Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  Histories swept away, hidden under laminates like Turkey’s dogmatic secularism, produced men like Abdullah, who were not content to be told to conceal their religion and wear European clothes. He was studying the past, ‘the big Islamic culture’ that Atatürk rejected, learning the languages that Atatürk sought to cleanse modern Turkish of, wearing the clothes Atatürk banned; and he had had to pay a price.

  ‘Growing up, what did you and the people around you think of Atatürk?’ I asked.

  I received the standard embarrassed smile that this question produced in religious people. I pressed Abdullah for an honest answer and assured him that it was not for a newspaper article. ‘Of course it wasn’t so good,’ he said at last. ‘We weren’t talking so much about the man . . . In my family, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Just growing up, in school, at home.’

  ‘I would go to school, and Atatürk was in school, just in school. Outside there was no Atatürk. It’s difficult to describe. There are some things you don’t say but you understand.’ Abdullah grew up in a conservative neighbourhood and, briefly, I imagined him in a playground like the one I had seen, a cemented patch of secular life surrounded by men and women of faith.

  He complained about secularism: ‘It is being used to create a new population, to push Muslims out of the system, and I think they have succeeded on a certain level. For example, if today a religious man, the prime minister, for instance, reaches a high position, it is something we must focus on, something bad. Muslims in Turkey are still out of the system and trying to get in. All the changes in Turkey are coming from the top. They don’t ask people if they want these changes.’

  Abdullah had suffered at the hands of the system. He came, like Erdoan, the prime minister, from the religious Imam Hatip schools. He was penalised for this in his college entrance exams; his marks had been docked. It hadn’t occurred to me until now to ask him whether he had even wanted to study religion and Arabic.

  ‘There is an ironic story about that,’ he said, ‘We were meant to write fifteen choices of faculties we wanted to join. Theology was thirteenth on my list. The first was commerce. I was nineteen at the time, not an age when you evaluate things properly, but after entering the theology faculty, I realised that it was the best faculty for me.’

  Commerce! I balked. Abdullah, so full of rage against the system, might have been climbing its rungs, drawn in by its rewards. Cast out from that system, he now wanted to be a researcher in the Islamic studies department.

  It was late and I rose to leave, but was detained by one last question. It had arisen because I felt at odds with someone I liked. ‘You say Muslims have to develop their own system,’ I asked, ‘separate from the “world system”. Why is it not possible for there to be a “world system” that Muslims could be part of ?’

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ Abdullah said in reply. ‘If a Muslim girl marries someone who is not Muslim, we say that’s not OK. She cannot do this. But if a Muslim man marries a girl who is a Person of the Book, that’s OK. Jewish people criticise us for allowing our men to marry Jewish and Christian girls, but not allowing our women to marry Jewish and Christian men. You know what the reason for this is? We accept all their prophets, all their books, we don’t say anything bad about Christ, but they don’t accept our Prophet. They don’t accept our Book, they don’t accept our religion, they don’t accept our system. That’s the difference. I think that Muslims have to be at the top, at the centre of the system. We have to determine all the things in the world, otherwise we won’t be free ourselves. That doesn’t mean we will destroy other cultures. No. We want to be at the top so that we can realise what has been ordered by Allah, to make it real in this world by our own hand. We believe that that is the right thing to be done in the world.’

  He stopped, and I thought he felt bad that the goodwill between us had evaporated again, but he went on anyway: ‘For instance, a Christian may live here with us but not like a Muslim. He may live here, but we have to be dominant.’

  I left Abdullah and Oskan on that cold, wet afternoon, in the cafeteria on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. I was taking the train to Damascus the next morning and had to pick up my tickets.

  Abdullah was also planning a trip to Syria the following summer. I wanted him to go; he had asked about Pakistan and the level of freedom its people enjoyed; I wanted him to go there too. Turkey and Pakistan had had similar histories: strong, politically involved armies, a coup every decade and the execution of a sitting prime minister, but Turkey had gone one way and Pakistan another. I felt that travelling in the Muslim world might produce new respect in Abdullah for what his country, outside its Islamic commonality, had achieved.

