”

  “With us religious education is compulsory. Almost every young Muslim has to know it. It’s a duty. With us the human value was being emphasized more than the religious value.”

  “But you fell behind intellectually.”

  “Yes, we fell behind intellectually. I would say further—in terms of pursuit for material and secular education we fell behind. But in terms of being more human, more responsible persons, being more reasonable in our conduct or way of life, I think that we are a lot better than them. Morally we are a lot better than them.”

  “But you weren’t technically equipped.”

  “No, we weren’t technically equipped. One of our mullahs in the village faced this problem. He started a coconut-oil mill-processing, as well as soap-making. And that was unsuccessful. Why? I consider he don’t have the technical know-how as well as the managerial ability. I wasn’t allowed to go to his factory, so I can’t say more.

  “But we never thought about it, technical learning. I remember one instance. When they started to build a bridge across the river in Kota Bharu, the few of the mullahs and hajis [Muslims who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca] were shocked. And they said, ‘How on earth could they build such a huge structure across the river?’ When they were doing the filling work—this very much shocked them.

  “Basically we are good persons, but not technologically equipped, for reasons that we are self-sufficient. We don’t need skyscrapers, the big lift, the road. We don’t need technological.”

  I said, “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t think so. When we were in the village we saw a calendar with a picture of a twenty-five-storey building in Singapore, and we were astonished with that. This was in 1957. In the village we feel we don’t need that sort of development. The realization of the need for all these things comes from the experiences on the visits we made out of Kota Bharu, to Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere.”

  “How did you get that calendar?”

  “A few of our relatives went for haj [the pilgrimage to Mecca] through Singapore, and they brought back that calendar. Singapore was a busy town—which they expressed in this way: when they sleep in a hotel they felt as if cars are passing by at the end of the bed. That bothered them in their sleep. I can remember only two or three cars in the village. The same person who described Singapore described the village now as more like Singapore—the sound of the car passing at the back of the bed.”

  “You don’t think the old village life is gone forever?”

  “No, it should be there. We need good basic amenities. We need good bus service, good school.”

  This vision of simplicity! But it required a bus—a road—road-making—machinery.

  I said, “What was your school like?”

  “In the village we had an earth floor and when it rained it was always flooded. And we didn’t have electricity.”

  But in that simple school the new world had broken in, lifting Shafi without his knowing it out of purely village ways. There was the scout movement. It was part of the British system, but to Shafi it would have appeared only as part of the life of his village school. There was a scout camp-craft competition in Malaysia in 1963. It was to take part in that competition that, at the age of fifteen and as a member of his school scout troop, Shafi left Kota Bharu and came to the British-Chinese city of Kuala Lumpur for the first time. After sixteen years the nervousness and upheaval of that journey were still close to him. It showed in his language.

  “We came in by train. One day and one night. We expected that. We looked forward. We were adventurous. We were in a group. On the journey we were searching for similarities. For instance, good Malay restaurants—we had them in Kota Bharu. We couldn’t find. It was difficult for us to eat; for us we have to take Muslim food.

  “When we left we could see a village scene. Towards the evening we see rubber estates and jungles and at night most of it is jungle. But in the morning, on approach to KL, we realized that we are passing by a Chinese community, Chinese neighbourhood, which is quite familiar to us, and we realized the pessimism we faced about the problems of having good Muslim food and not being able to meet more Malays. We were seeing more Chinese and Indians. Quite difficult for us to communicate. Because we don’t know them. For us it’s easier to talk to a Malay who knows us. It was a shock, but not an upset. Because we expected that. But we were not in the least frightened.

  “We had some ideas of certain landmarks in KL, so we get around easily. But we felt we were nowhere. We were lost in the huge community. Each time we go around, out of ten people we could hardly see a Malay. We had expected that. But we were in a group and we didn’t bother with them very much. We were staying right in the middle of a non-Muslim, non-Malay community, and that was the difficulty we had. We knew that there were Malay kampongs scattered about the town. But we stayed where we were because of the competition.”

  SHAFI was tired. The exercise of memory had exhausted him. And he was nagged by the inconsistency—as it had come out in our conversation—between his longing for the purity of village life and his recognition of the backwardness of Malays. Deep down he felt—he knew—that there was no inconsistency, no flaw; but he couldn’t find the words to express that.

