Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  Anyone who had traveled in the subcontinent and looked at old Hindu temples would have recognized in the granite pillar with the depression the lingam, the phallic emblem of Shiva. To hear the stories about the jinns and Ali’s footprint and the saint flying on the wall from Baghdad was like entering a still living historical moment, and witnessing the crossover from the old religion to the new.

  A small mosque below a very big tree—a great trunk, many gnarled branches—was part of the shrine area. The guardians of the shrines, living easily with marvels, said that the mosque had been built by Mohammed Bin Qasim, who had conquered Sindh in 710; and that the tree was also from that time; it would have been a tree Mohammed Bin Qasim knew.

  The tree might not have been as old as that; and the mosque was certainly much later. But the mosque had been given the Mohammed Bin Qasim association to celebrate the conquest—the faithful no longer saw themselves as the conquered—and also to claim the ancient site for the new faith. Just as, in Java, six or seven hundred years later, the new faith could take over the abstract Hindu-Buddhist-Jain figure of the great meditator, the Tirthankara, the “river-crosser,” a metaphor for the achiever of higher consciousness, and spin a more literal tale for him. The river-crosser became Kalijaga, the “guardian of the river”: obeying an order from a great teacher to sit and wait, and doing so by the riverbank with unwavering fidelity until the vines grew around him, and then being released by the teacher to get up and spread the message of Islam.

  The pir of Uch, the inheritor of the sainthood and the site, was the descendant of the saint who had been brought on the wall from Baghdad by the jinns, and had spread Islam in the conquered territory. The current pir was a man of power. He had a large religious constituency, and his sister was married to the biggest feudal landowner in the area. This was how the feudals were moving: making alliances with industrialists and with religious dynasties like the pir’s: religion and money and land locking together to rule.

  The pir had gone to Sindh that day. His murids or followers had called him to arbitrate in a murder case. Technically there was the rule of law in Sindh, but people had little faith in the apparatus of the state, and the pir’s followers preferred his judgment.

  So the women who had come to see the pir that day had to wait, and they were squatting like chickens in his courtyard in the sun. They were peasant women, serf women, chattels of their landlords and their husbands, unprotected by law or custom or religion. They lived with cruelty and their minds had half gone. The pir was the only kind of light for them, and they had come to see him because they were now possessed by demons. The pir had a reputation for dealing with demons. Demons could enter these women and for a while make them objects of dread, rolling their eyes and head and speaking filthy words in unnatural voices. The pir knew how to get at the demons by punishing the bodies in which they were lodged.

  I was told by a journalist from Bahawalpur that there was a special ceremony every spring in the pir’s courtyard. His followers, who were mainly from Sindh, came to the courtyard in a kind of pilgrimage. When the time came, they lay down in the courtyard and he walked or hobbled over them. He had a clubfoot; it was a congenital deformity of the pirs of Uch; and he cured the afflicted with every heavy step.

  In the big sitting room of the house, attended by contented and civil women servitors, who clearly felt themselves privileged, there was—and it was unexpected in the ragged desert town—a big Waterford chandelier. There were photographs of the pir’s ancestors, and photographs of the present pir, showing him with presidents of Pakistan, foreign ambassadors, and with the last Nawab of Bahawalpur, the Nawab seated against a bolster, dark-skinned, seemingly respectful but hard-eyed, and with his high fez.

  9

  WAR

  THE TRUCKS GOING TO KARACHI on the north-south “superhighway” traveled in convoy through the desert of Sindh. This was because of the dacoits or bandits. And, indeed, just a few days after I had seen that convoy moving slowly bumper to bumper through Bahawalpur, there was an incident on the outskirts of Karachi that made the Karachi evening newspaper: “Dacoity on Superhighway”: dacoits holding up a truck and shooting and wounding the two men in it.

  But the dacoits of Sindh were not always what they appeared. A police officer I got to know had had his first posting in a dacoit area. The land was wild. On one side of the highway was marshy forest, fed by the annual river floods; on the other side were mountain and rock and desert. It was all very poor: huts of mud and thatch in the countryside, and little two-roomed brick houses in the towns, with ten or twelve people to a house, many of the people having nothing to do in the desolation, just letting the years pass.

  The dacoits were almost as wretched as their victims. And then the young officer, head of a subdivision, discovered that the local feudal landlords were really running the dacoits. They protected the dacoits; the dacoits in return acted as the landlords’ gunmen, without pay. It cost about fifteen hundred rupees a month, thirty-seven dollars, to hire a gunman; to have two or three or four gunmen without paying was good business; and there would be a share in the dacoits’ more important loot. The dacoits would have had serious police charges on their head, even murder charges; they could have been turned in by the feudal at any time. And the army—“in Sindh forever,” as the police officer said, “supposedly fighting dacoits”—was always there, to kill the dacoit on whom the feudal “ratted.”

  The game had its formalities. The feudal, in his starched shalwar-kameez, and with his gunmen with their chadors (the guns below the chadors), might come one morning in his Nissan four-wheel drive—emblem of feudal authority—to subdivisional headquarters. He would be there, together with a delegation of local people, to complain about the dacoits. The same feudal would come at another time to say that the dacoit the police had picked up was the wrong man. A police officer who then pressed too hard or became aggressive could be “posted out.”

