Nasar himself, after a local education, had gone to England, to Bradford, to do a diploma in international relations. He had learnt that the big powers were not interested in peace; they cared only about their spheres of influence; they sold arms. And he hadn’t liked what he had seen of English life in Bradford.
“They are too individualistic. In Bradford people would say to me, ‘Why don’t you spend your time to go to pubs, disco?’ They’re trying to say to be together with others, but not with your family. They are created by their own technology. The modernization of Malaysia, if it is not checked, will follow the same pattern. We accept technology, but it must not affect the basis of the social structure. Free mixing and alcoholism are the great dangers. That goes with free mixing. Trust is the basis of family happiness. Allah created men and women so that they would get married in a proper procedure and to raise a family. That is the basis of the social structure. We must avoid having free mixing. Finally we intend here to have a separate school for the girls and the boys. We believe that unemployment today is due partly to this philosophy of female liberation.”
Women, the family: they created anxiety in these slender men who, just emerging, perhaps sensed more than their physical frailty. At the end of our first conversation Shafi had said, “When the girls come from the villages to Kuala Lumpur, they don’t want to be protected by the law.”
THE men were to go to the mosque for the 12:30 Friday prayers. Just before they left, just before the offices emptied and lights were turned off, Shafi introduced the brave girls he had promised.
We sat together in the front room overlooking the highway. It was a kind of storeroom, disordered, with plastic cups of undrunk milky coffee on a table, many folders and publications, and a lopsided office chair with one caster off. Two air conditioners muffled the traffic noise.
The girls were of different racial types. One was brown-skinned and slender; one was pale, plump, and round-faced. They both wore long dresses and had covered heads. The brown girl had a head-cover in thin black cotton that had crinkled up and looked slack; there was about her a general adolescent untidiness which was fetching. The round-faced girl was neater. A white kerchief was drawn tightly on her head, and over that she had a pink head-cover that was pinned below her chin.
They were both a little nervous. They had been at the ABIM school for two years, and they had come there because they hadn’t done well enough in the government school. They were both now in the highest school form.
I asked them about the headdress, which reminded me of the women in Tehran. They gave me the Malay word for it, tu-dong.
The girl with the black tu-dong said, “The head is to be covered.”
The girl with the tight white-and-pink tu-dong said, “Not a single piece of the hair must show.”
I said to the girl in black, “But some of your hair is showing.” And a lot of it was.
She giggled and became girlish.
I said, “Why must the hair be covered?”
The girl in black said, “The hair, you know—” And she giggled again, before composing herself and saying, “Some girls have very nice hair and sometimes men are sexually attracted to the hair.”
She spoke in Malay to the round-faced girl in pink, and the girl in pink went out of the room.
I said, “Is that bad? Is it bad for the woman? Or for the man?”
“Bad for both. For the girl it is a sin because you make men attracted to you.”
The girl in pink came back into the room. She said, “The hair is aurat.”
“Aurat?”
“Things that cannot be shown.”
They spoke then in duet, making appropriate gestures. The girl in pink said, “Girls can only show the face.” The girl in black said, “And the hands from the wrist.”
“And the feet?”
“The feet?” the girl in black said. “I don’t think so. I don’t think the feet are aurat.” Her own feet were visible below her long cotton dress, which was as crinkled as her head-cover; and she was wearing pretty little high-heeled shoes with a strap and a buckle.
The girl in pink said, “The feet are aurat.”
Some Malay words passed between them, and the girl in pink went out again.
The girl in black said, “Two years in this school is a short time. Because there are so many things to learn.” Then, as though making up for her uncertainty about women’s feet, she said, making a gesture down her body, “A man is aurat from the waist to the knee.”
The girl in pink came back and said, “The feet are aurat.”
(Who was sitting outside, ready with the answers? Could it have been the Australian?)
The girl in black said, “Some girls cover their face. There are many in this school. Though it isn’t necessary.”
“Why do they do it?”
The girl in pink said, “Maybe they know more.”
The girl in black smiled, less nervously now, as though amused by how little she knew.
Her friend, plump and tidy, seemed altogether solider. She said, “The main aim of these philosophies is to preserve the beauty and gentleness of the women. We can preserve our beauty. It’s not for showing off. It’s very bad.”
“Why is it bad?”
The girl in black, the frivolous one, as I now thought, said, “All I know, it’s very bad.” She laughed. “I know, but I can’t express it.”
“Would you like to cover your face?”
“Maybe one day. When we know more.”
“And when we find it necessary,” the girl in pink said.
“What more do you have to learn? You’ve been here two years.”
“There is so much to learn,” the girl in black said.
The girl in pink said, “We don’t know Arabic.”
“So you don’t understand the prayers you say.”
“We understand those. But the Koran is in Arabic and we would like to read the Koran in Arabic.”
“Would you have liked to stay on in the government school if you had passed the examination?”
