Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  Islam is not like Christianity, Iqbal says. It is not a religion of private conscience and private practice. Islam comes with certain “legal concepts.” These concepts have “civic significance” and create a certain kind of social order. The “religious ideal” cannot be separated from the social order. “Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.” In 1930 a national polity meant an all-Indian one.

  It is an extraordinary speech for a thinking man to have made in the twentieth century. What Iqbal is saying in an involved way is that Muslims can live only with other Muslims. If this was meant seriously, it would have implied that the good world, the one to be striven after, was a purely tribal world, neatly parceled out, every tribe in his corner. This would have been seen to be fanciful.

  What is really in the background of this demand for Pakistan and a Muslim polity, what isn’t mentioned, is Iqbal’s rejection of Hindu India. His hearers would have understood that; and both they and he would have had a concrete idea of what was being rejected. It lay all around them; they only had to look; it was an aspect of the real world. What didn’t exist, and what Iqbal’s proposal didn’t even attempt to define, was the new Muslim polity that was to come with the new state. In Iqbal’s speech—which was momentous—this polity is an abstraction; it is poetic. It has to be taken on trust. The Prophet’s name is even used indirectly to recommend it.

  The speech is full of ironies today. Pakistan, when it came, disenfranchised the Muslims who stayed behind in India. Bangladesh is on its own. In Pakistan itself the talk is of dissolution. The new Muslim polity there has turned out to be like the old, the one Iqbal knew: you don’t have to go down far before you find people who are as voiceless and without representation as when Iqbal made his speech in 1930.

  2

  THE POLITY

  ONE DAY six months before, this woman’s husband and his nephew, both laborers, had got hold of her and “butchered her nose.” The husband had then fettered her. Somehow she had freed herself, and then she had run away. She went to the big city of Karachi. She had a friend there. The friend got in touch with a human rights group in Lahore that ran—with foreign subsidy—a shelter for battered women.

  It was in the office of that group, in the waiting room, that I saw her. Among the very quiet women there—the passive, half-dead faces of women taken by suffering beyond shame and perhaps even feeling—she was noticeable. A veil of gauze-like material was pulled tight over her lower face, to hide the wound. Above the veil only her eyes and eyebrows showed. I thought they looked like the eyes of a child; this made the thought of her disfigurement more painful.

  But she wasn’t a child. She was thirty-five. I found that out when I went back to the office some days later to see her. Her face was uncovered this time. The tip of her nose hadn’t been cut off, as I had feared; it was more as though it had been pinched with a pair of hot tongs. On either nostril there was a wound, raw pink edged with dark red; but she was now used to it and didn’t try to hide it.

  She was small and thin and dark. She had got married when she was nineteen. Her father was ill at the time, and her mother thought she should get married. It was against Islam for a girl not to be married. She had got married without a dowry, “only for God”; this meant that the only dowry she could take to her husband was the protection of God. She had got married to a man who was an occasional laborer. She didn’t know the man and she didn’t know why her parents had chosen him. She had just done what she had been told; she was helpless.

  Farzana, the human rights lawyer who was translating, said, “She is a victim of feudal society.”

  The woman herself couldn’t see it so clearly. She only knew that the husband who had been found for her worked for the landlord that her father worked for. Her husband worked as a cook. He got three hundred or four hundred rupees a month, ten or twelve pounds. He also got food from the landlord. The landlord had a lot of land. She had got to know the landlord, had got to know who he was, because both her mother and her father worked for him. He was a respectful man, and very nice.

  There was a school in the village, a primary school, but she didn’t go. Her parents didn’t allow it. They were both illiterate. Her father had left no money when he died. He died penniless. He was a servant of the landlord; that is, he served the landlord when he was required to serve him. When the landlord went hunting he used her father. He would kill birds for the landlord and take care of the dogs. He lived in a mud hut in the landlord’s yard. She didn’t really know how many people lived there. There might have been twenty-five families, but she didn’t know. All of them were servants of the landlord. There was a mosque in the village and they all went there often.

  Talking about the mosque, the woman smiled. She had thought the question about it was a trap question, and she was glad to have seen through it. She felt, too, it was the only good thing she had said about herself.

  There was no furniture in her parents’ hut. There was a box; there were a few utensils; there was an electric fan. So there was electricity in the hut; and the fan, extravagant though it appeared, proved how bad the summers were. There was nothing else that she remembered.

  Her marriage had gone well for a while. She had three children, two boys and a girl. She used to work as a servant in people’s houses. But then two years ago her husband had become a heroin addict. He wanted her to bring home more money. There was trouble when she couldn’t. One day there was a quarrel between her children and her husband’s nephew’s children. Her husband’s nephew was a laborer also, but on another estate. She beat all the children. The husband’s nephew’s children complained, and when her husband came back he beat her very badly. She went with one child to her in-laws’ house. Her husband followed her. She wanted to go to the police, but one of her husband’s relations told her not to. He made her go back to her husband. That was her mistake. The quarrel about the children was only a pretext. Her husband was angry about the nephew, and then the two men got together and butchered her nose.

