Among the Believers (37 page)

The community had planned a housing development on the bank of this precious river. Many devotees had bought little plots. But then the Pakistan government—pursuing the community even here—had claimed the land for Bihari refugees from Bangladesh. Refugees against outcasts, the unwanted dispossessing the unwanted: the Biharis had actually built a mosque, symbol of their take-over, before the Ahmadis obtained a stay order from the courts against the appropriation of their land. In Rabwah itself the government had claimed nearly four acres of developed community land for a police station; a stay had been obtained against that as well.

Beyond the river, at the foot of one of the red hills, the light vaporous with heat, was the Ahmadi cemetery. The people buried there were people who had willed money to the community and the movement. The graves were low; the wall was low. The cemetery was like part of the strange landscape, and if Idrees hadn’t pointed it out to me I wouldn’t have noticed it.

Saltpetre was six inches to a foot deep on the land when the Ahmadis bought it. The land—they had bought a thousand acres—had been abandoned for centuries. Now on this land, as in places on the red salt rock, there was a lime-green growth, an extra tinge of colour. And there was a little township, with trees, though the tube-well water—which was the only water available here—was a little salt. The Ahmadi settlement and headquarters had the air of a government township: low, dusty, red brick buildings with reed curtains over the doorways; and verandahs around courtyards where, carefully watered, grew oleander, hibiscus, and a kind of small palm.

Idrees settled me in the guest house—“for dignitaries”—and went to leave his name at the office of the Imam, the current head of the sect. The Imam, the Promised Messiah’s grandson, was seventy and an M.A. from Oxford, Idrees said. Pepsi-Cola was brought in for me, then tea. Soon Idrees came in to say, with some awe, that he had been “called.” He thought that I, too, would soon be called.

But I wasn’t. Idrees, explaining later, said the Imam was busy. He
had thousands of letters and many administrative matters to deal with; and he was going to Rawalpindi the next day. Instead, I was shown a photograph—a turbanned, full-faced man—and allowed to go up to the darkened waiting-room, where, waiting as in a doctor’s surgery, was a sombre family group with a bowed, black-veiled woman.

In the publications section—in spite of trouble with the government about a new printing press—there were booklets in stacks, and translations of the Koran. Idrees, beating away desert dust from each bulky volume, showed the Korans language by language, title page by title page. The Ahmadis were active in Africa: they had Korans in Luganda, Swahili, Yoruba. The energy, the organization in this corner of the Punjab! But the Ahmadis aimed at nothing less than the conversion of the world.

They were banned in many Muslim countries; but the work went on elsewhere. The tall man in white had come back from a missionary posting in Denmark. He made me think of a diplomat recalled home and living in reduced circumstances. He said, before getting on his old bicycle to pedal away into the glare, that the Scandinavians were looking for new beliefs and he had built up a good little congregation for the Promised Messiah in Denmark.

Fatter, happier, and with a bigger story to tell, was the man who had served on and off for twenty years in London. He had a congregation of ten thousand (mostly Pakistani migrants, I would have thought); and he had not hesitated—in London—to fight for the Muslim cause. The headmistress of his daughter’s school wanted his daughter to wear the skirt of the school uniform rather than the slack trousers of Islamic modesty. He had taken the matter to higher authority and won his case. His daughter wore trousers, and when word got around, many Muslims sent their daughters to that school; the headmistress later thanked him. The law provided for freedom of religion, he said. He meant the law of England, the other man’s law.

His big problem had been to keep his daughter from having “a divided mind.” But she had been made restless by “this women’s lib” and she wasn’t adjusting easily to Pakistan and Rabwah. He was talking her round, showing her how much better for women the Islamic way was. He had seen the position of women go down in England during his time there; men no longer got up for them in buses, and he had read in
The Observer
that VD was now like an “epidemic.”

But what was it about women’s lib that attracted his daughter? He didn’t answer. The amplified call to the 1:00 prayer came: “There is no God but God,” melodiously and variously chanted. And the former London missionary got up. He put on his black fur cap and said—with a London-made jokeyness: he still had his London manner, his London security—that he didn’t want to be late for lunch: his wife, contrary to what was said about Muslim women, was a tyrant. People in London, he said, used to ask him why he didn’t take four wives; he used to tell them he couldn’t cope with one.

Idrees himself believed in the strict seclusion of women; his own wife kept
purdah
. Idrees thought that my unhappiness with the London man was only an unhappiness about Pakistani migration. And as we walked in the white light back to the guest house, he said, “There is a tide in the affairs of men …”

The image of the flood, the caliph’s dream, the migration!

We had lunch. Idrees went off to say his prayers, adding to the 3:00 prayer the 1:00 prayer he had missed. Afterwards I went to his room in the guest house and we talked. He lay on one of the beds, now on his back, now on his side. I sat on the dressing-table stool. It was hot. The salt rock of the Rabwah hills stored and radiated heat. In summer the rocks never cooled down. But Idrees was at peace. This land of salt and rock and river was his sanctuary. He said that peace always came to him at Rabwah.

