Among the Believers (36 page)

It was organized; every row had a number. I was passed from person to person, snatched at one stage from a developing conversation and taken to the foreign enclave, where there were Arabs, Indonesians, and even Africans (clearly old hands at these international Muslim gatherings, unashamedly enjoying the ethnic sensation they and their
costumes and their language were exciting). Snatched from a conversation there, I was led finally to the executive
shamiana
, where a scientist with a shaved head looked me over, before an air commodore with a wonderful white beard, sad eyes, and a tender manner came and talked to me about the afterlife. That, he said, was one of the aims of the gathering, to get people to think seriously of the afterlife.

They squatted before me on a cotton rug on the bare ground. The scientist said he had been to England at the end of the war; he had gone on a troopship. Even then he had seen signs of the sickness of the West, but he had held his peace; now, of course, the West admitted that it was sick.

The scientist said he didn’t want to be “divided,” as his own father had been divided in British India: a Muslim at home, a European away from home. They—he and everybody else at the assembly—wanted to be Muslim in the way the earliest Muslims had been. When I asked in what detail his new behaviour differed from his old behaviour, I could get no direct answer.

It was hot; the scientist with his shaved head was sweating. The turbanned air commodore was cooler, more impressive, too, more tormented. He wished to purge himself of thoughts of self, to do everything for the pleasure of Allah alone. But every action raised doubts; in every action he detected some debasing thought of self.

“Stay for our prayers,” he said. “It sometimes has an effect on newcomers, seeing us all at prayer.”

But that was what I didn’t want to stay for, and was anxious about: the prayers, the sight of a hundred thousand—or was it two hundred thousand?—bowed in unison, in the avoidable desert of Raiwind.

On the way back I stopped at a village. No crops grew here now. The men were no longer peasants, but labourers who commuted to the city of Lahore, two hours away. Subsurface water was the enemy: the simplest hole became a pool, and the village was full of stagnant pools, some quite large, rimmed with village debris. Green was missing. But somehow there were cattle: dung cakes, fuel, were drying on mud walls.

The men I talked to were sheltering from the sun in a ruined one-room building, of mud bricks, beside a pool. There was a house of some size farther down the uneven dirt street. I was told it was a Muslim house. I thought this was a strange thing to say, until I understood that what was being said was that, before Pakistan, before 1947, the house had
belonged to a non-Muslim. Now the village was all Muslim, pure. At prayer time—though no call came—two of the men got up to go to the mosque.

The land was salt. But the faith kept these men at peace.

A
ND
some were of such great faith that they had been taken out of the faith altogether. That had happened to the Ahmadis. It was to find out about them that I had come to Lahore.

The Ahmadis considered themselves the purest of Muslims. To their reverence for the Prophet they had grafted on a reverence for a Promised Messiah, Ahmad, who had appeared in India in the nineteenth century. Ahmad’s followers, the Ahmadis, claimed that Ahmad had appeared to purify the decayed faith. To other Muslims this reverence for the Promised Messiah derogated from the Prophet’s “finality” as a prophet and was the blackest sort of blasphemy. There had been repeated campaigns against the followers of Ahmad; and in Mr. Bhutto’s time the hated Ahmadis had been declared non-Muslims.

In Karachi, at the beginning of my stay in Pakistan, I had met an Ahmadi woman civil servant. She had married into the sect and had been instructed in its articles by her husband, an army man, who had later died. I had been struck by this young woman’s education and dignity, her acceptance of persecution, her acceptance of the fact that it might be necessary for her and her children to leave Pakistan.

My interest in the sect began with her. And my hope, in coming to Lahore, was to visit the Ahmadi settlement at the little town of Rabwah, about a hundred miles away. But introductions were necessary; and it was not easy in Lahore to get introductions to Ahmadis. The Ahmadis themselves were, understandably, secretive. And Muslims not of the sect didn’t want to know about them; either they pretended not to hear, or they raged.

I heard that the Ahmadis indulged in casuistry; that the man they publicly spoke about only as the Promised Messiah was accepted by them in private as a second prophet. I heard that the original Ahmad had been encouraged by the British to divide Indian Muslims. I also heard that they were strong in the armed forces; that they were good businessmen and “looked after their own”; that to become an Ahmadi was to be secure and looked after.

