Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  And other ideas had changed. In 1979 Shafi, grieving for the village of his childhood, had spoken of Malays as a pastoral, tropical people. Once he said they were a “timeless” people; he meant only they had little sense of time. They were not commercially minded; they were without the energy of the Chinese, who came from a “four-seasoned” country. He had worked these ideas—which were curiously colonial ones—into his overall religious view. They were not ideas that Malays liked now.

  A young lawyer said, “That’s been laid aside. Destroyed almost. It has been replaced by the idea of the Malays as a trading and manufacturing and innovative people. These are all words you would not have associated with Malays in the past.”

  The government had done all that it could to bring Malays into business, and over the last two generations it had succeeded. The racial anxieties of sixteen years before had been swamped by the great new wealth, and new men had been created on both sides. That was the message of the steel and concrete and glass around the site of the Holiday Inn, and the great highway through the forest that had opened up the villages and opened up new land. A journey to the interior that took six to eight hours, along old roads that touched many of the old colonial towns and settlements, now took two and a half hours and showed almost nothing of that past.

  The lawyer said, “I think it telescopes time.”

  In 1979 they had all been rather young in the Muslim youth movement. The leader, Anwar Ibrahim, the man on whom they all leaned, the man who gave them confidence, was only thirty-two, Shafi’s age.

  Nasar, to whom Shafi had introduced me, was only twenty-five. He was very much the junior; and physically he was even slighter than Shafi. He had just come back from Bradford in England, where he had been doing a diploma in international relations. He hadn’t liked the free and easy sexual ways of England, and he didn’t want those ways to infect young Malays over there.

  Nasar had an ancestor who was a Malay sheikh in Mecca. A sheikh was a guide, and this sheikh guided Malays who had gone to Mecca on the pilgrimage. This kind of guiding would have become a proper paying occupation only after the 1830s, when steam replaced sail, and the journey from Malaysia became quicker and more reliable. And it is possible that Nasar’s ancestor was doing this pilgrim work in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  Towards the end of the nineteenth century (as I work it out) this ancestor returned to Malaysia, to a tin town, predominantly Chinese, twelve miles or so to the north of Kuala Lumpur. This man’s son was Nasar’s great-grandfather. He married when he was twelve. In 1934, when he was very old, he set up a Malay-language newspaper that preached self-help to the Malays. He was a voice in the wilderness. After him the family declined; the tradition of learning faded away. There was little money in teaching; there was more in farming.

  Nasar’s grandfather, who should have been a religious teacher, became a rice farmer, with seven acres. Nasar’s father worked as a ranger in the forestry department. He had only the standard primary-school education, up to the sixth class; but he read the newspaper every morning before he went to work. This newspaper-reading was important: it was Nasar’s greatest intellectual stimulus as a child. Nasar was one of seven sons, and the fourth of eight children. When he was eight he began to read the newspaper, like his father. It was an advanced thing for a Malay child to do.

  In time, then, Nasar, the ranger’s son, was able to go to Bradford to do a diploma in international relations. And now, sixteen years later, only forty-one, he was running a holding company that managed the diverse affairs of eight companies.

  Nasar had a suite of offices in a skyscraper. The shadow of this skyscraper fell on the green-glassed skyscraper across the road. This made the road seem narrower; and the mid-afternoon tropical light, which would have been harsh and stinging in open fields and open streets, was softened in that narrow, protected space, so that the light and climate of Kuala Lumpur seemed perfect.

  Nasar, with glasses now, and less frail-looking than in 1979, was dressed with an executive’s care: belted trousers, tan shoes, matching socks, stylish wide tie, a large round watch on his slender wrist. His personal assistant was a tall and gentle young Sikh. In the main waiting room, and in the antechambers of various offices, were models, like toys, of white airplanes on silver sticks. Nasar’s holding company had interests in aviation; they ran scheduled domestic air services.

  It was an extraordinary transformation, and the man himself was welcoming and gracious, full of offers of help. It was as if good village ways had been given a kind of corporate enlargement. I had been moved in 1979 by the openness of the young men of the movement; they didn’t hide things or make up things about themselves. Nasar seemed to have that kind of openness still. He remembered what he had been in 1979; he didn’t put a gloss on it. And he talked without prompting of the internal demons—the phobias, the lack of confidence—that as a small-town Malay he had had to quieten before he could be what I now saw.

  What they had been looking to religion to do for them in 1979, simple power, simple authority, had done for them later.

  Nasar’s transformation began with Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the Muslim youth movement. It was clear in 1979 that Anwar was marked for great things. And when the time came and Anwar rose, he took Nasar with him.

  Towards the end of 1981 Anwar decided he had done enough youth movement work: the lectures and consciousness-raising, the protest. He thought the time had come to move on. He decided to join the ruling Malay party. He became one of the party’s candidates in the 1982 elections, and he called on Nasar—then with a master’s degree from Bradford in international relations—to handle his election campaign. Nasar did so. Anwar won his election and became a deputy minister in the prime minister’s department. He said to Nasar, “Join me. Be my private secretary.” Nasar was overwhelmed. He was twenty-eight; he had been used to facing authority “from the other side of the counter”; he had never dreamt of such a dignity, serving a minister in the government.