  It was now one o’clock. Too late for Shafi to take me to his brothers, which was part of his plan for me for this festival day. Because of the festival the big Holiday Inn Friday buffet lunch had been laid out here in the coffee shop rather than in the enclosed, mirrored room on the upper floor, where on normal Fridays (for non-Muslims, or Mus
lims not observing the sabbath) there was a fashion show, with music. The hotel depressed Shafi because it was alien, wasteful, full of strangers without belief and indifferent to the rules: I could see it now with his eyes. We walked past the bar, dark even in daylight. On the other side of the corridor were show-cases of Selangor Pewter—locally made decorative objects on show in every hotel, every souvenir shop, advertised in every local brochure, every magazine.

  It was strange to think of books being written and published in Shafi’s village, books of rules like those written in Iran by ayatollahs like Khomeini and Shariatmadari, copies of which were to be found in the houses of their followers, who could consult them without shame on the most intimate matters and find out what was permitted by the Koran and approved Islamic tradition, and what was not permitted. The simple life was a rigid life. It had rules for everything; and everyone had to learn the rules.

  In Pakistan the fundamentalists believed that to follow the right rules was to bring about again the purity of the early Islamic way: the reorganization of the world would follow automatically on the rediscovery of the true faith. Shafi’s grief and passion, in multi-racial Malaysia, were more immediate; and I felt that for him the wish to re-establish the rules was also a wish to re-create the security of his childhood, the Malay village life he had lost.

  Some grief like that touches most of us. It is what, as individuals, responsible for ourselves, we constantly have to accommodate ourselves to. Shafi, in his own eyes, was the first man expelled from paradise. He blamed the world; he shifted the whole burden of that accommodation onto Islam.

  This thought came later. That afternoon, after Shafi had left me, I was full of his mood. In the bar that evening I at last had the Holiday Inn’s complimentary drink, “Tropical Aura.” The Old Timers dinned away; the drink tasted of tinned pineapple juice. Later, in the coffee shop—again—I had an omelette. It wasn’t good. But the young Malay waiter was punctilious and helpful. And I thought, looking at him laying the next table carefully, trying to do the right thing, “He is like Shafi, I must remember.”

  2

  Brave Girls

  I awakened in the morning at half past two and couldn’t get back to sleep. During a previous sleepless night I had gone to the coffee shop at half past four and found it desolate, with a smell of cleaning chemical. So I stayed in my room. Just after five I ordered coffee. I had to telephone twice. The boy, when he came, was grubby, and not friendly. The milk was sour; it took away my appetite without lessening my need.

  When I drew the curtain it was light, and on the racecourse across the road horses were training. It was for that racecourse view, with the Kuala Lumpur hills, that I had chosen the Holiday Inn. On Saturday and Sunday the crowd gathered in the grandstand in the afternoon, and every half-hour shouted, above an amplified commentary. But there were no horses, no races. The races were being run elsewhere; the crowd was watching television, and had gathered only to gamble, because—under Malaysia’s Islamic laws—gambling was permitted in Kuala Lumpur only on the racecourse. In the phantom racecourse now there were horses: first I saw two, then six, then many more. I studied the riders’ stances over the horses’ necks, the stirrups short, the reins horizontal.

  It was overcast. The hills were smoking. Very white clouds were rising from the rifts; and above the range there was a whole level bank of grey-white raincloud, slowly lifting and fluffing out. Around the racecourse were the trees I knew from my childhood: banana trees, the frangipani, another tree with a yellow flower, the great Central American saman or rain tree, used in plantations as a shade tree.

  I wished I was more alert, and more free in mind, to enjoy what I saw. The exhaustion of sleeplessness turned to anxieties, irritations: the bad milk that had denied me coffee, unanswered cables. When I went downstairs there was a girl at the desk. I talked to her about the cables. She directed me to the telephone operator. The door had a sign: For Authorized Personnel Only. The operator, a Malay girl who couldn’t speak English well, was plain, with round glasses.

  While she checked her file I read the staff notices, which were in Malay and English. There was one notice that I wished I hadn’t read. “Irresponsible staffs” had been “urinating and purging” on the floor of the locker, and on canteen plates and in canteen glasses. Ritual cleanliness had nothing to do with cleanliness for its own sake, nothing to do with regard for the other man. There were rules for the villages; there were no rules for the town. There were hotel rules; they had to be obeyed because they were hotel rules—and the hotel maintained high standards. But below stairs, among their fellows, one or two Malays could still feel that rules had ceased to apply.

  The nausea stayed with me. When I went outside I fancied there were smells; and the smells seemed to follow me everywhere, even to the Equatorial Hotel, where I went for the buffet lunch. There I met a man I knew. He told me that the town had not been built for Muslim people. Muslims had to wash ritually five times a day before they offered their prayers; they used what was available; they used sinks and wash basins to wash their feet and genitals. So all the excitement I had felt at Shafi’s story—excitement which had partly kicked me awake that morning—turned the other way.

