Among the Believers

by V. S. Naipaul

  And one afternoon, walking from the Intercontinental down the two-mile road that led, through land reclaimed from mangrove swamp, to the Chinna Creek and the Napier Mole Bridge, I was surprised, at the edge of the creek, beside the bridge and amid the works for the new dock, to see a memorial plaque with Hindu names on a wall.

  The wall was the front of a bathing ghat, bathing steps, built in 1943—four years before Pakistan—by the Hindu Charitable Bathing Ghats Association. There were two carved wooden doors, still with their old signs: This Entrance Reserved for Hindu Women, This Entrance Reserved for Hindu Men. One door was carved with elephants rampant, the other with serene swans.

  The bathing steps still existed. They could be seen (the women’s steps walled around with concrete, though) from the Napier Mole Bridge: the lower steps black with the refuse of the oily harbour creek. There were stone seats higher up; the wall on this side, facing the water and the mangrove across the creek, was painted bright green; there were pigeons on the Mogul-style domes. On the Napier Mole Bridge itself was a stone recording the construction of the bridge in 1864, with the names of the British engineers.

  A boy of about twelve came to me on the bridge. He had been watching me. He nodded towards the tainted bathing steps and said, “Muslims can’t go there. Hindus can go there, Parsis, English people. But not Muslims.” To him the prohibition was what was important about the ghat. He was a Hindu, a remnant of the Sindhi Hindu population, but he was innocent of history (and I was to see him a week or so afterwards at a Muslim wedding reception in a hotel).

  The ghat clearly stood in the way of the new dock works. Later I was to meet the man who had intervened to prevent the ghat’s being pulled down. He said that the ghat had long ceased to be a ghat. There were two caretakers, and they used the place as their home. Someone had offered to put up a neon sign on the domed roof, to give the ghat some income for its maintenance; but the man who had saved the ghat thought it better for the place to stay as it was, washed by the polluted tides of the harbour, decaying at its own pace.

  The Hindus had all but disappeared. But that was old history. And there had been a greater dispossession since. Karachi, with its immigrant millions, was a city of Pakistan; it had ceased to be of Sind alone. Sind had received the bulk of the Muslims from India; and the Muslim polity as it had developed in Pakistan could not outbalance Sindhi feelings that they were being besieged and colonized, with their language and land under threat. Now, as against Sindhi talk of separatism, there was talk of detaching Karachi as a federal district from the province of Sind.

  The dream of the Muslim homeland had had strange consequences. And strangest of all was this: the state that had appeared to some as God itself, a complete earthly reward for the faithful, lived not so much by its agricultural exports or by the proceeds of its minor, secondary industries, as by the export of its people. The newspaper advertisements called it “manpower-export.”

  The idea of the Muslim state as God had never converted into anything less exalted, had never converted into political or economic organization. Pakistan—a thousand miles long from the sea to the Himalayas, and with a population of more than seventy million—was a remittance economy. The property boom in Karachi was sustained in part by the remittances of overseas workers, and they were everywhere, legally and illegally. They were not only in Muslim countries, Arabia, the Gulf states, Libya; they were also in Canada and the United States and in many of the countries of Europe.

  The business was organized. Like accountants studying tax laws, the manpower-export experts of Pakistan studied the world’s immigration laws and competitively gambled with their emigrant battalions: visitor’s visas overstayable here (most European countries), dependents shippable there (England), student’s visas convertible there (Canada and the United States), political asylum to be asked for there (Austria and West Berlin), still no visas needed here, just below the Arctic Circle (Finland). They went by the planeload. Karachi airport was equipped for this emigrant traffic. Some got through; some were turned back. Germans shoot 4 Pakistanis: Illegal entry. This was an item in Dawn, sent from Turkey, on the emigrant route, and it was the delayed story of the humane disabling (men shot in the leg) and capture of one batch.

  Abroad, the emigrants threw themselves on the mercies of civil-liberties organizations. They sought the protection of the laws of the countries where the planes had brought them. They or their representatives spoke correct words about the difference between poor countries and rich, South and North. They spoke of the crime of racial discrimination and the brotherhood of man. They appealed to the ideals of the alien civilizations whose virtue they denied at home.

