Among the Believers (45 page)

“What did he tell you about Napoleon?”

“Napoleon evolved simple and effective laws. But he cannot be compared with Khalid, the companion and general of the Prophet. Khalid said that his moment of contentment was when the armies of the faithful and the infidels clashed and only the sound of horses could be heard and sparks flew from the clashing swords in the dark night.”

“The dark, cold night,” the doctor said.

“Compare that with Napoleon. He withdraws his forces in order to meet his love. It is in history. You can read it. So how could you compare the two personalities? Khalid sacrifices his life to uphold his religion. Napoleon thinks of his love. Women have the same physical attributes everywhere. But conviction is one.” That was Khairul’s translation. “If Napoleon was a Muslim he would have been at the back of the army and most probably would have been quarantined—”

“Court-martialled?”

“That’s it,” Khairul said, accepting the suggestion. “He would have been court-martialled for immorality.”

I wanted the
haji
to talk more of his boyhood. I would have liked to compare his memories with Shafi’s. But he said he wanted to talk about bigger things. Still, I tried.

I said, “What was it about village life you disliked as not Islamic? Apart from the wedding ceremonies.”

“Usury.”

“Who were the moneylenders?”

“Malays, Chinese.” And the
haji
stopped, to spare my feelings.

“Indians,” the journalist said, sitting at the dressing table, writing. “Chetties. You’ve heard about the Chetties?”

I said I had. “What did you dislike about the Chinese?”

“Their way of life,” the
haji
said, round-faced, smiling. “If they became Muslims I wouldn’t mind. We have no racial feeling.” (But it was said in Malaysia that if the Chinese as a community became Muslims, the Malays would become Buddhists.)

He had looked after his father’s cows and worked in his father’s
fields until he was fifteen. Then his father died. A thousand people came to his father’s funeral.

“But why didn’t they support your father? He was a religious teacher. Why did they let him die with only a dollar to his name?”

The
haji
didn’t answer. He said he continued reading after his father’s death. He read everything he could get. “I read a book by Sukarno.
Revolution. Revolution
something.”

The doctor said, “
Under the Shade of Revolution
.” (That was a mistranslation. The title of the Sukarno book,
Dibawah Bendera Revolusi
, might better be translated as
Under the Flag of Revolution
.)

The journalist, making notes of our conversation, had also been looking at various papers on the dressing table, and there was an anxiety in one part of my mind that he might find something he wouldn’t like.

He spoke now in Malay to Khairul. Khairul asked whether I had a camera. I said no. Khairul said of the journalist, “He has a camera, but no film. Can he buy some here?”

I said he could try; the shop in the lobby was still open. And the little gowned man left, big white tennis shoes flashing over the dark Holiday Inn carpet.

I took some snuff, explaining that it was tobacco and nothing harsher—I knew they disapproved of stimulants.

Khairul said, “Tobacco is not encouraged by Islam.”

“Not encouraged?”

“It isn’t forbidden. It’s not encourageable. It’s a technical word in Arabic, you understand.”

The
haji
said, smiling, “Most of the tobacco manufacturers are Jewish, and in order to destroy the Jews we must not consume their products. There is a very good book about the Jews.”

The doctor said, “By Henry Ford.”

“The motorcar man,” Khairul said.

“Can I get this book here?”

“In the Perkim Bookstore,” Khairul said. “You can get it there.”

The
haji
said, “The Jews are the enemies of God. Do you know the evolution theory?”

“I know of it.”

The
haji
fixed his smiling face on me. “Do you know why the theory was put around?”

I said, “For a man with a farming background you know a lot.”

“I know very little. I know just a fraction of what is in the Koran.”

Khairul, cross-legged and comfortable on the low table between the doctor and the
haji
, said, “If you know the Koran you know everything. Economics, politics, family laws—the principles are all embedded in the Koran.”

There was a knock at the door.

I said, “That will be your friend.”

And I got up in my pyjamas to let the journalist in. With his turban, his round tinted glasses, his long thin beard, his gown, and a further, saronglike garment which I hadn’t noticed before, he looked like a shrunken little sun-dried dervish, lost in the desert of the Holiday Inn corridor; and he stood with his big white shoes very close to the door as though, away from his fellows, he was really quite shy. He hadn’t got any film.

I got back into bed and said to the
haji
, patient and smiling in his armchair, “You were telling me about evolution. You were saying it was put forward for a certain reason.”

The
haji
said, “What do you know about the history of the Jews?”

“Very little.”

“They are a genius race,” the
haji
said. “Did you know that? This is confirmed by the books of God.”

Khairul added on his own, “They are a genius race. Throughout history.”

The
haji
said, “Other races are jealous of them because they are a genius race. They have contributed much in the sense of concepts. Karl Marx.”

“Engels,” Khairul said, speaking for himself.

The journalist, making his notes again at the dressing table, said, “Tolstoy.”

“All Jews,” the doctor said.

I felt we had got far from the subject of evolution. I said, “Would you like some tea?”

The
haji
said, “Is it made by Muslims here? How do they make it?”

“They use tea bags. And the boys are Malays.”

The
haji
didn’t look convinced. They talked among themselves in Malay, and Khairul said, “We’ll have a bottled drink.”

I got down from the bed and went to the little Sanyo refrigerator, which stood at an angle in the corner not far from the
baji
’s chair and was labelled
Your Private Bar
. It had a double row of miniatures on the top, and the shelves had a modest stock of drinks. Beer, German wine, tonic water, Coca-Cola, Seven-Up. They chose Coca-Cola.

“One bottle would do,” Khairul said. “It will be enough for the four of us. It is our way.”

I took the bottle to the bathroom, saying, to prevent thoughts of pollution, “There is an opener next to the door.” I brought out one of the sanitized, cellophane-wrapped glasses and gave it to the
haji
, with the opened bottle.

The journalist was fingering two newspaper clippings on the dressing table.

I said, “That’s about the taxi driver and the African.”

They knew the story. It had been played up in the newspapers. A taxi driver had seen a despondent African at the Kuala Lumpur airport. The African said he had lost his ticket and other papers, and his money. The taxi driver took the African home. At his own expense he advertised for the return of the papers, without result; arranged a visa extension; lent money—his own and his aunt’s—for a hotel and then for an air ticket. Now, two months later, the African, a Ghanaian, had returned to Kuala Lumpur. He had given two thousand American dollars to the taxi driver’s aunt; for the taxi driver there was the promise of a new Datsun car.

The
haji
, passing the glass with the Coca-Cola to Khairul, said, “Would that kind of thing happen in your country?”

“No.”

“It happens every day in Islamic countries. It is news for you. It isn’t news for us.”

But the taxi driver was Chinese and, according to one newspaper story, couldn’t get a permit to own a taxi.

The
haji
, cleaning his nostrils with his index finger and then wiping the finger on the velveteen arm of the chair, said, “We must finish the story about the Jews. Before the time of Moses there was a Jewish tribe in Arabian lands. Among this Jewish tribe there is a prophet. The prophet, through revelations from God, ordered the Jews to pray on Saturday. But the Jews ignored the commands of the prophet because
on Saturday there were a lot of fishes in the sea and they preferred to go out fishing rather than make Saturday a religious day.”

I said, “I don’t know this story.”

The
haji
said, “It is in the Koran. As a result the prophet was angry, and the wrath of God—”

Khairul had some trouble with the translation here. He broke off and talked in Malay with the
haji
. Then he carried on. “And the wrath of God was imposed on the Jews, and God swore to convert the whole tribe to monkeys—” He broke off again, to giggle.

“Apes,” the doctor said severely. “They were converted to apes.”

“For seven days,” the
haji
said.

The journalist said, “And then they passed away.”

The
haji
said, “This story is mentioned in the Torah, the Koran, the Testament—”

“The Old Testament,” Khairul said, commenting on his own translation. “We don’t recognize Luke and the others.”

“These are the three books of God,” the
haji
said. “The people of the three books will all know this story. We Muslim people believe in the Old Testament. If you don’t believe in that book you are not a Muslim.”

The doctor said, “Because in the Old Testament there is one part that clearly mentions the coming of Mohammed.”

Khairul said, “There is a book written on this matter by Professor Benjamin. You can get it in the Perkim Bookstore. He is a Catholic priest converted to Islam. His new name is Professor Abu Daud.”

The
haji
, who had been left out of this English byplay, said, “The story of the Jews hasn’t finished yet. As a result of being turned to apes, the moral prestige of the Jews declined. To rectify this situation, because they are already degraded—”

“In the eyes of the world,” the doctor said.

“—the Jews are now pulling down the whole society with them.”

“They have that principle,” the doctor said. “If they are dirty, let others be dirty.”

The
haji
, bright-eyed, plump-lipped, said, “I surprised you when I said that the Jews were the enemies of God. But this is just one of the signs that show the wickedness of the Jews. You have asked me questions. Now let me ask you some. It is the way of Islam. You ask, then
I ask. I tell, then you tell. Do you believe that your great-grandfathers were apes?”

“No.”

The
haji
smiled and said (Khairul, after the Coca-Cola, burping through his translation), “That proves the wickedness of the Jews.”

I said, “But don’t men evolve? I don’t mean this in a personal way”—and I appealed to all of them—“but you told me that your grandfathers in Sumatra were headhunters. Now you are a
haji
and an educated man.”

The
haji
said, “That was a wrong way of life. That is why Islam came into being, to rectify the discrepancies of the way of life. For instance, before Islam, the Caliph Omar would take his daughter and bury her alive. It was a disgrace to have a daughter. It was the practice of the Arabs at that time. The Caliph Omar used to sob and weep thinking of his past, his life before Islam.”

The doctor said, “His friends would see him in the desert crying.”

“And after he came into the fold of Islam he became the best of men.”

Khairul said, “Have you read a book called
The Road to Mecca
? Ah, that’s a book. It’s by Mohammed Asad, an Austrian Jew.”

The journalist, silent for long, said, “What was his name before? Pold something.”

“Leopold,” Khairul said. “You can get that book, too, in the Perkim Bookstore.”

The doctor said, “It’s a biography, no?”

“Yes,” Khairul said, “it’s a biography. It’s a
beautiful
book.”

The
haji
, left out again, re-entered the conversation. “Do you believe in a creator?”

I said, “No.”

“But that is the basis of Islam.”

“It’s too difficult for me,” I said, after we had had some discussion. “I feel lost if I think too much about the universe.”

The
haji
said, “That feeling of loss I would describe as contentment.”

And I didn’t know whether he was being compassionate or critical.

“When you were in Iran, did you talk to the religious teachers there?”

“I saw some ayatollahs. Khalkhalli, Shirazi.”

“Ah, Shirazi,” the
haji
said. “What did you talk about?”

“About religion a little bit. I believe he was worried that I might be a communist.”

They laughed.

“What’s it like in Iran now?” the haji asked.

“A mess. No law. The factories aren’t working. The mullahs don’t know how to run the country. It’s something you may have to face here, too.”

The
haji
said, “If Muslims live in the Islamic way, the true Islamic way—” And again Khairul had some trouble with the translation.

“All will follow,” the doctor said.

I said, “What’s the difference between your life now as true Muslims and your life before?”

They didn’t say.

The
haji
only said, “You can see at a glance when you meet a person whether he is a Hindu or an animist or a Muslim.”

How? Did it show in the face? Was there a kind of grace or contentment in the face of the believer?

No, the
haji
meant something simple. Nonbelievers ate pork and weren’t fussy about food.

I asked about their clothes. Was it necessary for religious people to dress as they did?

Khairul answered. “There are five principles governing clothes. They are commandments of Allah. For men to cover from the navel to the knee. For women to cover everything except the face and the hands.”

I said, “Some women in the university are covering their hands.”