The Islam Quintet

by Tariq Ali

  There were some good things that happened in Yunnan when Suleiman declared himself the Sultan. He put a stop to the ceaseless raids authorized by the Qing court, which had affected most Yunnanese, who regarded the Han marauders as odious. I once compared the Yunnanese Sultanate to Yenan and the Maoist attempt to unite the people against foreign (in their case, Japanese) aggression. Suleiman tried to unify Yunnan as a single state to stave off the imperial masters in Beijing. Just because the Chinese empire was coterminous with the people it conquered did not make the Manchu better than the Japanese.

  Of course I developed this line of thinking to argue against Hanif’s uncritical and crude Maoism. [And yours? Or did your brand of Marxism impose a ban on blind worship? Can’t remember now.] Of course he was enraged at any comparison of the revolutionary government to the reactionary Manchu, but that was not what I was arguing. I was simply comparing it to a mid-nineteenth-century uprising that succeeded for a while in creating a state that was not theocratic like the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in Nanjing, where reading the Bible was made compulsory.

  Hanif got so angry with me one day that he sat in the living room and read a few books and manuscripts. He had a typical Elder Brother look on his face when I came home from Nairn one day, a mixture of contempt and triumph. ‘Let me tell you a few things, Jindié’, he said, ‘before you take ancestor worship in this household to such heights that it becomes difficult to find a way down.’ I was pleased at being taken seriously and sat down obediently to listen to Elder Brother.

  He picked up the late-nineteenth-century book he had found on Father’s bookshelves and read out the following passage:

  ‘Dù Wénxiù set into action a series of building programs based on Qing imperial institutions in Beijing, including an imperial Forbidden City. At both the upper and lower passes, he had Great Walls built, with only one entrance, which ran from high in the Cangshan Mountains deep into Erhai Lake, making the valley impenetrable.’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘So what?’

  ‘That is far too childish, Jindié. So what? So this great forebear was engaged in pure mimicry. Qing buildings and Ming robes.’

  ‘I don’t think that was so stupid. He wore Ming robes to stress that it was the Manchu who were the interlopers.’

  ‘But Jindié, don’t you understand what I’m saying? There was nothing progressive about Sultan Suleiman. The Taiping were better. They nationalized the land and gave women equal rights.’

  That drove me mad: ‘And imposed a Christian theocracy! They were much more irrational. The crazy guy who led the revolt believed he was the younger brother of Jesus. You prefer them only because the Maoists refuse to recognize the Yunnan rebellion as progressive for fear of encouraging something similar. But I accept that Sultan Suleiman was not a progressive. How could he be? Your beloved Marx hadn’t yet been translated into Chinese.’

  ‘I know, but the French Revolution had taken place. In this part of the world, Sultan Tipu, who was fighting the British fifty years before Suleiman’s victory, exchanged friendly letters with Napoleon in which he signed himself “Citoyen Tipu”. At least he tried.’

  ‘But his enemy was Napoleon’s enemy, and anyway Napoleon made himself a Sultan. Suleiman did not appeal for outside help. He knew he could win only with the support of his own people.’

  ‘Then why did one of his generals appeal for support to Queen Victoria?’

  ‘That was after the defeat, and he appealed for refuge, which is how we came to Lahore.’

  Later when I asked Father about why Suleiman had tried to build a Forbidden City in Dali, he smiled.

  ‘Very simple. He wanted to show that his government was for all the Yunnanese, including the Han. The architecture was designed to reassure people that they could have their own state, just like the Manchu in Beijing. His enemies were spreading the rumour that everybody would be forcibly converted to Islam. He knew it was an attempt to divide the Yunnanese and did everything possible to counter that suggestion. Large banners were painted and hung over the city walls: Make Peace with Han Chinese, Down with Qing Court: Unite Hui and Han people as one, to erect the flag of rebellion, to get rid of Manchu barbarians, to resurrect Zhonghua, to cut away corruptions, to save the people from water and fire.

  ‘Sometimes he deliberately refrained from praying in the Grand Mosque on Friday, spending the afternoon with non-Hui leaders drinking rice wine. Of course he never touched pork. That would have been going too far. The seal Suleiman used was in Chinese as well as Arabic, but the calligraphy was in our own style. Go and look at it. It’s there, just above the mantelpiece, one of the few mementos Elder Granny managed to keep, apart from one robe.’

  The more Hanif became disaffected from our Yunnanese past, the more it became a refuge for me. How could one fail to be moved by the glorious resistance of the Yunnanese and our ancestors? The impact of the victory in Dali was beginning to spread. It’s always like that isn’t it, D? A big wave creates ripples. Then and now.

  Imperial agents in Guangzhou were extremely worried by how much support there was for the long-haired rebels in Yunnan. They described how even in Guangzhou people had stopped shaving their foreheads and were growing their hair to demonstrate solidarity with the government in Dali. Similar reports were coming from border towns near Tibet. Everyone assumed that the long-haired people were all Hui, but this was not the case. The Taiping rebels had also grown their hair to show contempt for the Manchu.

