Among the Believers (30 page)

“What are these basics?”

“Relating to people. The innocence. People are always trying to trick people. The victims and the hypocrites. Everywhere you see the big-fish-small-fish thing. Big countries trying to dictate to the small countries. Not Pakistan only, but small countries everywhere. They tried to do it in Iran.”

His family was Shia. Iran was the Shia heartland; there had recently been a family wedding in Iran, in the holy city of Mashhad. I said, “Do you think it’s all right now, after the revolution?”

“No. It’s just a vicious circle. Something keeps going wrong all the time in Iran. So much killing can’t be right even in the name of God.” He was thinking of the executions decreed by the Islamic revolutionary courts. “A sort of eternal punishment—that is what death is—can’t be right if God is so great. It can’t relate to God if God is so great.”

Hypocrisy was the theme of the poem he had been showing visitors that morning—and he had spoken to me about the victims and the hypocrites.

Cruelty, injustice, slander: these were also among his themes (and in his own language, Urdu, the play on words, the twisting of idioms, would have been more unexpected and violent). Closest to him (and containing
the point he had made about his isolation at the medical school) was the poem about a surgeon friend of the family who had died from a viral infection contracted during surgery:

He said, talking of his poetry, “I am empty for three, four months. I am occupied—empty from the angle of the poetry. Then it just comes. It happens. I can write two or three poems then. I don’t want to do anything else. Even if I’m supposed to study I don’t feel like studying after this thing happens. And then I’m empty again.”

The poem he had just written was “The Big Black Man.” Strange theme. Who was he? Muhammad Ali the boxer,

At the end of the sabbath morning at the doctor’s a religious discussion between the two journalists seemed to turn to an outright quarrel. The subject was Ali, the Shia hero, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet. The Shias think that Ali should have succeeded the Prophet as the ruler of the Muslims in 632. But Ali—stupendous though his life was: one of the earliest Muslims, one of the handful, living to see Islam become an empire—was a political failure. Three men became caliphs of the Islamic empire before him. It wasn’t until 656 that Ali became caliph; even then his rule was challenged; and he was murdered in 661. And this was the sabbath debate: Ali, as caliph, had led armies, but could it be said that he had ordered men to kill? Or had he ordered his followers to kill only in self-defence?

The debate began calmly enough, in the doctor’s sitting-room. But soon the voices of the disputants altered: grated, quivered, became like the reciting voices of mullahs in the mosques. More than history was involved. The failure and death of Ali, the failure and death of Ali’s sons, had been worked over by the Shias into an extended agony in the garden, oddly unavenged after thirteen hundred years: an agony without the resurrection. The racial dissensions of the early Arab empire (Ali the defender of the oppressed) had turned to religion, and were the
source of this sabbath-morning passion in the British-built residence in Rawalpindi.

The dispute went on well past lunchtime. I did not stay for the end. The doctor, before I left, gave me his own copy of
The Maxims of Ali
. It was a small paperback booklet, locally published. It was the book that had worked wonders for him, the doctor said; it had given him the strength for that encounter with the general manager of the oil company; he thought it would do me good.

I looked at it later that afternoon, when I got back to Flashman’s Hotel on the Mall. Ali’s sayings were famous. The first collection—a hundred sayings—had been made more than a thousand years before; thousands had been subsequently added. This was a selection, in an English translation by J. A. Chapman. At first I was puzzled.

But there was another side to this folksy wisdom:

They were the sayings of a righteous man eaten up by injustice and defeat. The misanthropy, the pain! Could all this give strength? But to the defeated, and the faithful, Ali would have been the good man who had suffered more; he ennobled worldly defeat and suffering. And there was no question here of forgiveness or calm: he ennobled rage. And it became clearer to me—reading in Flashman’s, in my wide-eaved hotel room, screened by a free-standing wall of pierced concrete blocks from
the glare of the little pool, decoratively planted at the corners with banana trees—it became clearer to me how much of this Shia and Muslim religious attitude had been bred into the doctor’s son, who was a rationalist, and in whose poetry, always outward-looking, I might never—without this special new knowledge—have seen anything Muslim.

No religion is more worldly than Islam. In spite of its political incapacity, no religion keeps men’s eyes more fixed on the way the world is run. And in the poetry of the doctor’s son, in his fumbling response to the universal civilization, his concern with “basics,” I thought I could see how Islamic fervour could become more than a matter of prayers and postures, could become creative, revolutionary, and take men on to a humanism beyond religious doctrine: a true renaissance, open to the new and enriched by it, as the Muslims in their early days of glory had been.

The fundamentalists, insecure, with their unhistorical view, feared alien contamination. But fundamentalism offered nothing. It pushed men to an unappeasable faith; it offered a political desert. It violated the “basics”; it could never wall out the rest of the world. And I thought it was possible, looking not many steps ahead, to see how in Pakistan, by the very excesses of fundamentalism, Islam might be preparing its own transformation.

  8
In the Kaghan Valley

J
ust to the north the mountains began, and less than a hundred miles away were the high Himalayas. Winter came early there; snow blocked the passes for months. In September began the migration of the herdsmen and their families and their flocks from their high summer pastures to the lowlands. And to see that migration I went
to the Kaghan Valley. Qazi, a professor at the University of Islamabad, arranged the trip for me. He lent me his car and his driver; they were to take me to Balakot. There I was to hire a jeep for the rough ride north, beside the Kunhar River, one of the icy, early tributaries of the great Indus.

