Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  But there were two sides to the war. It soon became clear that, after the secession of Bangladesh, the government of Pakistan, under Mr. Bhutto, was going to deal with the Baluchis and their tribal chiefs with extreme severity. Shahbaz thought that at one time one hundred thousand troops were in Baluchistan. In London the South African had dazzled them with the name of Lin Piao and with his theory, from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, that guerrilla war in the countryside would swamp the cities. What they hadn’t expected, what no Marxist primer or revolutionary handbook had prepared them for, was this: a well-trained professional army moving with overwhelming strength to flatten the frail social structures of a nomadic people.

  Shahbaz’s misgiving or bewilderment on the very first day, at his sight of the “Martians” of Baluchistan, had something in it after all, however much, with the help of the thoughts of Mao, he had rationalized it away later. The nomads were not the workers or peasants of Marxist literature, rooted people. The nomads were wanderers; they traveled light; they could be brushed away.

  Shahbaz, telling the story, didn’t say a great deal about this. I felt there was more to say about the brushing away of the nomads, and when I went to see him some days later I asked him.

  He said, “People were dying all around you. People had lost their livelihoods and their families. The economy of a nomadic family is so fragile. It depends on flocks. All you have to do is to destroy the animals. Which they did. They shot them, rounded them up in big sweeps, thousands and thousands of sheep and goats and so on. And once you do that, people have nothing to live on.”

  The army didn’t move in the summer; the heat was too great. The army moved in winter, and at the end of the second winter the revolution in Baluchistan was more or less over. All the partying and love-making in London, all the discussion of sacred revolutionary texts with sexy Latin American girls, all the preparation and education in Baluchistan, had come very quickly to nothing.

  Shahbaz was for some time in one of the few liberated areas holding out. Soon as an administrator he was on his own. The South African had left not long after the actual fighting had begun. This hadn’t worried Shahbaz. He still had faith in the South African, and he knew that the South African was going to Europe to do important work: to raise funds (from Russia, Germany, and India, though Shahbaz didn’t say this), and to plant stories about Baluchistan in the left-wing press. The South African kept in touch, but he never came back.

  Such publicity as Baluchistan got abroad was because of the South African, but it was very little. Baluchistan never became one of the big international left-wing causes. One reason might have been the quick collapse of the revolution; another reason would have been the silence in Pakistan about the uprising and the army operations. The government said nothing; no Pakistan newspaper printed anything; and journalists who wrote about Baluchistan were jailed. The revolutionaries in the cities did put out a little clandestine bulletin, stylishly called Jabal (a Baluchi word meaning “mountain”), but it was rough and cyclostyled and it came out once a month. It would have looked a little too much like what it was, a voice in the wilderness, and its message didn’t carry.

  At the end of the second winter of the army’s operations the Baluchi clan chief—in whom Shahbaz and the others had seen a possible Ho Chi Minh or Mao of the Baluchi revolution—decided to leave Baluchistan, and to take some of his abandoned and derelict nomads on an unusually long walk across the border to Afghanistan. There were at one time about twenty-five thousand of these refugee nomads, Shahbaz said; many of them were women and children who no longer had men to support them.

  The winter after that, the Christian boy from Karachi, who had the “huge smile and huge laugh,” and wept for the poor, and had been studying in London to be a chartered accountant, was captured and tortured and dropped from a helicopter.

  The army was now pressing very hard. Shahbaz said, “Terrible. Massacres. Starvation. Bombing. Seeing many of the people you had raised up and trained die in front of you.” But he never doubted the cause. “No. The disasters made me wiser.”

  He had constantly to decide what to do with various groups of non-combatants, whether to send them north to Afghanistan or east to Sindh, or to keep them where they were. It was important not to send everybody away, because a depopulated area ceased perhaps to be a liberated area.

  The army watched all the routes. Shahbaz was closely blockaded in his liberated area. Extraordinarily—after all the planning for a guerrilla war in the countryside—food had to be smuggled in from the cities.