  But it was all right again when Shafi—in everyday office clothes—came to see me that afternoon. With the man before me, so frank, so attractive, my disturbance fell away. He had brought a friend, a very small and slight man of thirty-four. The friend’s father had been a village mullah. The friend himself had specialized in Islamic studies and—strangely—had gone to Birmingham in England for his doctorate. Now he was a high official in ABIM. He had lost a number of teeth in an accident, and he limped. Whenever he spoke he seemed, because of those missing teeth, to smile.

  I said, “Why are you all so young in the movement?”

  The friend answered, with his smile, “Our parents were simple people. Ninety-five percent of them hadn’t been to a university. And those who had, only got skills to serve their colonial masters.”

  His directness was like Shaft’s. All my sympathy of the previous day flowed back.

  I said, “But you are just like Shafi. You don’t try to cover up anything.”

  Shafi said, “What do we have to cover up? What do we have?”

  I said, “Shafi, when I asked you yesterday morning what you thought of the white people around the pool, was it the first time you had had to think of such a thing?”

  “It was the first time.”

  “But how, Shafi? These people are all around you. They are around us here now, in the coffee shop.”

  He said, “I never see those people.”

  He meant it in both ways: he never had occasion to meet white people, and when he saw them he never took them in.

  Neither of them had so far touched the egg sandwiches I had ordered for them. They were waiting for me to eat first. I ate. But then—though Shafi’s friend had had no lunch—they only nibbled. They both left most of their sandwiches uneaten. It was only out of courtesy that they had allowed me to order sandwiches for them; in a place like the Holiday Inn they were both nervous of eating non-Muslim food.

  To avoid the steps when they left, Shafi guided his limping friend down the carpeted luggage ramp at the side. Beside the very small, frail man with the damaged left leg, Shafi looked tall and protective. I thought of Behzad and his limping girl friend on the platform of the Tehran railway station: revolutionaries, unnoticeable now, but conscious of the truth and danger they carried with them.

  SHAFI had promised to take me to the ABIM school and even to find some “brave girls” there who would talk to me. He had brought his friend to look me over. The friend apparently didn’t disapprove; and early the next morning Shafi came for me in his car.

  Considering the hectic, mixed, modern city, with business signs in Chinese, English, and Malay; considering the traffic jams and the exhaust fumes that quivered in the heat; considering Shafi in his car, now driving with the rest (the boy whose village school, in
the far northeast, had an earthen floor that became flooded in rain); I asked whether the city still felt strange to him.

  He said it didn’t. But he was a stranger in his village. He meant that literally. Buildings had changed; people had gone away; he no longer knew everybody. The village had ceased to be his, in the way it had been.

  At the school, which was in the three-storey ABIM building away from the centre of the city, I met an Australian, a big, middle-aged man with glasses and a skullcap, sitting by himself and apparently doing nothing. Shafi said he was trying to learn about Islam. The busy young Malay men I met were of a type I had begun to recognize: village men whose faces, at first expressionless and with a hint of suspicion, lit up with smiles when Shafi explained my purpose: old manners, old village courtesies, just below the dourness.

  The secretary-general was tougher. He said, as soon as Shafi introduced me, that the world had gone down morally in the last two or three hundred years, with industrialization. He spoke like a man who was about to put that right. He had an executive manner and he held a number of folders in his hand.

  Shafi had work to do. He left me with Nasar. And again—as with many of the others—Nasar’s small physical size was noticeable, his frailty. A hundred years or more ago—when the European coastal steamers moved from landing stage to landing stage, when the British plantations were beginning and the Chinese were coming in, and administrative towns were rough settlements on the edge of the forest—Nasar’s ancestor was a sheikh, a Malay who lived in Arabia and shepherded Malay pilgrims to Mecca.

  That sheikh, returning to Malaysia and to his village, just six miles away from what was now the city of Kuala Lumpur, had a son. The son, Nasar’s great-grandfather, married when he was twelve. In old age, in 1934, this great-grandfather founded a Malay-language paper. He tried to stir the Malays up, to tell them that they had to fight for their survival. But nobody listened to him; even his own son, Nasar’s grandfather, who should have been a religious teacher, decided that the money from teaching wasn’t good enough and became instead a paddy farmer, with seven acres. The son of the paddy farmer became a government servant, an officer in the Forestry Department. He was Nasar’s father. So the family, once Arabic-educated and leaders in their own way, had in modern Malaysia become “a lower-middle-class family.”