Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (74 page)

It was at the Holiday Inn that Shafi used to come to see me. He wasn’t an easy guest. He said he didn’t like places like the Holiday Inn, and he didn’t hide his worry about the food: it might have been prepared by non-Muslims, Chinese or Indians. There were other things that would have offended him: the modest little bar, where at night “The Old Timers” (city
Malays, with an Indian or two) sang pop songs; the lunchtime fashion show on Friday, the sabbath, when people came to see the Indian and Chinese girls seesaw their shoulders and do their walk, in the rather stale, shut-in restaurant air; and the very small Holiday Inn pool, below the coffee-shop window, where white women exposed themselves in swimsuits.

But Shafi had stopped seeing—perhaps had never seen—what he rejected. He couldn’t even tell, for instance, as I found one day when I asked him, whether the sunbathing women at the poolside were attractive. When he had first come to Kuala Lumpur as a schoolboy he had been nervous; he had felt a stranger. Now he held himself aloof from it, and was strong in his self-righteousness. His ideas were sometimes confused; his Islam was being made to carry too many things. There was purity in his village in Kota Baru, for instance, purity in the life he had known there, which he had now lost; yet he wished to be like a scourge in those villages, to convert them fully, to cleanse them of what had survived of old Hindu customs. That had become part of his cause. The missionary Islam he now fed off had given him an impossible dream of Islamic purity. Out of this purity there was going to come power, and accounts would be settled with the world.

Sixteen years later, the Holiday Inn was surrounded by towers of concrete and steel. Land was precious here. The racecourse view I had known could not now be reconstructed; it was half mythical, like the Roman hills before the building of Rome. And all over Kuala Lumpur there was much more building to come. At the back of the hotel where I was staying, an immense hole was being dug across the road. The hole had the area of a large city block; it dwarfed men and machines; ramps led down from level to level, from red earth to dry pale earth. The composite tropical greenery of colonial days was overshadowed now by an international style in steel and glass and stone and concrete and marble; and the very climate seemed to have altered. Air-conditioning made the big buildings cold; the weather outside was always a little surprise; it was pleasant for the visitor to play with these temperature shifts. In 1979 Malaysia had been rich; not it was extraordinarily rich.

I wondered about the effect on Shafi. I knew that, before he had begun to work full-time for the Muslim youth movement, he had worked as the managing director of a Malay construction company. He was very young for the job, but there were not many business-minded Malays at the time. The firm hadn’t done well; there were big players in the construction business
in Malaysia. And then Shafi had set up on his own. He had failed. He thought this was because his Chinese workers and almost everybody else had let him down. The failure grieved him, I knew; it had got mixed up with his religious ideas. And I wondered whether, with the great new wealth of the country, and all the encouragement the government had been giving to Malays to go into business, Shafi hadn’t been tempted to try again. He would now be forty-eight, in middle life. His career, whatever it was, would have been more or less marked out.

But I couldn’t find out about Shafi. The people who had known him in the old days had lost touch with him. He was a preacher, I was told; he was on the move; he wasn’t easy to reach.

And then one morning I was taken to an Islamic commune on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur to meet a man who said he was Shafi and said he remembered me. The commune was a solid settlement of two-storied concrete houses. The houses were painted and the roads were paved, and there were gardens and cars. Whatever the commune people might say about their self-denying way of life, they were part of rich Kuala Lumpur.

We had to look for the house of the man who said he was Shafi. When we found it I found I didn’t know the man. He pretended for a little, but only for a little, and only in a half-hearted way, that he remembered me.

He was in his forties and he looked happy and idle, enjoying the commune life. His house, on two floors, had a big, open, well-furnished hall downstairs. And he was playing there, in the middle of the morning, with a kind of village serenity, with a sleepy-eyed, unsteady, young child of his. It was a form of display: in this kind of commune simple things could be paraded as religious or virtuous acts that gave especial pleasure to the believer, as reward.

He said in a mechanical way that the big highway the government had built was wrong; it was opening up the country to vice. He said that the official language of the country should be Arabic; English was not the language of Muslims. But he had said these things so many times before that now—he was on the floor and trying to get the child to play with one of its many toys—he was speaking by rote, without energy.

I felt that it was out of pure idleness that he had said he was Shafi. He wanted only to get a little attention. There was no point in being fundamentalist and dangerous and living in a commune if no one noticed.

And, in fact, Shafi, whom in the end I never met—because no one among his former associates particularly wanted me to meet him—had become like that idle man in their eyes. Once he had been at the center of the Muslim youth movement in Malaysia, the movement using Islam to wake
up the Malays. He had no other career. Now, though he had remained true to those early beliefs, he was on the outside. It embarrassed people to be reminded of him; he was a man who had taken the idea of the religious life to extremes.

