Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (51 page)

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T
HERE WAS MUCH TO SEE
in Persepolis, more than could be considered in a day. And not many visitors were ready after that to do the extra twenty-five miles or so to Pasargadae, where there was comparatively little, and what there was was bare and scattered and picked clean: the sunken tower of a fire temple, the palace of Cyrus, and the tomb of Cyrus. Mehrdad and I had the place to ourselves. The sunburnt old guide at the site entrance (perhaps also one of the watchmen), small and lean and unshaved, dressed in an old jacket and pullover for wind and dust, got on his motor scooter and, wordlessly, began to act as our outrider in the desolation, stuttering on just a few yards before us, kicking up dust and blue smoke, and—like a beguiler in a modern version of some old myth—smiling and beckoning whenever our driver hesitated.

So we came to the remnants of Cyrus’s palace. Large sections of the white floor, made up of big, irregular, interlocking marble blocks, had remained as level and close-jointed as they had been when set twenty-five hundred years ago. At one time the palace had been quarried for its stone. Some of this—used in a mosque in another place—had been recovered in the Shah’s time and brought back to the site. These blocks, carved with Arabic letters, served no purpose now; they were just there as sacred relics,
in what had been a seat of world power in the century before Herodotus, more than a thousand years before Islam. The flat land all around was full of wild grasses and flowers, dry and crisp after the summer, and alive with the song of unseen birds.

A short time before, the guide said, about thirty or forty people from India had come here in a bus. They had stood before a pillar with a cuneiform inscription high up—
I AM CYRUS, SON OF CAMBYSES, AND THIS IS MY PALACE
—and they had said prayers of some kind. Then, for about twenty minutes, they had wailed. When that was done they had got back into their bus and gone away.

The guide didn’t know who the people in the bus were. But it was an easy guess that they were Parsees, Zoroastrians, followers of the pre-Islamic religion of Persia, and descendants of the people who had left Persia after the Arab conquest and the coming of Islam. They had found refuge in Gujarat in India; Gujarati had become their language. They were a small community and had remained more or less intact until this century. Now, with the intermarriage that had come with the general opening up of the world, they were melting away. This remembering by some of them of old glory, this ritual grief in the ruined palace of Cyrus, was like a miracle; though the ancient prayers might have been ill-remembered, and the ritual made up.

Not many days later I went to Pakistan, to Lahore. I put up at the Avari Hotel. The Avaris were Parsees, part of the dispersion; the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 had left some Parsees in India, some in Pakistan. In the lobby of the hotel were large color photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Avari, the founders. At the entrance a plaque honored Mrs. Avari. It told of her life and work. It ended like this:
SHE DIED ON 25TH NOVEMBER 1977 AT BOSTON (U.S.A.). MAY THE ALMIGHTY AHURA MAZDA GRANT HER SOUL ETERNAL PEACE IN HEAVEN.

This made Zoroastrianism like a version of Christianity or Islam. Had the old Iranian religion been like that? Perhaps it didn’t matter. What mattered was what remained in the hearts of the people who had put up the plaque. The classical world had been overthrown and remade by Christianity and Islam. These were universal and not local religions; their religious and social ideas touched everyone and could seem familiar even to outsiders.

In Iran the pre-Islamic past was irrecoverable. It wasn’t like that in Pakistan. Vital fragments of the past lived on in dress, customs, ceremonies, festivals,
and, importantly, ideas of caste. Islam reached Iran just after the Prophet’s time. It was nearly four hundred years later that northwest India began to be penetrated (the conquest of Sind in the southwest is something apart). By 1200
A.D.
(giving very rough dates) the Muslims were a power in the north of the subcontinent; in 1600 this power was at its peak; by 1700, with the decline of the Mogul empire, Muslim power in India was more or less broken.

There had never been anything like an overall or settled conquest, as in Iran. In fact, the extraordinary peoples who came up after the Mogul decline—the Mahrattas, the Sikhs—were in part championing their own faith against the Muslims. It was the British, religious outsiders, who subdued both those peoples, and became, by a mixture of direct and indirect rule, the paramount power in the subcontinent.

The British period—two hundred years in some places, less than a hundred in others—was a time of Hindu regeneration. The Hindus, especially in Bengal, welcomed the New Learning of Europe and the institutions the British brought. The Muslims, wounded by their loss of power, and out of old religious scruples, stood aside. It was the beginning of the intellectual distance between the two communities. This distance has grown with independence; and it is this—more even than religion now—that at the end of the twentieth century has made India and Pakistan quite distinct countries. India, with an intelligentsia that grows by leaps and bounds, expands in all directions. Pakistan, proclaiming only the faith and then proclaiming the faith again, ever shrinks.

It was Muslim insecurity that led to the call for the creation of Pakistan. It went at the same time with an idea of old glory, of the invaders sweeping down from the northwest and looting the temples of Hindustan and imposing the faith on the infidel. The fantasy still lives; and for the Muslim converts of the subcontinent it is the start of their neurosis, because in this fantasy the convert forgets who or what he is and becomes the violator. It is as though—switching continents—the indigenous people of Mexico and Peru were to side with Cortés and Pizarro and the Spaniards as the bringers of the true faith.

A lawyer told me of the Muslim slogans he heard as a child of three, in a small town in the Punjab, at the time of the agitation for Pakistan. They had moved him as a child; they moved him still. The lawyer (whose father had been a famous liberal in pre-partition days) was presenting himself to
me as someone just as liberal as his father. If people out there, the lawyer said, lifting his chin (a little hesitantly) towards the street, knew how liberal he was, he would be “strung up in half an hour.”

But he was an old fanatic, really. He wasn’t content to possess his faith; he wanted it to triumph in an old-fashioned way. I could tell that as soon as he began to recite the slogans of 1947. His voice trembled, his eye gleamed: he was a child of three again in Lyallpur, playing with visions of sending the infidel to kingdom come.

The translation—liquid Urdu turning, word by word, to English stone—cooled him down. He said in half-apology, reverting to his lawyer’s manner, “As poetry not very good, perhaps. But clutching at my heart.”

We were sitting in the lawyer’s dining room. It was much used and strangely dark, as though it had sunk a little too much below the level of the land outside. There was a bad smell from the street ditch: perhaps something wrong with a sewer pipe. The lawyer apologized for it; it seemed, though, to be something he had got used to. The refrigerator was in a corner of the room, perhaps as a check on the servants. The tall and sullen Pathan servant, in the very dirty clothes that servants in Pakistan are required to wear, came in every two minutes to get something from the refrigerator or to put something back. This was distracting to me, but not to the lawyer. His eyes were bright, far away. The Pakistan slogans of 1947 had given him a lift; I felt they were still singing in his head.

At last we began to sip the bad coffee the dirty servant presented, and—as in so many of the houses I had been to—we contemplated the ruin of the state.

The new state had been hurriedly created and had no true program. It couldn’t be a homeland for all the Muslims of the subcontinent; that was impossible. In fact, more Muslims were to be left behind in India than were to be in the new Muslim state. It seemed rather that, over and above any political aim, the new state was intended to be a triumph of the faith, a
stake in the heart of old Hindustan. Someone (not the lawyer) remembered this taunting slogan of 1947: