Among the Believers (48 page)

He said, “We’ve been talking for an hour and a half. And we haven’t talked about the things you said you wanted me to talk about. The restructuring of the society.”

That was true. But I had preferred to stay away from that. I knew, from our short conversation earlier in the evening, that the dismantling of the society excited him more than the restructuring; that the restructuring he was interested in meant only Islam, and the abstractions of Islam. And so it turned out now. Malaysia—with its painful problems: the casualness of the Malays, the energy of the Chinese, the racial politics, the corruptions of the new money, the technological dependence of the small, uneducated country—vanished, became an abstraction itself, a land of pure belief, of total submission to Allah. In that submission everything was solved.

At midnight they had to leave. They were nervous about driving back later than that. Mohammed left two documents for me to look at. One was an essay he had written, “Modernism Defects: The Trend of
Nahdah
(Renaissance) in the Muslim World.” It was in the style of Islamic missionary writing. One section was headed “The Bankruptcy of the West” (“vice and lust, alcohol and women, wild parties and tempting surroundings”); another was headed “The Perfectness of Islam.” There was a logic in this. The West, which had provided Mohammed with academic learning, was open to the criticism it had trained him in. Islam, which had not provided this learning, which provided only the restoring faith, was exempt from criticism.

The second document Mohammed left with me was a pencilled paper he had prepared for our meeting. It was an outline of what he had said about the restructuring of Malaysia; and it was just as abstract. His “belief system” called for the worship of Allah; for the “social system” he wanted freedom, “no corruption or malpractices in departments,” the protection of women and family life, “no prostitution and gay quarters”; the “economic system” insisted on “moral earnings, no corruption, no gambling, exploitation of the poor and the low.” But there was a sting at the end of the paper. Mohammed’s last paragraph, on the
“political system” of his ideal state, called for “Imam-like leadership: Khalifah is God’s representative on earth.” It called, in fact, for someone like Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini ruled in Iran as God’s representative. It was Mohammed’s wish that someone like that should rule in Malaysia. It was his only concrete proposal.

That was where his Malay and Muslim passion, his knowledge of history, the beginning of self-awareness and intellectual life, had led him. He had no idea of reform or any ameliorative process. He didn’t deal in the concrete. It was hard for him—dependent on other people’s words and thoughts, fitting those thoughts to his own wordless emotions—it was hard for him to be concrete. He wished only for the world to be remade and repossessed as suddenly as (in his memory, the village boy going to the mission school beside the cemetery) it had been taken away from him. This was the promise of his Islam.

T
HE
news from the Muslim world was not encouraging. The new century of the Islamic era—from which so much was expected by the faithful—had begun with a series of calamities. A Pakistan plane carrying pilgrims who had completed the pilgrimage had crashed after leaving Mecca airport. In Mecca itself there had been a gun battle over many days in the Great Mosque, and many people had been killed. In Pakistan, martial law had been strengthened. The elections had been called off; public whippings had been instituted; a well-known Pakistani journalist had been arrested and photographs had shown him in chains. In Iran the American embassy had been seized by students and more than fifty Americans taken hostage, for no reason except that of drama: the Islamic revolution had turned sour, wandering, pointless.

But Mohammed and Abdullah didn’t believe in bad news from the lands of the faith. Mohammed thought that the news from Pakistan meant only that the country was at last being restructured. Abdullah didn’t think that the news from Iran was being correctly reported by Reuter’s or Associated Press. We had talked about it earlier in the evening, and Abdullah had said, “We need our own news services.”

I
went back to Kuala Lumpur, to the Holiday Inn.

The woman telephone operator said on the telephone, “How are
you? How’s your chest? You know, you shouldn’t take ice if you have asthma. And you should use bats.”

“Bats?”

“Bats. B-a-t-s. It’s what the kampong folk do. You get the bats. You take out the hearts, you roast it until it is crisp, really crisp, then you pound it and mix it with your coffee and drink it twice a day. It is what the kampong folk do. And it really works.”

“But a bat’s heart would be very small.”

“Perhaps they use two or three, I don’t know. But it really works.”

