Among the Believers (39 page)

“Social pollution?”

“Something that contradicts our customs and traditions. A man cannot walk with a woman who doesn’t belong to his family in the kampong. It is forbidden.”

“Why is it wrong?”

“The very essence of human respect and dignity comes from an honourable relationship of man and woman. You must have a law to protect the unit of your society. You need your family to be protected. When the girls come from the villages to KL they don’t want to be protected by the law.”

S
HAFI
was thirty-two. He was small and slender, with glasses, a sloping forehead, and a thin beard. He had at one time set up as a building contractor. But he hadn’t succeeded; and he had given up that and all other business to work full-time for the Muslim youth movement called ABIM. ABIM was the most important and the most organized Muslim youth group in Malaysia; and Shafi venerated the leader, Anwar Ibrahim, who was a man of his own age.

Anwar Ibrahim’s story was remarkable. He came from the more developed west coast of Malaysia, and was a generation or two ahead of Shafi. His grandfather ran a little village restaurant; his father was a male nurse in a hospital; Anwar himself had gone to a British-founded college for the sons of local princes or sultans. Anwar had to pass an entrance examination; the boys of royal blood didn’t have to.

The British had pledged not to dishonour the Muslim religion of the sultans, and in the college they were scrupulous about that pledge. But Anwar thought that religion as practised in the college was only a matter of ritual, with no great meaning. So, with the help of a British teacher (who later became a Muslim convert), Anwar began to study Islam; and he grew to understand the value of discipline, unity, and submission to God’s will. By the time he was sixteen he was making speeches about Islam in the villages; he was a fiery orator. Out of that schoolboy activity his movement had developed, and it was now highly organized, with a building in Kuala Lumpur, offices, staff, even a school.

He was in touch with Muslim movements abroad—in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan. He had been to Iran and met Ayatollah Khomeini; that had added to his reputation locally. For Anwar Ibrahim, Islam was the energizer and purifier that was needed in Malaysia; true Islam awakened people, especially Malays, and at the same time it saved them from the corruption of the racialist politics of Malaysia, the shabbiness of the money culture and easy Western imitation.

His office in ABIM—with staff in outer cubicles, with typewriters and filing cabinets—was like the office of a modest business executive: modern tools and modern organization to serve the Islamic puritan cause. He was small and slight, slighter than Shafi, and even more boyish in appearance. He was attractive; and it added to his attractiveness that in spite of his great local authority he gave the impression of a man still learning, still thinking things out. His grand view of Islam gave him a security that not all of his followers had; and travel had added to his vision. He disapproved of the “faddishness” of some Malaysian Muslim groups, their religious and political simplicities. He admitted that he had not yet thought through the economic side of things; he said he was still only at “the conscientization stage.” I got the impression that he genuinely believed that an Islamic economic system was something he might one day bring over from a place like Pakistan.

I would have liked to talk more with Anwar. It occurred to me, after our first meeting in the ABIM office, that I should travel about Malaysia with him and see the country through his eyes. He was willing, but it didn’t work out. He was busy, at the centre of all the ABIM activity; he was constantly on the move, by car and plane; he was in demand as an orator. When the second of our arrangements fell through, he sent Shafi to see me at the Holiday Inn, where I was staying.

It was only because of Anwar’s recommendation that Shafi, when he came, opened himself to me. And even as it was, Shafi was diffident about putting himself forward, of appearing as a spokesman, of derogating from the dignity of the leader.

“I am not the leader,” Shafi said with a laugh, when we sat in the Gardenia coffee shop. “I’m only a general.”

It wasn’t easy to talk with Shafi in the beginning. He spoke the abstractions of the movement, and abstractions made his language awkward. He dodged concrete detail, not because he was secretive, but because he was used only to answering questions about the faith and the movement, and not about himself.

He said he didn’t like places like the Holiday Inn. I thought this was an exaggeration until he began to talk about the wastefulness of city life. And I never became reconciled to the difference between the man who was talking to me—intelligent, self-possessed, scholarly-looking—and the slack village life he said he came out of and longed to go back to.

