Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (63 page)

But there had been a long serene period in the new country. The family had lost everything in Jalandhar, but Salman’s father, a civil engineer, was working for the government—he was in Baluchistan at the time of the riots in Jalandhar—and so there was money every month. In 1952, the year of Salman’s birth, his father left the government to set up on his own. For ten years and more his practice flourished. He brought up his family in a religious way. All the rituals were honored, and there were Koranic recitations. Salman as a child knew many prayers by heart. Religion was part of the serenity of his childhood.

In 1965, when he was thirteen, Salman became aware of another kind of Islam. This was at the time of the short, inconclusive war with India. “There were songs exhorting mujahids to go to war and promising them paradise, heaven. Mobs of people from the city of Lahore, armed only with clubs, set out to fight the holy war against the infidel Hindu. They had to be turned back. They had been charged up by the mullah. The interesting thing was that the mullah was not leading those people. He was sitting safe in his mosque.”

In this way Salman was introduced to the idea of
jihad,
holy war. It was a special Muslim idea. He explained it like this: “In Christianity Christ died for all Christians. He can ensure heaven for them. In Islam Mohammed can only make a submission in your favor for being a follower of his. It is only Allah who makes the final decision on the merit won by good deeds. Nothing is greater, so far as goodness goes, than jihad in the name of Allah.” Jihad was not meant metaphorically. “The word of the Koran is taken very literally. It is blasphemous even to think of it as an allegory. The Koran lays great store by jihad. It is one of the sayings of Mohammed—not in the Koran, it’s one of the traditions—‘If you see an un-Islamic practice you stop it by force. If you do not possess the power to stop it, you condemn it verbally. If not that also, then you condemn it in your heart.’ As far back as I remember I have known this. I think this tradition gives the Muslim license to act violently.”

In 1965 he saw for the first time the idea given a public, mob expression. And though he saw people then doing “silly things,” he understood both their need to win merit as followers of Mohammed, and also their fear of hell.

“Endless whipping with fiery flames, and fire beyond imagination. Having to drink pus. It’s very graphic in the traditions. In the Koran there’s just mention of the fires and the endlessness of punishment.”

In 1968, when he was sixteen, and in his first year at Government Science College, Lahore, Salman found himself part of just such a mob. There was a review in
Time
or
Newsweek
of a book called
The Warrior Prophet.
Two or three copies of the magazine with the review had somehow got to the college and were passed around. No one had seen the book, but the boys decided to take out a procession to protest about it. It was during a break; the boys were sitting outside. There was no particular leader. The boys were all as religiously well trained as Salman. The idea of the public protest simply came to them, and they became a mob. Salman went along with them, though he remembered very clearly, all the way through, that he hadn’t found anything obnoxious about Islam or the Prophet in the review. The weather was good. It was winter, the best season in Lahore, and they shouted slogans against the United States and broke up a couple of minibuses.

The mullah who in 1965 had charged up his congregation, and sent them off to the front to fight with sticks, had stayed behind quite safe in his mosque. It wasn’t his business to fight. His business was to charge people up, to remind them as graphically and passionately as he could of the rewards of jihad and the horrors of hell.

He was like the mullah I heard about (from someone else) who had been drafted in, with other mullahs, to campaign against Mr. Bhutto in 1977. This mullah was short and fat, in no way personable, and known to be unreliable. But that didn’t matter; he was a wonderful preacher, with a powerful voice. There was a curfew at the time, but it was relaxed (as it had to be) for the Friday prayers. The people who went to the mullah’s mosque found themselves listening to more than prayers. They heard stories, from Islamic history, of heroism and martyrdom, in the mullah’s famous voice and wonderful declamatory style. He asked them to be worthy of the past, to take up jihad, and not to ignore the forces of evil around them. “Say to the enemy, ‘You test your arrows on us, and we shall test our breast against your arrows.’ ” It sounded like poetry, and authoritative for that reason, though no one could place it. The actual words didn’t mean anything, but they drove people wild; and at the end of those Friday prayers poor Mr. Bhutto’s curfew had been rendered harmless. The congregation went away full of religious hate, determined to earn a little more merit in heaven by sending Mr. Bhutto to hell.

That the mullah was unreliable, and not a moral man in any recognizable way, was not important. He was not offering himself as a guide. It was his
business as a mullah to keep the converted people on their toes, and when there was need to charge them up, to fix their minds on hell and heaven, and to tell them that when the time came only Allah would be their judge. This was an aspect of the religious state—the state created for converts alone, where religion was not a matter of private conscience—that the poet Iqbal had never considered: that such a state could always be manipulated, easy to undermine, full of simple roguery.

There was something else that Iqbal had never considered: that in the new state the nature of history would alter, and with that altering of the historical sense, the intellectual life of the country would inevitably be diminished. The mullahs would always hold the ring, would limit inquiry. All the history of the ancient land would cease to matter. In the school history books, or the school “civics” books, the history of Pakistan would become only an aspect of the history of Islam. The Muslim invaders, and especially the Arabs, would become the heroes of the Pakistan story. The local people would be hardly there, in their own land, or would be there only as ciphers swept aside by the agents of the faith.