I
said to Shafi, when he came to see me to find out how the trip had gone, “But you didn’t tell me about the rain at Kota Bharu. It’s like telling me about Greenland without mentioning the ice.”

He laughed. “It slipped my mind. When there were floods, people would go to have the feel of water in the road. It’s a great thing for them. Then we go boating. There’s a story—but I never experienced it—that young girls would come out of their house in festive dress, in best dress, and the boys will take the opportunity to see them. They wouldn’t go any deeper than the knee. And the boating. Each house will have a boat kept under the house, will take it out and prepare for boating session. Row the boat around the village and see what it’s like when there is water where water isn’t normally. When the flood starts we cut banana trunks, poke a bamboo right through them, and on this raft we go paddling about.”

“That sounds like paradise to me. Your eyes light up even as you’re talking about it.”

It was how he sometimes talked of his village, not like a villager, but like a romantic traveller, like a man who now looked from a distance.

“Rain was something we longed for. I always like water.”

Some days later—Anwar Ibrahim had gone to an Islamic conference in Bangladesh, and there was less to do in the ABIM office—Shafi came again. We took a taxi and made a tour. We drove about the new residential developments in the beautiful hilly land to the west of the city. I saw a well-kept city where the money seemed to be spreading down fast, but that wasn’t what Shafi wanted me to see. The difference between the old and the new was the difference between Malay and
Chinese. And even when the houses were new, Shafi could spot the Malay house and the Chinese house.

I began to play the game with him. I was a novice; I chose easy examples. We passed a house stacked around with lumber. I said, “Chinese house?” Shafi said, “Chinese house.” We passed a house with rows of orchids in the front garden. I said, “Malay house?” Shafi said, “No. Chinese.” I gave up.

Farther out, suburbs turning to country, we passed some girls, one quite pretty, sitting in a bus-stop shelter. They were Malay girls.

Shafi said, “Timeless people.”

“How can you say a thing like that?”

But he was using the word in his own way. And he wasn’t speaking as a romantic, but as a reformer. “Timeless people. People who have no limits about time, and they are careless about time. They can afford to wait for a bus. There is no hurry for them to get things done, and in some villages you see people play dumb. Playing cards, chatting. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’m going to market.’ If you ask, ‘For what?’ they wouldn’t give you specific reasons other than that of aimlessness, to see people as they go and to meet friends and say hello and after—nearing lunchtime—return home. And when they meet the friends they would say, ‘How are your children? How about the catch? Is there a lot of fish in the market? What is going to happen to that family? How is the flood? Fifteen feet? Nineteen feet?’ Timeless people.”

We reached palm plantations. The rough-trunked trees with the dark-green fronds grew in rows. Heavy grappes of the oil-producing nuts, yellow and red, were stacked at the edge of the field, wet after rain. The sky was grey; more rain was coming. We turned back towards the city.

The driver said, “Mushrooms!” and Shafi asked him to stop at the Malay roadside stall where the mushrooms were. They were big white mushrooms on long stalks and they were tied up in bunches.

“They are not cultivated,” Shafi said. “They are gathered in the forest.”

I said, “They look like flowers.”

He said, with a curious tenderness, looking at the bunches he had bought, “They are a kind of flower.” And when we drove on again he said, “In the village they always said, ‘Never use a spade to dig up a mushroom. If you do that, the mushroom will never come again.’ I
thought that it had to do with the metal. But it wasn’t that. If you dig up a mushroom with a spade you dig up the spores, the subsoil.”

The girls were still sitting at the bus stop.

Near Kuala Lumpur, Shafi had the driver turn off the highway. We drove through a Malay squatters’ settlement: people coming in from the villages. The houses were like the houses in the villages, but closer together, and without the green. The houses went up overnight, and Shafi pointed to the big sheds, with lumber and other building material, that served the squatters’ needs.

“The Chinese,” Shafi said. “Exploiting.”

“But they also provide a service.”

“Providing a service is only seventy percent with them.”

“That’s enough. You want men to be perfect. That’s the difference between us.”

