Among the Believers (41 page)

It was overcast. The hills were smoking. Very white clouds were rising from the rifts; and above the range there was a whole level bank of grey-white raincloud, slowly lifting and fluffing out. Around the racecourse were the trees I knew from my childhood: banana trees, the frangipani, another tree with a yellow flower, the great Central American
saman
or rain tree, used in plantations as a shade tree.

I wished I was more alert, and more free in mind, to enjoy what I saw. The exhaustion of sleeplessness turned to anxieties, irritations: the bad milk that had denied me coffee, unanswered cables. When I went downstairs there was a girl at the desk. I talked to her about the cables. She directed me to the telephone operator. The door had a sign:
For Authorized Personnel Only
. The operator, a Malay girl who couldn’t speak English well, was plain, with round glasses.

While she checked her file I read the staff notices, which were in Malay and English. There was one notice that I wished I hadn’t read. “Irresponsible staffs” had been “urinating and purging” on the floor of the locker, and on canteen plates and in canteen glasses. Ritual cleanliness had nothing to do with cleanliness for its own sake, nothing to do with regard for the other man. There were rules for the villages; there were no rules for the town. There were hotel rules; they had to be obeyed because they were hotel rules—and the hotel maintained high standards. But below stairs, among their fellows, one or two Malays could still feel that rules had ceased to apply.

The nausea stayed with me. When I went outside I fancied there were smells; and the smells seemed to follow me everywhere, even to the Equatorial Hotel, where I went for the buffet lunch. There I met a man I knew. He told me that the town had not been built for Muslim people. Muslims had to wash ritually five times a day before they offered their prayers; they used what was available; they used sinks and wash basins to wash their feet and genitals. So all the excitement I had felt at Shafi’s story—excitement which had partly kicked me awake that morning—turned the other way.

But it was all right again when Shafi—in everyday office clothes—came to see me that afternoon. With the man before me, so frank, so
attractive, my disturbance fell away. He had brought a friend, a very small and slight man of thirty-four. The friend’s father had been a village mullah. The friend himself had specialized in Islamic studies and—strangely—had gone to Birmingham in England for his doctorate. Now he was a high official in ABIM. He had lost a number of teeth in an accident, and he limped. Whenever he spoke he seemed, because of those missing teeth, to smile.

I said, “Why are you all so young in the movement?”

The friend answered, with his smile, “Our parents were simple people. Ninety-five percent of them hadn’t been to a university. And those who had, only got skills to serve their colonial masters.”

His directness was like Shaft’s. All my sympathy of the previous day flowed back.

I said, “But you are just like Shafi. You don’t try to cover up anything.”

Shafi said, “What do we have to cover up? What do we have?”

I said, “Shafi, when I asked you yesterday morning what you thought of the white people around the pool, was it the first time you had had to think of such a thing?”

“It was the first time.”

“But how, Shafi? These people are all around you. They are around us here now, in the coffee shop.”

He said, “I never
see
those people.”

He meant it in both ways: he never had occasion to meet white people, and when he saw them he never took them in.

Neither of them had so far touched the egg sandwiches I had ordered for them. They were waiting for me to eat first. I ate. But then—though Shafi’s friend had had no lunch—they only nibbled. They both left most of their sandwiches uneaten. It was only out of courtesy that they had allowed me to order sandwiches for them; in a place like the Holiday Inn they were both nervous of eating non-Muslim food.

To avoid the steps when they left, Shafi guided his limping friend down the carpeted luggage ramp at the side. Beside the very small, frail man with the damaged left leg, Shafi looked tall and protective. I thought of Behzad and his limping girl friend on the platform of the Tehran railway station: revolutionaries, unnoticeable now, but conscious of the truth and danger they carried with them.

S
HAFI
had promised to take me to the ABIM school and even to find some “brave girls” there who would talk to me. He had brought his friend to look me over. The friend apparently didn’t disapprove; and early the next morning Shafi came for me in his car.