  Pakistan shared an important link with Turkey. When it gained its independence in 1947, carved out of a diverse, pluralistic society, it became, as Turkey had, what it had never been before: an almost pure Muslim state with fixed borders. But while Pakistan, intended as a secular homeland for Indian Muslims, re-asserted its connection to the great Islamic past – even importing Urdu as a suitably Islamic national language – Turkey, founded as a secular state for Turks, broke its links to that past.

  I had started out wanting to see how men of faith had fared in the state that had broken with Islam. What I hadn’t expected to find was the extent to which Abdullah’s faith, in its sense of politics and history, spoke directly to the alien and hostile ‘world system’ that sought to turn Islam into an ‘empty box’. For this aspect of his faith, faith didn’t even seem necessary: the same feeling of affront could have come to a people occupied by a foreign power.

  The Islamic world also meant something distinct to him: not just a world, but a world order, ‘a big culture’, to which Arabs, Persians and Turks had contributed. He had never been to any other Muslim country, but he was certain its people would be of the same mind as him, almost in the way that someone in America who’d never left his country might feel about Europe. I didn’t ask him about Muslim India, but I’m sure he would have included it as part of what a man in Karachi was later to describe to me as the ‘Civilisation of Faith’. To listen to him was almost to feel that a world as complete, as connected, as difficult to contain as the modern world, or the ‘world system’ that we knew today, had existed, with its origins in faith, in the Muslim world.

  The date Abdullah put to its demise, though he would have agreed that its decline was many hundreds of years in the making, was 1924, when Atatürk abolished the office of the caliph in Istanbul. The date chosen was important because it suggested a notion of sanctifying political authority, rule in the name of Islam, that accompanied the millennia-long history that had ended. Its end meant that Islam, at least in the world post-Islamic history, was not as effortlessly complete as Abdullah made out: its completeness had to be asserted. There were constant incursions – technological, moral and political – from the ‘world system’. And to realise the Islamic completeness, as Abdullah had spoken of it, the world would have to be recast, passed through an Islamic filter, and the ‘world system’ kept out. For this reason it was both possible to see why Atatürk had wanted the modern, Turkish state to break its connection with the ‘Civilisation of Faith’ and how the Turkish approach had been perhaps too extreme, needlessly alienating men like Abdullah.

  On my last night in Istanbul, a gay couple I had been staying with took me to a club called Love. We entered a dark room where a show was about to begin. I couldn’t make out the people around me, but the room smelt of a mixture of sweat and cologne. A dim purple light came on over the stage. My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw rowdy transvestites covered with jewellery, a few plain, dumpy girls and, interspersed among the crowd, tall, fine-looking men in their twenties wearing dark trousers and collared shirts. One was telling me about biotechnology when the show began.

  In the purple shade, I could make out four men in white underwear. Their bodies were smooth and taut. It made the mind reach for its gym Latin: quadriceps, erector spinae, pectoral majo
r and anterior all toned to the point of plasticity. Their faces showed the best of the region’s warm colouring, dark features and high cheekbones. Their hair was shiny and short, and they smirked and joked among themselves as if bound by soldierly comradeship. It was unclear what they intended to do with the green and orange paint in their hands, which glowed luridly in the purple gloom.

  Then the music started and the men stopped chatting. Their faces poised and pouting, they broke off in pairs and started to dance. The light dimmed and only their white underwear and the glowing paint were visible. They danced closer together, quadriceps brushed against quadriceps; the crowd let out a scream. Then a diagonal gash of phosphorescent green, from gluteus maximus to shoulder-blade, made it clear what the paint was for, and sent the crowd to frenzy. The two pairs of white underwear moved closer together, the paint changed hands, partners were exchanged and the music picked up. The men rubbed the glowing paint on to each other’s bodies in time to the music and as part of a dance. At last so much green and orange paint had been spilt that the figures of the men reappeared like a scene from The Invisible Man. The crowd was cheering in rhythm and the men were laughing, half in embarrassment, it seemed, and half in vanity.

