Stranger to History (37 page)
The ‘Pakistani ethos’ was hard to pin down, but I could tell that the rejection of India was an important part of it. So it was not because continuties did not exist that I didn’t wish to write about them, but because their reassertion was not part of the Pakistani story. To write about them was to write about obscurity.
If Iran found Islamic expression in a modern context through the Islamic Republic, so did Pakistan, but the nature of the republic, and even the impulses behind it, were very different. At first, it hadn’t been an Islamic republic at all, the ‘Islamic’ was added a decade later; it was a secular state for Indian Muslims. And, in the beginning, that was all: no Shariah, no clerics, no ban on alcohol; people remembered women on bicycles. It was as if a trust like Abdullah’s – that the Muslims he had never met possessed a certain basic identity – had been the impulse behind gathering the sub-continent’s various and disparate Muslims into a single state. That was Pakistan’s first religious battle: the cleansing of the population.
Pakistan’s founders were not clerics and fanatics, but poets and secularists. It was from the most sophisticated Muslims of that time that the case for the country was made. The poet Iqbal, the country’s intellectual founder, was a contemporary of my grandfather. He actually wrote and performed my grandparents’ marriage ceremony. And yet among these genteel people an idea was expressed whose full ugliness, and violence, only became clear in the cruder, more basic articulations that followed. For me, until I saw the faith’s unspoken hold on my father’s notions of history and politics, and the chauvinism it could produce, the idea would almost have been too strange to understand. Though it was disguised as an economic argument, a fear of being swamped by money-minded Hindus, it was really just a refinement of what Abdullah had said to me half a century later in Istanbul, also now free of its diversity: ‘I think that Muslims have to be at the top, at the centre of the system. We have to determine all the things in the world, otherwise we won’t be free ourselves . . . A Christian may live with us here, but not like a Muslim. He may live here, but we have to be dominant.’
Translated into political terms, he was saying that Muslims needed their own state. This had also been the demand for Pakistan. But despite its apparent political objective, the demand was less concrete than it seemed. Its impracticality, but also the frustration that arose from its failure, became clear when, in my last few days in Karachi, I met an Islamic ideologue.
‘When you see him,’ Salim, the reporter, said, ‘you would never expect him to be such an Islamist, but he’s a real hardliner.’ Salim was stocky and bearded, with tired eyes. He was a star reporter at the publisher’s paper and obsessed with the war on terror. The ideologue, he said, supplied some of the country’s fiercest religious groups with their philosophy. His description of an outwardly irreligious man, with political ideas that had all the force of religion, made me want to meet the ideologue.
We arranged lunch at the Usmaniye restaurant in the outer reaches of Karachi, deep within the city of cement and corrugated-iron. Once we left the broken streets on the outskirts of Karachi, the road signs and pavements continued for some distance, then fell away in parts. At traffic-lights, a couple of black eunuchs dressed in pink, with cloudy eyes and yellow teeth begged for money. It was a big, treeless intersection full of open-backed trucks and scooters. The heat and the smoke made the outlines of the buildings tremble. On a grey cement wall, a colourful scrawl read, ‘Crush Israel’ and ‘Down with Denmark’. A boy salvaged pens and plastic bags from a mountain of hardened garbage at the centre of which there was a half-full dumpster. The flags of local parties appeared in clusters, reds, greens and a worn-out Pakistani People’s Party flag. It was Bhutto’s party, my father’s party, at times the great hope of Pakistani democracy, still popular, especially in Sind, and now awaiting another life.
We passed another mountain of waste and compressed polythene, from which shreds of pink and blue fluttered in the hot breeze. Below it I saw a still body of black water, disturbed now and then by a mysterious sputtering of bead-like bubbles. Where there might have been rocks at the edge, there were hillocks of filth and little clumps of bright grass.
The restaurant was cool and dimly lit, away from the roar of the street. The ideologue wore an olive green shirt. He was dark, clean-shaven and his eyes were sunken. He smoked many cigarettes.
He didn’t want to talk about himself. ‘Nothing is personal in all of this. I don’t believe in personal opinion as far as religion is concerned. Nothing I say has to do with who I am or my own experience.’
He had grown up in Karachi, born just before the first war with India in 1965. In 1971, he told me, ‘Pakistan became two pieces. I have very little memory of that time,’ he recalled, his thin lips pulling at the cigarette, ‘but I was aware that we didn’t cook three meals a day in our house. The good thing about our house, though, and many others was that we read a lot, two or three papers a day, literature, we discussed politics. I had read all of Premchand [the short-story writer] by the time I was ten. We might have been misguided, but the political motivation was there. At times it might have been wrong, but it was there, and this was without it being associated with any one political party. But now all that is gone.’
The ideologue spoke some English, and refined Urdu. His intense, studious manner and nicotine-stained fingertips reminded me of an old-fashioned Marxist intellectual. But there was something missing about him – humanity, perhaps. He seemed hard and hollow.
‘Why is it gone?’
‘The people became disillusioned. We always thought Pakistan was made to be realised. This sense was lost, and with it, we lost many other things.’
‘What else?’
‘A sense of destiny, collective self-confidence. Our political framework was dismembered. But with Muslims, geography is not very important. If even after 1971 our ruling élite had bounced back, we would have bounced back because we’ve never been fascinated with geography. We are fascinated with ideas. If even then an idea could have come . . .’
The ideologue grew up talking about the idea of Pakistan. ‘Discussing Pakistan,’ he said, ‘was like discussing Islam. Pakistan was made in the name of Islam. It had to be a role model for the rest of the Islamic world. We identified characters who were responsible for its failure: Mujibur Rahman [the founder of Bangladesh], Bhutto, India, Mrs Gandhi. We thought one day we’d become one again. It was a very simplistic world-view. We were closely associated with the notion of Pakistan. It was more like a being than a country. It was all-living. It wasn’t geography or politics. It was more than that. It was a collective consciousness. This was the idea of many.’
And now, put this way, I felt the ideologue’s description wasn’t of a real place but of a religious Utopia. This man who could be so clear and down-to-earth had an almost magical side to him.
‘But this is such a country,’ he said, with new softness in his voice, ‘that has never let it be decided where it was headed. That’s why you see the situation of today. Look at the India of 1946. It was fractured, but then one idea came and the whole sub-continent was united and held together by this idea. Even if we had decided to become a secular state or a nation state, we would be in a good position now. But we did not follow a liberal model or an Islamic one. Nor did we achieve material success or build a bond. We have a lot of diversity, rare diversity, of language, of culture, of religion. This could have been a great force, but it was turned into contradiction by our political élite.’
‘Why was it so bad here?’
‘Our ruling élite was such that it never thought of anything but its own vested interest. It never thought of Pakistan as a nation, only as a private limited company.’ It was the first time in months that I had heard a Pakistani blame Pakistanis, not the foreign hand, for the country’s failures. Hearing him speak, I felt as I had when I met the young politician in Hyderabad: the faith was getting all the good people.
‘And the idea now?’
‘It’s still alive and kicking,’ he said sadly.
‘Of a state that embodies Islamic principles?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Have you thought more about a model?’
‘Islam doesn’t depend on form,’ he said. ‘Form is not important. Essence is the main thing. If the essence is there, you can derive from it any kind of model.’
It was the most untrue thing I had heard. This dependence on sacred essence, and disregard of form, political models and institutions, had been the undoing of Pakistan, and Iran.
‘Do you think that if Pakistan had been a successful secular country, you would be writing about political Islam today?’
‘There is no such thing as political Islam. There is just Islam, which has a political component. That is a Western phrase designed to distort the totality of Islam.
‘The problem with us,’ he said, ‘is that somewhere along the way we stopped being a country guided by an idea and just became a place where people lived.’
That remark stopped the ideologue’s torrent; he seemed to sense that he’d said a painful but amazing thing. So many places were just places where people lived, but Pakistan, which was made for an idea, and which had broken with history for that idea – which, if not for that idea, was just a handful of Indian Muslim states, with linguistic and cultural differences – depended on it for its survival.
‘There are two kinds of history,’ he said, of the connection to India, ‘dead history and living. Dead history is something on a shelf or in a museum and living history is part of your consciousness, something in your blood that inspires you.’