The girl in black nodded.
The girl in pink said in her plump, stately way: “Right now in the government schools the education system is more towards academic.”
“Science,” the girl in black said, now apparently disapproving of the government school. “Science. Technology. You have to pass all the examinations to get a place in the varsity—if you want to have a good job or having a high standard of living, to have a good earning. This religion they are not really taught in schools. The girls don’t pray. They have forgotten how to pray. And you must pray.”
“Do you tell the girls they are going to hell?”
“Oh, no!” the girl in pink said. “We never say that. We have to be gentle with them. We have to talk to them gently.”
“Do you feel sorry for them?”
“Well, yes,” the girl in black said.
“Is it bad to want a good job?”
“It isn’t bad,” the girl in pink said. “But we can’t be forever chasing materialistic things in life. Because there is life after death. So in our life we must balance ourselves between life on earth and life after death.”
I said to the girl in black—with her high-heeled shoes—“Aren’t you too young to be thinking of death?”
The girl in pink answered for her. She said solemnly, “Death can come at any time.”
“And you want to go to heaven?”
“Of course. In heaven we mix with good people. Not only with good people. We can mix with our Prophet. Have you heard of our Prophet? Everything is good and beautiful in heaven. I can’t tell you how good it is. Our God promised us. You can’t compare it with things on earth.”
“Do you find time to read?”
“Yes, we read,” the girl in pink said.
“We read so much,” the girl in black said, with a hint of complaint.
“What was the last book you read?”
The girl in pink said, “Far from the Ma
dding Crowd.”
“That’s a schoolbook. I don’t mean that. I mean something you read for yourself, for the interest.”
The girl in black said, “With all the schoolwork now, I haven’t read recently. I can’t think.”
The girl in pink said, “We read Barbara Cartland, Perry Mason.”
“James Hadley Chase,” the girl in black said, suddenly remembering.
“Denise Robins,” the girl in pink said, her round face brightening as it had brightened when she described the life in heaven.
“Harold Robbins?”
The girl in black said, “I didn’t like Harold Robbins and I stopped.”
She giggled. The girl in pink smiled.
“Why did you stop?”
The girl in black said, “I can’t tell you. I can only translate what we say in Malay. We say, ‘The book is dirty.’ ”
“What about Barbara Cartland and Denise Robins?”
“Oh, no!” the girl in pink said, melting. “They are not dirty.” And then, with a curious primness, “They are for young girls.”
“But aren’t the people in the books too far away from you? They are English, European, white. They’re Christian.”
The girl in pink said, and I began to detect another character below her solidity, “I read just to pass the time.”
“And our teacher made us read them,” the girl in black said.
“To improve our English,” the girl in pink said.
I said, “The Mills and Boon books—do you get them here?”
These short paperback light romances, known by the name of their English publisher rather than the names of the authors, have been successfully promoted in many countries of the Commonwealth. They meet the imaginative needs of people new to education and city life; they appear to instruct in modern ways of feeling and are read even by university students, and even by men.
“Mills and Boon!” the girl in pink said, softly, melting again, as at the memory of some especially sweet and rich food.
“Why are those books so nice?”
Formal once more, the girl in pink said, “When we read, the love is nice because it’s all fantasy.”
“You mean you wouldn’t like that sort of thing to happen to you?”
“No.”
“But what’s the fun, then?”
“We just read to imagine how nice their life is.”
“Nice?”
“They’re rich,” the girl in pink said. “They have a big house, big car.” Her voice went soft and round: “And they’re in love.”
“Love? Wouldn’t your marriage be arranged?”
“Oh, no! Not with us.”
The big house, the big car: were these Islamic ducklings—though learning the rules, contemplating the afterlife—already secret city swans?
I said, “Would you like to live in a village? I have spoken to some people here who think that village life is best.”
“No,” the girl in black said, “I want to live here.”
The girl in pink—solid again, well trained—said, “The village is more peaceful. I would like living in the village.”
The girl in black seemed to change her mind. She said, “Yes, the village is more peaceful.” Then she changed her mind again. “But I would like to be in the town because everything happens here.”
The girl in pink said soulfully, “It is more peaceful in the village.”
Like someone who now knew her own mind, and had found a way of saying what she felt, the girl in black said, “I would like to be in the town because it is also the centre of the religious movement.”
I said, to provoke them, “But there are so many strangers in the town.”
“Yes,” the girl in black said, and she was quick and firm. “We have too many immigrants.” It was the word used by Malays to describe non-Malays—Chinese, mainly; it was the word rejected by non-Malays, who claimed a century of residence. “The immigrants cause trouble. It’s the British who brought them here. The British introduced the British system. Before that it was all Islamic system.”