He wanted to go back, to have again a sense of the fitness and
wholeness of things; and I could see how for him Islam was the perfect vehicle. But Shafi—a professional man, an organizer—had been made by the world he rejected; that was the world that had released his intelligence. It would not have been easy for him to separate the part of himself that was purely traditional or instinctive from the part for which he alone was responsible. And his village had changed; and Malaysia had changed; and the world had changed.

It was of that changed and urgent world that, not long after Shafi left me, I heard the Malaysian foreign minister speak at a seminar at the university. The minister wore a flowered shirt: that was the only touch of traditional colour. He—and the Indian official from his ministry—spoke of the discussions at the recent Nonaligned Conference in Havana; he spoke of the disturbance on the northern borders: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam. Foreign ambassadors were present. The two men from the Chinese embassy, in short-sleeved grey safari suits, made notes, holding their pens straight up in the Chinese calligrapher’s way. Afterwards big cars took some of the ambassadors away. It wasn’t only the rich local Chinese and the builders of highways and the manufacturers of colour TV sets that had altered the world.

It was to another kind of old life that later, at dinner at the house of a distinguished Indian lawyer, the talk turned. James Puthucheary, the lawyer, had once been active in colonial politics in Malaysia and Singapore. He said, “I’ve been jailed by the British, the Singaporeans, and the Malaysians. The only people who jailed me in such a way that it was possible to be friendly with them afterwards were the British.” The British colonial secretary—in rank just below the governor—came to see him in jail one day. Before he came into the cell he said, “Mr. Puthucheary, do you mind me coming into your room?” Afterwards, Puthucheary said, they “both went down in the world.” The colonial secretary retired and went into business; Puthucheary completed the studies he had begun in jail and became a lawyer. “We used to meet and play bridge.”

It was an elegant and educated middle-class gathering, conscious, in addition, of its racial variety: Malays, Chinese, Indians. There were many cars in the drive and on the lawn. Old battles, old rules; and it might have been said that—with the help of the money of Malaysia—these men had just arrived at dignity. The world had moved fast for them. But already what had been won was being undermined by the
grief and rage of the people not represented there, the people of river and forest who had stood outside the awakening of colonial days, and whose sons now made the first generation of educated village Malays. For them the world had moved even faster.

It was possible in the morning to read the newspaper with greater understanding.
Shares worth $15m offered to bumiputras
. A
bumiputra
(the word was Sanskrit, pre-Islamic) was a “son of the soil,” a Malay; and Malays were to be given loans to buy the shares reserved for them. This was how the government discriminated in their favour, seeking to bring them up economically to the level of the Chinese. The method was ineffectual; it had only created a favoured class of Malay “front men.” It was against this kind of racialism that Anwar Ibrahim and ABIM campaigned, setting up against it a vision of a purer Islamic way.

Mandatory Islamic studies welcome, says Abim:
Islam was to be a compulsory subject for Muslims in schools.
Rahman: Don’t neglect spiritual growth:
that was a government man, as Muslim as anyone else.
Hear the call from across the desert sands:
that was a feature article, for this special day, the Festival of Sacrifice, by a well-known columnist, a good, lyrical piece about family memories of the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Only half the population was Muslim; but everyone had to make his obeisance to Islam. The pressures came from below: a movement of purification and cleansing, but also a racial movement. It made for a general nervousness. It made people hide from the visitor for fear that they might be betrayed. It led—oddly, in this land of rain and steam and forest—to the atmosphere of the ideological state.

S
HAFI
came in the morning, dressed in formal Malay clothes for the religious holiday, the Festival of Sacrifice. He wore a pale-orange tunic and trousers (this part of the Malay costume copied from the Chinese), with gold studs in the tunic; he had a sarong around his middle like a slack cummerbund (the sarong was the original Malay dress, and Shafi’s had been woven for him, in pastel stripes, by his mother); and he had a black velvet cap that folded flat (the cap was the Indian part of the Malay costume). He looked princely. With a knife at his side he might have been a raja of a hundred years before, standing on a riverbank, with his own court. But he had driven up in his car; and we were in the lobby of the Holiday Inn.