‘But why is the pre-Islamic history of Iran living?’
‘There is a reason for this,’ he replied. ‘If all India became Muslim, we might have been able to identify with the Hindu past. We would have modified something. But since it didn’t happen that way, we can’t choose something that goes against our taste. You won’t wear a T-shirt you don’t like.
‘It’s very unusual,’ he continued, ‘in the case of Europe, that the Christian world should have abandoned its roots and looked to Hellenistic civilisation. It ran away from the Christian golden period, when Constantine accepted Christianity and it spread through Europe. They abandoned it and ran towards Greece. It shows that they did not have a law, and that for the law, they had to run to Rome. They didn’t have
shariat
. We have spirituality and we have a law.’ The ideologue knew that those histories had flowed from each other, but couldn’t accept an origin other than in faith. It was interesting that he didn’t choose Jesus as a starting-point, but Constantine and Christianity’s political triumph.
‘Who’s “we”?’
‘The Muslims.’
‘You say it as though you were Arab.’
‘This doesn’t arise in the case of Muslims – Arab, non-Arab. It’s a civilisation of faith. We are Muslims.’
A ‘Civilisation of Faith’. This was also the civilisation to which my father belonged. It was the thousand-year culture, of which Abdullah had spoken. It was what all Muslims had in common, believing or non-believing, moderate or extremist. For me, there was something miraculous in this transfiguration of one’s culture and history, by either a profession of faith, or an inherited profession of faith. There was something miraculous in the idea that if Even, my Norwegian friend, converted to Islam that this would also become his history. The poet Iqbal’s family, after all, were only recent converts to Islam. And how had I fallen through the cracks? What would it take to believe in a history like that? A profession of faith? My father had made none, but believed in the history. My mother gave me no religion, so how was it that my father and I had ended up being from two different nations having been once from the same country, and even, the same region? Perhaps it was like retaining certain moralities without believing in God, or religion. Perhaps it was kept in place by everyone around you believing.
It was time for me to make the final part of my journey north to see my father.
I
made my way to Lahore by train. My father hadn’t called me once during my time in Pakistan and I feared an unfriendly reception.
In Karachi railway station, beyond a line of peach-coloured arches, listless railwaymen sat with their feet on desks in dark offices, with open doors and brown mesh windows. One picked at his feet as he spoke to his colleague. An old-fashioned red metal roof came down over the arches, protecting the platform from the late-afternoon blaze. Among the hurried movements of porters in orange, men sat on their haunches next to swollen plastic sacks and women, on the floor in groups, fanned themselves. A great brass bell, a blue phone booth, a Pizza Hut and a black-tiled water fountain were arranged in a line down the platform. Sunken polythene bags and candy wrappers hung in the few inches of grey water that lay between the tracks. The large families and skullcapped men waiting for a train under droning fans seemed like characters in a Partition scene.
Talk of the train began. The crowd on the platform compressed, then broke loose, all moving at once with the arrival of the Tezgam, an elegant pool-table-green train with beige and red stripes. My brother’s driver, who waited quietly with me, now said, ‘Wherever you look, there’s public. People I’ve spoken to say the condition of India is better than Pakistan.’
I didn’t answer, wishing to avoid the conversation of differences. What I did know was that discovering Pakistan, its closeness to India and the trap I felt it had fallen into where religion was concerned, filled me with an affection for the country that I hadn’t expected.
‘Yes, on our side, things have yet to be established,’ the driver said. He spoke in Urdu, but said ‘establish’ in English.
We found the sleeper by the numbers written in white chalk on the side of the carriage; a crest said ‘Islamabad Carriage Factory’. The cabin was air-conditioned with its own bathroom and the most spacious since Istanbul. The dark green seats were wide and springy, the walls were of plywood, and the windows darkened. A smart, painted sign with yellow letters and black outlines, reminiscent of another time, read: ‘To seat 3 sleep 2;’ I had it to myself. My brother’s driver put the white box of Sind Club sandwiches that the publisher sent for me on the table. His large, mascaraed eyes scanned the carriage and he said, ‘If there’s been any error on my part, please pardon it.’ Then he went off and stood on the platform until the train left.
