Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (60 page)

T
HE FUNDAMENTALISTS
were known to English-speaking people in Pakistan as the “fundos.” They were to that extent a presence now. They were still in the background, but they pushed and pushed, and always wanted more.

The Indian subcontinent had been bloodily partitioned to create the state of Pakistan. Millions had died, and many more had been uprooted, on both sides of the new frontiers. More than a hundred million Muslims had been abandoned on the Indian side, but virtually all the Hindus and Sikhs had been chased away from Pakistan, to create the all-Muslim polity of Iqbal’s casual poetic dream.

That should have been enough. But the fundamentalists wanted more. It wasn’t enough that this large portion of the ancient land had ceased, after the millennia, to be India; and—like Iran, like the Arab countries—had been finally cleansed of the older faiths. The people themselves now had to be cleansed of the past, of everything in dress or manners or general culture that might link them to their ancestral land. The fundamentalists wanted people to be transparent, pure, to be empty vessels for the faith. It was an impossibility: human beings could never be blanks in that way. But the
various fundamentalist groups offered themselves as the pattern of goodness and purity. They offered themselves as true believers. They said they followed the ancient rules (especially the rules about women); all they asked of people was to be like them and, since there was no absolute agreement about the rules, to follow the rules they followed.

The most important of the fundamentalist groups was the Jamaat-i-Islami, the Assembly of Islam. It had been founded by a religious teacher and zealot, Maulana Maudoodi. Before partition he had objected to the idea of Pakistan, for strange reasons. The poet Iqbal, presenting the case for a separate Indian Muslim state in 1930, had said that such a state would rid Indian Islam of the “stamp which Arab imperialism was forced to give it.” Maudoodi’s ambitions were just the opposite. He thought that an Indian Muslim state would be too limiting, would suggest that Islam had done its work in India. Maudoodi wanted Islam to convert and cover all India, and to cover the world. Iqbal had said that an important reason for the creation of Pakistan was that Islam had worked better in India than in other places as “a people-building force.” Maudoodi didn’t think so. He didn’t think the Muslims of the subcontinent and their political leaders were good enough, as Muslims, for something as precious as an all-Muslim state. They were not pure enough in their belief; they were too tainted by the Indian past.

Maudoodi had died in 1979. But the attitude of the Jamaat was still that the people of Pakistan and their rulers were not good enough. If Iqbal’s Muslim state had had its calamities, it wasn’t the fault of Islam; it was only the fault of the people who called themselves Muslim. In the fundamentalist way of thinking this kind of failure automatically condemned itself as the failure of a false or half-hearted Islam. And the Jamaat could always say—its cause ever fresh—that Islam had never really been tried since the early days, and that it was time to try it now. The Jamaat would show the way.

The Jamaat headquarters and commune was in a twenty-eight-acre site at Mansura, on the edge of Lahore, on the Multan road. Among the people in the commune were some penitents, expiating sins of varying magnitude.

One of the penitents was Mohammed Akram Ranjha. He was fifty-eight. Penitent though he was, and devout, he was not a solitary. He was living at Mansura in a rented house with his rather large family. He was a man of rough feudal background. His father was a rich man, with five hundred acres, and with some political influence even in the British time. But
Mohammed Akram had received no formal education as a child. There was a reason. He had had typhoid when he was very young, and his father had vowed that, if his son recovered, he would never be sent to a secular school, but would be educated in the Koran. The boy recovered; but the father forgot one half of the vow, and the boy (though receiving simple religious instruction from a mullah) grew up like someone of an uneducated feudal family, spending his time on horses and tent-pegging and polo, and gambling and hawking, and going to local festivals.

When he was twenty-three Mohammed Akram became involved in a serious family quarrel. The quarrel was about a woman and land. The woman was a cousin of Mohammed Akram’s. She was an educated woman, the first in the family to get a degree. When her father died she inherited six hundred acres. She was twenty-three. Her uncle, her father’s brother, an old-fashioned man, wanted her to stay in purdah; he also wanted to marry her off to his eight-year-old son. She wanted none of that. She had studied in Lahore at Queen Mary College, a famous coeducational school run by Christians; and she was used to freedom. She was also in love with Mohammed Akram’s brother, her cousin. He was twenty-six and unusually handsome and spoke well. He was already married, with two sons. But she ran away with him and became his second wife.

The uncle (with the eight-year-old son) was enraged. He threatened to wipe out Mohammed Akram’s branch of the family. This was very much the local feudal way, and the uncle was a man of local power. Mohammed Akram went to the uncle and asked for pardon. “Please don’t kill us. I promise that we will find out where my brother and the girl are, and we will bring the girl back to you.”