I had thought of the girl in black—with her messy tu-dong head-cover, her high-heeled shoes, her uncertainty about the Islamic rules—as the more frivolous of the two. Now I saw that politically, racially, she was the fiercer. She took over this part of the conversation. The girl in pink merely listened, with her fixed sweet smile.
The girl in black said, “The Chinese try to monopoly our economy. They are good businessmen. We are left behind. It isn’t true what they say about Malays being lazy. We know it isn’t true, but it hurts us to hear these things. If we don’t have the Chinese we could be a good business people. If you look at history, in the time of the Malacca sultanate we Malays are very well known as the best business people.”
“Why do you worry so much about the Chinese?”
“The Chinese have China, the Indians have India. We only have Malaysia.”
“Don’t you have Indonesia and all the islands?”
She made a face; her young forehead creased. “Indonesia is full of Christians—you don’t know.”
“Were you born in Kuala Lumpur?” I asked the girl in black.
She was, but her family came from Indonesia, from Java. “Long ago,” she said.
“Before the war,” the girl in pink said.
So the girl in black, or her family, had come during the British time. She was Indonesian, but that meant she was racially akin to the Malays; and she was also Muslim. After forty years she could consider herself a Malaysian. After a hundred years and more, the Chinese—who had made her country—were still immigrants.
The inner offices were in darkness. The men were still at the mosque. The girls walked down to the road with me. The girl in pink crossed the busy road to wait with me until I got a taxi. The girl in black remained on the other side, in the doorway, the idea of feminine allure not far from her now, smiling, giving occasional little waves, friendly to me, an outsider; but full of her confused passions. Her slack, inexpertly tied tu-dong did not hide her hair; and below her long, drab-coloured, sacklike cotton dress—the garb of Islamic modesty, the symbol of her aggression—her pretty little high-heeled shoes showed, with their straps and buckles.
To be Malay was to be Muslim—it was written in the laws of the new state. But to be Malay was also to be denied the great rich British-Chinese city, where everything happened. Money had come to the tropical land of forest and river and villages; and money created new frenzies and frustrations.
3
Between Malacca and the Genting Highlands
The land was rich: rain and heat and rivers, fertile soil bursting with life, with bananas, rice fields, palm trees, rubber. Grass grew below the rubber trees; and cattle, which would have suffered in the sun, found pasture in the shade. The heat which in the town was hard to bear was in the countryside more pleasant. Water and sun encouraged vegetation that sheltered and cooled; and green quickly covered the red earth where it had been exposed by road works or building developments. The Malay villages were never far away; the houses, with steep pitched roofs and low timber walls, were set in little gardens. And regularly there were the little towns of the colonial period, Chinese settlements: two-storey shop-houses, concrete and corrugated iron, the shops set back, the pavement sheltered by the house above. The dates—painted on the shop-houses, or in raised concrete numerals—were recent; many were from the 1930s; the colony was developed late.
I saw this on a drive one Saturday from Kuala Lumpur south to Malacca. I went to Malacca for the sake of its historical name: the Malacca Straits, the Malacca cane, Malacca pepper.
In the centre of the town there was a red-painted church dated 1753; there was a museum beside the gateway of a ruined old European fort. But elsewhere history seemed to have been burnt away in the heat. The shore at low tide was wide and flat, of soft black mud; drains from the town poured into it; and the black mud was dotted with the holes of small crabs and marked with the trails of amphibiou
s creatures, little leaping minnows and finned black creatures that wriggled.
A ship was anchored far out. A line of barges, each with a barebacked, saronged Malay at the tiller, was being towed into the town canal—an open sewer, grey rather than black or brown, that was lined with the warehouses and houses of the recent colonial period.
The European past was older than that picture suggested. Malacca, guarding the route to the spice islands of the East Indies, was once thought valuable; and the Portuguese conquered Malacca (seven months’ sailing from Lisbon) in 1511, eight years before—on the other side of the world—Cortés marched on Mexico, twenty-two years before Pizarro went to Peru. That was hard to grasp now; what was even harder was that Portugal and the West arrived here not long after Islam.
The West, after its many mutations, had remained new, prompting change, prompting disturbance, as it was doing even now. Islam had aged, had appeared to have become part of a self-contained and—to use the word Shafi was soon to give me—“mediocre” Malay village life.
THAT subject of mediocrity, the contradiction between his longing for village ways and his wish to see Malays holding their own, was on Shafi’s mind. He had telephoned me about it. He hadn’t been happy with what he had said.
And when on Sunday I told him about my drive to Malacca and the richness of the land I had seen, he said, “You can throw a seed and it will grow.” He made a gesture of throwing a seed into the pool of the Holiday Inn. “You can put a bare hook in the water and catch a fish. That is why perhaps Malays have been mediocre. They live beside rivers. This will of course provide fish, fertile land for paddy cultivation, easy movement by boats. Life is too easy, compared to the Chinese, who come from a four-seasoned country.”
Among the Believers Page 31
