Among the Believers (22 page)

The town stood on a creek, but was now some little way from the water. The creek opened out, in the distance, into the sea. In the middle of the creek were salt flats; on a whitish spit of land, which looked intolerably hot, were the contemporary houses of the salt workers; on one flat far away were little white pyramids of salt.

It could never have been a rich town. The museum displayed one gold coin; the other coins were shoddy bronze things, cast in honeycomb moulds of hard-baked ashy clay. But there was the mosque, or the floor plan of the mosque, modelled on the mosque of Kufa in Iraq: that was the treasure of Banbhore.

Kufa was associated with the rightly guided Muslims at the very beginning of Islam; it was one of the earliest military towns the Arabs established among the conquered peoples north of Arabia; it was from Kufa that Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, ruled as the fourth caliph, from 656 to 661
A.D.
Conquest first, Islam later: it was the pattern of Arab expansion. So Banbhore, repeating Kufa, and in the first century of Islam, linked Sind and Pakistan to the great days. The Banbhore mosque, if it was what it was said to be, was fabulous. The remains had been made neat; the floor had been retiled around the few old tiles that had survived.

Fragments of decorated pottery lay all over the excavated town site. And everywhere, too, mixed with the earth, and commoner than pottery, were crushed bones, white and clean and sharp. Ahmed said they were human bones. But such a quantity! The bones weren’t only on the surface; the excavation trenches showed the mixture of bones and earth all the way down, the bones like a kind of building material. Had the town been built on a cemetery? But why were the bones so crushed? If Ahmed was right, and the bones were human bones, Banbhore held another mystery.

I was keeping the Ramadan fast with Ahmed, and that disturbed him. He said again and again that he should have brought something for me to drink. He said that, but when we left Banbhore he seemed in no hurry to get back to Karachi. He, who normally drove fast, now drove slowly. I thought he might himself have been tired out by the long fasting day, and the sun and salt of Banbhore. Abruptly, after we passed the Pakistan Steel area, now called Bin Qasim after the Arab conqueror,
Ahmed drove off the road and stopped the car in low bush. I thought he wished to rest. But no: he had only been looking for a place where he could get off the road and pray. He said, “You can’t stop on the road. Those fellows in the buses and cars take pleasure in bouncing you.”

I passed him his prayer mat. He walked briskly to the edge of the road, erect, military-looking in his grey-blue Pakistani costume, the long shirt and the slack trousers; and, oblivious of the passing traffic, he offered up his prayers for a long time. He said, when he came back, that if he missed a prayer during the day he grew restless in his sleep; his wife would wake him up and he would do the prayer he had missed.

We drove back fast to Karachi after that, not to his house, but to the house of the industrialist for whom he had worked. It was in one of the richer housing “societies.” There was a wide concrete drive at one side of the big plot. Royal palms lined the front of the lawn, which went back to a terrace that ran the width of the house.

On this terrace, on an easy chair, lay an elderly man in brown; he was paralyzed. He was the grandfather, the head of the family, and once the head of the firm. Two young boys, his grandsons, were dressed like little Arabs, with the cream-coloured gown and the headgear with the black bands. They had just been to Mecca with their father, and it was clear they had done the pilgrimage in style. The father was a tall man, dressed in white, the pilgrim’s colour, and with a white skullcap. He was soft-featured, soft-voiced. He was as Ahmed had described him: in his pilgrim clothes he seemed as much a man of religion as of business.

He, Ahmed, and I sat out on the lawn. For my sake Ahmed asked for some drinks to be brought out. The servant brought out three tumblers of a red liquid. I was nervous of the colour, let my tongue touch without tasting, and—not wishing to appear to be spurning their hospitality—I asked whether I could have a Coca-Cola instead.

Ahmed was shocked. He said, with distinct irritation, that the red liquid was a delicacy; it was used to ease people off their fast; it was made from special herbs and was very expensive, twenty-three rupees for a small bottle. I would have liked to try it; but I felt, after Ahmed had mentioned the price, that I would have compounded my vulgarity by going back on my choice. So the astonished servant brought out a Coca-Cola. And through all this pother on the lawn about my drink—which I didn’t really need—the man in the white skullcap smiled sweetly.

I complimented him on his house. He said it looked much better after Mecca, because of the green. I asked about the hotels of Mecca. I was hoping to hear something about the effects of the new Arab and Muslim money; but he said only that the hotels nearer the Great Mosque and the Kaaba were more expensive, the ones farther out less expensive.

The family had migrated from Bombay, and a branch was still in business in that city. But Muslims in India were “not encouraged to come up.” Some had “come up”; but generally there was no “encouragement.” It was easier in Pakistan. Everything was new, just starting; and there were more opportunities; but there was as yet no “infrastructure.”

I asked what difference there was for him between being in Bombay and being in Pakistan. He said that for him, as a businessman, there was no difference; business was business. But when you were in India or some other foreign country you were never sure whether the meat had been slaughtered in the correct way; you had to ask and you couldn’t always get answers; you had sometimes to go without. In Pakistan there was no such problem. Sometimes when you were abroad you felt like going to a mosque. But mosques weren’t always easy to find; you had to ask. Here, at prayer time, he said, gesturing to one end of the lawn and then to the other, here at prayer time a muezzin called from this side and a muezzin called from that side. There was no problem about finding a mosque in Pakistan.

I had expected someone less serene, more complicated. But Ahmed had spoken of the industrialist less as an industrialist than as a pious man, a good Muslim, someone who followed the rules in deed and heart. The rules made a man free: Mr. Salahuddin the newspaper editor had told me that.

And Mr. Salahuddin had also told me that it was possible in Islam for perfection to come to a child: as it seemed to have come to the elder and plumper of the industrialist’s sons. The boy, his father said, had already been twice on the pilgrimage to Mecca; during this month of Ramadan, now about to end, he had kept the rest of them up to the mark by his extraordinary strictness. He, the dimpled boy in Arab clothes, pretended not to know that he was being talked about. Standing on the edge of the terrace, bending a length of black rubber tubing in childish sport, he went grave and withdrawn, frowning slightly, just minding his own business, being a little Arab.

It was nearly seven. Other members of the family, women, began to come out of the house onto the terrace, gathering around the paralyzed grandfather on the easy chair. It was fast-breaking time, and time for us to leave.

A
ND
yet it was strange, the Arab tilt of Pakistan: the little boy in Arab clothes, the Pakistan Steel project given the name of the Arab conqueror. The poet Iqbal, putting forward his plan for an Indian Muslim state in 1930, had said that the Islam of India was special, “a people-building force … at its best.” “I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interests of India and Islam,” Iqbal had said. “For India, it means security and peace …; for Islam, an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian imperialism was forced to give it.”

But the world had changed since 1930; Arabia had some say in the world again. Pakistan had changed since 1947. Seeking more than Iqbal’s Muslim polity now, seeking in failure an impossibly pure faith, it called up its Arabian origins, mystical but at the same time real. At Banbhore, a remote outpost of the earliest Arab empires, you walked on human bones.

  4
Killing History

I
n the imagination, the Arabs of the seventh century, inflamed by the message of the Prophet, pour out of Arabia and spread east and west, overthrowing decayed kingdoms and imposing the new faith. They move fast. In the west, they invade Visigothic Spain in 710; in the east, in the same year, they move beyond Persia to invade the great Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Sind. The symmetry of the expansion
reinforces the idea of elemental energy, a lava flow of the faith. But the Arab account of the conquest of Sind—contained in the book called the
Chachnama
, which I read in Pakistan in a paperback reprint of the English translation first published in 1900 in Karachi—tells a less apocalyptic story.