  This was the Turkey the visitor could never discount, the Turkey of freedoms such as these, of the Istanbul biennale, of the first Picasso exhibition in the Muslim world, the country a professor living in Istanbul described to me as ‘the only livable place from here to Singapore – no offence’. It was this same country that was anathema to men like Abdullah, where freedom meant licence, where secularism was a tool of oppression and foreign values prevailed in place of the rule of God. In secular Turkey, it was impossible to see what his vision of the world was. The Islamic completeness he had spoken of, though touched with a sense of loss and attack, was hard to visualise. It was only in Syria, and later, to a greater extent, in Iran and Pakistan, that Abdullah’s words gained physical reality.

  The show ended and the activity at Love resumed. My Turkish friend had caught my eye from time to time. And now turning to me, he said, in a sibilant whisper, ‘This is why we’ll never be Iran.’

  Recompense

  ‘Ahuman being,’ my grandfather always asserted, when people asked whether I was being brought up as a Sikh or a Muslim. ‘He’s being brought up to be a human being.’

  Perhaps all children feel that their grandparents were born for the job. In the case of my grandparents, it was as if their years as very young army parents, distant and old-fashioned, had been a preparation for their true calling as devoted, dependable grandparents. And, as a child, I depended on them a great deal. I lived with them, travelled with them; they were my guardians when my mother was on assignment in Punjab and Kashmir; I was in their care when mobs roamed the streets in 1984, very nearly attacking our house, killing Sikhs in revenge for Mrs Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguard.

  The religious violence that followed Mrs Gandhi’s assassination was a painful reminder of the main historical drama of my grandparents’ lives. They had become engaged a few months before the 1947 partition of India. They were married at the end of that year when my grandfather, made homeless by the partition, arrived as a refugee bridegroom in Delhi. And as much as my grandmother rejoiced in the plurality of religion in India, my grandfather kept his distance. Because, if not for religion, he would also have been Pakistani. It could be said, growing up with them in Delhi, that my grandparents were a living historical record of the event whose shadow fell on me four decades later.

  In 1947, as landowning people in what was to become Pakistani Punjab, when the time came to divide India, my grandfather’s family opted for Pakistan. It was not just a question of land: my grandfather’s regiment, Probyn’s Horse, just back from fighting the Japanese in Burma and temporarily stationed in southern India, was going to Pakistan. ‘We thought,’ my great-grandmother once said, ‘that first it had been the rule of the Muslims, then it was the rule of the English, and now again if it was to be the rule of the Muslims, what difference would it make?’

  She discovered the difference in a painful and abrupt way at Lahore railway station in August 1947. In the weeks before, she had been part of an August insouciance that had prevailed on both sides of the border, a feeling that the partition was nominal and that there would be no transfer of populations. So, when India was being divided, my Sikh great-grandmother, a young widow, spent the summer with her younger son in the hill station of Mussoorie on what was to be the Indian side. When doctors suggested that my great-uncle, suffering from tuberculosis, go up to Kashmir for a change of air, she thought she would stop at their house on the plains before heading north again.

  By then the carnage in Punjab, which was to take a million lives, had begun. A Muslim police superintendent recognised their party at Lahore station; my great-grandmother recalled fires swelling on all sides. The policeman told them, with sorrow and disbelief, that there was now no place for them there.

  ‘Where will we go?’ my great-grandmother asked.

  The policeman put them on a train to Amritsar, the first town on the new Indian side, but the train didn’t leave. They waited all day in the monsoon heat and humidity. At last, the policeman took them off the train and put them on another that left soon after, and in this way saved their lives. The train they had been on was a death train, attacked soon after it left the platform. They heard in Amritsar that it had pulled into the station with everyone aboard dead.

