Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

by V. S. Naipaul

  The sister Dahar had nominally married for the sake of his kingship burned herself to death with other women of her household. Dahar’s real wife (now the property of the Arab caliph and state) was bought by Bin Qasim with part of the loot of Sind. And Dahar’s two daughters were sent in the charge of Abyssinian slaves to the caliph.

  They were admitted into the caliph’s harem. He allowed them to rest for a few days. Then he asked for them to be brought to him at night. He wanted to know who was the elder; he wished to take her first. He found out through an interpreter. The elder was called Surijdew. When the caliph tried to embrace her she jumped up and said: “May the king live long! I, a humble slave, am not fit for your majesty’s bedroom, because the just amir, Imaduddin Mohammed Bin Qasim, kept us both with him for three days and then sent us to the caliph. Perhaps your custom is such, or else this disgrace should not be permitted by kings.”

  The caliph bit his hand. He immediately ordered a letter to be sent to Bin Qasim, ordering him to “put himself in raw leather and come back to the chief seat of the caliph.”

  Bin Qasim was on the Indian border. He obeyed. He asked his men to put him in a fresh hide, to put the hide in a box, and to send the box to the caliph. He died within two days. The body, when it came to Baghdad, was displayed by the caliph to the daughters of King Dahar. “Look,” he said, “how our orders are promptly obeyed by our officers.” And then Surijdew said she had lied, to be revenged on Bin Qasim. She and her sister were both virgins; they had not been touched by Bin Qasim.

  “The caliph immediately ordered the two sisters to be buried alive in a wall. From that time up to our own days, the banner of Islam has been rising higher and higher and gaining greater and greater glory day by day.”

  With that apparent inconsequentiality the narrative ends. The recall of Bin Qasim speaks of some political change in Iraq and Syria at the time; but the Arabian Nights fabrication, and the degeneracy it implies, is a reminder that five hundred years separate the Chachnama from the conquest of Sind: the Mongol storm is about to break over minaret and seraglio.

  THE Arab conquest of Sind is distinct from the Muslim invasions of India proper, which began about three centuries later. But the Sind conquered by Bin Qasim was a big country, roughly the area of present-day southern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan; and the Chachnama might be said to be an account of the Islamic beginnings of the state. But it is a bloody story, and the parts that get into the schoolbooks are the fairy tales. An Arab ship was taking gifts to the caliph; the ship was seized by King Dahar, and Muslims were made captives. The women among them called out, “Hajjaj, save us!” To rescue them (rather than the soldiers captured during the previous Arab expedition), Hajjaj invaded Sind.

  Little things have to be changed even in the fairy tales. The flags on the temple of Debal—the talisman knocked down by the catapult—were green (in my 1900 translation, by a Sindhi, Kalichbeg). But green is the Islamic colour; so, in at least one textbook, the flags are made red, for the children. In little things, as in big, the faith has to be served.

  In September 1979, on Defence of Pakistan Day, there was a long article in the Pakistan Times on Bin Qasim as a strategist. The assessment was military, neutral, fair to the soldiers of both sides. It drew a rebuke from the chairman of the National Commission on Historical and Cultural Research.

  “Employment of appropriate phraseology is necessary when one is projecting the image of a hero. Expressions such as ‘invader’ and ‘defenders,’ and ‘the Indian army’ fighting bravely but not being quick enough to ‘fall upon the withdrawing enemy’ loom large in the article. It is further marred by some imbalanced statements such as follows: ‘Had Raja Dahar defended the Indus heroically and stopped Qasim from crossing it, the history of this sub-continent might have been quite different.’ One fails to understand whether the writer is applauding the victory of the hero or lamenting the defeat of his rival?”

  The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology. The excavated city of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley—overrun by the Aryans in 1500 B.C.—is one of the archaeological glories of Pakistan and the world. The excavations are now being damaged by waterlogging and salinity, and appeals for money have been made to world organizations. A featured letter in Dawn offered its own ideas for the site. Verses from the Koran, the writer said, should be engraved and set up in Mohenjo-Daro in “appropriate places”: “Say (unto them, O Mohammed): Travel in the land and see the nature of the sequel for the guilty … Say (O Mohammed, to the disbelievers): Travel in the land and see the nature of the consequence for those who were before you. Most of them were idolaters.”