My companion was Masood. Masood was a science student. He had been doing degrees all his adult life and now, at twenty-seven, was at a loose end. There was no post for him in Pakistan. He would have liked to continue his research work, and had been accepted for an advanced course at an English university; but the fees were beyond him.

He was a tall, thin, melancholy man with glasses and a walrus moustache. The moustache hinted at his military background: his father had served from 1941 to 1961 in the army, for the first six years in the old British Indian army, then in the army of Pakistan. Now his father was an accountant. The family had migrated from Lucknow in India; in Pakistan they were
mohajirs
, strangers.

The
mohajirs
had altered the provincial or regional cultures of Pakistan, Masood said; they had brought a new style in food, music, language. Urdu, the
mohajir
language, was now the national language of Pakistan; and Masood said—speaking to me as to a stranger who had to be put right about the country—that Urdu was a beautiful, easy language. After we passed the site of the ancient Buddhist city of Taxila and turned north, climbing, to Abbottabad, he gave me an Urdu lesson, and it was possible even for me to appreciate the clarity and elegance of his Lucknow accent. But then, as we climbed between the dry, bright hills, and as he became used to me, he became less of a spokesman for the
mohajirs
; he allowed his tone to become ironical.

Many of the
mohajirs
who had migrated to Pakistan, he said, had pretended they were nawabs and aristocrats in India. He made no such claim. His father had been in the army, but he had only been a
havildar
, a noncommissioned officer, something like a sergeant. So, in spite of his Lucknow Urdu, his military moustache, his science degrees, Masood was—in Pakistan, more feudal than India, with less of an industrial or professional middle class—of simple origins; and a man without a job.

At Balakot we parked our car. We had to bargain for a jeep at the government travel office. That was unexpected, the bargaining. And the office, too, was unexpected—an open room at the end of a lawn, with two upholstered chairs, two metal-framed beds with foam mattresses,
two other metal beds on their sides, a couple of chairs stacked upside down at the back of the room, a little sofa at the front—an office that was at once like a waiting-room and a run-down hospital ward. But it was a working place: the jeeps on the lawn were real enough.

Masood asked me to stay out of the way, and not to speak English, while he bargained. I sat in the verandah of a chalet at the side of the lawn, and after a while he came out of the office looking grim. He said they had asked for 750 rupees, $75; he thought they would settle for 700; but he had told them we would go and find another jeep in the bazaar.

A man came out of the office. He asked for 650. Masood paid no attention. He said to me grimly, in English, “Let us go to the bazaar.” We walked through the bazaar—a blackened dirt road, blackened little shops. In a beaten-up, oil-blackened filling station, a man was hosing down a beaten-up jeep; he asked for 900 rupees. So we went back to the government office and settled, not for 650, but for 700.

And almost at once (the government people had never doubted that they would get us) we were off. The jeep driver was a man of extraordinary handsomeness: rich, dark-brown hair, classical Indo-Aryan features, his slender, strong physique well set off by his baggy white trousers and long-tailed tan shirt. He had a boy assistant, a grubby, square-faced little cigarette-smoker with only a thin shirt below his khaki-coloured shawl. We had started off with such dispatch that it was some time before I was aware of his holding on (for the sake of the drama) to the back of the jeep, shawl wrapped around his head and narrow shoulders; and then, for a few miles, I had taken him for a Balakot bazaar boy hitching a ride.

Soon we were beside the Kunhar River, shallow in a wide, rocky valley. And after all my weeks in sand and heat I stopped the jeep to listen to the sound of water. The road was shady with trees; they were an extra blessing. But we couldn’t dally; we had far to go; and Masood said there was a lot more water on the way. We began—and, after the easy ride from Rawalpindi, it was like something theatrical, arranged—to see the shepherds driving down their flocks. They were Afghans, unexpectedly small and frail-looking, the men black-turbanned, the women in bright baggy trousers and long head-covers. Busy, the women, private, shut away in their migrant life, grimy with their bright colours (red and black), underfed, exhausted by the work and the walking, their faces tanned and lined.

The hills were irregularly marked with old, overgrown terracing. The houses, set against the hillsides, had flat, thick mud roofs, often at varying levels; these roofs rested on heavy beams, sometimes whole trunks—trees were plentiful here. Houses set against the embankment of the road often had their roofs level with the road and showed only as a kind of earthen yard: the quarters were below, hidden.

We stopped at a village to talk to some boys. They looked idle, but they wore the slate-grey uniform of schoolboys, and were not as isolated as they appeared. One boy had an uncle in Lahore; another, brothers in Karachi and a brother in Saudi Arabia. A young man who came out from a two-level, flat-roofed, stone-walled house said that he could go to Karachi any time and earn twenty-four hundred rupees a month as a carpenter. Masood didn’t think he was exaggerating: with the great migration, artisan skills were rare in Pakistan. But the man’s peasant arrogance added to Masood’s own melancholy; he said he couldn’t earn that himself.