  Shahbaz was still game, still excited, in spite of the failure and tragedy all around him, still seeing the revolution as part of his personal development. He said, “It was an intensely creative time.”

  Wheat was what they most needed. Shopkeeping in Baluchistan had been something the Hindus did once upon a time, but after partition they had been run out of all the towns. Tribals had taken over, and they were relatives or distant relatives of the insurgents. They organized camel trains. These camel trains, sometimes with guerrilla escorts, had to pass through various army checkpoints. There were disasters, especially in winter, the time of the army offensives. Guerrillas would be taken in by the army; shopkeepers would be taken in; precious food would be lost. There were times when Shahbaz and his people were eating one meal every two days. They traveled with bits of bread in their pockets; that kept them going.

  The army moved up one winter to the mountains where Shahbaz and his group were. They had to get out fast. They moved at night, to avoid being spotted by the army helicopters. They were moving with a lot of food, reserve stocks. They couldn’t lose that. For a whole day Shahbaz and his group hid in a nomadic settlement. They were fed and looked after, and in the night they moved out. The army at this stage wasn’t using helicopters alone; they were also using trackers, army scouts and local Baluchi trackers. These trackers led the soldiers to the nomadic settlement. They asked questions. “Who was here last night? Who made all those tracks outside, coming up to your houses?” Everybody in the settlement was killed, sixteen people.

  Shahbaz was disturbed for weeks after he heard. The Baluchis with him were more stoical; they comforted him.

  Shahbaz said, “Because nomadic life is hard, they have a great capacity for absorbing calamities. I learnt that stoicism and patience from them.”

  Three years later—the interlocking wheels of all the various Greek tragedies and revenge tragedies of Pakistan grinding away—Mr. Bhutto, who had unleashed the army against the Baluchis, was deposed by a general and tried and hanged. This general declared an amnesty, and the war in Baluchistan was over.

  Shahbaz was now in Afghanistan with the other refugees. He had walked there over the mountains from Baluchistan. There were two camps for the refugees in the south of Afghanistan. The clan chief who had led the refugees to Afghanistan was still there, still a man of influence. The revolutionary movement also had various flats in Kabul. For the many weeks that Shahbaz was in Afghanistan he moved between the refugee camps and the flats in Kabul.

  It was in Kabul that Shahbaz met the South African again, after six years. The revolutionaries, those who had survived or were still interested, were meeting in Kabul (especially safe for them, with the Russian occupation) to talk about the future of the movement. Shahbaz and some of the others also wanted to talk to the South African about what he had been doing in Europe for six years, and about the money he had raised.

  There were tremendous arguments, “huge fights.” At the end Shahbaz and the South African were not talking to one another. The South African began to say that Shahbaz and the others were traitors; they had betrayed the revolution and should be killed. Shahbaz was shocked. He was even more shocked when the clan chief—in whom they had once seen a future Mao or Ho Chi Minh—called him and said he could no longer guarantee Shahbaz’s safety: the South African would now be trying to poison Shahbaz. Shahbaz thought it better to leave the Baluchi to deal with the South African. He went ba
ck to the mountains. This was how Shahbaz said goodbye to the two men he had most admired.

  The movement had now broken up. The Baluchis didn’t want to have anything more to do with outsiders. They were not interested in revolution now; they had become separatists. The South African finally went back to London. That was where after a while Shahbaz went, too, returning to Kabul from the mountains to take a plane. From London he got in touch with his parents, who had felt betrayed by him, and made it up with them.

  He was deaf in one ear because of the war. He had lost all his teeth. He had had hepatitis, and couldn’t drink alcohol now. He had annual bouts of malaria.

  He said, “I have no regrets. That was and always will be the most creative, stimulating part of my life. Where I was most energized, and where I learnt so much. I was disappointed by the end result, but that doesn’t make me bitter.”

  The angle was unexpected. Didn’t he feel now—time having passed, and leaving aside his parents and the Baluchis—that he had misused his privilege and betrayed himself intellectually?

  “No. I came to maturity when all this was going on.”

  “All this?”

  “Guerrilla wars all over the third world.”

  It was his idea of education. It was the strangely colonial idea of his generation in Pakistan, born though they were after independence. Education wasn’t something you developed in yourself, to meet your own needs. It was something you traveled to, without fear of prejudice now, and when you got to where you were going you simply surrendered to the flow.

  As a Marxist he thought he had been unconventional. He hadn’t wished to impose the standard Marxist kit on the Baluchis. He thought that there was much about the tribal culture that was good and positive and should be preserved, like the legal system, and the common ownership of pasture land. Now the whole tribal structure had been destroyed. There was no longer traditional law; there was no access to the courts; and there were now two to three hundred blood feuds among the leading families. So things in Baluchistan were now much worse than they were in 1970, when he had gone there from Karachi, by train and bus and on foot, carrying revolution.

  This was the story Shahbaz told over many hours. Stories told in this way can have elisions and jumps, but as I read my notes over the next day or two I felt that certain things were missing. There was no sense of the passing of time, though Shahbaz had spent ten years in Baluchistan and Afghanistan. There was no reference to water, no true sense of a landscape. And the tribesmen were not there. They were the people to whom Marxism was being taken; they were the people who were being ravaged; but they were not there, not even as costume figures. Only the Baluchi clan chief and the South African and the Christian boy with the big laugh were there.

  Shahbaz was surprised by what I had said about the tribesmen. It hadn’t occurred to him, and he had no explanation. The tribesmen had been present to him while he spoke. “I see them—the tribesmen—all the time. But my description may have been one-sided.”

  About the passing of time he said, “It was ten years. Hard to encapsulate. People here find it difficult to relate to the passing of time. Time passes slowly for many people and they find it difficult to pinpoint. People are not used to rapid changes and that affects their attitude to time. Lives have changed—dramatically—but it has been a very slow, cumbersome process. I don’t think it’s Islam. People don’t have the mechanism to remember when the dish reached their village or when they saw their first naked girl on MTV.”

  What he said about water was puzzling, considering his silence about it: “Everything was dominated by water. The search for water was the most important thing in the world. The tribesmen knew where the water was, but not in what quantity, or how clear it was, and whether it could support a hundred men and the animals with them. Or whether there would be springs or rivers or pools. So we sent scouts ahead to find out. And sometimes at five the scouts would come back and say the water wasn’t good enough or wasn’t enough, and so we had to walk on into the night. It was also like this for the military. The extremes of temperature were enormous.”

  The experiences and the emotions were there, but they had not come out in the earlier account. It was as though, in this story of revolution, he had wished to strip people down to their Marxist essentials. (In some such way the Islamic zealot wanted converted people to be the faith alone, without distorting history and traditions.) He had seen the tribesmen not as men but as tribesmen, units, and the clan chief as a leader rather than as a man with affections and human attributes.

  He had been just as hard on himself; he had left out much of his physical suffering, which had been very great. His eardrum had been punctured by an explosion at the very beginning; and his ears had bled for many months. He had been tormented by hepatitis; every bout lasted two months, and it made the long marches “killing.” Hepatitis came from the bad water; the tribesmen were less susceptible than he was. (This was probably why he had never talked about water the first time.) There were no fruit juices to help with the hepatitis; the food was mainly bread and meat, sometimes lentils, and sometimes damaging things like milk and clarified butter.

  All of this he had left out as inessential, with the faces and costumes of the tribespeople, and the tents, and the camels, and the baggage, and the landscape.

  He said, “It was a very personal account. I very rarely speak about these experiences.” Later he said, “I didn’t talk about my own suffering because the people I was with were suffering more.”

  That vision of suffering, though repressed, was there. It came out now, when he talked of what had happened afterwards.