  So theology complicates history for the people of Pakistan. And for people who feel that their country hasn’t worked, that in the Muslim homeland they are still strangers, or dispossessed, or threatened with dispossession, for such people the wish to claim kinship with a triumphant Islam makes for further disturbance.

  In orthodox theology only the first four caliphs were rightly guided. After that the caliphate becomes a dynasty; the Islamic ideals of brotherhood are betrayed. Sind, therefore, was conquered by the Arabs in the bad time; but the Arabs brought the faith, so the bad time becomes a sacred time. The Mongols destroyed the Arab empire in the East. So the Mongols were bad. But the Mongols became Muslims and established the great Mogul empire in India; so that becomes a wonderful time. The Turks displace the Mongols; but the Turks also become Muslims and powerful, and they, too, cease to be bad. So history—which begins as a “pleasant story of conquest”—becomes hopelessly confusing. And out of this more-than-colonial confusion some Pakistanis fabricate personalities for themselves, in which they are Islamic and conquerors and—in Pakistan—a little like people in exile from their glory. They become Turks or Moguls. Or Arabs.

  The Chachnama shows the Arabs of the seventh century as a people stimulated and enlightened and disciplined by Islam, developing fast, picking up learning and new ways and new weapons (catapults, Greek fire) from the people they conquer, intelligently curious about the people they intend to conquer. The current fundamentalist wish in Pakistan to go back to that pure Islamic time has nothing to do with a historical understanding of the Arab expansion. The fundamentalists feel that to be like those early Arabs they need only one tool: the Koran. Islam, which made the seventh-century Arabs world conquerors, now clouds the minds of their successors or pretended successors.

  It was the poet Iqbal’s hope that an Indian Muslim state might rid Islam of “the stamp that Arab imperialism was forced to give it.” It turns out now that the Arabs were the most successful imperialists of all time, since to be conquered by them (and then to be like them) is still, in the minds of the faithful, to be saved.

  History, in the Pakistan schoolbooks I looked at, begins with Arabia and Islam. In the simpler texts, surveys of the Prophet and the first four caliphs and perhaps the Prophet’s daughter are followed, with hardly a break, by lives of the poet Iqbal, Mr. Jinnah, the political founder of Pakistan, and two or three “martyrs,” soldiers or airmen who died in the holy wars against India in 1965 and 1971.

  History as selective as this leads quickly to unreality. Before Mohammed there is blackness: slavery, exploitation. After Mohammed there is light: slavery and exploitation vanish. But did it? How can that be said or taught? What about all those slaves sent back from Sind to the caliph? What about the descendants of the African slaves who walk about Karachi? There is no adequate answer: so the faith begins to nullify or overlay the real world.

  The military rule; political parties are banned. There is 15 percent literacy, and fundamentalism stifles the universities. There is no industry, no science. The economy is a remittance economy; the emigrants, legal and illegal, pour out. But in the social studies textbook in the sixth class in English-language schools the child reads:

  “ ‘Uncle,’ said Salman, ‘I have read in my history book that in old times the caste system had a
very firm hold in India. Everyone had to adopt the occupation of his family. He could take no other work.’ ‘Oh!’ said the uncle. ‘Conditions in India are much the same to this day. But we are a democratic country. Here everyone is free to adopt the occupation of his choice. This is the secret of our progress.’ ”

  5

  Hyderabad Boogie-Woogie

  Ahmed wanted me to go to the interior of Sind, to a famous shrine near the town of Hyderabad. Sind was full of the shrines of Muslim saints. Islam had long ago taken over the old holy places of Buddhists and Hindus; but memories of old religious attitudes adhered, and Islamic purists didn’t always approve of the mystical or ascetic or near-idolatrous practices of some of these places.

