Among the Believers (17 page)

“We are Muslims in Pakistan. Muslim people like God. I like God.”

“But you told me you were angry with God.”

“Angry, yes. But God is God. God is not like people. Now I will show you before Pakistan.”

We drove in thick traffic into old, commercial Karachi. Scooters squalled and racketed. The hot air was grey and brown with smoke.

I said, “What did your father do?”

He pretended not to understand.

“Was he a civil servant?”

“I told you, he was with the government.”

He made it sound like a job. But he was unwilling to say more, and I wasn’t sure whether he was telling me that his father was a politician or someone who had somehow prospered under Mr. Bhutto.

He stopped at a perfume shop to buy perfume and henna for his sisters for the festival at the end of Ramadan. Henna to redden the girls’ palms, a gift for the festival—the family side of the elder son, spoilt by sisters and mother. He told me it was the only shop in Karachi where such things could be bought. He was a long time in the shop; he seemed to know the people.

Africans in workaday Sindhi clothes gave a touch of the Arabian Nights to the street, which was architecturally extravagant, Oriental. They were simple concrete structures, the bazaar buildings of Karachi “before Pakistan,” but they were fantastically decorated: iron balconies, Saracenic arches, Corinthian or Doric columns, Gothic or mock-Gothic windows. All the available styles of the late British period were jumbled together in pure delight, as at some once-a-year feast where no delicacy could be left out. The inspiration for the Gothic—at first puzzling—was easy to spot later. It was the British-built Victorian Gothic memorial called the Mereweather Tower, in the middle of commercial Karachi. What was the point of that tower?

The driver said, “It is a
tower
. Like the one in Paris.”

And then he took me to see the Mecca-bound pilgrims, in the reception centre the government ran for them near the docks. It was like an army camp, with the neatness; and walking up and down the well-swept lanes, like well-groomed stage figures in an artificial setting, were elderly men from all the provinces of Pakistan in their provincial dress: Punjabis, Baluchis (with a difference in the turban), Sindhis (with their flat caps), Pathans from the Afghan frontier. The faces were calm, contented. They were men for whom—whatever was happening outside, whoever ruled—heaven was at last within reach.

The driver said, “It’s only because we look like Pakistanis we can come here. If you were an American I wouldn’t bring you here.”

Like the pilgrims, my driver had moved from passion to calm. And his religious emotions had risen on a contrary curve, after the mosques, Mr. Jinnah’s impressive white tomb, and the pilgrim centre. From being angry with God and an indifferent Muslim, he had become at the end as passionate and secure a Muslim as any.

There remained his sad story. I had my doubts about it. But truth can be crude, and later I believed that in its outline the story was true. I believed that his father had risen fast in Mr. Bhutto’s time, had risen to being the near neighbour of an Arabian king, but had lost everything with Mr. Bhutto’s fall and had in some manner been put away: a peasant drama, the small change of Mr. Bhutto’s tragedy, part of the thuggish public life of the Muslim polity, where in practice the only morality (and also the eternal balm) was the possession of the faith.

“N
OW
I will show you before Pakistan”: it was one way of getting around the awkwardness of history. Before 1947 there was no Pakistan here; there was only the Indian province of Sind and the British-built city of Karachi. That past survived in buildings, and in names: Club Road, Bleak House Road, Clifton, McNeil Road, Jutland Lines, Jacob Lines, Abyssinia Lines, Clayton Quarters, Napier Barracks, Soldier Bazaar. There were even purely Indian survivals: Tamil Colony, Ranswamy, Dadabhoy Nouroji Road. There was no longer a Motilal Nehru Road, but there was still a Gandhi Garden.

And one afternoon, walking from the Intercontinental down the two-mile road that led, through land reclaimed from mangrove swamp, to the Chinna Creek and the Napier Mole Bridge, I was surprised, at the edge of the creek, beside the bridge and amid the works for the new dock, to see a memorial plaque with Hindu names on a wall.

The wall was the front of a bathing ghat, bathing steps, built in 1943—four years before Pakistan—by the Hindu Charitable Bathing Ghats Association. There were two carved wooden doors, still with their old signs:
This Entrance Reserved for Hindu Women, This Entrance Reserved for Hindu Men
. One door was carved with elephants rampant, the other with serene swans.

The bathing steps still existed. They could be seen (the women’s
steps walled around with concrete, though) from the Napier Mole Bridge: the lower steps black with the refuse of the oily harbour creek. There were stone seats higher up; the wall on this side, facing the water and the mangrove across the creek, was painted bright green; there were pigeons on the Mogul-style domes. On the Napier Mole Bridge itself was a stone recording the construction of the bridge in 1864, with the names of the British engineers.

A boy of about twelve came to me on the bridge. He had been watching me. He nodded towards the tainted bathing steps and said, “Muslims can’t go there. Hindus can go there, Parsis, English people. But not Muslims.” To him the prohibition was what was important about the ghat. He was a Hindu, a remnant of the Sindhi Hindu population, but he was innocent of history (and I was to see him a week or so afterwards at a Muslim wedding reception in a hotel).

The ghat clearly stood in the way of the new dock works. Later I was to meet the man who had intervened to prevent the ghat’s being pulled down. He said that the ghat had long ceased to be a ghat. There were two caretakers, and they used the place as their home. Someone had offered to put up a neon sign on the domed roof, to give the ghat some income for its maintenance; but the man who had saved the ghat thought it better for the place to stay as it was, washed by the polluted tides of the harbour, decaying at its own pace.

The Hindus had all but disappeared. But that was old history. And there had been a greater dispossession since. Karachi, with its immigrant millions, was a city of Pakistan; it had ceased to be of Sind alone. Sind had received the bulk of the Muslims from India; and the Muslim polity as it had developed in Pakistan could not outbalance Sindhi feelings that they were being besieged and colonized, with their language and land under threat. Now, as against Sindhi talk of separatism, there was talk of detaching Karachi as a federal district from the province of Sind.