The Arabs had to fight hard. They turned their attention to Sind at some time between 634 and 644, during the reign of the second caliph or successor to the Prophet, and in the next sixty or seventy years made ten attempts at conquest. The aim of the final invasion, as the
Chachnama
makes clear, was not the propagation of the faith. The invasion was a commercial-imperial enterprise; it had to show a profit. Revenge was a subsidiary motive, but what was required from the conquered people was not conversion to Islam, but tribute and taxes, treasure, slaves, and women.

The invasion was superintended from Kufa by Hajjaj, the governor of Iraq. When, in the middle of the campaign, he received the head of the defeated king of Sind, together with sixty thousand slaves and the royal one-fifth of the loot of Sind, Hajjaj “placed his forehead on the ground and offered prayers of thanksgiving, by two genuflections to God, and praised him, saying: ‘Now have I got all the treasures, whether open or buried, as well as other wealth and the kingdom of the world.’ ” He summoned the people of Kufa to the famous mosque of that town, and from the pulpit told them, “Good news and good luck to the people of Syria and Arabia, whom I congratulate on the conquest of Hind and on the possession of immense wealth … which the great and omnipotent God has kindly bestowed on them.” It was open to the conquered people to accept Islam. But the conquerors were Arabs, and the kingdom of the world was theirs.

There are resemblances to the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru, and they are not accidental. The Arab conquest of Spain, occurring at the same time as the conquest of Sind, marked Spain. Eight hundred years later, in the New World, the Spanish conquistadores were like Arabs in their faith, fanaticism, toughness, poverty, and greed. The
Chachnama
is in many ways like
The Conquest of New Spain
by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the Spanish soldier who in his old age wrote of his campaigns in Mexico with Cortés in 1519 and after. The theme of both works is the same: the destruction, by an imperialist power with a strong sense of mission and a wide knowledge of the world, of a
remote culture that knows only itself and doesn’t begin to understand what it is fighting. The world conquerors, the establishers of long-lived systems, have a wider view; men are bound together by a larger idea. The people to be conquered see less, know less; their stratified or fragmented societies are ready to be taken over. And, interestingly, both in Mexico in 1519 and in Sind in 710 people were weakened by prophecies of conquest.

There is this difference between
The Conquest of New Spain
and the
Chachnama
. Bernal Díaz, the Spaniard, was writing of events he had taken part in. The
Chachnama
is Arab or Muslim genre writing, a “pleasant story of conquest,” and it was written five hundred years after the conquest of Sind. The author was Persian; his source was an Arabic manuscript preserved by the family of the conqueror, Bin Qasim.

The intervening five centuries have added no extra moral or historical sense to the Persian narrative, no new wonder or compassion, no idea of what is cruel and what is not cruel, such as even Bernal Díaz, the Spanish soldier, possesses. To the Persian, writing in 1216, the Arab conquests—“the conquests of Khurasan, Ajam [Persia], Iraq, Sham [Syria], Rum [Byzantium] and Hind”—are glorious; they are the story of the spread of true civilization. Conquest is pleasant to read about because conquest is “based on spiritual rectitude and temporal excellence … of which learned philosophers and generous kings would be proud, because all men attain advancement to perfection by acknowledging as true the belief of the people of Arabia.” There is an irony in this praise of conquest: not many years after those words were written, the invading Mongols were to arrive in Persia and Iraq, and the Arab civilization which the
Chachnama
celebrated was to be shattered, stupefied for centuries.

The
Chachnama
begins with an account of the native dynasty of Sind that is to be overthrown by the Arabs. In this part of the narrative dates are few, and there are elements of the fairy tale. The dynasty was founded by Chach. Chach was a Brahmin ascetic who lived with his brother in a village temple. One day he went to the palace of the king and offered his services as scribe and secretary to the chamberlain. Chach was tall and handsome; he spoke well and wrote a beautiful hand. He became first a correspondence clerk; then chamberlain when the chamberlain died; then prime minister.