And other ideas had changed. In 1979 Shafi, grieving for the village of his childhood, had spoken of Malays as a pastoral, tropical people. Once he said they were a “timeless” people; he meant only they had little sense of time. They were not commercially minded; they were without the energy of the Chinese, who came from a “four-seasoned” country. He had worked these ideas—which were curiously colonial ones—into his overall religious view. They were not ideas that Malays liked now.

A young lawyer said, “That’s been laid aside. Destroyed almost. It has been replaced by the idea of the Malays as a trading and manufacturing and innovative people. These are all words you would not have associated with Malays in the past.”

The government had done all that it could to bring Malays into business, and over the last two generations it had succeeded. The racial anxieties of sixteen years before had been swamped by the great new wealth, and new men had been created on both sides. That was the message of the steel and concrete and glass around the site of the Holiday Inn, and the great highway through the forest that had opened up the villages and opened up new land. A journey to the interior that took six to eight hours, along old roads that touched many of the old colonial towns and settlements, now took two and a half hours and showed almost nothing of that past.

The lawyer said, “I think it telescopes time.”

In 1979 they had all been rather young in the Muslim youth movement. The leader, Anwar Ibrahim, the man on whom they all leaned, the man who gave them confidence, was only thirty-two, Shafi’s age.

Nasar, to whom Shafi had introduced me, was only twenty-five. He was very much the junior; and physically he was even slighter than Shafi. He had just come back from Bradford in England, where he had been doing a diploma in international relations. He hadn’t liked the free and easy sexual ways of England, and he didn’t want those ways to infect young Malays over there.

Nasar had an ancestor who was a Malay sheikh in Mecca. A sheikh was a guide, and this sheikh guided Malays who had gone to Mecca on the pilgrimage. This kind of guiding would have become a proper paying occupation only after the 1830s, when steam replaced sail, and the journey from
Malaysia became quicker and more reliable. And it is possible that Nasar’s ancestor was doing this pilgrim work in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century (as I work it out) this ancestor returned to Malaysia, to a tin town, predominantly Chinese, twelve miles or so to the north of Kuala Lumpur. This man’s son was Nasar’s great-grandfather. He married when he was twelve. In 1934, when he was very old, he set up a Malay-language newspaper that preached self-help to the Malays. He was a voice in the wilderness. After him the family declined; the tradition of learning faded away. There was little money in teaching; there was more in farming.

Nasar’s grandfather, who should have been a religious teacher, became a rice farmer, with seven acres. Nasar’s father worked as a ranger in the forestry department. He had only the standard primary-school education, up to the sixth class; but he read the newspaper every morning before he went to work. This newspaper-reading was important: it was Nasar’s greatest intellectual stimulus as a child. Nasar was one of seven sons, and the fourth of eight children. When he was eight he began to read the newspaper, like his father. It was an advanced thing for a Malay child to do.

In time, then, Nasar, the ranger’s son, was able to go to Bradford to do a diploma in international relations. And now, sixteen years later, only forty-one, he was running a holding company that managed the diverse affairs of eight companies.

Nasar had a suite of offices in a skyscraper. The shadow of this skyscraper fell on the green-glassed skyscraper across the road. This made the road seem narrower; and the mid-afternoon tropical light, which would have been harsh and stinging in open fields and open streets, was softened in that narrow, protected space, so that the light and climate of Kuala Lumpur seemed perfect.

Nasar, with glasses now, and less frail-looking than in 1979, was dressed with an executive’s care: belted trousers, tan shoes, matching socks, stylish wide tie, a large round watch on his slender wrist. His personal assistant was a tall and gentle young Sikh. In the main waiting room, and in the antechambers of various offices, were models, like toys, of white airplanes on silver sticks. Nasar’s holding company had interests in aviation; they ran scheduled domestic air services.

It was an extraordinary transformation, and the man himself was welcoming and gracious, full of offers of help. It was as if good village ways had been given a kind of corporate enlargement. I had been moved in 1979 by the openness of the young men of the movement; they didn’t hide things
or make up things about themselves. Nasar seemed to have that kind of openness still. He remembered what he had been in 1979; he didn’t put a gloss on it. And he talked without prompting of the internal demons—the phobias, the lack of confidence—that as a small-town Malay he had had to quieten before he could be what I now saw.

What they had been looking to religion to do for them in 1979, simple power, simple authority, had done for them later.

Nasar’s transformation began with Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the Muslim youth movement. It was clear in 1979 that Anwar was marked for great things. And when the time came and Anwar rose, he took Nasar with him.

Towards the end of 1981 Anwar decided he had done enough youth movement work: the lectures and consciousness-raising, the protest. He thought the time had come to move on. He decided to join the ruling Malay party. He became one of the party’s candidates in the 1982 elections, and he called on Nasar—then with a master’s degree from Bradford in international relations—to handle his election campaign. Nasar did so. Anwar won his election and became a deputy minister in the prime minister’s department. He said to Nasar, “Join me. Be my private secretary.” Nasar was overwhelmed. He was twenty-eight; he had been used to facing authority “from the other side of the counter”; he had never dreamt of such a dignity, serving a minister in the government.