Considering the hectic, mixed, modern city, with business signs in Chinese, English, and Malay; considering the traffic jams and the exhaust fumes that quivered in the heat; considering Shafi in his car, now driving with the rest (the boy whose village school, in the far northeast, had an earthen floor that became flooded in rain); I asked whether the city still felt strange to him.

He said it didn’t. But he was a stranger in his village. He meant that literally. Buildings had changed; people had gone away; he no longer knew everybody. The village had ceased to be his, in the way it had been.

At the school, which was in the three-storey ABIM building away from the centre of the city, I met an Australian, a big, middle-aged man with glasses and a skullcap, sitting by himself and apparently doing nothing. Shafi said he was trying to learn about Islam. The busy young Malay men I met were of a type I had begun to recognize: village men whose faces, at first expressionless and with a hint of suspicion, lit up with smiles when Shafi explained my purpose: old manners, old village courtesies, just below the dourness.

The secretary-general was tougher. He said, as soon as Shafi introduced me, that the world had gone down morally in the last two or three hundred years, with industrialization. He spoke like a man who was about to put that right. He had an executive manner and he held a number of folders in his hand.

Shafi had work to do. He left me with Nasar. And again—as with many of the others—Nasar’s small physical size was noticeable, his frailty. A hundred years or more ago—when the European coastal steamers moved from landing stage to landing stage, when the British plantations were beginning and the Chinese were coming in, and administrative towns were rough settlements on the edge of the forest—Nasar’s ancestor was a sheikh, a Malay who lived in Arabia and shepherded Malay pilgrims to Mecca.

That sheikh, returning to Malaysia and to his village, just six miles away from what was now the city of Kuala Lumpur, had a son. The
son, Nasar’s great-grandfather, married when he was twelve. In old age, in 1934, this great-grandfather founded a Malay-language paper. He tried to stir the Malays up, to tell them that they had to fight for their survival. But nobody listened to him; even his own son, Nasar’s grandfather, who should have been a religious teacher, decided that the money from teaching wasn’t good enough and became instead a paddy farmer, with seven acres. The son of the paddy farmer became a government servant, an officer in the Forestry Department. He was Nasar’s father. So the family, once Arabic-educated and leaders in their own way, had in modern Malaysia become “a lower-middle-class family.”

Nasar himself, after a local education, had gone to England, to Bradford, to do a diploma in international relations. He had learnt that the big powers were not interested in peace; they cared only about their spheres of influence; they sold arms. And he hadn’t liked what he had seen of English life in Bradford.

“They are too individualistic. In Bradford people would say to me, ‘Why don’t you spend your time to go to pubs, disco?’ They’re trying to say to be together with others, but not with your family. They are created by their own technology. The modernization of Malaysia, if it is not checked, will follow the same pattern. We accept technology, but it must not affect the basis of the social structure. Free mixing and alcoholism are the great dangers. That goes with free mixing. Trust is the basis of family happiness. Allah created men and women so that they would get married in a proper procedure and to raise a family. That is the basis of the social structure. We must avoid having free mixing. Finally we intend here to have a separate school for the girls and the boys. We believe that unemployment today is due partly to this philosophy of female liberation.”

Women, the family: they created anxiety in these slender men who, just emerging, perhaps sensed more than their physical frailty. At the end of our first conversation Shafi had said, “When the girls come from the villages to Kuala Lumpur, they don’t want to be protected by the law.”

T
HE
men were to go to the mosque for the 12:30 Friday prayers. Just before they left, just before the offices emptied and lights were turned off, Shafi introduced the brave girls he had promised.

We sat together in the front room overlooking the highway. It was a kind of storeroom, disordered, with plastic cups of undrunk milky coffee on a table, many folders and publications, and a lopsided office chair with one caster off. Two air conditioners muffled the traffic noise.

The girls were of different racial types. One was brown-skinned and slender; one was pale, plump, and round-faced. They both wore long dresses and had covered heads. The brown girl had a head-cover in thin black cotton that had crinkled up and looked slack; there was about her a general adolescent untidiness which was fetching. The round-faced girl was neater. A white kerchief was drawn tightly on her head, and over that she had a pink head-cover that was pinned below her chin.

They were both a little nervous. They had been at the ABIM school for two years, and they had come there because they hadn’t done well enough in the government school. They were both now in the highest school form.

I asked them about the headdress, which reminded me of the women in Tehran. They gave me the Malay word for it,
tu-dong
.

The girl with the black
tu-dong
said, “The head is to be covered.”

The girl with the tight white-and-pink
tu-dong
said, “Not a single piece of the hair must show.”

I said to the girl in black, “But some of your hair is showing.” And a lot of it was.

She giggled and became girlish.

I said, “Why must the hair be covered?”

The girl in black said, “The hair, you know—” And she giggled again, before composing herself and saying, “Some girls have very nice hair and sometimes men are sexually attracted to the hair.”

She spoke in Malay to the round-faced girl in pink, and the girl in pink went out of the room.

I said, “Is that bad? Is it bad for the woman? Or for the man?”

“Bad for both. For the girl it is a sin because you make men attracted to you.”

The girl in pink came back into the room. She said, “The hair is
aurat
.”

“
Aurat?
”

“Things that cannot be shown.”

They spoke then in duet, making appropriate gestures. The girl in pink said, “Girls can only show the face.” The girl in black said, “And the hands from the wrist.”

“And the feet?”

“The feet?” the girl in black said. “I don’t think so. I don’t think the feet are
aurat
.” Her own feet were visible below her long cotton dress, which was as crinkled as her head-cover; and she was wearing pretty little high-heeled shoes with a strap and a buckle.

The girl in pink said, “The feet are
aurat
.”

Some Malay words passed between them, and the girl in pink went out again.

The girl in black said, “Two years in this school is a short time. Because there are so many things to learn.” Then, as though making up for her uncertainty about women’s feet, she said, making a gesture down her body, “A man is
aurat
from the waist to the knee.”

The girl in pink came back and said, “The feet are
aurat
.”

(Who was sitting outside, ready with the answers? Could it have been the Australian?)

The girl in black said, “Some girls cover their face. There are many in this school. Though it isn’t necessary.”

“Why do they do it?”

The girl in pink said, “Maybe they know more.”

The girl in black smiled, less nervously now, as though amused by how little she knew.

Her friend, plump and tidy, seemed altogether solider. She said, “The main aim of these philosophies is to preserve the beauty and gentleness of the women. We can preserve our beauty. It’s not for showing off. It’s very bad.”

“Why is it bad?”

The girl in black, the frivolous one, as I now thought, said, “All I know, it’s very bad.” She laughed. “I
know
, but I can’t express it.”

“Would you like to cover your face?”

“Maybe one day. When we know more.”

“And when we find it necessary,” the girl in pink said.

“What more do you have to learn? You’ve been here two years.”

“There is so
much
to learn,” the girl in black said.

The girl in pink said, “We don’t know Arabic.”

“So you don’t understand the prayers you say.”

“We understand those. But the Koran is in Arabic and we would like to read the Koran in Arabic.”

“Would you have liked to stay on in the government school if you had passed the examination?”

The girl in black nodded.

The girl in pink said in her plump, stately way: “Right now in the government schools the education system is more towards academic.”

“Science,” the girl in black said, now apparently disapproving of the government school. “Science. Technology. You have to pass all the examinations to get a place in the varsity—if you want to have a good job or having a high standard of living, to have a good earning. This religion they are not really taught in schools. The girls don’t pray. They have forgotten how to pray. And you
must
pray.”

“Do you tell the girls they are going to hell?”

“Oh, no!” the girl in pink said. “We never say that. We have to be gentle with them. We have to talk to them gently.”