It is a dreadful mangling of history. It is a convert’s view; that is all that can be said for it. History has become a kind of neurosis. Too much has to be ignored or angled; there is too much fantasy. This fantasy isn’t in the books alone; it affects people’s lives.

Salman, talking of this neurosis, said, “Islam doesn’t show on my face. We have nearly all, subcontinental Muslims, invented Arab ancestors for ourselves. Most of us are sayeds, descendants of Mohammed through his daughter Fatima and cousin and son-in-law Ali. There are others—like my family—who have invented a man called Salim al-Rai. And yet others who have invented a man called Qutub Shah. Everybody has got an ancestor who came from Arabia or Central Asia. I am convinced my ancestors would have been medium to low-caste Hindus, and despite their conversion they would not have been in the mainstream of Muslims. If you read Ibn Battuta and earlier travelers you can sense the condescending attitude of the Arab travelers to the converts. They would give the Arab name of someone, and then say, ‘But he’s an Indian.’

“This invention of Arab ancestry soon became complete. It had been adopted by all families. If you hear people talking you would believe that this great and wonderful land was nothing but wild jungle, that no human beings lived here. All of this was magnified at the time of partition, this sense of not belonging to the land, but belonging to the religion. Only one people in Pakistan have reverence for their land, and that’s the Sindhis.”

This was what lay all around Salman’s serene childhood. These fantasies and illusions, which to some extent were also his when he was a child, were to become his subject when he became a writer. They took time to discover; they needed the adult eye; they required him to stand a little outside himself.

But even while he was still an adolescent Salman began to have intimations of being somewhat apart. Just a few months after he had gone along with that schoolboy demonstration about
The Warrior Prophet
(feeling all the time that it was unjustified), and in that little afternoon jihad had helped to break up a couple of minibuses, something happened that unsettled him.

It was Ramadan, the fasting month. He had been told, and he believed, that if he stayed up praying on one particular night during the last ten days of Ramadan, he would be cleansed of all his sins; he would become a new man. They told him he would feel lighter; that was impressed on him. That year the big night was the night of the twenty-seventh. He and his brother and his sister and the rest of the family stayed up praying. In the morning he didn’t feel any different. He had been looking forward to a great feeling of lightness. He was disappointed. But he didn’t have the courage to tell anyone in the family.

His disappointment, and the worry about it, might have been greater at this particular time because, after a decade and a half of success, his father’s civil engineering business had begun to fail. The actual work was holding up, but Salman’s father had begun to make a series of misjudgments about people. Salman was still at school; his father’s business troubles would have worried him.

Two or three years later—Salman’s father’s business going down all the time—there was another incident, this time at the end of Ramadan. Id is the great festival at the end of Ramadan, and the Id prayers are always in a congregation. Salman’s father had taken the car to go to the mosque he always went to, and Salman and his brother were going on foot to look for a mosque in the neighborhood. Salman said to his brother, “What a waste of time.”

The brother said, “Especially when you don’t even believe in it.”

Salman said, “What? You too?”

The brother said, “Our elder sister doesn’t believe either. Don’t you know?”

Salman had a high regard for his brother’s intellect. The worry he had felt about losing his faith dropped away. He didn’t feel he was letting down the people who had died in the riots in Jalandhar in 1947.

All three children of the family had lost religion. But, as his business had gone down, Salman’s father had grown more devout and more intolerant. One of the festivals the family had celebrated when Salman was a child was the Basant, or Spring Festival. Now Salman’s father banned it as un-Islamic, something from the Hindu and pagan past. There were great quarrels with his daughter when she came from Karachi, where she lived. She was not as quiet as Salman and his brother. She spoke her mind, and the arguments could become quite heated. One day, when Salman’s father’s brother was also present, Salman’s father said, “Let her be. She’s an apostate. Don’t get into these arguments with her.” And he walked away in anger. The house would have been full of strains.

Salman’s father wanted Salman to be an engineer. But Salman’s mathematics were bad, and just before his twentieth birthday he joined the army. He had developed an interest in guns. He had no religious faith now, but he was the complete Pakistani soldier. He was passionate about going to war with India, though there had been the Bangladesh defeat just the year before.

“It was in my mind that we—or I, personally—had to get even for the murder of my grandparents and my two aunts. It must have been with me always, but this was a very cold feeling. Like a seasoned murderer going in for his hundredth kill. I wasn’t excited or emotional about it. It was just something I had to do. I didn’t talk about my grandparents, but I was very vocal about going back to war with India. This was with my army companions. Not at home.”

After two or three years this feeling left him. He also fell out of love with the army. He couldn’t find people to talk to, and he was rebuked for talking about books and trying to impress. Three years later he was able to leave the army. He joined a multinational company in Karachi. The job came through an army friend whose uncle was the number two in the company.

So Salman went to Karachi, the mohajir city. Life was not easy. He lived in the beginning as a paying guest in a family; after that there was a shabby little rented room with a kitchen. He moved up the ladder slowly. He had a friend in the company. One day when they were talking Salman mentioned the
Reader’s Digest.
The friend laughed. Salman said he wanted to learn. The friend was pleased; he began to guide Salman, and Salman looked back on this as the start of his education.