Among the Believers

by V. S. Naipaul

  It was Islamic justice, swift, personal, satisfying; it met the simple needs of the faithful. But we hadn’t, in the old days, been told of this Iranian need. This particular promise of the revolution had been blurred or fudged; and we had read, mostly, Down with fascist Shah. Only Iranians, and some foreign scholars, knew that when Khomeini was a child—while the Qajar kings still ruled in Iran—Khomeini’s father had been killed by a government official; that the killer had been publicly hanged; that Khomeini had been taken by his mother to the hanging and told afterwards, “Now be at peace. The wolf has attained the fruit of its evil deeds.”

  In his advertisement in The New York Times in January 1979, when he was still in exile in France, Khomeini had appealed to “the Christians of the world” as to people of an equal civilization. It was a different Khomeini who said in August, on Jerusalem Day (the day the Phantoms were sent against the Kurds): “The governments of the world should know that Islam cannot be defeated. Islam will be victorious in all the countries of the world, and Islam and the teachings of the Koran will prevail all over the world.”

  That couldn’t have been said to the readers of The New York Times. Nor could this, spoken on the last Friday of Ramadan (and a good example of the medieval “logic and rhetoric” taught at Qom—certain key words repeated, used in varying combinations, and finally twisted): “When democrats talk about freedom they are inspired by the superpowers. They want to lead our youth to places of corruption.… If that is what they want, then yes, we are reactionaries. You who want prostitution and freedom in every matter are intellectuals. You consider corrupt morality as freedom, prostitution as freedom.… Those who want freedom want the freedom to have bars, brothels, casinos, opium. But we want our youth to carve out a new period in history. We do not want intellectuals.”

  It was his call to the faithful, the people Behzad had described as lumpen. He required only faith. But he also knew the value of Iran’s oil to countries that lived by machines, and he could send the Phantoms and the tanks against the Kurds. Interpreter of God’s will, leader of the faithful, he expressed all the confusion of his people and made it appear like glory, like the familiar faith: the confusion of a people of high medieval culture awakening to oil and money, a sense of power and violation, and a knowledge of a great new encircling civilization. That civilization couldn’t be mastered. It was to be rejected; at the same time it was to be depended on.

  II

  PAKISTAN

  THE SALT HILLS

  OF A DREAM

  GONZALO Had I plantation of this isle, my lord,—

  ANTONIO He’d sow’t with nettle-seed.

  SEBASTIAN Or docks, or mallows.

  GONZALO And were the king on’t, what would I do?—

  SEBASTIAN Scape being drunk for want of wine.

  GONZALO I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too,—but innocent and pure; No sovereignty,—

  SEBASTIAN Yet he would be king on’t.

  ANTONIO The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning.

  The Tempest

  1

  Displacements

  The rule of Ali had come to Iran: the Iranian state was disintegrating. The outsider could make the connection. But the man of faith could juggle with these great events and keep one separate from the other; and even while he prepared to run he could continue to rejoice at the victory for Islam. Pakistan could be contemplated in the same way. It could be seen as a fragmented country, economically stagnant, despotically ruled, with its gifted people close to hysteria. But Pakistan was also the country that had been founded more than thirty years before as a homeland for the Muslims of India, and for that reason was to be cherished as a pioneer of the Islamic revival.

  An article in the Tehran Times linked the two countries. “The history of Pakistan and the Islamic Revolution in Iran is a reminder of the power of religion and the hollowness of secular cults. How the world works is the concern of science, and how society is to be governed is the affair of politicians, but what the whole thing means is the main concern of Iran and Pakistan. Politics is combined with religion in Islam. Iran and Pakistan can join hands to prove to the world that Islam is not just a faith of the past, practising ancient rituals.”

  It was the logic of the faith. The writer acknowledged, and dismissed, what was lacking in both countries—science, the ability to run a twentieth-century state; and then by a kind of intellectual wipe, a verbal blur (“what the whole thing means”), he offered the honouring of the faith as an achievement that overrode everything else. To do that—and without irony to present chaos as its opposite (“a reminder of the power of religion and the hollowness of secular cults”)—the writer had to leave out a lot.

  He had referred to “the history of Pakistan.” But he hadn’t gone into that history, and he had ignored its nature: the uprootings and mass migrations after the state had been founded in 1947; the absence of representative government; the land of the faith turning into a land of plunder; the growth of regionalisms; rule by the army in 1958; the bloody secession of far-off Bangladesh in 1971. There was no hint in the article that the army ruled once again in Pakistan, that there was martial law once again; no hint that Mr. Bhutto, the country’s only elected prime minister, deposed by the army in 1977, arrested on a murder charge, tried, and sentenced to death, had been hanged after nineteen months in jail; no hint that this hanging, just four months old, had shocked, demoralized, and further divided the country.

  All this history, all this secular failure and pain, had been conjured away by the logic of the faith.

  THE desert of Iran ran into the desert of Pakistan. From thirty thousand feet up the wastes of Iranian and Pakistani Baluchistan showed brown and black, but pale, more glare than colour.