  And in the eyes of the faithful there was no contradiction. Home was home; home wasn’t like outside; ecumenical words spoken outside didn’t alter that. The Muslim polity was like God itself, a thing apart, and had ceaselessly to be purified and defended. As the Tehran Times article said, speaking of the Islamic wave, “With reformation and adaptation to present needs in full conformity with the holy Koran and Sunnah [the old, right way], Iran and Pakistan with a clarity of purpose and sincere cooperation can establish the truth that Islam is a complete way of life.”

  2

  Karachi Phantasmagoria

  Pakistan had a high reputation in the Muslim world. It was the twentieth-century Islamic pioneer, and for some time there had been reports of its “experiments” with Islam. Pakistan, it was said, was experimenting with Islamic law, with a Koranic alms-levy that would eventually sustain an Islamic welfare state, and with a banking system that would do away with interest.

  I wanted to have a look at these experiments. But after a few days in Karachi it became clear that I needed help, that by myself I would see nothing. The Tehran Times had said that an Islamic bank existed in Pakistan, “established under the patronage of the great Pakistani Moslem scholar Maulana Maudoodi.” But in Karachi what I saw everywhere were the green signs of the Habib Bank. The main Habib building in central Karachi was a concrete tower of New York magnificence; and Habib had just opened a branch in Europe. The newspaper advertisements announcing this opening said it had come about “by the grace of Allah.” But Habib was not an “experimental” bank.

  I needed help, and I went to see Mr. Deen, the government information officer. His office was in a concrete shed in what looked like old British military barracks.

  Off a wide central corridor, a barroom-style swing door led to Mr. Deen’s room. The cotton carpet was worn, its red-and-white pattern faded with dust and sun. The distempered walls were ochre-coloured, flaking, erupting with lime; the windows, of the roughest carpentry, were protected by a diamond-patterned metal grille; and someone was running a scooter just outside, creating a tearing noise in a cloud of blue smoke. Two small windows cut into the top of the wall were meant to let out hot air; and a ceiling fan spun over the old, government-issue sofa set, which, as I found when I sat down, was a little rickety: government on a shoestring.

  And Mr. Deen was bemused by my request. He had been courteous to me; he had sent the office van—he called it “a thing on four wheels”—to fetch me from the hotel. But he was a busy man. He was concerned that morning with the pilgrims going to Mecca—the government had decreed that to be a matter of importance—and he was going through the official photographs of the scene at the docks the previous day. It was clear that Mr. Deen was finding some of the photographs unsatisfactory. And now: Islamic courts, Islamic banks, Islamic experiments? He seemed mentally to grope.

  So I had read the wrong papers?

  “People talk about these things,” Mr. Deen said, with the weariness of a harassed official. “But the people who talk expect other people to do the work.”

  There was an Islamic Ideology Council that met ten days a month; but that was in Islamabad, the capital, far to the north. Mr. Deen didn’t know what he could do for me in Karachi. He was in his mid-fifties; he wore grey trousers and a white shirt, and the striped tie hanging on the wall be
hind him might, in another country, have been a club tie of some sort.

  Mr. Sherwani, a colleague, came in. He was heavy, looser in flesh than Mr. Deen; his skin was smooth, and he was wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt. Mr. Deen explained what I was after, and Mr. Sherwani looked hard at me. He said to Mr. Deen in Urdu, “But he looks just like Qutub. When I came in the room I thought, ‘But it is Qutub.’ ” Mr. Deen looked at me with a new interest and said with sad affection that yes, I looked like Qutub. Qutub, they told me, was a Pakistani painter.

  Mr. Sherwani said, “How old are you?”

  I said, “Forty-seven.”

  “I am forty-eight. And I am healthier than you. No, you can’t deny it. Your eyes are tired. They are the eyes of an old man. That indicates a vitamin deficiency.”

  Mr. Deen said, “He wants to see Islam in action.”

  I thought Mr. Deen put it well.