  He was Anwar’s private secretary for seven years. In those seven years Nasar shed his phobias and doubts. He met people of all sorts; he saw the workings of government from within. And Anwar never ceased to treat him as a friend, never ceased to give him confidence.

  Nasar said in his boardroom, where we were talking over lunch, “I will remember that forever.”

  After seven years he resigned as Anwar’s secretary. He went to England again and did a two-year law degree. When he came back he became the senior vice-president of a Chinese conglomerate. His government experience helped him get that job. After two years there, getting knowledge of “real business,” he left, and went on his own.

  I asked about the ideas of 1979, Shafi’s ideas about the goodness of kampung or village ways, their joint ideas about religion.

  Nasar said, like a man who had prepared his case, “Shafi was a businessman. But he had failed as a businessman. Hence his romantic view of the kampung. In those days we talked about religion theoretically. Now we are talking about Islam as a way of life in practice. Now I confront the real world. My previous knowledge helps me—what I can do, the limit of my freedom, to what extent I can adhere to a mere capitalist philosophy. I am involved in some government contracts, and business outside the government. There is a certain kind of behavior which I will not condone. Corruption, giving commission under the counter, taking people out, giving them ladies, condoning immoral actions to get contracts. That is the test. The test for a Muslim is when they are confronted with reality and a choice to make. Until then they are always right. Utopian.”

  He might have been thinking of Shafi. I said, putting words in his mouth, “And they can make trouble because they feel they are always right?”

  “They can make trouble. When I am in the business world I am being confronted with choices, problems, people—of a kind I could not have imagined. People wanting a stake in your company—in return for a project. In the real world of business competition knows no bounds. At th
at juncture they contradict the values we want to create in the society.”

  Nasar felt he had been educated by the Muslim youth movement; and he remained loyal to that education. Power and authority might have brought out his latent qualities and made him what he was; but it had also to be said that religion had given him the important first push.

  Nasar said, “The Malay no longer has an inferiority complex. He is no longer like the frog under the coconut shell.” That was a Malay saying: to the frog the underside of the coconut shell was the sky.

  One Saturday I went by the new highway to the town of Kuala Kangsar. The famous Malay College was there. It had been founded by the British for the sons of local chieftains, on the pattern of similar schools in the Indian subcontinent. Boys of all ranks went there now. Many important careers had begun at Malay College. Anwar Ibrahim, whose grandfather had run a village restaurant in Penang, and whose father was a male nurse, went to Malay College. He had to sit an entrance examination; boys of royal family at that time didn’t have to.

  Kuala Kangsar was also the seat of the royal family of Perak. There was a big new palace, white and rich and rhetorical, with an air-conditioned throne room. There was also an old timber palace, really a traditional long house on pillars, narrow and dark, with much decorative fretwork, thick floor planks, and a cooling cross breeze. It was a museum of sorts now. But one could easily in imagination strip it of its framed photographs and charts; and—dark and cool and protected inside, bush and dazzle outside—it could take one back to buried childhood fantasies about the house and safety.

  On a hill overlooking the Perak River, and almost at the entrance to the royal enclave, was the house of Raja Shahriman, a sculptor and a prince, distantly related to the royal family. It was an airy house of the late 1940s, and it was furnished in the Malay style, with rattan chairs, brightly colored fabrics, and cloth flowers.

  The sculptor was small, five feet six inches, and very thin, in the pared-down Malay way. There was little expression on his face; the nature of his work didn’t show there. He worked with found metal; there was a forge in the yard at the back of the house. He created martial figures of great ferocity, two to three feet high, in clean flowing lines; and the effect of the black-metal figures in that house, with the pacific, restful views, was unsettling.

  The sculptor, in fact, lived in a world of spirits. He also made krises, Malay daggers; it was part of his fascination with metal. Krises found out their true possessors, the sculptor said; they rejected people who didn’t truly own them. He had a spiritual adviser, and would have liked me to meet him; but there wasn’t time. The world of Indonesian animism felt close again. In more ways than one we were close here to the beginning of things, before the crossover to the revealed religions.

  The sculptor had a middle-aged Chinese housekeeper. She would have been given away by her family as a child, because at that time Chinese families got rid of girls whom they didn’t want. Malays usually adopted those girls. The sculptor’s housekeeper was the second Malay-adopted Chinese woman I had seen that day. It gave a new slant to the relationship between the two communities; and it made me think of the Chinese in a new way.

  In 1979 I had been looking mainly for Islam, and I had seen the Chinese in Malaysia only from the outside, as the energetic immigrant people the Malays were reacting to. Now, considering these two gracious women, and their fairy-tale adoption into another culture, I began to have some idea how little the Chinese were protected in the last century and the early part of this, with a crumbling empire and civil wars at home and rejection outside: spilling out, trying to find a footing wherever they could, always foreign, insulated by language and culture, surviving only through blind energy. Once self-awareness had begun to come, once blindness had begun to go, they would have needed philosophical or religious certainties just as much as the Malays.