  There was some natural gas in Baluchistan, but the desert of Pakistan was without oil. Iran was a land of oil and money; here desert was desert. Iran, with a population of thirty-five million, earned seventy million dollars a day from its oil; Pakistan, with twice the population, earned one hundred forty millions a month from its exports of rice, leather, and cotton. Iran had just won, in an American federal court, a repayment of thirty million dollars from the American Bell International company; Pakistan, in a year, could spend only twenty million dollars on the roads of Sind Province, which was vast. Iran could write off billions in military equipment—oil turned to money to water; here it was news that Pakistan was approaching Iran for a loan of one hundred fifty million dollars.

  Here—the world dwindling and dwindling—it was news that one hundred forty thousand dollars had been granted to thirty Pakistani sports organizations. A bigger country than Iran, but a dwarf economy, and this was reflected in the newspaper advertisements, which were for insurance, tropical clothes, TV sets, a cotton pesticide (made in collaboration with the British firm of May and Baker), cement, a voltage stabilizer, brass and copper triangles and rods, a cosmetic soap, a brand of razor blade.

  Sophisticated administrative forms, surviving in a dwarf economy, could at times suggest a people at play. In Dawn, the leading English-language newspaper of Karachi, there was a double-column, four-inch tender advertisement from the Defence Science and Technology Organization (HQ), Ministry of Defence, for the supply of one refrigerator and four cupboards (“wooden with glass panel doors fitted with hinges”).

  Eight inches were given in that paper to the announcement of a government “skill development plan for youths.” What was that plan? The government was giving two thousand rupees, two hundred dollars, to a thousand village schools to buy worktables and hand tools. Eight inches for that? How? Like this: “… The training programme will be adjusted to the immediate needs of the local community and matched with th
e interest of the learners in order to derive maximum benefit out of this programme. The Government officials explained that this programme will be based on modular concepts consisting of well-defined community-oriented skills.…”

  When money was short, language took up the slack. Farm mechanisation being stepped up: that was the reassuring headline in Dawn. This was the story: “Agriculture mechanisation programme is being stepped up in Sind province by deploying more machinery in the fields for their development, it was learnt here yesterday.…”

  But then it was less funny to read the advertisements for workers, at two hundred dollars a month, in Saudi Arabia. “Candidates will be employed on single status basis regardless of their actual marital status. Bachelor air-conditioned accommodation on a double occupancy basis equipped with necessary items of furniture and communal cooking and toilet facilities will be provided against deduction of appropriate rental charges.” It was on foreign earnings like this, as much as on its exports of rice, leather, and cotton, that Pakistan lived.

  And yet there was also news of a Pakistan-manufactured “Islamic” nuclear bomb; and there was a long article on the editorial page about opposition to this bomb by “International Zionism.” Pakistan was poor; but it was a land of the faith, with the obsessions of the faith. Indira gets money from Israel for KGB information: this was a story from Dawn’s London correspondent. The KGB had passed on some information to Mrs. Gandhi when she was prime minister of India, and she had passed on the information to Moshe Dayan, foreign minister of Israel, and he had given her six million dollars. The source for this story was said to be an unpublished book by a Ugandan diplomat (Uganda, under Amin, having been part of the Muslim world).

  Away from this Jewish-Indian-Russian underhandedness, pious Pakistanis were preparing for the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Pan-Islamic Steamship Company had arranged twelve sailings to the Arabian pilgrim port of Jeddah ($280 for the “deck class” return fare, including $26 for food; $420 first class, including $57 for food); and General Zia, the president and chief martial-law administrator, had decreed that each pilgrim ship should be seen off by a different provincial governor or federal minister. General Zia himself was going quietly by air in a day or so to Arabia, to perform his own devotions without fuss (and he was to return with a modest Saudi loan of a hundred million dollars).

  Off stage there were rumblings that were like a continuation of events in Iran. Various people in Pakistan were calling for stricter Islamic laws, and at the University of Karachi there had been a gunfight with Sten guns between students of the left and right—words that have to be defined in every country and here meant, on the right, people who were against Mr. Bhutto and were using Islam to discredit him, and, on the left, people who grieved for Mr. Bhutto and longed to pull down his enemies.

  In Iran you felt, in spite of all that was said about the wickedness of the Shah, that the money had gone down far. Money, and the foreign goods and tools that it bought, gave an illusion of Islamic power. Seventy million unearned dollars a day kept the idle country on the boil, and fed the idea of the revolution. In Pakistan poverty had the same effect. The tensions of poverty and political distress merged with the tensions of the faith. Thirty-two years after its founding as a religious state, an Indian Muslim homeland, Pakistan remained on the boil, and Islam was still an issue: failure led back again and again to the assertion of the faith.

  THE idea of a separate Indian Muslim state, once it had been formulated, couldn’t have been resisted. The idea was put forward in 1930 by a revered poet, Sir Mohammed Iqbal (1876–1938), in a speech to the All-Indian Muslim League, the main Muslim political organization in undivided India.