  But Ahmed had his own reasons. The shrine or sufi centre he wanted me to see was associated with an order or brotherhood—some centuries old, he said—who had renounced the world to live in the desert and serve the poor. They ran a dispensary; every day at lunchtime they fed all the poor who came. It was the idea of sacrifice and service that attracted Ahmed. And one morning he put me in a car and sent me a hundred miles north to Hyderabad.

  It was desert all the way from Karachi. The “superhighway” was flat and fast. The Indus River, where it was crossed, was wide, its muddy waters choppy; little fishing boats with dingy white sails gave an abrupt antique feel to the unremarkable desert. Hyderabad—a nondescript desert town with low, ochre-distempered concrete buildings—baked. But there were pools of stagnant water here and there: the desert was waterlogged.

  And when I got to the Circuit House, where I thought I was staying, there was trouble. Two civil servants, with little English, greeted me and told me that a minister had unexpectedly arrived, my booking had been cancelled, and I was to stay in a hotel. “A class, A class,” they repeated. But the place they took me to was—in spite of the central air conditioning—rough and dark, with a broken lavatory seat in my bathroom.

  I didn’t have to spend the night there, though. Razak, the young man who was to take me around, had another programme for me. Ahmed’s sufi centre was to wait until the next day. Razak intended that evening to show me other shrines and religious places, hours away, and in an opposite direction. We started in the middle of the afternoon.

  Razak was a Sindhi. On this religious tour with a visitor he was at once a pilgrim, who couldn’t have enough of the holy places, and a bureaucrat, firm about his programme and schedule. He was intelligent and kind, but language was our mutual irritant.

  I strained him right from the start. I said, seeing a man in Sindhi costume by the roadside, “So you have Africans here, too, Razak.” He said sharply, “They are not Africans. They are Negroes, local Negroes.” Razak’s English was precise, as precise as that. But several Pakistanis—a Pakistani teacher-chain—separated him from the spoken language, and what came out required a lot of attention. I said, “Do they do anything with these reeds, Razak?” He said, “Bar skates.” I struggled with that. After a while I said, “What are bar skates, Razak?” And now he struggled with his irritation. He said, “Bar skates are used for putting domestic articles in.” Baskets: a precise, but no doubt for him also a taxing, definition. And it could be like that: I being Harpo to his Chico Marx, or Chico to his Harpo.

  So, though there was much that Razak could have told me, I drove ignorantly through this ancient, peopled part of Sind, hardly knowing why Razak became excited at certain places: understanding only later, for instance, that the desolation of Mansura was the site of King Dahar’s great city of Brahminabad.

  We drew a blank at the first shrine. The holy man here, Razak told me, had a hundred thousand followers. We arrived a couple of hours after dark, and to enter the compound was like entering a medieval town. Boys opened the main gate for us and closed it behind us. The lanes were paved, with central gutters. People were sitting on tiled platforms outside the great man’s courtyard. One man took our request inside; another man came out to answer it. He was thin and oldish, in blue, with a cloth glove on his left hand. He said the great man received only in the mornings; he was now resting.

  So we left and drove on to the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif. In the dark, tiled courtyard of the mosque there was music: the saint’s 250-year-old devotional songs. And listening to the music at the end of the long day—a small crowd, some asleep, people coming and going—I felt, as I had felt in the garden of Ayatollah Shariatmadari’s house in Mashhad, that Islam had achieved community and a kind of beauty, had given people a feeling of completeness—if only the world outside could be shut out, and men could be made to forget what they knew.

  In my room in the rest house the air conditioning didn’t work. If I opened the window, insects came in. And it was because of the insects that I didn’t sleep outside, like Razak and the others. To sleep in the open you had to wrap yourself up like a mummy, from head to toe; that took practice. So I stayed in my hot room and rested and waited for the morning. We were to make an early start, going back to Hyderabad and then beyond, to get to Ahmed’s sufi centre in time for the midday feeding of the poor: Ahmed had been particular about that.

