My articles on Kashmir appeared in an American magazine. Soon after they came out, officials from the Indian IB (Intelligence Bureau) visited my retired parents in India and interrogated them at some length about my “pro-Pakistan” proclivities (which would have been confirmed for them when the Pakistani high commissioner in New Delhi praised my articles in print and then, not long afterward, arranged my exceptionally generous visa for Pakistan). Senior Indian columnists denounced me as unpatriotic and, while wondering what would lead an apparently well-to-do upper-caste Hindu to betray his country in an American magazine, concluded that I was pandering to white pro-Muslim audiences in the West.
This was optimistic. In the days before 9/11, you wouldn’t have known that such audiences existed, judging from the little attention paid to Kashmir or Chechnya—another place where Muslims led a popular, but hopeless, uprising against a powerful pro-West nationstate—in the British or American press. Bereft of any recognizable context, the international news pages often seemed a kind of brisk atrocity mongering ; part of their purpose seemed to be to verify the free world’s privileges, as with the luxuries on display in the more expansive sections on shopping, food, sex, and celebrities, and Islam with all its diversity appeared primarily as the West’s “other,” in the way communism once had been: the aggressive ideology of an underprivileged and dangerously deluded people.
It wasn’t a conclusion I ever expected myself to reach about Islam and Muslims, particularly when soon after returning from Kashmiri, I thought of traveling to Pakistan and Afghanistan. I wanted to find out more about the CIA-led jihad in the 1980s and the rise of the Taliban, although there were related, less specific things I was curious about. One evening in Srinagar an old Muslim politician, routinely described as “fundamentalist” in the Indian papers, had spoken to me of how the West feared Islam even more since the demise of communism because it alone offered an alternative to the modern civilization of the West. It was hard for me then to work through such large generalizations. Later, when I began to read more in Islamic history, it became clearer to me how quickly, after the centuries of cultural and technological backwardness, the West had caught up with, and then begun to politically subjugate, the Islamic world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
As it turned out, it wasn’t very difficult to understand how people in demoralized societies could grow inflexible while trying to protect their older lifestyles. But this understanding came from the books I read in London, before I spent any time in a Muslim-majority country, and when, not long after I arrived in Peshawar from London, Jamal in Peshawar said, “They are all such fanatics here,” I immediately warmed toward him. For I had found myself silently nurturing this commonplace prejudice, although I wouldn’t have wanted to articulate it myself.
Jamal worked as a subeditor for The Frontier Post, one of Peshawar’s English-language dailies, at whose offices I spent many hours on those bleak winter evenings. As I drove up to the boxlike narrow building, the three spies parked their car a few meters behind, before an empty lot where scrawny dogs loitered around mounds of assorted rubbish; these men had already ordered tea and barely looked at me as I walked past the pale mist-blurred lights of the chai shacks. Inside, at the reception, an old Pathan in a coarse-textured military coat hunched over a rickety table, a Kalashnikov leaning against the seat of his wicker chair; on the floor beside his feet squatted a bar heater, and occasionally he would bend toward its weak orange glow, palms stretched and facing outward, to gather some warmth. Upstairs, low doors led in and out of one cramped smoke-filled room after another, and in the room where I usually sat, a windowless cube really, the cigarette smoke stayed suspended in the air, the delicately curled plumes outlined against green walls and brown paper files and aging computers with grimy screens.
It was a difficult time for the newspaper. Its owner, a local Pathan businessman called Rahmat Shah Afridi, had been arrested in 1999 on a charge of drugs trading. His son, a young, easily distracted man who ran the paper now, told me that the small amount of cannabis found in his father’s Mercedes had been planted there by agents of Mian Nawaz Sharif, then prime minister of Pakistan. It seemed like a typical Pakistani story: big men pursuing small private feuds and vendettas—and perhaps not entirely inaccurate. A few weeks after I left Pakistan, a special antinarcotics court in Lahore sentenced Afridi to death. In any case, the smaller people were suffering; the staff had been working without salaries for three months.
But the shared austerity had made people jollier; the door to the room opened every two minutes to reveal a newcomer, announcing his presence with a joke, an anecdote, a filched cigarette, and a curious friendly glance at the visitor from India. A teenage boy, his oversized brown shalwar flapping around his ankles, kept bringing trays full of chipped cups steaming with thick milky tea; the rim of the cup’s bottom would be already wet by the time you took your cup, and there were so many visitors that at the end of three hours the broad, dusty table glistened all over with small overlapping circles.
Jamal was as much of a cigarette cadger and tea drinker as anyone there. But he looked restless amidst the bonhomie of his colleagues, among whose ruddy handsome Pashtun, or Pathan, faces his swarthy, blunt features, so much like that of a South or East Indian, looked alien. I often felt his dull yellow eyes fixed upon my face; there was, I sensed, something he wished to tell me in private, and when the moment came early one evening, it was this difference that he was so keen to establish.
