Among the Believers (46 page)

“It is better,” Khairul said.

“Why do you wear green cloaks?”

“To wear white and green is encourageable under Islam.”

“Why?”

“Because this is the way the prophets lived. Wearing a batik like yours is not encourageable under Islam.”

“Batik?” I plucked at my Marks and Spencer winceyette pyjama jacket.

Khairul said, “A batik like that is only for ladies.”

The journalist said, “For men it has to be plain.”

“But pyjamas are Islamic. The styles and colours are Islamic. The Europeans took the idea from places like Turkey and India.”

“They are from Islamic countries,” the haji said. “But they are not from Allah’s commandments.”

“You don’t understand the beauty of Islam,” Khairul said. “Once you understand the five principles, you will see the beauty of it. They apply to everything. In Islam certain things are mandatory. Certain things are encourageable. That’s a technical word, a translation from the Arabic.”

“Permitted?”

“Permitted? No, encourageable is better. Then certain things are not encourageable, like your batik. Then certain things are
haram
, forbidden. Like a man exposing his knees. The fifth category is
harus
, discretionary.”

“Discretionary, discrepancy—you have quite a vocabulary, Khairul.”

He said, “I am a lawyer.” And, boasting a little, “I was educated in a Malay-language school. Let me give you an idea of a discretionary principle. A businessman who only really needs five shirts, but buys forty because he can afford forty. In the hereafter the extravagance will be accountable. These five principles cover all aspects of life. Everything—politics, economics, family life, even coughing. There is so
much
to learn about Islam. You can spend
years
and never come to an end.”

“Tell me about the coughing and the five principles.”

“I will give you an example. If you are in a gathering and you are ashamed to cough and three days later you wake up with a pain in your side because you didn’t cough, that is wrong. It is mandatory to cough, if not coughing is going to damage your health. Coughing is encourageable if you cover your mouth and say, ‘Grace be upon Allah.’ It is not encourageable to cough without covering your mouth. But to cough in somebody’s face”—he turned towards the doctor and made as if to spit in the doctor’s face—“to do that is horrible. It is
haram
. It is forbidden. It is un-Islamic and sinful.”

“What about the discretionary cough?”

“
Harus
. When you are by yourself and it doesn’t offend anybody. Then you can stand up and cough or sit down and cough. It becomes entirely discretionary. All these things are regulated.”

Then it was time for them to go. The
haji
had a meeting; they said he was a great traveller and preacher. The doctor had his clinic.

“You must see his clinic,” Khairul said. “It is so Islamic and beautiful. You are not well; I can see you are not well. He would have treated you
beautifully
. He would treat you now.”

I said, “I am in the hands of another doctor. I can’t change.”

The doctor, oddly professional now, said, “That is so.”

T
HE
commune was on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, in a hilly wooded area. There was a signboard on the roadside some distance before. I wasn’t expecting a signboard. But—though the commune had the reputation of being secretive—there was no point in dressing up like an Arab and hiding.

The land was perfect for a Malay settlement, for wooden houses on stilts or pillars, for green gardens and tall shade trees. But the forest had been cut down for a wide street; and the street was lined with modern Malay houses—modern because they had glass louvres instead of windows and because the downstairs, pillared part of the houses had been walled around to provide more space.

Rain had turned the dirt street to mud. Many young people were about, with green cloaks or gowns and white turbans. At the far end of the street a stalled car was being pushed in the mud. Among the pushers I thought I recognized the
haji;
anything seemed possible here. I was wrong; it was only that the white turban gave a mulatto cast to some Malay faces. Other costumed figures (waiting for prayer time, like actors waiting for a stage call) were lounging about the verandah or porch of the shop at the corner, where—as part of its independent Islamic way—the commune sold little things to passing motorists.

I bought a few ounces of fried shredded sweet potato. It came in a stapled plastic packet. It tasted less of sweet potato than of the frying oil.

The taxi driver said, “You see the kind of bullshit we are getting these days?” He pronounced the word “bu’shi’.” I heard it as “bushy,” and thought at first it was his word for a village Malay: “You see the kind of bushy we are getting these days?”

I offered him some sweet potato.

He said, angrily, “No.”

  5
The Spoilt Playground

S
hafi came from the undeveloped northeast, from Kota Bharu. I wanted to see the village for which he grieved—unpolluted once, the people pious, dignified, and not materialist. And Kota Bharu was the first stop in a trip to the interior that he arranged for me.

It began badly. The gap-toothed Tamil driver, the man of misfortune, was to drive me to the airport. He ran up happily to me in the Holiday Inn lobby the evening before and told me that my airport job had fallen to him; having involved me over many drives in all his anguishes, he now regarded himself as my friend. And, as I half expected, something went wrong. His car was smashed during the night (but he said he was going to get the insurance), and in the morning I had to hunt around for another driver.

An hour’s flight took us to Kota Bharu, and the monsoon. (For Shafi, seventeen years before, it had been a journey of a day and a night from Kota Bharu, through rubber estates and then jungle, to all the shocks of Kuala Lumpur.) The plane made two tries at the Kota Bharu runway. We landed in a downpour and the passengers went out to the little airport shed in small groups, under gaudy umbrellas. And Rahman wasn’t there to meet me, as Shafi had arranged.

I got the name of a hotel and took a taxi there. Kota Bharu was flooded: a rickety colonial town of the 1920s and 1930s—little low shops, little low houses, tiled roofs, corrugated iron—out of which new money was causing a new town of concrete and glass to grow. The hotel was new, small, with modern pretensions. And I found—it was like a little miracle, but there was only one hotel in Kota Bharu—that Rahman had booked me in for the night.

He telephoned later. He said it was strange no one had met me. He hadn’t sent just one man to meet me; he had sent three men, three head
teachers. He had even told them that after my years in England I would probably have a white skin. His storytelling—the opposite of the directness of people like Shafi—was meant to be read by me as storytelling: it was Rahman’s way of letting me know that he didn’t want to have too much to do with me. Rahman worked for the government. He didn’t want to have too much to do with Shafi and ABIM and a visitor sent out by ABIM.

The rain never stopped. Rahman came to the hotel late in the afternoon. He was a small, plump, smiling fellow in a short-sleeved blue safari suit. I was expecting to be taken to Shafi’s village or a village like it. But Rahman didn’t intend to do that; he didn’t intend to appear in public as my guide to anything. Instead, we drove through the rain in the fast-darkening afternoon—flooded fields, scattered sodden little Malay houses below dripping fruit trees—to a Muslim college where Rahman could share responsibility for me, his dangerous visitor, with two or three other people who were as nervous as he.

They had laid out tea. The tea was sweet, milky, and cold. And they, my hosts, seemed determined to say nothing. Were these Shafi’s fellows, the fisher-boys and bird-stoners of his childhood? They were. Not Shafi’s actual friends, perhaps; but people like them. It wasn’t Shafi alone who had evolved.

There was a man who was a lecturer in philosophy. A lecturer? A man from Shafi’s pastoral past? Yes; he lectured at the college about the attempts by Arab and Persian philosophers to synthesize Islamic thought with Greek thought. That seemed a difficult course, and the lecturer said that it was difficult, adding with some sadness that he still had to read a lot, especially in Greek philosophy. He had studied at the Islamic Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He hadn’t liked it (but few village Malays seemed to have liked their travels). He had found the Arabs undisciplined and unreliable.

I wanted to hear more about his time at Al-Azhar. But he said—storytelling again—that he was busy. He had to have dinner with his wife. After dinner? After dinner he had to drive around with a message about a family death; it was a Malay custom (and that was the first reminder of the village ways Shafi had spoken about).

Prayer time came. They left me with the tea and went to say their prayers in the next room. They took their time.

When they came out again, the registrar, who wore a buttoned-up
tunic and had a buttoned-up look, opened out a little. He said he had spent three days in England, in “Queensway, WC
₂
.” From those three days he remembered three things: people travelling underground; a speaker in Hyde Park saying that 60 percent of the men in England were homosexual; and the (somewhat contradictory) sight of men and women embracing in public.

“This absence of manners,” the registrar said. “Here when we catch a fish we clean it, we fry it, and then we eat it. There they catch a fish and eat it straight away. We are still washing the fish, while they are wiping their mouths after eating.”

Rahman, leaving out the village imagery, said, “Here we have a room and a time for the sex act.”

“It’s a private thing with us,” the philosophy lecturer said. “Secret and sacred. We don’t even tell our friends.”

“Those people are lost,” the registrar said.

We were joined by the Arabic teacher. He was taller than the others, and wore a sarong and a white skullcap. His face was blank. He began to eat. He said that people were tired of novels and for that reason were turning to the Koran.

“It’s more
natural
,” Rahman said.

But weren’t there Arabic novels?

Yes, the Arabic teacher said, eating. There was an Egyptian novelist. But one book went that way and another book went another way, showing that the man himself was lost.

What were those novels?

He couldn’t say. He said he was saying only what his pupils said. And he ate some more of the Malay cake, drank quantities of the cold tea, stood up, straightened his sarong, and clomped away.

They were content: the word was used again and again. They wanted me to know that they were content. Rahman worked for the government and got a thousand dollars a month and had a car. He said, “I like it here.” He didn’t want to go to any other part of Malaysia. Here they didn’t live competitively; here they didn’t worry about the Chinese; they didn’t have the problems of Malays in other areas.

It rained and rained. We went to have dinner at a Malay restaurant, run by a Malay organization. The restaurant was grander than anything Shafi would have known as a child. Its decorations were a bit neglected, but Rahman was pleased to show it off as an example of Malay
enterprise. He said, “You see, we aren’t all going back to Islam.”

The philosophy teacher was still with us. He had apparently forgotten about dinner with his wife and his death duties. But that piece of storytelling had been no more than a signal to me not to press him about Al-Azhar or philosophy or any other contentious matter.

And—it was part of their contentment—they all had large families. Rahman had five children; the buttoned-up registrar, who was very young, had three; the philosophy lecturer four.

“We are optimists,” the philosophy lecturer said. “My father was a poor man. Yet I’m all right. It will be all right for our children.”

The registrar said, “Allah has said that no living creature will be unprovided for.”

I said, “But what about a place like Cambodia?”

“They have brought that punishment on themselves,” the registrar said. “Allah has said that about unbelievers.”

Rahman said, “One ant bites you on the leg. But you don’t kill that particular ant. You get rid of the lot.”

I asked about an item in the morning’s paper. A story had gone around that forty heads were needed for the completion of the port, and village people were keeping their children away from school.

They said it was an old story. Rahman said that when he was a child there was a similar story about forty heads being needed before the railway could be completed. Stories like that had a simple explanation. Parents wanted their children to stay at home and not wander too far, because it was dark in the village, with only a light here and there. It was also said when he was a child that if you climbed a banana tree your private parts rotted away: that was just to keep children from climbing the tree. If you sat on a pillow you got boils on your bottom: that was to keep the pillows clean.