  My great-grandmother never recovered from Partition. After Amritsar, she and my great-uncle moved to Karnal, a rural town near Delhi, where she lived in a gloomy house till her death in 1989. She never discussed Partition, until five decades afterwards, when my mother interviewed her on the fiftieth anniversary. Then she spoke about what had been lost. She mentioned land and silver, but her mind fastened on one genteel image that appalled her especially. ‘I can’t believe the tenants’ wives are wearing my shawls,’ she said. ‘I used to have the most beautiful shawls.’ When I was born and my mother took me to her, she said bitterly, ‘Yes, he is lovely, but Muslim nonetheless.’

  The resentment my great-grandmother felt for Muslims became, in my grandfather – younger and spared Partition scenes – a general suspicion of religious politics and an unlikely love for Muslims, feeling they were also the victims of the futile wrong committed in the partition of Punjab. What my great-grandmother dealt with by forgetting, my grandfather dealt with by remembering, and remembering well. With age, even as his present perceptions became dull, his memory of the Punjab where he had grown up became sharper. He recalled certain shops, gentlemen’s clubs, society beauties, and missed old friends. He thirsted for his Punjab. Cobwebs dropping over his eyes, heavy on the Scotch and prone to tears, his longing for the country he would never see again was touched with the special irony of finding that, after all these years, he had a half-Pakistani grandson.

  His face came alive as he’d tell me the story of how he had called my father from London to inform him of my birth. When the operator on the Pakistani side spoke, and my grandfather heard the music in his accent, he gasped, ‘He spoke my Punjabi!’ It might have been the first time since 1947 that he had heard a voice from the Punjab he had left behind. It was his nostalgia for undivided India, as well as the knowledge that I was twice connected to the land that was Pakistan, that my grandfather transmitted to me as I grew up with him in Delhi.

  This feeling for the land and its common culture, deeper than the present boundaries that divided it, might have been a way for him to put to rest some of the absurdities he faced in his lifetime, such as the 1965 war against Pakistan when he fought against the men in his old regiment. Partition was then still a recent event; the men knew each other, and at the end of the day when the fighting stopped, they would call to one other. He was proud of the Pakistani prisoner-of-war from his old regiment who refused to surrender to the infantry, and immediately dispatched an artillery unit to give him the honourable surrend
er he demanded. It was perhaps the most serious war my grandfather had fought and the heavy casualties on both sides brought home a terrible feeling of futility. He recalled his commanding officer being forced to cremate a large pyre of Muslims – a horror for Muslims – and Hindus together, and when their families came for the bodies, they were given a small urn of ash and told that these were the only remains of their brave Indian dead.

  The governments of the two countries parted ways more decisively than the people. My grandfather’s best and oldest school friend lives in the Swat valley in Pakistan; in recent years it has become a battleground between Islamic militants and the Pakistani Army. They kept up a correspondence over six decades, even in the days of heavy surveillance, when letters were difficult between the two countries and phone calls virtually impossible.

  I came across a recent letter in which, after all the violence, wonder at the passing of time was subject enough:

  Dear Amarjit, Many thanks for your letter. I just came down from Swat, where my nephew was killed in a bomb blast. All very sad, a young man of 41 gone for nothing. Things will only change with change in government.

  I am not doing too badly for my 80 years. Except that I fell 3 years ago, and developed neuropathy. This has made my limbs very weak and my ears rather deaf. If you had an email, we could correspond more frequently. I am sure one of the children has it. I started using a computer only last year, when my grandchildren began to laugh at me.

  If I am 80, you must be 81. Do you realise you’re my oldest living friend? So let’s communicate more often. Happy New Year. Regards and best wishes, Aurangzeb

  ‘Typical Aurangzeb,’ my grandfather said, with glee. ‘He’s writing from Pakistan to an Indian brigadier and he says, “Things will only change with change in government.” Typical Aurangzeb!’