  The officer was fresh from his eighteen-month training in the civil service and police academies. “A British colonial throwback: a spot of riding, a spot of shooting, a spot of academic work, very theoretical about the world outside. In reality they knew that the officer who would make a lot of deals and compromises, and hunt with the hounds, would be the one who would be successful.”

  Some such dislocation had befallen the mohajirs, the Muslim migrants from India, who had come in great numbers after independence to the feudal land of Sindh. They had agitated more than anyone else for the separate Muslim state, and they came to Pakistan and to Sindh as to their own land. They found that it belonged to someone else; and the people to whom it belonged were not willing to let go. They, the mohajirs, became the fifth nationality of Pakistan, after the Baluchis, the Pathans, the Punjabis, and the Sindhis. They were a nationality without territory. And that was where, a generation or two later, the war of Karachi began: with the mohajir wish for territory. They wished Karachi to be theirs; they were a majority in Karachi. Their passion, their sense of grievance, was like religion; it was like a replay of the agitation by their fathers and grandfathers fifty years before for Pakistan.

  The war had lasted more than ten years; the mohajirs said that twenty thousand people had died. It was not a clear-cut war, mohajirs against the state. The city was too big and too varied. Governments had sought to use the passions of various groups. The Afghanistan war had brought guns to everyone. And now there were two militant and mutually hostile mohajir factions; there were Sindhi nationalists and Sindhi feudals; there were sectarian groups, Sunni and Shia, both ready to kill; there were the intelligence agencies; there were drug gangs and criminal gangs and real-estate gangs. The many-sided immigrant city was at war with itself. It had been too much even for the army. They had been there for twenty-nine months; they had achieved little, and had been replaced by the Rangers, a semi-military border force.

  The poet Iqbal in 1930, making the case for an all-Muslim Pakistan, said, “The religious ideal of Islam is organically relate
d to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other.” It was the convert’s view: the faith was identity enough, and state enough. It was the very idea with which the mohajirs had come to Pakistan. In that romantic view of Iqbal’s there was no intimation of the carnage and plunder and grief of partition; or of the abandonment of the more than a hundred million in India; of the war that was going to start forty years later in Karachi. And a front page like this: “Shops closed: aerial firing in protest against yesterday’s killings—GULBAHAR, L’ABAD, KORANGI TENSE.”

  Gulbahar, Liaquatabad, and Korangi were vast mohajir slum areas. The war, which had begun with middle-class mohajir protest, had got down to the very bottom.

  The editor of an Urdu-language newspaper—I met him by chance in the Press Club—said, “Yesterday the brother of the chief minister here was killed. Today three thousand young men of a particular area have been picked up by the police. They will be tortured, some of them. Their families have to ransom them for twenty-five thousand rupees.” Six hundred dollars. “So there is terror and impoverishment. You should see the city at night. The city changes at night. It’s like an occupied city. Come out and see the police in action, stopping and searching. But you must have courage.”

  The editor was a small and mild-mannered man of forty-two. He was sympathetic to the mohajir cause, though he was not strictly a mohajir. He was a Memon; the Memons were a Gujarati-speaking business community. The editor felt that as outsiders he and his family had suffered in Sindh. His family’s businesses, in insurance and medicines, had been nationalized; nationalization had been used to damage non-Sindhi business interests. And the editor himself, because of Sindhi nationalist “terror” at his university, had not been able to take his M.A. degree.

  The editor had changed houses four times. He had done so to protect himself not only against the police but also against the militant mohajir movement, the MQM. The MQM, reaching downwards through the mohajir community, and losing some of its middle-class support, had become as brutal as its enemies. Like other successful movements of the oppressed, it had also become authoritarian. It had a leader now who could not be questioned. The Memon editor, sympathetic though he was to the cause, could at times print things that offended the MQM leader. Once the paper was “banned” by the leader for two weeks. The editor had then been required to write a personal letter to the leader, “begging for forgiveness”; and after that for three days running he had had to print an apology.

  Still the editor kept going. He had courage.

  Abdul said, “Please understand that when I leave home in the morning I am not sure whether I will return home.”

  He was thirty-six, a family man, and also a man of the mohajir movement. He wasn’t a fire-eater. His speech was flat, and he was dressed in white, white trousers, white shirt; on him it was like the color of grief. He was withdrawn, expressionless, no life in his eyes; he was like a man stunned and brutalized by the long war. If Nusrat, who was a common friend, hadn’t introduced us, I don’t think he would have wanted to talk about Karachi or the war.

  His father and grandfather were from Simla; they were catering contractors for the British army. His mother was from Meerut. They had come over in 1947 and his father had started a radio and television repair shop. The business was successful. The details had to be pulled out of him one by one; he had no vision of a life or a past that made a whole.

  I asked, “What are things like now in Karachi?”

  “Very good.”

  “Why?”

  “The government is doing it.”

  “Doing what? The murders?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why is that good?”