I hadn’t been misled by his appearance. He was a Bengali, from Bangladesh. In 1975, when the country was just four years old, he had, as a young captain in the Bangladeshi Army, taken part in the military coup against the government. He had been present on the morning when the prime minister, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and his family were gunned down at their official residence. “An accident,” he said, “we didn’t mean to kill him.” Whether accidental or not, the moment was firmly in the past, part of Bangladesh’s history. But Jamal had spent the quarter century since then dealing with the consequences.
After the 1975 coup, he spent four more years in Bangladesh, waging a futile insurgency against the government, before finally escaping to Pakistan. There was no other choice; Pakistan, still bitter about its lost province, was the only country that wouldn’t deport him straight back to Bangladesh, where he was sure to be executed for Rahman’s murder.
Jamal hadn’t liked his new country one bit, however. He had arrived in Pakistan just as General Zia-ul-Haq was beginning his program of Islamization; there was enough of the liberal Bengali, the reader of Tagore and Nazrul Islam, in Jamal to be repelled by the brutal imposition of religion on everyday life. But he couldn’t object too loudly; as a political refugee lie had to be grateful that he wasn’t being hanged or shot. He had to manage as best he could, and so he had done, moving from job to job, city to city, from one kind of meanness to another.
Jamal’s story was refined and embellished over several evenings. I wasn’t always sure how to respond to it, especially when he added that he had a wonderful book inside him. After all, he had been eyewitness to the murder of Rahman, and the world was still waiting to hear the truth behind those events in Bangladesh in 1975.
The heaviness in his yellow eyes disappeared briefly when he said this. I didn’t feel like telling him that all he had was a story, that a book was something else, and that the world wasn’t much interested in what had happened that morning in Dacca all those years ago.
I didn’t want to discourage or alienate him. He had known such a damaged life and then only a kind of survival in Pakistan. Besides, he was on my side, a fellow stranger in Pakistan, adrift among the fanatics with whom Pakistan appeared, during my first days there, alarmingly replete. There were the black-turbaned heavy-bearded leaders of the Taliban, arriving at their embassy in Islamabad in gleaming new Pajero cars; the retired general in Rawalpindi declaiming on the nobility of jihad; the crudely painted donation boxes for the jihad in Kashmir in the bazaars; t
he fundamentalist demagogues in small towns threatening to march upon Islamabad if the Sharia and interest-free banking weren’t immediately introduced; the tribals in the so-called self-administering areas near the Afghan border cutting off a few arms in their attempts at proper Islamic justice. Almost every day, Sunnis murdered Shias and vice versa; a few young mujahideen achieved shahadat (martyrdom) in Indian Kashmir, and the newspapers alone, while reporting on all-consuming religious obsessions, could take you to the point where you began to sense something hard and fierce in even the simple devotion of the skull-capped men half prostrate, on chilly evenings, on the streets of Peshawar.
But here I had to look out for my own prejudices. There had been many Muslims in the railway towns of North and Central India I had grown up in. I couldn’t distinguish them from the low-caste Hindus among the railway labor gangs my father supervised. My father certainly had Muslim colleagues. But I cannot remember identifying any among the exhausted men in sweat-drenched white shirts and gray pants who returned home with my father for a cup of tea after a long day out on the tracks, although the tea would have been served to them not in cups but the special glasses kept aside in our kitchen for Muslims and low-caste Hindus.
Most Muslims in the towns of my childhood were, in fact, very poor—much more so than we—and this was the reason I noticed them. They lived in ghettos inside the older parts of the town, where, after the expansiveness of the British-built cantonment and Civil Lines and railway colony, the streets and houses suddenly shrank and were edged with open drains, the women disappeared behind sinisterly black burkas, flimsy rags curtained off the hanging carcasses at the butcher shops, and the gaunt-faced men with pointed beards standing outside dark houses looked quite capable of the brutality that our prejudices ascribed to them.
The prejudices were bred partly by our own lower-middle-class deprivations, the anxieties about money, status, security that came to be related, in the usual unreflective way, to the alien-looking community in our midst. We weren’t the kind of people who incited or ever took part in Hindu-Muslim riots. But we did believe the stereotype that fueled these brief explosions of rage and despair; we had no trouble imagining the bearded Muslim as a fundamentally violent aggressor, who could murder a Hindu with as much avidity and relish as he slaughtered the cow whose chopped-up flesh, thrown inside temple courtyards, usually inaugurated the savagery.
Another, quite common, and somewhat subtler cliche presented Muslims as backward-looking, as a drag on modernizing India, if not fifth columnists for Pakistan. Of course, the blunter dismissal was: Why don’t these Muslims simply go to Pakistan? After all, India had been partitioned in 1947 in order to create a new homeland for Indian Muslims. Pakistan was what most of them had asked for, so what were they doing in India?
It seems a crude question now, but it wasn’t easy to answer, although politicians and other privileged men tried. However, their assertion that India was a secular country which was open to people from all religions didn’t convince those of us—upper-caste Hindus—who lived in straitened circumstances and practiced as well as suffered discrimination. And so, feeling frustrated and demoralized ourselves, we redirected most of the pity and scorn with which we would have seen, if we could, our own lives. Most Hindu women probably deserved as much sympathy as was expended, in any cursory discussions of the minorities, on Muslim women, who were imagined to be leading terribly oppressed lives, forced to breed like rabbits and wrap themselves in heavy burkas.