  Father often used to say that if the Sultanate had survived another five years, the British and perhaps even the French would have recognized Yunnan as an independent state. Beijing, aware of the developing trade links between Dali and the Europeans, was determined to move swiftly and crush the Sultan’s armies.

  Someone intelligent must have been advising the Qing emperor, who was told to ignore the insults—Suleiman had let it be known that his grasp of Mandarin and Chinese culture was on a much higher level than that of the Manchu barbarians in Beijing, and it is said that when the emperor was informed of this remark by his son, he became so angry that he had a seizure, and six eunuchs were required to lift him and place him on his bed. The emperor wanted to assault Dali immediately but was told the provocation was a trap and the Hui generals would wipe out the imperial army. An old palace eunuch reminded him that the European powers had won the Opium War just over a decade ago. They were waiting and watching, and if Beijing became isolated the foreigners might decide to help the Hui in Yunnan. If you attack Kunming and Dali, he told the emperor, there will be a prolonged conflict that will undermine the court, and what if some new rebellion erupts in the lower Yangtze, cutting off the supply of grain and rice? If our supply routes are cut we are finished. The long-haired rebels might even move on to Beijing reinforced by Britain and France. The Hui have been accumulating muskets and building gun-towers all over Yunnan. That is what the emperor was told, and for once he listened to his advisers and asked them to prepare an alternative method of destroying the independence of Yunnan.

  That decision turned out to be our undoing. The Qing court bought some Muslim generals and made overtures to the Hui in Kunming, who were meant to be our allies, and by dividing our ranks they defeated us. That, D, is the verdict of history and the overriding weakness of Islam. Since the very beginning the followers of the Prophet have been unable to live in a single mansion. This has led to many defeats, but I fear you might be getting bored with this history lesson from an untrained historian, and so I’ve translated this document from our family’s archive that my father guarded so devotedly and which I inherited. I have now sent many of the documents and books to the museum in Yunnan, where they are displayed quite proudly.

  But this one document I kept, because it was very personal. It was written by Elder Granny’s mother a few weeks before she died. She was Sultan Suleiman’s youngest sister. He had appointed her Yunnan’s trade commissioner in Burma. That’s how she survived, and later the British gave her permission to shift her operat
ions to Calcutta. We moved to Lahore soon after her death in 1882, and only because some of the Hui who were descendants of the collaborators had established themselves in Calcutta and began to make our commercial existence difficult. My greatgrandfather refused to pay them protection money and, as a consequence, we had to leave the city.

  That history is without any intrinsic value to anyone outside our family. It’s like immigrant life everywhere, and I observed similar divisions among the subcontinental Hui in the United States. Always divided by clans and political affiliations. What always amused me greatly was the facial expressions of Punjabi taxi drivers in New York and Chicago and now London when they realized I was more fluent in their language than some of them—they tend to use too many English words—and that I had understood every word uttered on the cell phones to which they are permanently attached. It was as if they had received an electric shock. I suppose it would be the same in Yunnan if a healthy, moustachioed Punjabi boy suddenly broke into our dialect. Forgive the digression.

  I have translated the old document from Chinese as accurately as I could, but I could not have it double-checked by anyone in the family. Everyone is dead and your old friend Confucius has disappeared. We haven’t seen my brother for more than twenty years. Outside help I considered inappropriate. For one thing, the document is still private, and for another, I am not convinced that it is an accurate account. Also there are elements in it that are cinematic, and I would hate a tart like Zhang Yimou to be tempted. He’s wrecked enough Chinese history. Some swear words I have left in Chinese with my translation in brackets. Very mild compared to Punjabi, but more hurtful, said without a trace of affection.

  I think Elder Granny’s mother was searching for other explanations. She could not quite bring herself to believe that the great betrayal was due solely to money, jealousy and an unhealthy power addiction. Many centuries ago, as you keep writing, al-Andalus and Siqilliya had already experienced what happened in Yunnan a hundred and sixty years ago. A case of those who never learn from past mistakes being destined to repeat them?

  EIGHT

  QIN-SHI, MY DEAREST child, I am writing this memorandum for you and your children and whoever comes after them. It is the story of your uncle’s last days, but also about a great deal more, as you shall read. I am not used to writing anything except trading reports and balance-sheets and, rarely and only when my brother Sultan Suleiman instructed me, detailed dossiers on the rulers of Burma and India and what we might expect from them in the future. As you know, I loved my brother dearly. He never treated women as mere bearers of children and he permitted me to marry a Han, outside our family and community, but a pure Yunnanese boy. Your father refused to leave Dali with me in 1872, even when ordered to do so by the Sultan, who was worried about his pregnant sister travelling on her own. I was three months pregnant with you and had returned to give a report on our trading situation. My brother had ruled for sixteen years, but he knew we were about to be defeated and he wanted us all to leave. Your father refused. He was killed defending the Sultan. A Han fighting the Hui traitors. His memory has never left me, which is why I never remarried, though there were more than a few offers. Together with your uncle, your father was truly the kind of man of whom our great scholar Liu Chih wrote in older times:

  Only those who are the most sincere, authentic, true and real can fully realise their own nature;

  Able to fully realise their own nature, they can fully realise the nature of humanity;

  Able to fully realise the nature of humanity, they can fully realise the nature of things;

  Able to fully recognise the nature of things, they can take part in the transforming and nourishing process of Heaven and Earth;

  Once this is achieved they can form a trinity with Heaven and Earth.

