Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  All this for me was a revelation. Many of the hard facts from the Prophet’s personal life make their way into the Book and Traditions. ‘Islam has many rules about this world,’ Abdullah had said to me in Turkey. ‘We say that for a person who is a Muslim, the religion will have something to say to him at every second of his life.’ This was one aspect of the faith’s ‘completeness’, its detailed control of the believer’s life from his personal habits to his food choices.

  In Arabia, it was possible to see these commandments as organic, suited to the place, the way Hindu ritual can seem in India. And it was their old tribal past that the Prophet had in mind when he gave the Arabs their religion, a well-balanced reform of the existing way of life and of which the pilgrimage to Mecca, a pre-Islamic custom common to all the warring tribes of Arabia, was an abiding symbol.

  Even though the Prophet’s family had been custodians of the Kaba, it was not his first choice as the new religion’s direction for prayer. Thomas Patrick Hughes wrote, in the nineteenth century,

  At the commencement of Muhammad’s mission, it is remarkable that there is scarcely an allusion to the Ka’bah, and this fact, taken with the circumstance that the earliest Qiblah, or direction for prayer, was Jerusalem, and not the Ka’bah, seems to imply that Muhammad’s strong iconoclastic tendencies did not incline his sympathies to this ancient idol temple with its superstitious ceremonies. Had the Jews favourably received the new prophet as one who taught the religion of Abraham, to the abrogation of that of Moses and Jesus, Jerusalem and not Makkah would have been the sacred city, and the ancient Rock and not the Ka’bah would have been the object of superstitious reverence.

  But the Jews did not welcome the Arabian prophet. Mecca itself only came in the last years of his life. In 629, the idols were still there and the Prophet, according to a treaty with the Meccans, was permitted a visit of three days. At noon, on one of the days, his companion, the slave convert Bilal, climbed on to the Kaba and sounded the first Muslim call to prayer. The next year, the Prophet and his armies occupied Mecca and destroyed the idols in the Kaba. It was then – two years before the Prophet’s death – that the ancient pagan pilgrimage common to all the tribes of Arabia was recast in an Islamic mould. Hughes continued, quoting Professor Palmer’s Introduction to the Koran:

  Here, then, Muhammad found a shrine, to which, as well as at which, devotion had been paid from time immemorial; it was one thing which the scattered Arabian nation had in common – the one thing which gave them even the shadow of a national feeling; and to have dreamed of abolishing it, or even diminishing the honours paid to it, would have been madness and ruin to his enterprise. He therefore did the next best thing, he cleared it of idols and dedicated it to the service of God.

  This was another revelation about the pilgrimage to Mecca: it had very little to do with Islam and everything to do with Arabia. It was a pre-Islamic Arabian custom refashioned by the Prophet to unite the Arab tribes and celebrate the fathers of their race, Abraham and Ishmael.

  And, just as it was possible to imagine Islam as organic in Arabia, it was possible to imagine it as alien in places where the faith went. Hybrids would have formed between Arabian Islam and the cultures of the places to which the faith spread. Cultural Islam was the result of these mixtures and it was this, rather than the letter of the Book, that was followed. This Islam, with its mysticism, its tolerance, its song and poetry, its veneration of local saints, often common to Muslim and Hindu in India, was the religion that gave me the string I wore round my wrist.

  But in modern Saudi Arabia, this type of worship felt like a religion apart from the literalism that was followed. The dark, fleshy pilgrim had approached Hani and Kareem expressly to state his objection. Hani had replied to my weak defence: ‘Don’t say that. That’s even worse. The Wahhabis hate Sufis.’

  But even in Arabia it wasn’t always like that. The historical events that had made our short exchange possible were also behind the growth of a more global, literal Islam.

  In the first years of the nineteenth century, the Wahhabis invaded Mecca. Most of the Hejaz region at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire and the Sultan was perturbed by their success in the region and by the doctrine they propagated. Its founder was Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who had made a religious and political pact with Muhammad ibn Saud, a local chieftain and ancestor of the present Saud family, half a century before. The objections of the Wahhabis were to the excesses they felt had come into Islam, indeed to cultural Islam, and taken it away from the pure simplicity of the Prophet’s example. In the years they controlled Mecca, they attacked sacred shrines, superstitions, idolatry and luxuries, such as silks, satins and Persian pipes. They attacked shrines like the one from which my string had come, places of music, dance, amulets and comparatively tolerant, flexible doctrines. At the time these attacks were taking place, a large part of the Muslim world would have known faith of this kind.