Then, through the son of a retired army officer, I met Colonel Anees, formerly of the Pakistan army. The colonel was of the sect; he had left the army because he felt that the prejudices—especially after the outlawing of the sect—were now too strong. He was forty-one, heavy but muscular, with powerful shoulders. He had a serene expression that seemed close to a smile. He had spent two years as a prisoner of war in India after the Bangladesh war in 1971. In the Indian camp he had read a lot, learnt French, and done a number of fine, patient, photographic drawings in pencil. Some of his serenity would have come to him during those two years of withdrawal and mental concentration.

He was an easy man to like. It was harder to enter his prodigious faith. But he expected that: he said that to understand the Ahmadis it was necessary to know a lot about Islam, a lot. And I understood what he meant only after he had taken me to meet the Lahore leaders of the sect. He took me there late one afternoon, and left me to make out on my own.

A rich, suburban house, with three or four cars in the drive; a green, leafy garden; sliding timber-framed glass doors; a carpeted floor; reproduction furniture; low carved tables; modern Pakistani paintings; servants; tea. A strange setting—right perhaps only in its Indian-Victorian fussiness, the feeling it gave of being enclosed—for the exposition of religious mysteries that to me seemed to come from an antique world. And the men waiting for me—of varying ages, from the late thirties to the late sixties—might have been modern businessmen, from their dress, education, and manner. Some probably were businessmen. But they had an extra authority: they were men in their own estimation made tremendous by their faith.

It was not given to many to recognize a Messiah, to be among the first: to be linked in this way to the earliest believers in the Prophet’s mission. The courage of those early believers was now vindicated, as theirs would be when the whole world turned to the Promised Messiah. And as a mark of their faith—in spite of persecution—some wore a very thin crescent of beard on the chin.

A hundred years before there was only Ahmad, one man. Now there were ten million Ahmadis all over the world. In a hundred years from now, why not ten million times ten million? It was what the Lahore Imam or bishop (who had a crescent beard) had told a doubter in London. With that tremendous faith they could afford to laugh at
scoffers, at “vested interests.” True religion, the Imam said, was overlaid by “culture.” Once that passing thing was seen through, religion became clear again.

There were always people who preferred to deny the signs, the Imam said. It had been prophesied, for instance, that when the Promised Messiah appeared or declared his mission there would be an eclipse of both the sun and the moon. When such eclipses had occurred in close conjunction in 1894, a doubter banged his head in frustration against a wall and said, “Now that man”—the Promised Messiah—“is
right!
” But the doubter had not given up his doubt.

They laughed at the story, which they knew well. And there was a more recent story of disbelief and vested interests.

The Imam said, “Last year there was a conference in London at the Commonwealth Centre. There were hundreds of delegates from various countries. There were scientists there. Some read papers. But the press ignored the conference. The TV people didn’t send anyone.”

I said, “What was the conference about?”

The oldest man said, “It was about the deliverance of Christ from the cross.”

Christ hadn’t died on the cross. He was only in a coma when he was taken down from the cross. The Turin shroud proved that blood had flowed from a man who was still living. Christ’s broken limbs were healed and he went about preaching to the lost tribes of Israel. He made his way to Kashmir, in northern India, and died there at the age of 120.

I said, “Who arranged this conference?”

The Imam was taken aback. “We did.”

I was puzzled. But that belief about Christ was central to the Ahmadi faith.

Some Muslims believe (though there is no sanction for it in the Koran) that Christ (to Muslims, one of the prophets before Mohammed) will return to earth as the redeemer or the Mahdi. The Ahmadis say that the prophecy has been misinterpreted. For this reason: Christ is not alive in heaven somewhere, waiting to come back to earth; Christ is dead. He is dead because he was not taken up to heaven from the cross. He was taken down from the cross, healed, and went on with his preaching work until he was 120. He lived out his life as a man; it was a very long life; he cannot come back to earth for a second spell.