We had lunch at the Holiday Inn. He made no trouble now about the food.

I said, “Is it really true? You’ve never thought or talked about your life as you’ve done with me?”

“It’s true. To me what is past is past. I feel I have no time to think of those things.” And he added, “Those good old times.”

He knew nothing of history. From his parents he had heard about the Japanese occupation of Malaysia during the war; but that was all. There were old legends in other districts; but in Kota Bharu there were none, or he had heard none. At school he wasn’t interested in history. And now there wasn’t time for learning or reading; there was his work for the movement. The rich past of his people remained closed to him: Hinduism, Buddhism, animist belief.

He existed in a limbo. He felt that as a Malay he had nothing; and in reaction he wished—as though such a thing was possible—to be nothing but his faith, a kind of abstract man. To be civilized, he had said, a man had to know where he had come from and where he was going to. That wasn’t a matter of history; for Shafi that was only a question of correct religious belief. Everything flowed from the true faith. Out of love for his Malay people, his wish to put the world right for them, he wished them to be as cleansed as he thought he was. That was the great task he had set himself.

I said, “But isn’t religion diverting people from what they should be doing? Isn’t it giving them an easy way out?”

He missed my point. He interpreted the question in his own way. He said, “We are the first generation. It’s only a few who can understand the complete way of life of Islam. We want to change from the normal tradition, which is not the true Islamic way of life. But the process is difficult and takes time.”

I asked him about Nature. I told him what Mohammed and Abdullah had said in Penang: that Muslims sought to coexist with Nature, and non-Muslims, especially people of the West, tried to conquer it.

He didn’t take up Mohammed and Abdullah’s phrases. “I must be very frank with you. In my village there is no development. No tin mines, no rubber estates. So I have little to say about it.” His experiences were smaller and more personal. “When I was young my impression of my surroundings was that they were clean. The streams were not polluted with any chemicals. The only polluting thing we had was the smell of the pigs and the pigs’ waste in the neighbouring Chinese community. When I was fifteen people started building batik factories—three, one Malay and two Chinese—and the chemicals were being discharged into the river. And this disturbed our swimming activities in the small stream nearby. They spoilt our playground. They should have put the waste in a hole. My gang—my teen-age friends—was not happy with it. That happened to be a Chinese batik factory and we despised it very much.”

“I was reading a Malay novel. The writer talks about pools of urine below the verandahs of the houses.”

“That is biological pollution and sometimes these wastes are fertilizers. Bird droppings, chicken droppings. However, the waste of pigs is not in our favour because of the religious restrictions.”

“Did you think the hills beautiful when you were a child? And the young rice plants?”

“To us it was a common sight. We never thought whether it was beautiful or not. But we read in a few novels about paddy fields and the wind blowing through the bamboos making a kind of sound, natural sound, and that made us realize the beauty around us.”

“You said this morning, showing me the houses, that the Chinese planted for commercial reasons and the Malays for aesthetic values.”

“I didn’t say aesthetic.”

But he had. The word had made an impression on me. Perhaps—though the word could be justified—he hadn’t used the word he intended.
He meant that the Chinese house and yard was a commercial establishment; that the people in the house with the orchids in rows grew those orchids for money. The Malay yard was a garden, part of a home; it remained part of the good earth, part of Nature, even if some of the fruit and food it produced was meant for sale. There was no one word to describe that. “Aesthetic” (though fair enough) was only Shafi’s shorthand, the word he had let slip, and was not strictly defensible. Perhaps the idea hadn’t been fully worked out by him. Perhaps—though the difference was real enough, could be felt and seen—there was no definition of the difference between Malay and Chinese houses that couldn’t be shot to pieces.

And I wondered how far—added to the absence of the sense of history—this inability to fit words to feelings had led Shafi to where he was. Feelings, uncontrolled by words, had remained feelings, and had flowed into religion; had committed Shafi to learning the abstract articles of a missionary faith; had concealed his motives, obscured his cause, partly hidden himself from himself. Religion now buried real emotion. He loved his past, his village; now he worked to uproot it.