Among the Believers

by V. S. Naipaul

  “I stood up and asked permission of the Dutch lecturer to go to the mosque. He seemed very friendly and allowed me to go. Two or three students followed me out. I went to the mosque, but I lost the lecture. So I always had the choice on Fridays—mosque or lecture. That was why it started the idea in my mind of having a mosque close to the campus. That first time only three or four of the students followed me out. Now—I believe The New York Times did a survey and they said that two thousand students go to the mosque.”

  “You applied for a scholarship. Did you get it?”

  “After two months. My mother’s money, the money from the ring, lasted two months. It was five hundred rupiah.” Eighty cents now, after all the devaluations. “The scholarship was three hundred rupiah a month, which was enough. The boarding house cost about one hundred.”

  Some people came into the office. Among them was a middle-aged man, small, carefully dressed, perhaps of simple origins, perhaps the father of a student. He was respectful towards Imaduddin; and Imaduddin, with the prompt courtesy that had made such an impression on Prasojo (and me) the previous evening, excused himself and got up to greet his visitors.

  I gave up my armchair and sat at the desk while Imaduddin and his visitors talked. There was a duplicated, letter-headed sheet at the top of some letters. It wasn’t quite the public circular I thought it was. It was personal, from the United States, from a university professor sending season’s greetings with an end-of-the-year round-up of family news. American coziness, good will to all men of all cultures: here, on Imaduddin’s desk. American teacher and Asian learner, infidel and missionary: in what degree of misunderstanding had they come together!

  In 1947 the revolutionary government, in the midst of all its troubles, had established a secondary school in Sumatra. Ever since then Imaduddin had been academically on the rise; and in 1963, ten years after he had come to Bandung with five hundred rupiah, the Bandung institute had sent him to the United States to get a higher degree. He had spent three years there, at first in Iowa, and then in Chicago. In the summer of 1966, at the end of his course, he got a holiday job at Cornell as a consultant in the Indonesian language. He got a hundred dollars a week for nine weeks, and with the nine hundred dollars he went to Europe and then to Mecca.

  “I cried in Mecca. The first time I entered the mosque there, the place with the black stone, I cried. And I also cried when I was about to leave.”

  That was the way, after his visitors had gone, he told about his first three years abroad. That was the emphasis he gave: the three years of higher study, the luck with the Cornell holiday job, the climax in the Great Mosque of Mecca.

  “Actually, that letter you looked at”—so he had noticed—“was from my professor. He’s a Christian. He wrote a letter of protest to the government when I was arrested.”

  After that time abroad his Muslim interests became more international. At Cornell he had met a man from Malaysia. In 1971, through this man, he went to Malaysia to help with the conversion of a polytechnic into a university. Imaduddin stayed for two years in Malaysia, until 1973; he became involved with the Muslim youth movement there and still looked upon the people of that movement as his “brothers.” He felt that it was from that time that he had become suspect to the Indonesian authorities—they, and others in Indonesia, were nervous of “the Malaysian disease,” and they were especially nervous of radical developments in the Bandung institute.

  Nineteen seventy-three was the year of the oil-price rise, the year when money for Arab oil seemed to come like a reward for the Arab faith. Muslim missionary activity picked up; in a dozen foreign countries, half-evolved Muslim students, until then shy in the new world, hardly able to relate their technical studies to the countries where they were, felt the time had come to proclaim the true faith. Imaduddin travelled, to Libya, to England, rising higher in international Muslim students’ organizations, more and more in demand for his mental-training courses, which gave a now necessary modernity to old-fashioned mullah’s teachings.

  His imprisonment had not arrested his rise. His card, white, black, and green (the Islamic colour), said: Muhammad Imaduddin Abdul Rahim—Secretary General—International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations. He had no Indonesian name.

  I said, “But all your names are Arab.”

  “They are not Arab names. They are Muslim names.”

  The midday call to prayer came from the mosque tower—the mosque that hadn’t been there when Imaduddin first came to the Bandung institute to study electrical engineering. He said he would be back in fifteen minutes, and he left me to the books in the bookcase.

  Some, in English, were the bread-and-butter books of Islamic missionary work: The Myth of the Cross, Jesus Prophet of Islam. Others were Indonesian translations published by the movement, paperbacks. One book was by Qutub, an Egyptian. I didn’t know about Qutub; Imaduddin said he had been killed by Nasser. Another book was by Maulana Maudoodi. He was the Indo-Pakistani fundamentalist so extreme that he had opposed the idea of Pakistan, because Indian Muslims weren’t pure enough for a Muslim state. For thirty years after Pakistan had been created, he had agitated (though never offering concrete suggestions) for Islamic laws and an Islamic state. Entirely destructive to Pakistan, he had at the end flown to a Boston hospital, surrendered to Western science, and died.

  Imaduddin came back. We were now well into the lunch hour of this fasting day of Imaduddin’s; and I felt that now, especially after his prayers, he was aware of doing without.

  I said, “Is it only Islam that moves you?”

  “I like some Western music. Messiah by Handel. I like Bach. The religious music.”

  But he was not happy about the attention paid in Indonesia to the monuments of the old faiths.