The true prophecy, according to the Ahmadis, was that someone
like
Christ was going to come back to earth as the Promised Messiah, to cleanse religion at a time of darkness and restore the purity of Islam. And that man was Ahmad, born in 1838 in the village of Qadian, now in India, just across the border from Pakistan. Jesus was born thirteen hundred years after Moses; Ahmad was born thirteen hundred years after the Prophet. Jesus was born in a Roman colony; Ahmad was born in a British colony. Those were just two of the numberless similarities.

Ahmad’s family had been landowners. But under the British administration they had lost their eight villages, and family division of the remaining property had left little for Ahmad. Of Ahmad’s childhood or early life little is said. It is known that Arabic, the holy language, came to him without instruction; and that he suffered from vertigo and diabetes and had a slight stammer. He had his first revelation when he was forty. But it wasn’t until he was fifty-one or fifty-two, in 1890, that he announced his mission. It was found then that many of the things about Ahmad—including his physical disabilities and the name of his birthplace—had been prophesied.

His revelations came to him in words, and that was important. If he had claimed merely to be inspired, he would not have been able to claim much for his words. He was charged at one time with attempted murder—it was an early attempt to discredit him—but he was acquitted. He married late and had a son at the age of fifty (the year before he announced his mission); the son became the third head of the movement (Ahmad died in 1908). All these events were prophesied.

It was a difficult story, as Colonel Anees had warned me; and I may not have got all the details right. Much of what I have written (but not all) was told me by Idrees, the Lahore Imam’s brother, during a long morning drive to the Ahmadi settlement at Rabwah.

Idrees wished me to see that the faith was pure Islam and fitted accepted traditions and prophecies. He was also, I felt, a little nervous after the outlawing of the sect, and anxious not to appear to be blaspheming. Idrees was a high-court lawyer, white-haired; his explanations could be fine and detailed.

The outlawing of the sect by Mr. Bhutto had been prophesied. So had the punishment of Mr. Bhutto. It had been prophesied that a ruler was going to declare them
cafars
, infidels; and that afterwards both hands of this ruler were going to be broken. “The hand that held the declaration,” Idrees said, “and the hand that authenticated it.”

I asked Idrees whether it wouldn’t have been better for the Ahmadis to stay in India, in their original headquarters in Ahmad’s birthplace.

Idrees said, “Without Pakistan and Mr. Jinnah, India would have been another Spain.”

“Spain?”

“A land where Islam has been wiped out. And now so many scholars say that the most glorious achievements of Islam were in Spain.”

Long before partition, though, the second caliph or successor (Ahmad’s son) had prophesied a migration: a migration similar to Christ’s, after he had been taken down from the cross. The prophecy had come to him in a dream.

The land through which we had been driving was flat. The hills, when we came to them, were abrupt. They were the salt hills of the Punjab, and Idrees said that from the air they showed as the last outcrop of the Himalayas. They were low red hills, so red that the men who quarried the salt—pure, the lumps like veined marble—were red with the dust.

Beside the hills was the Chenab River, one of the rivers of the Punjab, a river here of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent: not a flow of water within well-defined banks, but a wide, ravaged depression, which at the town of Rabwah (below the salt hills) was two to three miles wide: most of the riverbed exposed and dry, with low, convex sandbanks, great grey flats of silt, blackish where soaked by water, and with water in pools, with the true river like an irregular spread of water rather than a flow, unrippled, seemingly without depth, lazily dividing around an island.

The second caliph, after he had prophesied the migration from India, had seen a landscape like this in a dream, and it did have a quality of dream, with the abruptness of the red rocky hills and the sprawling river channel after the level, irrigated Punjab plain.

“He saw that there was a huge flood,” Idrees said, “and we were all drifting in it and ultimately we touched land at a place which was hilly, which had mounds, and some sandy area also.”

The hills were important in this migration that had to resemble that of Christ: it was reported that Jesus and Mary, after leaving Galilee, had moved to some physically elevated place. And the river was important, because the Promised Messiah himself had prophesied that times would
be hard for his people and that then, to solace them, he would appear on the banks of the Nile or a river like the Nile. In an unreal world, “simile”—to use the word Idrees constantly used—was everything. The Nile, Idrees said, rose in the Mountains of the Moon; Chenab meant “Moon River.”