  The clan leader he had admired had quarreled with the sardar, or chief of the tribe. The sardar had not wanted to “take the movement forward,” and the tribe was now badly divided. The clan leader had gone back to his own area, and he was hard up. His people were hard up.

  Shahbaz said, “You should remember that the people have remained totally impoverished because of the loss of their flocks. Thousands of them have come down to Sindh and Punjab to look for work for daily wages. So the economic life of the tribe, and other tribes as well, has been destroyed.” The sardars blocked development. “They are greedy. They want commissions. The sardar’s own economic life has been destroyed. No flocks of his own, no gifts of sheep from his followers. So the sardar depends now on government handouts.”

  Afghanistan, with the Russian occupation, had been a safe place for Baluchi refugees during the insurgency. But that war in Afghanistan had turned out to be calamitous for the Baluchi people. A million Afghan refugees had been settled in Baluchistan, and they had been like locusts. They had come with their own very big flocks, and they appeared to repeople the land. They cut down the trees and their flocks grazed on the best pasture. The Baluchis could do nothing. They had become a minority in their own territory.

  “Those refugees were Pathans. So the Pathans today are in a much stronger position than the Baluch in Baluchistan. The Pathans brought with them their fundamentalist trend. Madrassas [Koranic schools] and so on—totally alien to the Baluch culture. This happened after the war. Friends still keep coming here and talking about how bad it’s become.”

  And still he didn’t feel responsible. Still he thought of himself as a carrier of the truth.

  “The ideology was supplied by the 1968 movement. But the urge was a local urge, to do something for my country, especially after the loss of Bangladesh. Today the people who think they have the answer are the fundamentalists.”

  5

  PENITENT

  THE FUNDAMENTALISTS were known to English-speaking people in Pakistan as the “fundos.” They were to that extent a presence now. They were still in the background, but they pushed and pushed, and always wanted more.

  The Indian subcontinent had been bloodily partitioned to create the state of Pakistan. Millions had died, and many more had been uprooted, on both sides of the new frontiers. More than a hundred million Muslims had been abandoned on
the Indian side, but virtually all the Hindus and Sikhs had been chased away from Pakistan, to create the all-Muslim polity of Iqbal’s casual poetic dream.

  That should have been enough. But the fundamentalists wanted more. It wasn’t enough that this large portion of the ancient land had ceased, after the millennia, to be India; and—like Iran, like the Arab countries—had been finally cleansed of the older faiths. The people themselves now had to be cleansed of the past, of everything in dress or manners or general culture that might link them to their ancestral land. The fundamentalists wanted people to be transparent, pure, to be empty vessels for the faith. It was an impossibility: human beings could never be blanks in that way. But the various fundamentalist groups offered themselves as the pattern of goodness and purity. They offered themselves as true believers. They said they followed the ancient rules (especially the rules about women); all they asked of people was to be like them and, since there was no absolute agreement about the rules, to follow the rules they followed.

  The most important of the fundamentalist groups was the Jamaat-i-Islami, the Assembly of Islam. It had been founded by a religious teacher and zealot, Maulana Maudoodi. Before partition he had objected to the idea of Pakistan, for strange reasons. The poet Iqbal, presenting the case for a separate Indian Muslim state in 1930, had said that such a state would rid Indian Islam of the “stamp which Arab imperialism was forced to give it.” Maudoodi’s ambitions were just the opposite. He thought that an Indian Muslim state would be too limiting, would suggest that Islam had done its work in India. Maudoodi wanted Islam to convert and cover all India, and to cover the world. Iqbal had said that an important reason for the creation of Pakistan was that Islam had worked better in India than in other places as “a people-building force.” Maudoodi didn’t think so. He didn’t think the Muslims of the subcontinent and their political leaders were good enough, as Muslims, for something as precious as an all-Muslim state. They were not pure enough in their belief; they were too tainted by the Indian past.