  The Wahhabis’ stern rules led to a sharp drop in the number of pilgrims to Mecca. Soon after, they seized Medina, the second of the holy cities, and their reforms were so complete that even the Prophet’s tomb, with its ornate dome, was destroyed. The Ottomans at last sent a strong army to retake the holy cities, and in 1818 Saud’s descendant Abdullah, who had become the Wahhabi leader, was executed in a public square in Istanbul. After that, the Saud dynasty and the Wahhabi doctrine seemed to vanish for nearly a century, and when the Englishman Wilfred Blunt wrote the Future of Islam towards the end of the nineteenth century, he described the Wahhabis as characters from the past:

  I believe it is hardly now recognised by Mohammedans how near Abd el Wahhab was to complete success. Before the close of the eighteenth century, the chiefs of the Ibn Saouds, champions of Unitarian Islam, had established their authority over all Northern Arabia as far as the Euphrates, and in 1808 [sic] they took Mecca and Medina. In the meanwhile, the Wahhabite doctrines were gaining ground further afield. India was at one time very near conversion, and in Egypt, and North Africa, and even in Turkey, many secretly subscribed to the new doctrines. Two things, however, marred the plan of general reform and prevented its full accomplishment. In the first place, the reform was too completely reactive. It took no account whatever of the progress of modern thought, and directly it attempted to leave Arabia it found itself face to face with difficulties that only political as well as religious success could overcome. It was impossible, except by force of arms, to Arabianise the world again, and nothing less than this was in contemplation. Its second mistake, and that was one that a little of the Prophet’s prudence, which always went hand in hand with his zeal, might have avoided, was a too rigid insistence upon trifles.

  It was strange now to be in Arabia, more than a century later, and to see that the Sauds and Wahhabis had triumphed. Once again the doctrine had wide international reach, once again it sought to Arabianise if not the world, then the Muslim world, not by force, but by the tremendous wealth at its disposal. And here, once again, I was being pulled up for trifles.

  Blunt, writing then, was more forgiving. He saw in Wahhabism similarities to the reforms brought to the Christian Church. He felt that an ‘unquiet attitude of expectation’ had been an ‘unintended result’ and ‘that Islam was no longer asleep’. A ‘wiser’ Wahhab, he thought, might ‘play the part of Loyola or Borromeo with success’.

  An ‘unquiet attitude of expectation’, Islam ‘no longer asleep’ but the Wahhabis stronger than ever: these were the mixed, but still potent, still pregnant ingredients that, more than a hundred years later, made the passion, zeal and inevitable frustration in the Muslim world seem as though it was on the verge of some undisclosed outcome. The Muslims themselves, more religious than the rest of the world, closer to the idea of a precipice, gave the impression that something had to give. But what Blunt saw as a failing then was a failing now too: literalism instead of reform.

  On the train back from Beeston, I had felt short on Islam, that the small sense of being a Muslim with which I ha
d grown up was not enough. Now, mid-way into my journey, after Turkey and Syria, after much time spent with men of faith, I no longer felt that my idea of the religion was a great negative space. I now had a detailed sense of how the faith’s injunctions on dress, food, worship and individual behaviour, as well as in the context of family and society, could form a complete way of life. But learning more about the faith had also extinguished my interest in it. I didn’t believe any more that knowledge of the religion, especially its Book, could explain its modern revival. Men like Butt and Abdullah and the people I met at Abu Nour had re-found the faith, but even they thought more about the ‘world system’ than the Book. And men like my father, who couldn’t have been further away from the Book, stood up in surprising ways to defend the faith. So I felt that if I were to understand these emanations of modernity, I would have to look outside the closed circle of faith. And for this I would need a wider view of the societies I travelled in.