The clichés bubbled up only when we noticed the Muslims. For the most part this depressed minority was invisible and remained so for me even after I left home and went to university in Allahabad, where Hindu caste politics in the 1980s managed to overshadow Hindu-Muslim discord.
In the late 1980s, when I moved to a university in Delhi, the Hindu nationalist agitation to demolish the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya had just picked up all over North India. There was much opposition to this inside my university campus; in fact, it was there, in the isolated and artificial world of university politics, that I became slightly more aware of the peculiar status of Indian Muslims. The student politicians organized almost daily protests inside the campus, which many of the Muslim students, most of whom came from the nearby riot-prone town of Aligarh, joined, and where one speaker after another denounced the Hindu nationalists for attempting to destroy the great Indian traditions of tolerance and accommodation.
The student leaders were eager to make themselves known; they worked hard to make their protests as noisy and disruptive as they could, and the library, where I spent most of my time, was often closed early in the evenings.
The fuss over a disused tottering mosque in the middle of nowhere seemed excessive. Then came the day in December 1992 when the mosque was demolished by a frenzied Hindu mob.
The student politicians in the campus raged for some weeks afterward, but the Muslim students stayed away from their rallies. They appeared bitter and haunted. I began to look differently at them as they huddled around the dining table and spoke in low voices, eating swiftly all the while with their fingers.
I still couldn’t feel involved. I had my own anxieties to deal with; the university degree I was working toward was only the first stage in what then seemed a long, slow climb out of the relative poverty my family had lived in for much of my childhood. Occasionally I would attend the after-dinner lectures by visiting left-wing journalists and academics, articulate, suave men who discussed the historical bonds between Hindus and Muslims and the uniquely syncretic civilization of India. These ideas about India’s past and present didn’t always match my experience, the sense I had of the distrust and hostility between Hindus and Muslims and the keener sense I’d had, in the course of my travels through small-town India, of the stagnant resentments of the Muslim ghettos. But I didn’t have the courage to contradict them then and even now feel insecure before such powerful liberal pieties.
Pakistan has its own marginalized but vigorous liberals; indeed, its small English-language press is intellectually more adventurous and engaging than its Indian counterpart. This is probably because the country seems to have few pieties left over from its fifty years of existence. The bookstores are full of such titles as The Years of Disillusionment and Whither Pakistan?; the newspapers carry long letters by retired army men expressing concern over the number of educated Pakistanis wanting to emigrate.
Very early in Pakistan’s history, its foundational myth had been broken ; a shared religion, it turned out, couldn’t solve the problem of how people with different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds were to live together. Urdu-speaking Muslims from India, arriving in large numbers in Sindh, found themselves resented by the poor Sindhis, who in turn felt oppressed by the rich and dominant majority of Punjabi speakers in the north. The Bengalis revolted and broke away in the early 1970s, the Baluch attempt to secede was put down with a lot of difficulty, and the disastrous Pakistani imperative to control events in Afghanistan grew out of the urgent need to pacify the Pashtun separatists of the North-West Frontier. The country, which many Hindus in India still imagined to be the natural home of Indian Muslims, had created its own ghettos, where resentments were anything but stagnant.
India has had its share of restless minorities—the Tamils, the Sikhs, and the Nagas. But it has also had a consistent political life, the semi-democratic institutions it inherited from the British. Since partition, elected politicians themselves have wrecked Pakistan’s frail democratic structures when given half a chance by the army officers and the bureaucrats, who have otherwise been the real rulers; the major newspaper story in Pakistan when I was there early in 2005 offered details about how a few army officers, working for the ISI, cobbled together a coalition of quasi-Islamic political parties under Nawaz Sharif in order to overthrow the government of Benazir Bhutto in 1990.
The rulers of course lived separately, in well-fortified enclaves, indifferent to all the associations of third world sleaze they gave off. There wasn’t much subtlety
in the town houses, with their many carpets and chandeliers and servants and guards with automatic rifles, or the large farmhouses outside cities, whose brick-walled boundaries meandered far and invisibly into the countryside and where cheap French wine bootlegged by African diplomats flowed by the glimmering pool and people discussed the latest article on Kosovo in The New York Review of Books and grew very worried about the “bearded fundos” and the imminent—or, depending on whom you talked to, ongoing—Tahbanization of Pakistan.
The phrase “Talibanization of Pakistan” was one l hear often. It was a new way of referring to troubles that had begun much earlier, in 1979, in fact, when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, and the United States responded by arming anti-Communist Afghans with the help of the military dictator of Pakistan, General Zia-ul-Haq.
Although something of a tyrant, Zia was not without his Pakistani supporters. His Islamic zeal was admired by those religious parties who received government patronage for their largely unsuccessful attempt to Islamize Pakistan. He was popular too among senior officers in the military. As he himself described it, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul was one of the early jihadis in the military and much loved by Zia, who first made him director of military intelligence and then director general of the ISI. While holding these positions in the 1980s, Gul was one of the three or four most powerful men in Pakistan, who, under Zia’s patronage, could get away with just about anything.
Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond Page 26