  “It’s the Urdu-speaking people basically who are dying, and this is the sacrifice. When you want something you have to give something. Twenty lakhs died for the creation of Pakistan.” Twenty lakhs, two million. “We have to make sacrifices for our rights.”

  Nusrat said, “He is talking of a mohajir nation. They are talking of separatism now.”

  He couldn’t say what had pushed him to that position. He had begun to feel ten years ago that things were not right. He had had some trouble with a Punjabi traffic policeman and had had to bribe him with fifty rupees; at the same time a Punjabi driver, who could talk Punjabi to the policeman, had been let off.

  Wasn’t that a very small thing?

  He didn’t answer directly. He said, “Look what the police have been doing when they raid mohajir houses in Golimar. They break in the doors. They take the men away and abuse the women. Two months ago I saw a body in a gunny bag, and I was very upset.”

  Nusrat said, “Very common. It’s a joke, in fact. If you see a gunnysack in the street invariably there’s a body or parts of a body in it.”

  I asked Abdul, “What gives people courage now?”

  “They are fighting for their rights and they are ready for anything.”

  “Religion gives them strength?”

  “What has this got to do with religion? What has Islam got to do with this? They are also Muslims.”

  Nusrat asked, “Is God on your side?”

  “God is with truth and justice.”

  But the mullahs in his area, though they were mohajirs, didn’t “touch the themes.”

  I said, “Prudence?”

  “It isn’t that. They don’t really talk about current affairs.”

  “How do you communicate with the movement?”

  “We visit each other in the evening.”

  “Police?”

  Abdul said, “They have spread a network of informers. Street hawkers selling popcorn and candy and ice cream. A lot of new faces on the streets in the neighborhood. Some mohajirs, some not.”

  He had four brothers and four sisters. All the sisters were married. One brother-in-law was dead, one was without a job, one was a draftsman, and one worked in a paint company; the jobs were not good enough.

  I said, “I feel you are an unhappy man.”

  “No. You can’t call me unhappy.”

  Nusrat said, “He is in great financial distress. His wife nearly died giving birth to their seventh child. He had five sons but wanted a girl.”

  Abdul said, “Whatever Allah will do for me will be good for me.”

  I asked, “What do you talk to your friends about? Do you talk about politics?”

  “We are not talking a lot these days.”

  Nusrat said, “It’s true. It’s not safe.”

  I said, “So what do you talk about?”

  “It’s the worry about how many have died today. Where the police have raided. How many have been detained.”

  Nusrat said, “People have stopped visiting one another in these localities.” The troubled areas of the city. “Should I take the risk after eleven P.M.? Car-snatching, dacoits, police search, army as well, people in bogus uniforms. Anything. Five hundred rupees each time. Better to pay and go home. And you often wouldn’t know they were bogus. They can plant a pistol in your car and say they’ve found it. Life has been restricted. There was a wedding yesterday which began at six P.M. instead of eleven. Even if you are making a death announcement in the papers you are hesitant to disclose your phone number and address. Because some bogus people might come to condole. They have actually come to find out the arrangements in the house. They will visit you later.”

  I asked, “How do you think it will end?”

  Nusrat said, “There is going to be a big breakdown, a big confrontation, and something will emerge out of that.”

  I said to Abdul, “Why don’t you leave Karachi?”

  “No. My family are here, my children are in school here, and we have to stay in Karachi in its hour of need.” Karachi now, in his eyes, a mohajir city, his city.

  “Will you live, or will you die, you think?”

  “There was firing even this morning. I take the risk of dying every day.”

  “Who was firing?”

&nbs
p; “Someone. Unknown.”

  Nusrat said, “Often we know when we say unknown.”

  I asked Abdul, “Does your father talk of the old days in Simla?”

  “My father used to say that the British were better than these governments. It was not injustice in this form. My father used to say that in the British days there were little kerosene lanterns on the street. But now we have no streetlights.”

  Only food shops and newspaper shops, small places, were open. The bigger shops were closed; the gray steel shutters were down. A park had been turned into a rubbish dump; in another street rubbish was uncollected. There were slogans on the walls.

  This was the most troubled part of the city, and Mushtaq, a teacher of English literature, lived here with his in-laws in a two-story house. The inlaws had been in that house for twenty-five years. The “colony” (a word of the subcontinent) was one of the first to be developed in Karachi after independence and the great migration from India. At that time, between 1949 and 1950, it was considered a middle-class and educated area, and it would have been beyond Mushtaq’s family’s means and style.

  Mushtaq had come to Karachi in 1949. He was eight. The family was from Banaras. Mushtaq’s father had been a small trader in clothes in that town, with a shop which Mushtaq thought was “sizable”; it was ten feet by twelve. Mushtaq’s elder brother was a civil servant in Delhi; he opted for Pakistan, and the whole family migrated with him. They brought very little with them. They weren’t allowed to bring jewelry and money; and they didn’t sell the clothes shop; they left it to neighbors and relations. By that time migration to Pakistan was no longer a free-for-all; there were visas and permits. The family couldn’t get a visa for Lahore. So they came to Karachi, and they came by rail, on a line now discontinued for strategic reasons.