He said, “Did you read what I said last night? Did you like it?”

“I liked what you said about your family unit.”

“Do you want to ask more?” He was eager, open. The effort at autobiography, my interest in the details of his life, had excited him.

“Yes. But I know your philosophy, the ideas of your movement. I want something more personal.”

We went from the lobby to the Gardenia coffee shop, passing the bar on one side, where at night in near-darkness couples sat and “The Old Timers”—Indians and Malays or perhaps only Malays—sang amplified pop songs. In the coffee shop we sat next to the window, overlooking the small oval pool with its ancillary little oval pool for children. Everybody there was white this morning.

I said, “What do you think about that?”

He had grown a little tense, waiting for the personal questions. He turned and looked at the people around the little pool, showing me his profile, the smooth brown Malay skin, the slope of his forehead, his glasses, the dip of his nose-bridge, the knob of his snub nose, his beard. He looked hard; his face grew serious.

He said, “I don’t know what I think. They are foreign to us, that’s all. They don’t belong to our culture.”

“You wouldn’t like to be with them?”

“No. But the water’s quite cooling. We have the same clear water in the village. More natural environment. You would see the riverbed. You would see the plants, creepers by the side, on the bank.”

Across the pool was a woman in her forties in a black bathing suit. She was white, untanned, soft-bodied but still with a fair shape, and her legs were drawn up awkwardly rather than provocatively on the white plastic straps of the easy chair. Below us was a younger woman in blue, smaller, firmer, lying on her belly. Both might have aroused desire in a sexually active man.

I said, “Do you think those white women are pretty?”

He looked at them one after the other, with the same serious expression: he was trying hard to find out what he thought.

He said, “We don’t have a sense of comparing.”

“But white men and others find Malay women pretty.”

“I have heard that. But is it true? Is that really what they feel?”

And in the coffee shop, with the Malay waitresses in long green
dresses pinned with their Holiday Inn identity badges (“Beautiful and Homely”), we talked of the village. It was not easy for Shafi, though the effort of thought and memory excited him. The narrative that came out was shaped by my questions.

“I know every corner of my village. We used to go bird-hunting, catching some fish. Either in trousers or sarong. In the trousers, the pockets loaded with pebbles. We used those pebbles to catapult birds. We would go out about ten a.m. in the school holidays or much earlier in the fasting month. And returning about lunchtime with the whole pocket of pebbles gone and returning without any reward. Sometimes we diverted to collecting rubber seeds. We would each put some seeds in a section of bamboo, put the bamboo on supports about four inches above the ground, and try to knock it down from a distance. The boy who knocked it down got all the stakes.

“One of the other activities in childhood was to read Koran, even without knowing the meaning of the verses. We were told by our parents to do it. We were just obeying them.”

I said, “Don’t you think that’s a bad intellectual start?”

“You’re right. But it’s more than that when you read Koran. We were told from various sources about reading Koran. Each time you read will bring you some goodness in life. I do feel that.”

“Like magic, then?”

“It is above magic in this case. It is not written by human being. Magic is operated by human being, whereas Koran is above that. The other book we had is text written by a few well-known leaders in the village. Religious texts, mainly dealing with teachings. They were printed in the town. On how to pray, on keeping yourself clean. Physically clean. If you have water you wash in water. If you don’t have water you’re allowed to use other things. Stones, wood, bark, leaves, paper. But not bones of animal which is not slaughtered. Basic hygiene.

“You should choose, if you don’t have a proper toilet, a secluded place where nobody would see you, and not in the flowing stream where people are using the same source of water supply, and not under a house, and not anyplace where the faeces will give offence to the public. It is a holy teaching and it is applicable in our life. So I took it as something we’ve got to follow. This was when we were not more than twelve years old.”