  Iqbal’s argument was like this. Islam is not only an ethical ideal; it is also “a certain kind of polity.” Religion for a Muslim is not a matter of private conscience or private practice, as Christianity can be for the man in Europe. There never was, Iqbal says, a specifically Christian polity; and in Europe after Luther the “universal ethics of Jesus” was “displaced by national systems of ethics and polity.” There cannot be a Luther in Islam because there is no Islamic church-order for a Muslim to revolt against. And there is also to be considered “the nature of the Holy Prophet’s religious experience, as disclosed in the Koran … It is individual experience creative of a social order.”

  To accept Islam is to accept certain “legal concepts.” These concepts—revelatory, but not to be belittled for that reason—have “civic significance.” “The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.”

  Iqbal, in fact, is saying in a philosophical way that in an undivided India Islam will be in danger, will go the way of Christianity in Europe and cease to be itself. Muslims, to be true to Islam, need a Muslim polity, a Muslim state. The Muslims of India especially need such a state, Iqbal suggests; because “India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best.” And Iqbal’s solution was simple: the Muslim-majority areas of northwest India should be detached and consolidated into a single Muslim state.

  Seventeen years later (and nine years after Iqbal’s death) it happened—and to the Muslim-majority northwest was added the Muslim-majority eastern half of Bengal, a thousand miles away. But that Muslim state came with a communal holocaust on both sides of the new borders. Millions were killed and many millions more uprooted. And it was only afterwards that it became clear that that plan for the creation of Pakistan, apparently logical, meeting Muslim needs, had a simple, terrible flaw.

  Muslim passions were strongest among those Muslims who felt most threatened, and they were in that part of the subcontinent which was to remain Indian. Not all of those Muslims, not a half, not a quarter, could migrate to Pakistan. The most experienced Muslim political organizations were rooted in Indian India rather than in Pakistan. Indian Muslim politicians, campaigners for Pakistan, who went to Pakistan became men who overnight had lost their constituencies. They became men of dwindling appeal and reputation, men without a cause, and they were not willing to risk elections in what had turned out to be a strange country. Political life didn’t develop in the new state; institutions and administration remained as they were in British days.

  A special word began to be used in Pakistan for the migrants from India: mohajirs, foreigners. In the province of Sind, especially, where Karachi became a mohajir city, local resentment built up into separatist feeling.

  In the new state only the armed forces flourished. They were seen at first as the defenders, and possible extenders, of the Islamic state. Then it became apparent that they were the state’s only organized group. They became masters, a country within a country. The armed forces were mainly of the northwest, with the cultural prejudices of the northwest; in time they forced the eastern wing of Pakistan into secession as Bangladesh. It was Pakistan’s luck then to get a national leader in Mr. Bhutto, a man of Sind and the country’s first native leader, as it were. He was a populist; he ruled despotically for nearly six years. Then he was deposed by the army and hanged, and the fragmented country was further riven.

  Calamity was added to calamity. The Bengali Muslims had Bangladesh; the people of West Pakistan had Pakistan. The Bihari Muslims had nothing. They had migrated from Bihar in eastern India to Pakistani Bengal. But by language and culture they were closer to the Muslims of the West. When Bangladesh became independent they were wanted neither by Bangladesh nor by Pakistan, and they became a lost community, cast into limbo by their dream of the Muslim polity.

  The state withered. But faith didn’t. Failure only led back to the faith. The state had been founded as a homeland for Muslims. If the state failed, it wasn’t because the dream was flawed, or the faith flawed; it could only be because men
had failed the faith. A purer and purer faith began to be called for. And in that quest for the Islamic absolute—the society of believers, where every action was instinct with worship—men lost sight of the political origins of their state. They forgot the secular ambitions of Mr. Jinnah, the state’s political founder, who (less philosophical than Iqbal) wanted only a state where Muslims wouldn’t be swamped by non-Muslims. Even Iqbal was laid aside. Extraordinary claims began to be made for Pakistan: it was founded as the land of the pure; it was to be the first truly Islamic state since the days of the Prophet and his close companions.

  At the end of my time in Pakistan I met a middle-aged man, a civil servant and a poet. He had sought me out to give me his books. But the condition of his country was closer to him than poetry now. It was of Pakistan that he spoke, with an unfocussed rage that took him almost to tears.

  “When I was a child in India,” he said, “and I heard we had got Pakistan, I cannot tell you what I felt. To me it was like God, this country of Pakistan.”

  But wasn’t that where the failure started? Wouldn’t it have been better if the creation of Pakistan had been seen as a political achievement, something to build on, rather than as a victory of the faith, something complete in itself? Wasn’t that the flaw in the Iqbal speech? “One lesson I have learnt from the history of Muslims,” Iqbal said at the end of that speech. “At critical moments in their history it is Islam that has saved Muslims and not vice versa.” Wouldn’t it have been better for Muslims to trust less to the saving faith and to sit down hard-headedly to work out institutions? Wasn’t that an essential part of the history of civilization, after all: the conversion of ethical ideals into institutions?