  She smiled when she said she knew the landlord’s family. That was clearly, in her own judgment, the second good thing she had said.

  Her own children, the two boys and the girl, used to go to the school. But then they left and they forgot how to read and write. They forgot “each and every thing.” But they went every day to the mosque; she made them do that. She thought now that her children were being treated very harshly. Her husband’s father and mother didn’t like the children.

  The landlord didn’t help her in her trouble. She didn’t ask him. She didn’t think of asking him. Her landlord didn’t know of her trouble. There was no one to tell him. She had no family in that village anymore. Her brothers and sisters were not interested in her anymore.

  She was living in the shelter of the human rights group. They had found a job for her, working two days a week in a bandage-making factory.

  She wore plastic shoes; her feet were restless in them. She constantly adjusted her pink skirt which had a flowered pattern. A block-printed headdress was the only touch of style.

  She said that nothing gave her pleasure now. All she wanted was to get her children back. But something had happened since she ran away from her husband: she was not frightened now.

  Farzana said, “She is callous.”

  Strange word. Perhaps Farzana meant “calloused.”

  But “callous” might also have been right, because when Farzana asked again, the woman said, “I am not supposed to feel pleasure or happiness.”

  And suddenly she began to laugh. She was laughing at me, my strange questions, my clothes, the fact that I needed an interpreter to talk to her. The laughter had been building up inside her, and when it came she couldn’t control it, remembering only, for manners’ sake, to turn aside and cover her mouth and butchered nose with her palm.

  The Moguls had built forts, palaces, mosques, and tombs. The Brit
ish in the second half of the nineteenth century had put up buildings to house institutions. Lahore was rich in the monuments of both periods. Ironically, for a country that talked so much about Islamic identity, and even claimed to be a successor to Mogul power, it was the Mogul monuments that were in decay: the fort, Shah Jehan’s mosque, the Shalimar Gardens, the tombs both of both the emperor Jehangir and his great consort Noor-Jehan. It was as though two Versailles, at the very least, were being allowed to rot away. This was due in part to a general lack of education, the idea of earlier centuries that what no longer had a purpose no longer required attention. But there was also the Muslim convert’s attitude to the land where he lives. To the convert his land is of no religious or historical importance; its relics are of no account; only the sands of Arabia are sacred.

  The British administrative buildings live on. The institutions they were meant to house are still more or less the institutions the country depends on. On the Mall, the central thoroughfare of Lahore, these big buildings stand, a little artificially, one after the other, each in its splendid grounds, as though the British here, out of their experience elsewhere on the subcontinent, knew from the beginning what they had to set down in central Lahore: the civil service academy, the state guest house, the college for the sons of local chieftains, the governor’s house, the British club, the public gardens, the courts, the post office, the museum.

  The courts were always busy. But, with all their apparatus, they didn’t deliver, the lawyers said. There was too much political interference, too much litigation; there were too many false witnesses; the judges were overworked. But there was no earlier local system that could be restored. There was a peasant story of justice under the Mogul emperors. Night and day, in this story, a rope hung outside the palace wall. The poor man who wanted justice only had to run to this rope and (if there wasn’t too much of a crush, or if he wasn’t stopped or cut down) pull on it. The rope rang a bell; the emperor appeared at his window, and gave the peasant justice. This story—really a serf fantasy about the mercy of the master—had got into Pakistani schoolbooks as a fact, and was used to make a point about the grandeur of the old Muslim rulers. But according to Waleed Iqbal, a lecturer in law (and a grandson of the poet who proposed the idea of Pakistan), the law here before the British, in the days of the Sikhs, was “vague”; and going back further, to the times of the Mogul (the times of the rope and the bell), the law was simply dictatorial. The British-given courts, and the British procedural laws of 1898 and 1908, were still all that the country had. They met a need; that was why they had lasted.

  I went to see the courts with Rana, a junior lawyer in an important practice. Rana was twenty-nine, and from the Punjab. He was the son of a small landowner who had sold his land, lost the money, and lost his status. Rana had decided quite late to become a lawyer. He wanted power; he wanted to protect himself. At the same time—and this was his unwitting tribute to the institution—he thought that in the law, and in the practice of the law, he was going to find something like purity, something separate from the disorder and unfairness of the country, something in which a man was judged as a man.

  The law had been a double disappointment to him. The disappointment showed in his manner; he was a brooder. He was handsome and slender; he had many friends among the young lawyers. They were pleased to see him in the yard and Victorian Gothic corridors of the courts, and the lawyers’ tea room (like a railway station buffet). He was more buttoned up than his friends. I don’t think he liked wearing the black suit of his profession; I think that, as a junior, he had grown to think of it as a livery of servitude.

  In the half-broken street at the back of the courts there was a forest of lawyers’ boards or tins, in the swaggering Urdu script, black on white, or red on white, and hanging like shop signs on the rails and on the concrete and metal electricity poles. The crowd in the yard of the lower courts was in constant movement, like a schoolyard at recess; part of the swirl, and barely noticed, was a prisoner being led on a chain by a policeman. In the arches of the verandahs of the main building, on the lower floor and the upper, people stood at rest, draped in loose Punjabi costume.