  Kuala Lumpur was fabulous for the visitor: so rich, so new and glossy, so full of new public buildings and splendid new interiors, so full of energy. There was a new bank in a new building. It had been created by two Chinese brothers. They were only in their forties, and their beginnings had been quite simple. So far as vision went, one brother was all sparks, a talker; when he talked his face became flushed. The other brother was calmer, with glasses, a listener, with the manner of a physician. Yet I felt that when the time came the calm brother would be the more daring. They made great projects appear very simple, a matter only of logic. For both of them money had ceased to be simply money; business had become more an expression of energy, and vital for that reason.

  It was Philip who introduced me to the brothers. Philip was the secretary of their company. He was Chinese, too, and as young as the men he worked for. He was easy of manner, humorous, quick, immensely attractive. There seemed to be an unusual depth to him; and I was to find that his serenity, which was part of his attractiveness, was something he had had to work for. It overlay great childhood unhappiness.

  Philip’s father had two families. Philip belonged to the second family, and he felt that his mother had been badly treated. He didn’t like what he had seen as a child. He wished to put matters right for his mother, but he was adrift emotionally, until his conversion to Christianity in his fifteenth year.

  It happened at his school. It was a mission school run by the Plymouth Brethren, who had been in Malaysia for about ninety years. He was at a very low point when one day, quite by chance, he went to a chapel service. He was dazzled by the teaching that God was a loving father. He felt it gave him a place in the world.

  Philip said, “It’s ironical, because I would have thought I would have rebelled against that kind of religion—coming as I did from a broken family, where I didn’t have a father since age eight. And the direct teaching about grace—in the parable of the prodigal son, where the father waits, and hugs and kisses the returning son. Grace: unmerited love and favor bestowed upon an undeserving person: it was something very powerful.

  “I owe a lot to the faith. It gave me a certainty and belongingness, identity. It had all been confused. Who am I? Chinese, but not Chinese. In a Chinese cultural program I would be lost. English, but not English. I’ve never been to England. The Scriptures gave the original impetus to my love and passion for reading, which exists at this day.”

  At that time, 1966 and 1967, Islam was not the proselytizing force it now was. It was only one religion among others. At the time of his conversion Philip was thinking more of his future. He wanted very much to be a lawyer, a professional man.

  “I remember my mother saying to me, ‘It’s so hard to deal with lawyers.’ I thought one day I’ll be a lawyer and give the time of day to my clients. I wanted to compensate for the family shortcomings. My father’s first family had doctors. The second family, to which I belonged, hadn’t done well at all. So I wanted to vindicate—to win back face for my mother.”

  She was a worshiper of Chinese idols. People like her had now moved to a new form of Japanese Buddhism.

  “It’s quite common, the Chinese family throwing away their gods and joining this new Japanese Buddhism, which is based on strong humanistic traditions. I’m happy for them that they’ve liberated themselves from those kitchen gods.”

  People who knew about his faith and his intellectual inclinations wondered how he could work in a bank. He told them, “My understanding of Christianity is that we don’t deny the world. We are in the world but not of the world.”

  His mother’s honoring of the kitchen gods was mainly a matter of habit. She would light joss sticks to them and place offerings for them; it was part of the routine of her day.

  “Even as a child it had no meaning for me. When the time came to discard it we just got rid of it like old clothes. We weren’t worried that the gods would come and punish us. When I was fourteen or fifteen I felt a lack. A void, an emptiness. It cannot be articulated. For me it was serendipitous that I chanced upon a chapel service. The second generation of Chinese had to anguish over the fact: Who am I, b
eyond my shelter, my diploma, my degree? These questions were more real to the second generation. The first generation was much too busy. For the Chinese there is inherited wealth, inherited circumstances, but also the query: Am I only my father’s son?”

  2

  NEW MODEL

  NADEZHA’S FATHER, who was born around 1940, was a kampung or village Malay. Nadezha never went looking for her father’s village, and she was never interested in her father’s background. The family would have been very ordinary, and Nadezha didn’t feel she had to make inquiries. She thought the family would have been “farmers or something like that.” She was sure they would have lived in a wooden house in a paddy field, and would have kept chickens at the back. There would have been no books in the house.

  But education mattered to Nadezha’s father when he was a boy. He knew—some admired older person would have told him, or he would have picked it up from conversation—that for a boy like him education was the only way out. He was a bright boy and he studied hard, and eventually he won a scholarship to the great Malay College at Kuala Kangsar.

  It was in Kuala Kangsar that he saw the girl who was to be Nadezha’s mother. He saw her walking out one day with a chaperone, and he was taken with her. It was easy for him to find out who she was and where she lived; the boys of the college knew about the young girls of Kuala Kangsar. Nadezha’s father began a correspondence with this girl. She was corresponding with other boys at the college as well. It was the recognized way of boy-girl friendship in Kuala Kangsar; boys and girls were not free to meet.