  It was also for this reason that I felt Mecca had been a wrong turn: Mecca was about faith, faith and tribal Arabia. For the second part of my journey, the journey away from Arabia, through Iran and Pakistan, I didn’t feel I needed to be among people of faith. It was more interesting to see how Islam worked on men and societies in ways deeper than the faith, to see how it worked on men like my father, and on countries like Iran where Islamic revolution had redrawn the landscape.

  After we finished the re-enactment of Hagar’s search for water, Hani’s Lexus met us directly outside. The Meccan barbers were sitting there and cut a symbolic strand of my hair, bringing the visit to an end. A mood of fatigue and inadequacy hung over our small group. Though full of clues for the journey ahead, it had been a sad, ill-advised undertaking, a wilful misstep on my part, embarrassing for us all. Hani apologised for it not having been a very orthodox umrah. I thought of my father who had also performed an umrah but hadn’t worn the towels; he had done it in a suit. I apologised for not being a very orthodox candidate. Kareem asked if I would do the hajj with him the following year. I thought he was joking, then saw he was quite serious. I wasn’t sure if I would, but I was happy to be asked.

  It was hard not to be affected by the fraternal attitude of other Muslims towards me. Having grown up without the faith, I was perhaps more aware of this. In a sense, being seen and treated as a Muslim because my father was Muslim constituted the biggest part of whatever Muslim identity I had. My father was also Pakistani, but that didn’t automatically make me Pakistani, even in the eyes of Pakistanis. But being Muslim was a different matter.

  We took the curved, descending road out of the city. Mecca was quieter now, its lights dimmer. A corresponding gloom grew in the car too, interrupted by flashes of street-light. Then, just before the city limits, I saw two golden arches with no Islamic influence.

  ‘A McDonald’s?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kareem said. ‘A Muslims-only McDonald’s.’

  PART II

  Stranger to History

  ‘That’s Tehran,’ Mr Sadeghi said, ‘if you can see it through the pollution.’ I couldn’t. The sun was at a tilt and seemed to make solid the brown skin that hung over the city. The vague shapes of sunlit buildings lost their outlines to the wobbly vapours of heat and haze. There were snowcapped mountains in the distance, above the film that covered the city, and their soiled edges, like dirty bed sheets, produced a special squalor. We came in from the south and the girdle the mountains formed in the north made Tehran seem like a city built in a crater.

  ‘Tomorrow will be clean. It’s the birthday of Muhammad,’ he sniggered, ‘the Prophet of Islam.’

  We passed a great golden dome with minarets, bronze now in the murky light.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s Khomeini’s . . . Khomeini’s whatever,’ Sadeghi said, his tired, drooping eyes lighting up. ‘Khomeini’s palace,’ he added, with a chuckle, pronouncing it with a French accent.

  With his education, Sadeghi should not have been driving a taxi. And at his age he should not have had to drive more than four hundred kilometres to Isfahan that morning to pick me up, and then the same distance back. But when he told me he had been an economics student in India when the revolution happened, I realised I had misread his age. The lines in his face, the droop of his cheeks and his pulpy, lidded eyes made me add fifteen years to his fifty-something. His master’s in economics was interrupted by the revolution. Like many Iranians he came back to take care of his parents. He started a garments business with a friend, but it failed within a few years. ‘I had problems with my partner,’ he said in a barely audible voice, ‘but, besides, those were difficult times for business. It was the time of the war.’

  A varied scene opened up before us: apartment buildings with murals of martyrs in poppy fields from the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s; a detailed digital gauge showing red levels of pollution; a green plastic cactus and a neon-orange coconut palm; a network of highways choked with traffic; and a mismatch of four- and five-storey buildings. Some had reflective silvery squares between blue borders; others were colourless and rectangular with dusty aluminium windows. One rust-coloured giant grew outwards from a circular base and had no windows except a thin, hidden strip at every level. As the city went north, the buildings grew taller. There was more reflective glass, mostly ice blue, sometimes black, and many clusters of white towers. Nothing seemed old, nothing especially modern, nothing particularly Iranian, nothing so Western; it was a bleak, unplanned vista without landmarks, a city on the edge of history, free of the stamp of any one culture, free of design, guided only by human multiplication. Urban snobbery was written into its geography. It was built on an incline: the rich lived at the top and the poor at the bottom where the pollution seeped deepest.