  Mr. Sherwani said, “He should read the Koran. Marmaduke Pickthall—that’s the best translation for you.”

  “It’s more an interpretation,” Mr. Deen said.

  Mr. Sherwani said, “You must know the philosophy.”

  I clung to Mr. Deen’s good words. I said, “I want to see Islam in action.”

  Mr. Sherwani said that many people said they were Muslims, but there were very few true Muslims. Islam was a complete way of life and for that reason was too hard for most people. I mentioned Iran; Mr. Sherwani said with immense, fatherly tolerance that the Shias of Iran were a deviation.

  A man came into the office with some photographs. Mr. Deen, withdrawing from the conversation, looked at the photographs and began to be vehement with the man who had brought them.

  Mr. Sherwani—ignoring the row at the desk, and the running scooter outside—asked whether I had any religious faith. I said I hadn’t, and to my surprise he was delighted. He said it meant I wasn’t prejudiced; it was important, in studying Islam, not to be prejudiced.

  The man who had brought the photographs left the office, and Mr. Deen followed him out.

  Mr. Sherwani said to me, “A man like you—I am going to make a prophecy about you. When you have finished your investigations you will become a Muslim.”

  Mr. Deen came back and Mr. Sherwani said to him, “I’ve just been telling him: he is going to become a Muslim.”

  Mr. Deen, his handsome face still full of the cares of his office, smiled at me. And then he and Mr. Sherwani began to discuss what could be done for me. I heard “Ideology Council” a few times. I felt I was imposing on both of them, taking up their time with a nonofficial matter. But Mr. Deen said, “It makes a change from what journalists here usually want us to do for them.” And so the two of them talked on. How could they demonstrate Islam to a visitor?

  Pilgrims, they decided. In the morning another pilgrim ship was going to Jeddah. Officers from the department would be going to cover the event, and I could go with them. Mr. Sherwani thought it a very good idea: unless I saw and talked to the pilgrims going to Mecca I wouldn’t understand the depth of their faith. And mosques, they decided. I should visit the mosques of Karachi that evening. No evening could be better, Mr. Sherwani said; because this was the night in Ramadan when in 610 A.D. the Prophet received his first revelation; prayers offered on this night were worth a thousand times more than on other nights. In Shia Iran, Ramadan was a month of mourning, full of the calamities of the Shia heroes who had failed to be recognized as the Prophet’s successors. For the Sunni Muslims of Pakistan, Ramadan was a happier month, the month of the revelation and the foundation of the religion.

  So that was the programme, then: the mosques in the evening with Mr. Sherwani, and the docks and the Mecca-bound pilgrims in the morning.

  Mr. Sherwani said to me, “I will tell you a story. Listen. An English lord had two sons. They started just like you. They thought they would travel and find out about Islam. So they travelled. They went to Ajmer in India, to the famous Muslim shrine there, and they began to study with a Muslim teacher. The teacher had two daughters. The two sons of the English lord became Muslims and married the two daughters of the teacher. When you become a Muslim you will remember this story.”

  English lords, double marriages, Arabian kings with five hundred servants for one month: in Karachi—already with camels, dwarfs, and Africans—the Arabian Nights came easily.

  Mr. Deen gave me a lift in the office van back to the hotel. Mr. Deen came from India; he had migrated from Delhi just after the partition. He had had many opportunities, official and unofficial, of seeing Delhi again. But for a reason he couldn’t explain he had preferred not to. He had left India; the past was over; the wound was not to be reopened.

  In the evening Mr. Sherwani came for me with a junior colleague from Information, and we went in the office van to some of the mosques of Karachi. The junior colleague was silent; Mr. Sherwani did the talking, and I felt that for him it was a good way of easing himself into the long night of prayer: going from mosque to mosque, and in between talking of the faith to someone who had volunteered to listen.

  The mosques were crowded, and lit up. Fluorescent tubes were used decoratively, sticks of blue-white glitter; and strings of coloured bulbs were hung over walls like illuminated carpets. Breathless recitations in Arabic from the Koran—some of the mullahs showing off how well they knew the book, how fast they could recite, how little they needed to draw breath—were followed by expositions in Urdu. And at every mosque, like a bee sipping from every flower, Mr. Sherwani prayed and, whenever the opportunity offered, joined in the responses of the congregation.

  In the mosques in the better-off areas there was a feeling that men were separate, engaged in private devotions. In the poorer areas there was a feeling of community. At one mosque in a poor area sweets were distributed while the mullah chanted, and children so besieged the distributor of sweets that he seemed to lose the use of his legs and to be propelled about the courtyard, holding aloft his cardboard box, by the busy little legs of many children, like a dead cockroach being carried off, as though on hidden wheels, by ants. The scrimmage didn’t affect the sanctity of the occasion; the occasion was also a communal one, and the children and the sweets were part of it.

  Islam was each man’s salvation; it was also the faith itself, the Prophet’s story; it was also the community, stitched together by innumerable communal acts and occasions. Unity, faith and discipline: that was the theme of Islam, Mr. Sherwani told me, and it was only later that I learned that he had borrowed the words from Mr. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Something else underlay the feeling of community: anxiety about the hereafter. It was important, it was fundamental, it locked all the components of faith together: the anxiety whether, on doomsday, one was going to torment or to bliss. Mr. Sherwani said that by his own pious exercises he had been given the merest glimpse of the hereafter; the truly pious could see further.

  Mr. Sherwani was steadily losing his joviality, his wish to explain. The prayers were holding him more and more; and soon, like a man who grudged the time, he took me back to the hotel and hurried away. On this night of revelation, when prayers were so precious, Mr. Sherwani intended to pray right through until the morning fast began. To be a devout Muslim was always to have distinctive things to do; it was to be guided constantly by rules; it was to live in a fever of the faith and always to be aware of the distinctiveness of the faith.

  But the world was going on. Another revelation was being prepared that night, and in the morning it burst on us, in a big front-page story in the government paper, the Morning News: PLOT TO MAKE PAKISTAN A FOREIGN STOOGE—Benazir’s bid to arrange US-backed coup—Photostat copy of letter to Murtaza released.

  What was reproduced, in six full columns of the paper, were letters from Mr. Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, to her brother in London. They were written from that house the taxi driver had shown me; one letter had been written nine days before the hanging of Mr. Bhutto, another four days before the hanging. They were family letters, and it was a violation to
expose them; they were suggestions—in the circumstances, extraordinarily lucid—from a sister to a brother about what might be done in the way of petitions and pressure to save their father. The burden of the Morning News story was that, in return for American help in saving her father, Benazir Bhutto was offering to give up the Pakistan nuclear programme. The handwritten letters were presented as evidence; but they were poorly reproduced and no transcription was given. And, in fact, the newspaper story was a fabrication.

  It was the other side of the life of faith. The faith was full of rules. In politics there were none. There were no political rules because the faith was meant to create only believers; the faith could not acknowledge secular associations or divisions. For everyone in open political life Islam was cause, tool, and absolution. It could lead to this worldly virulence.

  MR. Sherwani must have had enough of me; or perhaps more official duties had claimed him. I found, when I went to Mr. Deen’s office in the morning, that another officer was to go with me to the docks to see the pilgrims leave for Mecca.

  The officer was a young woman in a green sari. She was slender, almost thin, and her English was precise. She had, unusually, taken a degree in journalism at the University of Karachi. Afterwards she had passed the examination for the Pakistan civil service; and after that there had been an eight-month civil-service course. She hadn’t chosen Information; she had been allotted to the department, and she found it frustrating. In Information she just had to do whatever she was given to do; it wasn’t good enough for someone who had done a degree in journalism and wished to do proper writing.

  She said all this quite openly in Mr. Deen’s office, and she wasn’t speaking to impress me or Mr. Deen. She was as unhappy and tense as her thinness suggested; and I wondered why—as important as the federal civil service was in Pakistan—she kept on with the job. I asked what her husband did. She said all her family were service people, army people, and her husband, too, used to be in the service. Used? Yes; her husband was dead. “He expired in a helicopter crash.”