  Beyond Hyderabad there were patches of cultivation, patches of scrub, patches of sand. The brightness hurt; the heat hurt. Village dogs stood still in yellow waterlogged pools. We were in one of the famous river valleys of early civilization. But there was no feeling of a valley; the land felt like an immense plain, until you noticed that the flat land was at different levels and that the upper levels were capped with rock, so that it seemed that the Indus was the merest remnant of a vaster flow of water that had flattened everything not protected by rock. For some miles we drove on the west bank of the river. In the distance were jagged hills. They were of pure rock, fractured in parts. Some great convulsion had created this mountain range, forcing up and folding over the rock strata like pastry; and then some water cataclysm had punched through the rock. The river made a bend here. And not far away was the town with the shrine.

  The stalls in the main street were hung with photographs of Mr. Bhutto. Mr. Bhutto, during his time in office, had given or caused to be given new gilt gates for the shrine. They could be seen from the outside, beyond the outer iron gates. A plaque on the wall recorded Mr. Bhutto’s gift; but since his death the plaque had been covered over by a gold-fringed green cloth. Pilgrims looked both at the gates and at the green cloth before they went in.

  We left our shoes with the man who sat below a sheet awning. He was turbanned and dignified, brisk, a professional; he tied up each pair of shoes, gave each pair a number, and charged half a rupee a pair. The fee seemed high; there was no competition; and I asked Razak whether the pitch was hereditary or somehow protected. He said these shoe-keeping shrine pitches were auctioned by the government, and the bidding could go as high as four thousand rupees, four hundred dollars. The successful bidder was, in more than one way, in business.

  It was crowded and close inside. People were sleeping on the worn marble floor. They had come from far, and for the poor there was no other place to stay: the wretched of the desert, of those scattered poor fields and villages beside the Indus, people for whom the shrine—and all the shrines that had stood here, even before Islam, between the river and the shattered hill-range of rock—had always provided shelter and comfort. The marble floor was grimy; there were babies, and many flies, seeking always to settle on the floor and the bodies.

  The shrine—the tomb of the saint—was railed around in silver, beautifully worked, worn by the hands of the faithful. One corner post had been broken, perhaps by a crush of pilgrims on a particular day; there was a kind of frenzy even now. There were several canopies, one above the other, and just below the ceiling was a wire net, perhaps to catch bird droppings. A stone, clamped around with a silver band, hung by a short cord from the canopy bar. The stone was heart-shaped; it was pale-brown, and so smooth and shiny from being touched that it did seem to have a fleshy quality. I thought there was some significance in the shape. But Razak said the saint had carri
ed this stone on his belly while he lived; the Prophet had done the same thing. (Probably, though, it was an ascetic adaptation of an old Arabian torture: Bilal, the Abyssinian slave who was one of the first to accept the Prophet’s message, was exposed and tied down in the Meccan desert with a heavy stone on his chest.)

  People passed their hands over the stone, caressed it, and then brought their hands to their lips and eyes, or touched their heart; or they appeared to hug themselves. Outside, the Indus Valley town, blazing with heat; here, this passion. It was important to touch: not only the stone and the silver railing, but also the cloth draped over the saint’s tomb, at one end of which were a mitre and cope, curiously Christian-looking, and a turban which seemed to stand for a head. It was a land of faith, but it was also a land of dust and sand and dry nostrils and nose-picking; and the peasant woman who rubbed her hand on the rail before touching her young sons’ mouths with her hand, also in between scoured and scraped at her nostrils.

  We went on to the koli, or sufi centre. It lay at the end of a short bazaar lane. The dirt surface of the lane had turned to black mud, with washing-up and other water from the food stalls on either side, which were in business and active, although at the koli it was feeding time for the poor: brown rounds of flatbread were in many hands at the entrance.

  To the right, as we entered to noise and bustle and music, was the shrine: the tombs of the pirs, the holy men who had settled here to celebrate the saint and had become rulers or governors of the brotherhood. A Mondrian of the desert had been at work with modern bathroom tiles on the shrine walls, creating a bigger and more direct version of the abstract painter’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie: a kind of Hyderabad Boogie-Woogie, with stepped lines of yellow, white, blue, red, black, and so on, delightful to come upon because it was an expression of such pure delight.