The dream of the Muslim homeland had had strange consequences. And strangest of all was this: the state that had appeared to some as God itself, a complete earthly reward for the faithful, lived not so much by its agricultural exports or by the proceeds of its minor, secondary industries, as by the export of its people. The newspaper advertisements called it “manpower-export.”

The idea of the Muslim state as God had never converted into anything less exalted, had never converted into political or economic organization. Pakistan—a thousand miles long from the sea to the Himalayas, and with a population of more than seventy million—was a remittance economy. The property boom in Karachi was sustained in part by the remittances of overseas workers, and they were everywhere, legally and illegally. They were not only in Muslim countries, Arabia, the Gulf states, Libya; they were also in Canada and the United States and in many of the countries of Europe.

The business was organized. Like accountants studying tax laws, the manpower-export experts of Pakistan studied the world’s immigration laws and competitively gambled with their emigrant battalions: visitor’s visas overstayable here (most European countries), dependents shippable there (England), student’s visas convertible there (Canada and the United States), political asylum to be asked for there (Austria and West Berlin), still no visas needed here, just below the Arctic Circle (Finland). They went by the planeload. Karachi airport was equipped for this emigrant traffic. Some got through; some were turned back.
Germans shoot 4 Pakistanis: Illegal entry
. This was an item in
Dawn
, sent from Turkey, on the emigrant route, and it was the delayed story of the humane disabling (men shot in the leg) and capture of one batch.

Abroad, the emigrants threw themselves on the mercies of civil-liberties organizations. They sought the protection of the laws of the countries where the planes had brought them. They or their representatives spoke correct words about the difference between poor countries and rich, South and North. They spoke of the crime of racial discrimination and the brotherhood of man. They appealed to the ideals of the alien civilizations whose virtue they denied at home.

And in the eyes of the faithful there was no contradiction. Home was home; home wasn’t like outside; ecumenical words spoken outside didn’t alter that. The Muslim polity was like God itself, a thing apart, and had ceaselessly to be purified and defended. As the
Tehran Times
article said, speaking of the Islamic wave, “With reformation and adaptation to present needs in full conformity with the holy Koran and Sunnah [the old, right way], Iran and Pakistan with a clarity of purpose and sincere cooperation can establish the truth that Islam is a complete way of life.”

  2
Karachi Phantasmagoria

P
akistan had a high reputation in the Muslim world. It was the twentieth-century Islamic pioneer, and for some time there had been reports of its “experiments” with Islam. Pakistan, it was said, was experimenting with Islamic law, with a Koranic alms-levy that would eventually sustain an Islamic welfare state, and with a banking system that would do away with interest.

I wanted to have a look at these experiments. But after a few days in Karachi it became clear that I needed help, that by myself I would see nothing. The
Tehran Times
had said that an Islamic bank existed in Pakistan, “established under the patronage of the great Pakistani Moslem scholar Maulana Maudoodi.” But in Karachi what I saw everywhere were the green signs of the Habib Bank. The main Habib building in central Karachi was a concrete tower of New York magnificence; and Habib had just opened a branch in Europe. The newspaper advertisements announcing this opening said it had come about “by the grace of Allah.” But Habib was not an “experimental” bank.

I needed help, and I went to see Mr. Deen, the government information officer. His office was in a concrete shed in what looked like old British military barracks.

Off a wide central corridor, a barroom-style swing door led to Mr. Deen’s room. The cotton carpet was worn, its red-and-white pattern faded with dust and sun. The distempered walls were ochre-coloured, flaking, erupting with lime; the windows, of the roughest carpentry, were protected by a diamond-patterned metal grille; and someone was running a scooter just outside, creating a tearing noise in a cloud of blue smoke. Two small windows cut into the top of the wall were meant to let out hot air; and a ceiling fan spun over the old, government-issue sofa set, which, as I found when I sat down, was a little rickety: government on a shoestring.

And Mr. Deen was bemused by my request. He had been courteous to me; he had sent the office van—he called it “a thing on four wheels”—to fetch me from the hotel. But he was a busy man. He was concerned that morning with the pilgrims going to Mecca—the government had decreed that to be a matter of importance—and he was going through the official photographs of the scene at the docks the previous day. It was clear that Mr. Deen was finding some of the photographs unsatisfactory. And now: Islamic courts, Islamic banks, Islamic experiments? He seemed mentally to grope.

So I had read the wrong papers?

“People talk about these things,” Mr. Deen said, with the weariness of a harassed official. “But the people who talk expect other people to do the work.”

There was an Islamic Ideology Council that met ten days a month; but that was in Islamabad, the capital, far to the north. Mr. Deen didn’t know what he could do for me in Karachi. He was in his mid-fifties; he wore grey trousers and a white shirt, and the striped tie hanging on the wall behind him might, in another country, have been a club tie of some sort.

Mr. Sherwani, a colleague, came in. He was heavy, looser in flesh than Mr. Deen; his skin was smooth, and he was wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt. Mr. Deen explained what I was after, and Mr. Sherwani looked hard at me. He said to Mr. Deen in Urdu, “But he looks just like Qutub. When I came in the room I thought, ‘But it is Qutub.’ ” Mr. Deen looked at me with a new interest and said with sad affection that yes, I looked like Qutub. Qutub, they told me, was a Pakistani painter.

Mr. Sherwani said, “How old are you?”

I said, “Forty-seven.”

“I am forty-eight. And I am healthier than you. No, you can’t deny it. Your eyes are tired. They are the eyes of an old man. That indicates a vitamin deficiency.”