Mohammed Akram found the runaway couple in Karachi. He asked them to return to Lahore. When they were there he and three or four other male members of the family kidnapped the woman at gunpoint. The woman’s husband, Mohammed Akram’s brother, was not cowed. He went to the police station and filed a charge against the kidnappers. This show of spirit in the husband, this bringing of the law into a rough feudal dispute about land and honor, must have been unexpected. And it was at this stage—perhaps to resolve the overlapping issues of land and honor, before the police did what they had to do—that the kidnapped woman was shot dead. It was never established who actually did the killing.

All the kidnappers were arrested and tried. The law moved fast—this was in 1960, during the rule of General Ayub—and less than two months after the killing all five kidnappers were jailed. Mohammed Akram was sentenced to fourteen years, a life term.

He was sent to the jail in the city of Multan. He was offered a choice of cellmates. He could share with a well-known Lahore thug of the Gujar tribe (and, though this wasn’t said, risk being sexually assaulted); or he could be with the secretary-general of the Jamaat-i-Islami, who was doing time as a political prisoner. Mohammed Akram chose the man from the Jamaat.

The two men talked. In a matter of months Mohammed Akram underwent a change of heart. He began to read the writings of Maulana Maudoodi. He saw the error and emptiness of his feudal ways. His jailhouse conversion to the cause of the Jamaat became famous. Soon he began to study. Matriculation, bachelor of arts—the young feudal didn’t want to stop. He became legendary as a reformed prisoner. His sentence was cut from fourteen years to six, and on the very day of his release his master’s diploma in Urdu literature arrived in the post.

Mohammed Akram’s son, telling this story of his father’s conversion (larger in this account than the dead girl’s own tragedy), said, “He went to jail as a feudal, and came back as a Muslim revolutionary.”

It was twelve years, though, before Mohammed Akram made the move to the Jamaat commune at Mansura. First he enrolled in a law college, with the help of the distinguished lawyer who had defended him at his trial in 1960.

(I met this lawyer in Karachi in 1979. He was by then very rich, quite crazed with religion, vain, and hoping for political power. It was a very religious time—Mr. Bhutto had been deposed and hanged, the Islamic whipping vans were being sent out to punish the wicked [and everybody was running to see], and everything stopped for prayers—and the lawyer thought that it was important for him to make a show of his piety. He muttered his prayers all the time I was with him and clacked his prayer beads. I didn’t respond. He said, “I suppose you’re thinking that I should be in a monastery.” I had no intention of encouraging him. I said, “I am not thinking that.” He clacked his beads and muttered and clacked his beads again and then, ratcheting his piety up a notch or two, said, “I’m God-intoxicated.”)

This man not only helped Mohammed Akram get into the law college; he also became his unofficial spiritual adviser. And so it happened that when Mohammed Akram started his law practice in his home area of Sargodha he also became politically active on behalf of the Jamaat. This was a break with the past; the feudals here had always been supporters of the people in power.

But the past was not buried. Blood feuds here never absolutely died. In 1975 scores were settled with Mohammed Akram’s brother, who fifteen years before had filed a case against the kidnappers of his wife and had caused them all to go to jail. This brother, now only forty-one years old, was killed by persons unknown. Four years later Mohammed Akram moved to the Jamaat commune at Mansura; two years after that he got his son to move there; and the year after that, 1982, he moved the rest of the family. In that year the son of Mohammed Akram’s murdered brother killed someone on the other side; and Mohammed Akram for an unstated reason gave up politics.

Security and piety and penitence and the cause of the Jamaat now ran together for them all at Mansura. It had become their world.

The killing was never discussed in Mohammed Akram’s family. Saleem, the only son, conceived in the year of the killing, and born in the first year of his father’s imprisonment in Multan jail, said, “We don’t have courage to talk about it to my father.”

Saleem was now thirty-four, and important in his own right as a senior customs officer. For him the drama—his father’s conversion and repentance, the studying in the jail—marked the beginning of the family’s intellectual rise. He came one Saturday after work (Friday now the sabbath—the hanged Mr. Bhutto’s weekly memorial—and Saturday the first working day of the week) to take me to Mansura. He was a tall man wearing a tie and a light tweed jacket (for the Lahore winter) and from certain things he said I felt he was expecting me to be surprised that a man living in Mansura should be wearing such “modern” clothes. He came in his office car, with a driver, and on the backseat were
The Economist
and other serious magazines.

The mistake was not to accept his offer of air-conditioning. It was early evening, and I feared a chill. But it was also the rush hour. By the time we got to Mansura, stopping and starting at traffic lights all the way, the main road misty all the way with dust and brown fumes, I was quite choked.

I had heard much about Mansura and its fortress-like atmosphere, and I had expected something more hidden away. But it was just there, beside the main road, in the heat and fumes and dust, and with fluorescent strips; and just at the entrance, on the left, as if in immediate demonstration of who they were, the faithful were at their evening prayers in the Jamaat’s mosque, below a kind of netting or open frame which might have been used for a cover when it was too sunny or when it was raining.