Among the Believers (64 page)

K
arachi, Pakistan, six months later. Many things had happened in those six months; the Muslim world had been on the boil. The American embassy in Tehran had been seized by Iranian students and more than fifty embassy staff held as hostages. There had been a siege and gun battle in the mosque at Mecca, hinting at underground movements in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan.

In Pakistan itself there had been changes. In August and September there had been talk of elections. Those elections had been cancelled; martial law had been tightened; the newspapers were censored; there were public whippings. A well-known journalist had been arrested, had appeared in court in chains, and had been sent to jail for a year. Crowds—seeing an American hand in events in Mecca—had attacked American embassy buildings in the northern cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. A Pakistani scientist based in Europe had won a Nobel prize; but he belonged to the proscribed Ahmadi sect, who venerated their own Promised Messiah; and his visit to Pakistan had led to a student riot.

It looked like terror and despotism. But the state still proclaimed its goal to be the true Islamic way. And that had to be taken seriously. In Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran, Islam served or contained other causes. In Pakistan—though there were politicians and ambitious people among the fundamentalists—the faith served itself.

In the Muslim world Pakistan was special, the creation of the Muslims of India, a minority, who had never ceased to feel themselves under threat. And there were people in Pakistan who had taken the faith to its limit. To them Islam was more than personal salvation, more than a body of belief; it had become country, culture, identity; it had to be
served, at whatever cost to the individual or the state itself. The poet Iqbal, outlining his plan for a separate Indian Muslim state, had said in 1930: “It is no exaggeration to say that India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best.” And, near the end now of my own Islamic journey, I felt that to be so.

Karachi had been green in August, after the monsoon. No rain had fallen since then, and now, in February, the gardens were brown, the trees dusty, some of them leafless; and no rain was going to fall until June.

I thought I would go and see Nusrat. He was the journalist from the
Morning News
who had taken me to the Karachi courts. I remembered his abrupt way of speaking, his round cheeks, his walrus moustache. In the courts he had exclaimed about the shortage of chains for the prisoners, some of whom were being led about by ropes tied to their upper arms. He had said he was going to write about that—the shortage of chains, the slackness of the prison authorities. Nusrat was always on the look-out for newspaper stories. He worked hard; he liked his job; he was driven by some kind of anxiety. He was a man of the faith. Almost his first words to me were that he was a bad Muslim—meaning that he wasn’t good enough: because to him, as he then said, Islam and the afterlife were the most important things in the world.

I had been aggressive with Nusrat. He had said that he wanted to go to the United States to get a degree in mass media or mass communications and then perhaps to get a job with some international body. The assumption that—while Pakistan and the faith remained what they were, special and apart—the outside world was there to be exploited, had irritated me. I had said that he wasn’t qualified to do what he said he wanted to do. And that impulse of aggression towards him—so friendly, open, anxious—had worried me.

I took a taxi to the
Morning News
. A long board on the upper floor spread out the name of the paper; there were a number of small shops at street level. Steep concrete steps led up from the pavement. It wasn’t like the entrance to the office of a daily paper. It was more like the steps to an unimportant government office. And that was how it felt upstairs: an old tiled floor, the colours of the tiles faded, as though ground away by dust; beaten-up office furniture; old distemper on the walls; a few men sitting without urgency at tables.

It wasn’t the building I wanted, as it turned out: it was only the advertising department. The editorial department was in a building at the back. I went down by an iron spiral staircase. The iron of the steps had been worn into holes here and there. A sweeper was sweeping the concrete steps at the side of the editorial building, sloshing down one step with blackened water from a pail, working that into the concrete, sloshing down a slower step: it explained the faded tiles in the advertising department. He paused; I picked my way up.

It was a new building, but the atmosphere in editorial, at this early hour of the morning, was like the atmosphere in advertising. In a room full of files—dusty, as though what had been filed had been put away forever—a girl was sitting at a desk. She worked for the children’s page of the
Morning News
. She was answering children’s letters and—as though fitting tool to the job—she was using a typewriter that was very small. She wasn’t veiled: it seemed strange. On other tables were typewriters in varying stages of decrepitude—like the machines I had seen in the typewriting stalls of the Karachi bazaar (a businessman in one stall one evening, grandly dictating to a male secretary) near the law courts. Karachi, where iron steps wore out and tiles faded, gave its own atmosphere to offices: the editorial room of the
Morning News
had the feel of the court registry I had visited with Nusrat.

The girl telephoned Nusrat’s house for me. Nusrat was not at home. He had already gone out, chasing some story. That was like Nusrat. I left a message for him with the girl from the children’s page. He was keen on his job, always on the go; it was strange to think that this was the room to which he brought back his hot copy.

Later he telephoned.

“I’ve just come in. I didn’t expect you back. I thought we had put you off for good. And now you’ve altered my life.”

I recognized his fruity voice, his brisk delivery. The hyperbole—which was the hyperbole of Urdu poetry—was especially touching. Because I had already had some idea of his misadventure.

T
HE
office looked run-down. But just a few months before, there had been a drama. The
Morning News
had made a slip on the woman’s page. They had reprinted an article from
Arab News
about a great Arab woman. The woman was the great-granddaughter of the Prophet. And
the article, for various reasons, had outraged the Shia community. There had been demonstrations and threats, and the government had had to act. They had closed the paper down for three days; they had ordered an inquiry.

It was a time of danger. If the authorities hadn’t acted as they had done, and if the
Morning News
had had a weaker editor, there might have been a calamity. Ghauri, the editor, had taken full responsibility for what had appeared in his paper; he had acted throughout as a man of courage and honour. He was a very sick man. He was only in his late forties, but he looked much older. He had been in the hands of doctors for months; his illness did not allow him to sleep regularly. When I saw him he seemed to be in some physical pain and was hardly able to sit upright. But he had found the strength to guide his paper through its many bad weeks until the affair had been cleared up by the inquiry.

The matter was now closed. But for Nusrat the matter was not closed. It was Nusrat who looked after the woman’s page. It was he who had made the slip, had passed the article from
Arab News
. For weeks and months Nusrat had lived with danger and guilt; the editor had seen him shrink into himself.

What was the offending matter that the
Morning News
had published? To understand, it was necessary to go over a little of Islamic history. For the Shia Muslims, Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, should have been the first temporal successor (or caliph) to the Prophet. He was passed over three times; he was only the fourth caliph, and then (after a reign of only five years) he was murdered. Ali had two sons. Neither was granted the caliphate. The first was poisoned. The second died in battle when he tried to claim the caliphate. This second son, Husain, had a daughter—Ali’s granddaughter, the Prophet’s great-granddaughter. The offending article was about her.

There is some controversy between the two main Muslim sects about this woman. The Arabians (or orthodox) try to suggest that she was not interested in the cause of her father, Husain, or her grandfather Ali. They say that, after her father’s death, she settled down happily in the Arabian city of Medina; that Medina, bursting with the wealth of the Arab conquests, became in the eighth century a city of luxury and culture: musicians, singers, courtesans, slaves, exquisite brothels; and that Husain’s daughter, many times married, queened over the city.

To the Shias, grieving for Ali and his sons, this story about Ali’s granddaughter adds insult to injury. They reject it. They say that the girl never grew up, died as a child. But the article on the woman’s page of the
Morning News
—reprinted from
Arab News
—gave the Arab or orthodox version of this woman’s history, made her a beguiling, luxury-loving patroness of the arts in eighth-century Arabia.

The article could not have appeared at a worse time. It was the month of Mohurram, when the Shias mourn the deaths of Ali and his sons for ten days. Under the martial-law regulations of Pakistan, crowds were not allowed to assemble; but the Shias were free to meet during this month of mourning in mosques or parks or playgrounds, and there they became worked up against the
Morning News
. Forty or fifty students marched to the paper one day; there were threatening telephone calls; there was talk of leading a procession of forty thousand to the
Morning News
and burning it down. At another level, there began to be talk of an international conspiracy against the Muslim world. The siege of the Mecca mosque had just taken place; the American embassy had been seized in Tehran; a Pakistan plane with pilgrims had crashed after leaving Mecca airport.

It was a bad time for the paper. It might have been closed down for good, and many people would have lost their jobs. And there was the physical danger from the enraged Shias of Karachi. And not only Shias: in the month of Mohurram, feelings about Ali and his sons run high among the orthodox as well. Nusrat must have lived a nightmare. He wished to serve the faith above everything else; and in the land of the faith he must have felt quite alone. The world would have changed for him: the appearance of the streets, the crowds. At any moment he might have been set upon.

Ghauri said—was it with despair or fatigue?—“There are four versions of this lady’s story. One version is as was printed. The second version is that the lady died at nine and a half. The third version is that she died at eleven and a half. The fourth, and most likely, is that she didn’t exist.”

“Y
OU’VE
altered my life,” Nusrat said on the telephone. But he meant something else.

And when we did meet he was immediately recognizable. He was
in a bright plaid tweed jacket, his tribute to the Karachi winter or, as the British called it, “cold weather.” I hadn’t seen the jacket before, but it was in character, bold, like Nusrat’s round tinted glasses and walrus moustache.

He said, “I am dead on time.”

“You are five minutes late.”

“Yes. I’m five minutes late.”

We took the elevator up to the Chandni restaurant, on the roof of the Intercontinental.

“How is the paper?”

“Not so good. I closed it down for three days. But you must have heard.”

He spoke jauntily. He might have been speaking of some trade-union activity, some victory over the management. And I was prepared to leave it at that.

And it was only in the bright rooftop restaurant, when we were going around the Intercontinental buffet, a little more meagre than I had remembered it in August, it was only then—Karachi browning all around us, the cold weather burning away fast, the February sky already very bright, the restaurant door open, the air already warm—that I saw that Nusrat had gone grey. In five months he had changed.

“You’ve gone grey.”

“You’ve noticed? It happened,” he said. “There is no reason. Don’t think there is any special reason. I like grey hair. I like to look grey.”

“It looks nice on you. How old are you?”

“Thirty-three. I was grey before, when you saw me. You mightn’t have noticed, but I was grey then.”

When we were at the table he said, “I didn’t intend to go to the office until four that day. The day I got your message. So it’s a bit of luck that I am here. I could have been out of Karachi. I could have missed you. Doesn’t that make you believe in a chain of events?”

“You are working too hard.”

“I work very hard. There is pressure on me. The other day, on the entertainments page, do you know what I did? I put in a picture of an Indonesian actress in her national dress. It would have gone to the printers if someone hadn’t pointed it out to me. It showed up the outlines of her body. I didn’t see that. I just saw the national dress. What am I to do? I don’t know how far I can go on the entertainments page.
I don’t even know whether an entertainments page is desirable in an Islamic society.”

He broke off, waiting for me to give an opinion. I didn’t say anything.

He said, “This is serious. This is something that has to be discussed in our society. And what about the position of women? Should they do jobs? Or should they stay home? Should men teach women? Should women teach men? These are important questions.”

“Why are they so important?”

“Because we have to create an Islamic society. We cannot develop in the Western way. Development will come to us only with an Islamic society. It is what they tell us.”

We had talked of this in August. He knew where I stood. For a second or two I wondered whether he was speaking ironically. But he was in earnest. The jauntiness suggested by his round cheeks, his moustache, his man-about-town jacket was false. He was grey and tormented. In five months he had changed as much as the Karachi landscape.