  “You’ve been to Canberra?” he said. “You’ve seen the Indonesian embassy there? It’s a Hindu building. This isn’t a Hindu or Buddhist country. This country is ninety percent Muslim.”

  “Borobudur and Prambanam are great Indonesian monuments.”

  “Borobudur is something for the international community to look after.”

  The international community, the universal civilization: providers of tape recorders and psychological games and higher degrees in electrical engineering; and now, also, guardians of Indonesian art and civilization.

  For Imaduddin, as a Muslim and a Sumatran, Indonesia was a place to be cleansed. His faith was so great that he could separate his country from its history, traditions, art: its particularity. His faith was too simple for Indonesia, certainly for Java, too simple even for the koum of Linus’s village. And Indonesia—overpopulated, with so many people squeezed out, with only the army to hold the country together—was too fragile for his kind of protest.

  “You go around Jakarta. For fifteen or twenty kilometres around Jakarta you could find the real story of what is happening here. The land is not owned by the people who work on it. According to my understanding of Islam, I cannot own a stretch of land if I cannot cultivate it. Only Allah has that right. So if this is run as an Islamic state, the state should arrange the land so that landlordism cannot exist.”

  “Is there an Islamic state where that has happened?”

  “Yes. In the time of Abu-Bakr and Omar and all the first four caliphs.”

  Right at the beginning of Islam, then, in the thirty-year period that ended with the death of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, in 661 A.D. It was the reply I would have got from a village mullah in Pakistan. It wasn’t the reply I was expecting from Imaduddin in Bandung.

  “I will tell you this story,” Imaduddin said. “One of the closest friends of the Prophet was a man by the name of Bilal. He was a Negro slave and he was freed by Abu-Bakr and he had the job of calling the people to prayer. When the Prophet and his companions migrated to Medina, the Prophet gave Bilal a stretch of land for him to cultivate. During the time of Omar, the second caliph, Bilal was old and weak and couldn’t cultivate all the lands. And Omar took part of the land and ga
ve it to another.”

  “Do you think a country can be run like that now? By one man?”

  “That fitted the need of the time. And we were talking about land reform, not leadership. And even Omar had a kind of advisory council.”

  “Why did that system of rule break down?”

  “It was broken down by the fifth caliph. He was interested in having a dynasty. The first feudalism in Islamic history.”

  “And Islamic rule has been like that ever since?”

  “Yes, I think so. So if you want to practise Islam right now you have to build a state on the basis of a republic.”

  “Aren’t you saying that Islam has failed?”

  “No, not Islam. The people. The Muslims.”

  “You think you can get them to do it now?”

  “I think so. Especially Indonesia. Because the political structure quite resembles the Islamic teaching. The president, the council or parliament, the army. What we need now is the men behind the structure. They must be true Muslims.”

  “Is this why the government is nervous of you? Is this why some people say you are brave?”

  He seemed surprised. “I am not brave.” And he meant that: he was only doing what he had to do.

  Some of the trainees came in to say good-bye. Their faces were bright, awed. The course had been a success. All the Revival of Islam tee shirts (the words in English) had been sold. Imaduddin was as moved as the trainees. He walked with them to the doorway and stood in the sunlight, chatting: white shirt, grey belted trousers, strong, attractive, reassuring.

  “I am preparing the next generation of leaders of Indonesia,” Imaduddin said when he came back. “I believe that the constitution has some Islamic value in it. I am preparing the new generation to replace all this.”

  TO replace all this. But for what, and by what? Not by new institutions, but only by men as pure and cleansed as himself. “I am just a teacher, an ordinary teacher, at least to my feeling,” Imaduddin had said. “I am interested in educating the youngsters. Because I believe that what we need right now is a true Muslim leader.”

  Out of this, as in the days of Omar and the other rightly guided caliphs, all good would flow. It was where his fundamentalism led: the need for the pious leader, not a man of individual conscience, compassion, or wisdom, but a man who lived according to the book, the man who could stand in for the Prophet, the man who knew the Prophet’s deeds and revelations so well that he would order affairs as the Prophet himself might have ordered them. It was the idea of piety and goodness that separated Islam from other ethical systems.

  The logic of Imaduddin’s faith, and his own integrity, was simple: injustice was un-Islamic, and Indonesia was full of injustice. And the Imaduddin who grieved about injustice at home could travel without pain to Muslim despotisms abroad. To these countries he travelled as to lands of the achieved faith. In such lands you did not look for injustice; you considered only the leader, and felt cleansed by the purity of his faith.

  He told me he had spent a couple of days in Pakistan. Of Pakistan’s founding and history he appeared to know little. To him it was only a Muslim state, made special by the poetry of Iqbal. Of the institutions of Pakistan, of its phantom Islamic laws, its martial law and constitutional breakdown, its political abjectness, the public whippings, the censorship, the humiliation of its intellectuals—of this he knew almost nothing.

  Why did he know so little? He said, “Perhaps it’s because of the Western press.” And it was because of his suspicion of that press that he remained uncertain about events in Iran. He received only a little information “from inside.”