  Small, beaten-up rooms: small courts perhaps, some with a few people, some with hardly any. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing; Rana didn’t talk a great deal. But then we came to the main hall, and Rana became respectful. He found a chair for me and made me sit on it; he stood behind me, near the door. The ceiling was high, with hammer beams; the floor was of marble. Books were in trays or baskets on the floor, and paper slips were in the books. Lawyers in black jackets stood at lecterns before the bar, and attendants all the time brought in trays and files. Two judges sat below a fringed brown-cloth canopy; it was like an emblem of majesty. “What is the number of the ordinance?” one of them said, turning the pages of a big book. At the back of the judges and their canopy were curtained Gothic windows; above the doorways were Gothic arches. And once again, considering the careful Victorian Gothic decoration of the hall, the Mogul motifs of the side doors, the scales of justice above the fireplaces (now with electric or gas heaters), it came to me, as it had come elsewhere in the subcontinent, that the architects of the Raj had always been on their best behavior in these public buildings, taking pains with details which might not be noticed individually but which added to the overall effect. The big-bladed fans did not hang from the ceiling; they were fixed vertically to the walls; in this autumnal season they were still.

  The judge began to read his judgment. It was in English, and in a mumble that I found hard to pick up. He repeated certain words as he read. He was finding against a district commissioner who had ordered the silencing of the loudspeakers on a mosque. “It cannot be countenanced. It is not in his power.…”

  It was possible to see—in this fine hall, with the judges below a canopy, and the lawyers in black at their lecterns, with the formality of debate and judgment, and the laws all printed in big books—it was possible to see how, even with things going wrong in the country, Rana could have this idea (as I read it, from his conversation) of the purity of the law.

  He had for some years wanted to be a policeman. That was for the sake of security, to protect himself in the Punjab, where the police had such power over simple people. He was ten or eleven when he had found out about this power of the police. He had been cycling in a careless way on the public road and had caused an accident between a rickshaw and a car. The police had come for him at home and taken him to the police station. This was in the small town where Rana’s family had lived before they moved to Lahore. His father and mother were not at home; they had gone to Rana’s father’s village; some relation was very ill or had died. So Rana had to get in touch with an uncle. The uncle said he was coming over right away. Rana told the sergeant, and the sergeant said to him very roughly, “Go and sit there.” A little later, still waiting for the uncle to come, the sergeant said to Rana, “Go and wash my plates and spoon.” Rana, without thinking about the consequences, said, “No. I am a Rajput.”

  It was the pride of his family and clan that they were Rajputs, ancestrally of the Hindu warrior caste. The ancestry was in his name, Rana; the actual pride had come to him in his father’s village. He often went there with his father. His father at that time still had his land, and everywhere Rana and his father went people treated them with regard. They would say to Rana’s father, “Rana Sahib, how good of you to pay a visit to us here.” The people who said that were peasants who worked on Rana’s father’s land. Rana was stirred by their respect; he grew to enjoy it; in this way he had got to know what being a Rajput meant.

  That was why when the sergeant in the police station in the town asked Rana to wash his plates and spoon, he was able to face the sergeant squarely and say, “I don’t like the job. I don’t want to do it.”

  The sergeant didn’t do anything to him. He could have; he could have been brutal. It might have been Rana’s manner, or the fact that Rana’s uncle was coming. The uncle had to pay up when
he came: five hundred rupees to the sergeant to hush up the matter, and a further five hundred for the rickshaw owner.

  When they were leaving the station the sergeant said to Rana’s uncle, “Wait a minute.” He told the story about the plates and the spoon and said, “This boy is only ten, but he is already a goonda.” A thug. The uncle, though he approved of Rana’s behavior, said to Rana, when they were outside, “This is how the police will behave. In future you should be careful.”

  That was the incident that made Rana want to be a policeman. A little while afterwards some policemen raided the house of a neighbor. This made Rana want to be a policeman even more. As a policeman he would be protected, his family would be protected; and, of course, it was a government job. A government job made a man secure. When he was thirteen or fourteen he began to think of himself quite seriously as a future police officer. He felt the instinct to power in himself. Then one day this changed.

  He had a cousin who was a policeman, an ASI, an assistant sub-inspector, in a small village about forty miles outside Lahore. An ASI was a low rank, but Rana had always been proud of this cousin, had seen him as a successful man. Just as, in his father’s village, he had grown to feel pride as a Rajput and a landowner’s son, so the possession of an ASI cousin, when he began to understand about these things, made him feel “superior.” He was about sixteen or seventeen when he thought one day that he would go and visit this cousin. There was no reason; he just wanted to say hello to this successful man, to be in his presence. In his cousin’s police station he saw men in handcuffs, men in chains. He saw that the police had been trained to treat ordinary people like criminals. He remembered that, though his cousin was very nice with his friends, he was very rough with his family. Rana didn’t like what he saw; he decided he didn’t want this kind of power. He gave up the dream of being a policeman. It had been with him for a very long time; he had nothing to put in its place.