  The traffic was hypnotic. The overspill from the main arteries, tar gashes with lush traffic islands, reached the avenues, and from the avenues, the smaller streets, so that the city seemed always either paralysed or spasmodic. At the traffic-lights where we waited for many minutes, I rolled down the window and let in the warm, smoky air. A girl walked by, wearing huge oval shades with a yellow and black polka-dot headscarf. The only other flashes of colour came from yellow taxis and pink buses.

  I had been delayed by my travelling in Arabia, then by the two-week-long Iranian New Year and lastly by my journey north to Tehran from the southern city of Shiraz. It was April, and I had a month-long tourist visa.

  My relatively trouble-free experience in the Arab police states – Syria and Saudi Arabia – made me feel that my work could be done more easily than I had thought. I had managed to fly under the radar in these countries, and so long as I didn’t ask about politics or approach people connected with the state, a renewable tourist visa had been the best way to operate.

  An Iranian journalist friend lent me his flat, leaving his keys and mobile phone with Sadeghi. It was off Shiraz Avenue, a road devoted to bathroom fittings. Down its entire length, and even on the streets leading off it, all the shops sold gold-plated taps, four-spray shower heads, shallow basins, toilet seats, cisterns and bowls. It seemed impossible, even in this city of fifteen million, for demand to match supply.

  The flat was in a large building complex, overlooking the city on both sides: mountains, some greenery and taller buildings in the north; low, boundless sprawl and smog to the south. Around me, there were cemented rooftops with a busy organisation of air-conditioner exhausts, blue coolers on stands, television antennae and discreetly positioned satellite dishes. Besides the congestion, the roar and the greyness of Tehran, something else, like a drone, an alloy of noise, fumes and concrete, tapped against your equilibrium. It was a city you longed to turn off or escape. The only visual respite, indeed the only reason for building a city in this spot at all, was the mountains. Below, but for three feet of wretched green water in the deep end, the building’s swimming pool was empty. Graffiti in red, on the boundary wall, read, ‘Life = A Sexually Transmitted Disease’.

  For me, even in those first few days, Te
hran was addictive: a modern crisis city, full of energy, anonymity and menace. It was also a city full of talk. Summer was on its way and there were rumours of girls rounded up for not being correctly dressed, cars stopped for playing Western music, raids, confiscations, a general tightening of the belt. At the same time, the news carried reports of women being allowed to enter stadiums for the first time, despite the religious men in Qom creating an uproar about it. The regime was keeping people busy interpreting these mixed messages.

  My guard was down in Tehran for no other reason than that the Iranians I met spoke openly and freely, and were so trusting that I stopped feeling as if there was anything to be worried about. In Syria, even people I knew for weeks remained guarded and never spoke in public places or on telephones. But in Iran, people not only seemed to speak without fear, they seemed to take special pleasure in the volume of their dissenting voices. On the way north, a student I met at the university in Yazd relished telling me, ‘Our revolution has expired.’

  This mood suited my ambitions. I was at a turning-point in my journey. Rather than meeting specific people of faith, I wanted to gain a sense of what kind of society the Islamic Revolution had created. I wanted to know what the desires of men such as Butt and Abdullah looked like when they were realised in a larger, more macro sense, when they became more than just voices in Manchester and Istanbul. I also felt that this would be a preparation, or rather a coalescence, for the second part of the challenge my father’s letter had presented me: to know Pakistan better. But first, I wanted to meet a man who had made good under the Islamic Republic.

  Muhammad Rahimi was twice as old as the Iranian Revolution. The first half of his life was spent under the Shah, the second under the Islamic Republic. Like my driver Sadeghi, he had been a student in India. He attended the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, a highly competitive university, in the late 1970s – interesting years in India, cataclysmic years in Iran. His level of involvement in the events of 1979 was unique. He was politically active, had been anti-Shah, and when the revolution came, he was part of a small group of Iranian students in India who took over the Iranian Embassy in Delhi and proclaimed the new Islamic Republic. Nearly a quarter of a century later, he was a private-sector businessman who had thrived in the post-revolution years. On paper, he was a sort of golden child of the Islamic Revolution.