  Before I tell you what happened in those last months, I want you to remember that the Hui in southeastern China were never fully trusted by the Muslim people in the northwest, who were far more rigid than we were in the application of their beliefs and the observance of rituals. The Han mistrusted us because all that divided them from us was ritual. They simply could not understand how pork could be forbidden, since, unlike some Buddhists, we were not vegetarians. When they started burning our villages near Kunming before the big massacre, they would first address us impolitely as Hou didi [monkey’s brother], Gou nainai [grandmother’s a dog] and always Zhu shi ta de Zuxian pai [your ancestral tablet is a pig]. One of my great-uncles used to say that the Hui are descended from the good son of Adam who did not eat pork and the Han from the bad son who ate pork all the time. It is strange that this meat became such a big issue, but the Han regarded eating it as healthful, and many Hui noble families, ordered by the emperor to desert their faith or incur his displeasure, used to prove their loyalty by ostentatiously eating pork at court banquets. At my brother’s banquets in Dali, since there were many non-Hui Yunnanese present, pork was always served, but the polluted dishes were never kept in the palace kitchens. Our northwestern cousins would regard serving pork even to non-Hui as a heresy.

  I sometimes wondered what the emperors would have demanded had the Arabs not observed the pork taboo and had the meat not been forbidden by the Honoured Classic. It would have been difficult to sew the foreskins back onto the men. But enough of this nonsense.

  Six months before the Sultan was captured, a young soldier arrived at the court from Kunming. He was unarmed, but hurt. His arm was bleeding profusely through makeshift bandages. He was offered food and water, but insisted on seeing the Sultan personally. Suleiman saw the young man and immediately ordered that a surgeon be sent for, but the soldier insisted that it was a flesh wound and had been wrapped in a salt bandage. He would be fine soon. He asked to speak to the Sultan in private.

  Very few people knew that my brother had a network of spies throughout Yunnan, mainly to report on Manchu activities in our country and the neighbouring regions. The soldier said he was one of them. The code to help identify the network was Wang Tai-yu’s ‘True Answers’. Each region in Yunnan had been given a separate set of them.

  ‘What is your password?’

  ‘A question.’

  ‘Ask.’

  ‘The language of the Lord—what is its sound and script?’

  Suleiman gazed at the young man’s face and smiled. ‘The real word of the Lord belongs to neither sound nor script. Ask the second question.’

  ‘How did the Honoured Classic come to be?’

  ‘It descended from heaven.’

  The soldier was from Kunming. Suleiman gave him some water and insisted on tending to the wound himself. He gently removed the soldier’s shirt and blouse and drew back in surprise. It was a woman. She covered her breasts, leaving the hurt arm hanging by her side. Suleiman washed it and dried it tenderly, then tore a bit of his own silk tunic and bandaged her arm.

  ‘How were you hurt, Li Wan?’

  She looked scared. How could he know her name?

  ‘It’s inscribed on this amulet. It is your name?’

  She nodded in relief. ‘One of Ma Rulong’s men tried to stop me as I was leaving the city, since I had no identification. I brushed him aside. He drew out a dagger, which grazed me. I broke his neck and left the city.’

  ‘How old are you, Li Wan?’

  ‘Eighteen. Ma Rulong is my uncle.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Our family despises him. That is why I agreed to join your network.’

  ‘Who recruited you?’

  ‘We are forbidden to say.’

  ‘I am the Sultan. I can find out easily.’

  ‘Please do. I am forbidden to say.’

  And nor did she, but the inevitable happened. Your uncle avoided the four vices. He was not addicted to wine, lust, avarice or anger, but he was a human being with all the strengths and weaknesses of one and we Yunnanese are a passionate people. My brother was overcome by emotion. The young woman must have been flattered, but she resisted. Then he asked her another question
from the master’s work.

  ‘Which is prior, heaven or earth?’

  She smiled, but refused to reply and insisted, very correctly, that the question had nothing to do with her recruitment to the network.

  ‘You are talking statecraft and I am speaking passion’, said the Sultan, ‘and I order you to reply.’

  She answered: ‘If you know the sequence of men and women, you will naturally know the priority and posteriority of heaven and earth.’ He roared with laughter, and she added: ‘The Master Wang Tai-yu was a brilliant sage, but not always correct. That was a wrong answer, since in our country and especially in the more remote regions, the sequence of men and women is not always the same.’

  You can tell from this conversation, Qin-shi, that your uncle was developing a passion for Li Wan, and despite her pretence, it was obvious that she was not indifferent to his attention, but she was a very disciplined girl and would not let him touch her till she had given him a detailed account of what the Qing court had asked of Ma Rulong in return for the promised governorship of all Yunnan.

  His fever of passion cooled as he heard the story. He became firm and fierce, but first he wanted to be sure that Li Wan’s sources were trustworthy. She hesitated, but only for a moment.