There were pinpricks; there was always persecution. He had received a little shock even that morning: a man of the town had complained to the police that he had been thrown out of a house on the orders of the head of the sect. It wasn’t so; it was only a dispute between a tenant and a landlord; but people knew they could go to the police with stories about the sect. It was like the recent case he had had to deal with, of a dismissed workman who had inflicted some injuries on himself and then complained to the labour court that he had been beaten up by the sect.

He invariably came to some little piece of bad news like this. But he liked to come to Rabwah, and it was his good fortune to come about twice a month. I couldn’t enter his faith. But in that room, as he lost his anxieties, I felt tenderer towards him. I liked seeing him relaxed on the bed, snatching at peace, carrying the stupendousness of his faith, his
belief in the Promised Messiah who had come to cleanse and reveal anew the true religion. He became calmer; his face freshened. And I saw how I had been misled by his grey hair: he was some years younger than me. The great dry heat, the dream landscape to which men had only recently given significance, the site of deliverance and possible martyrdom: it was like being taken far back.

We talked about dreams. The second caliph’s dreams had been famous even in the British time. Sir Mohammed Zafrullah Khan, one of the most distinguished Ahmadis, used to pass them on to the British viceroy, who was sceptical until he received in this way some precise information about Allied warplanes. But dreams and prophecies had to be handled with care; they couldn’t be broadcast; they could be provocative. It was better for prophecies to be made public after they had come to pass—like the prophecy about Mr. Bhutto and the breaking of both his hands.

But how long would the peace hold at Rabwah? Had there been any hint, any dream about a new migration?

It was like touching a nerve. That was something Idrees didn’t want to think about. He said, formally, “At the present moment this is the place which is fulfilling the purpose of God, providing guidance for the whole world and the whole human race.”

We went out into the heat. We looked at the mosque, and the big courtyard where every year there was an assembly of the faithful. We saw the school where students from different countries were being trained—training taking from six to seven years—to go back and spread the word about the Promised Messiah. We met a twenty-two-year-old Indian Muslim boy from Trinidad, an Indonesian of twenty-six. There were two Nigerians, twelve and fourteen, at the edge of the brown playing field. “Here, here!” Idrees said to me. “I don’t want them to feel left out.” And the boys, looking orphaned, came up: nothing to say: bright eyes in sad faces, pining below the salt hills of the Punjab, in the artificial township, for the wet forests of Africa.

The sun began to go down. We left. Abruptly, as we were talking, Idrees held his open palms together in the Muslim gesture of prayer. We were passing the cemetery. It was his custom, he said afterwards, to say a prayer for them, “that they might be elevated even higher in heaven.”

Sunset flared in the Chenab, the Moon River. And when we were
past the river, sunset flared in the still pools of waterlogged fields, irrigated land dying, turning to salt and marsh, marsh clearer at dusk (water catching the last of the light) than in the even glare of day.

Idrees had talked all the way out. Now he was silent. It was as though the land called up and gave an anxious edge again to his own melancholy.

Smoke rose from cooking fires. On the road smoke was black from the exhausts of unregulated vehicles. The horse carriages had no lights; and the trucks often had no lights at the back. They all had lights once, Idrees said. Now there was no law. “When the law is dishonoured by the lawmakers, how can the common man obey?”

His high-court practice hadn’t been growing. But his wife had some property and income. He wanted to travel; he liked travelling; he was only forty-two. He never said it; but I felt that for him, as for the Ahmadi girl in the green sari I had met in Karachi, there was now some idea of migration, of getting away from some harder persecution to come.

The lights of Lahore began to show.

He said, “Did you make a note of that prophecy? By 1989 the world will be tired of waiting for the coming of Christ. The Iranians will get tired of waiting for the Twelfth Imam. They will then turn to us.”

THE PRIMITIVE
FAITH

 … A half-naked, betel-chewing pessimist stood upon the bank of the tropical river, on the edge of the still and immense forests; a man angry, powerless, empty-handed, with a cry of bitter discontent ready on his lips; a cry that, had it come out, would have rung through the virgin solitudes of the woods, as true, as great, as profound, as any philosophical shriek that ever came from the depths of an easy-chair to disturb the impure wilderness of chimneys and roofs
.

JOSEPH CONRAD:
An Outcast of the
Islands
(1896)

Those communities that have as yet little history make upon a European a curious impression of thinness and isolation. They do not feel themselves the inheritors of the ages, and for that reason what they aim at transmitting to their successors seems jejune and emotionally poor to one in whom the past is vivid and the future is illuminated by knowledge of the slow and painful achievements of former times. History makes one aware that there is no finality in human affairs; there is not a static perfection and an unimprovable wisdom to be achieved
.

BERTRAND RUSSELL:
Portraits from Memory

  1
First Conversations with Shafi: The Journey Out of Paradise

I
t was from India or the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent that religion went to Southeast Asia. Hinduism and Buddhism went first. They quickened the great civilizations of Cambodia and Java, whose monuments—Angkor, Borobudur—are among the wonders of the world. These Indian religions, we are told, were spread not by armies or colonists, but by merchants and priests. And that was the kind of Indian traveller who, after Islam had come to the subcontinent, began in the fourteenth or fifteenth century to take Islam to Indonesia and Malaysia.