  A Muslim editor in Jakarta, to whom I reported this, said, “Nothing’s keeping them out. They can send people to find out. If they don’t know it’s because they don’t want to know. It doesn’t serve their cause.”

  And indeed that cause was well served by the Western press. The Revival of Islam: the English words on the tee shirts sold at the end of the mental-training course had been made familiar by the cover stories of many international English-language magazines. Imaduddin himself, speaking of the attendance at his own mosque, had referred to The New York Times.

  In Jakarta the president of an important youth organization attached to a mosque in a middle-class area, one of Imaduddin’s former trainees, said that Islam was the great new movement in the world, winning converts everywhere. Both Time and Newsweek had said so. And Newsweek, in a feature, had included the Prophet and one other Muslim in a list of fifty people who had most influenced the history of the world. “It’s in history now,” the young man said, meaning only that it was in Newsweek. (History like a divine ledger, guarded, like so many things, by the other civilization.) He was middle-class, the young man, tall, of langsat complexion. Since his mental-training course with Imaduddin he had become obsessed with death and the afterlife. But there was still a corner of his mind open to worldly pride.

  Newsweek and Time were helping to make the history they recorded. Islam was pure and perfect; the secular, dying West was to be rejected: that was the message. But the West was taking a long time to die. And more and more people were being drawn into the new world. In this new world, whose centre seemed so far away, so beyond control, newly evolved men like the president of the Jakarta youth organization felt only their inadequacies. These men were not peasants or pesantren boys. They aspired to high Western skills; they took encouragement from, they needed, Western witness. It was part of their great dependence. This dependence provoked the anguish which (like adolescents) they sought to assuage in the daily severities of their new religious practice: the five-times-a-day prayers, the unnecessary fasts. The religion which was theirs but which they had disregarded had now become an area of particular privacy. It gave an illusion of wholeness; it held a promise of imminent triumph. It was also where they became interesting to themselves—and, as the newspapers made them understand, to others—again.

  Rejection and dependence: it was hard for the half-evolved to break out of that circle. One of the girls at Imaduddin’s mental-training course—she had sat apart from the boys and had covered her head and had drawn Koranic lessons from the Western psychological games—one of the girls was going on to London. She said it was to model. But it was only to do a modelling course. The Indonesian-European modelling business was becoming organized. I saw a brochure. Its appeal was to the middle class, the half-evolved. Attractive now, this modelling business, to girls and their parents, an easy step forward into the new world. But it needed little imagination to see that a girl or two might become lost, and that one day that step forward might be another source of communal pain.

  7

  The Interchangeable Revolutions

  To replace all this. Islam sanctified rage—rage about the faith, political rage: one could be like the other. And more than once on this journey I had met sensitive men who were ready to contemplate great convulsions.

  In Iran there had been Behzad, who had shown me Tehran and the holy cities of Qom and Mashhad. He was the communist son of a communist father, and not a Muslim. But his communism was like a version of the Shia faith of Iran, a version of the Shia rage about injustice: a rage rooted in the overthrow by the Arabs of the old Persian empire in the seventh century. Good Muslims believed that the best time in the world was the time of the Prophet and the first four, good caliphs; Behzad believed that the best time was in Russia between 1917 and 1953. Darkness had been dispelled; an unjust society had been overthrown; and the jails and camps of Russia were full of the wicked. For Behzad the idea of justice was inseparable from the idea of punishment. Ayatollah Khomeini spoke in the name of God the avenger; Behzad, the communist, spoke like Khomeini.

  In Pakistan, in the Kaghan Valley in the far north, I had talked to the gentle Masood. He was only sentimentally a Muslim. But, standing beside me above the gorge of the cold, green Kunhar River, he had allowed anxieties about his family and his own future to flow into a wider political despair about his country, and
he had said: “Millions will have to die.”

  And something like that was said to me in Jakarta by a businessman. We met late one afternoon in the restaurant of the hotel. He had been described to me as an economist, someone in touch with government departments, a man planning for the future. He was all that, but he also had the Indonesian feeling of things going wrong. And he was full of rage: against the Chinese (too gifted for Indonesia, “like Rolls-Royce spare parts in a Japanese car”), the multinationals, the successful, the ignorant men who were now running his country.

  He said, “The leaders of the developing countries—most of them—are prosperous outside, but very poor inside.” And he touched his heart. “They can buy the Mercedes, but they don’t have the true feeling for it—they cannot appreciate the ingenuity and the work that has been put into that appliance. There is no point in buying an IBM typewriter if your speed is forty words per minute.” He was not a humorous man, but his anger (and his fondness for scientific metaphor) appeared to give him a kind of wit.

  He was a Muslim from Sulawesi, formerly the Celebes, where—as in Sumatra and West Java—in the 1950s there had been a strong Muslim separatist movement. And there was more than a remnant of that rage in him, though he had benefited from the holding-together of the Indonesian state. Starting from nothing, he had become educated; he had studied abroad, in the United States; he had prospered in the business he had established; he had shared in the development of the country after the waste of the later Sukarno years. But it was not enough. His success had, if anything, been dislocating. It made him see more clearly the kind of people who had got ahead, and of all these people he wished to be rid. He wished now to pull down the state that had enabled him to rise.