And Mr. Salahuddin had also told me that it was possible in Islam for perfection to come to a child: as it seemed to have come to the elder and plumper of the industrialist"s sons. The boy, his father said, had already been twice on the pilgrimage to Mecca; during this month of Ramadan, now about to end, he had kept the rest of them up to the mark by his extraordinary strictness. He, the dimpled boy in Arab clothes, pretended not to know that he was being talked about. Standing on the edge of the terrace, bending a length of black rubber tubing in childish sport, he went grave and withdrawn, frowning slightly, just minding his own business, being a little Arab.
It was nearly seven. Other members of the family, women, began to come out of the house onto the terrace, gathering around the paralyzed grandfather on the easy chair. It was fast-breaking time, and time for us to leave.
AND yet it was strange, the Arab tilt of Pakistan: the little boy in Arab clothes, the Pakistan Steel project given the name of the Arab conqueror. The poet Iqbal, putting forward his plan for an Indian Muslim state in 1930, had said that the Islam of India was special, "a people-building force ... at its best." "I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interests of India and Islam," Iqbal had said. "For India, it means security and peace ...; for Islam, an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian imperialism was forced to give it."
But the world had changed since 1930; Arabia had some say in the world again. Pakistan had changed since 1947. Seeking more than Iqbal"s Muslim polity now, seeking in failure an impossibly pure faith, it called up its Arabian origins, mystical but at the same time real. At Banbh.o.r.e, a remote outpost of the earliest Arab empires, you walked on human bones.
4.
Killing History
In the imagination, the Arabs of the seventh century, inflamed by the message of the Prophet, pour out of Arabia and spread east and west, overthrowing decayed kingdoms and imposing the new faith. They move fast. In the west, they invade Visigothic Spain in 710; in the east, in the same year, they move beyond Persia to invade the great Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Sind. The symmetry of the expansion reinforces the idea of elemental energy, a lava flow of the faith. But the Arab account of the conquest of Sind-contained in the book called the Chachnama, which I read in Pakistan in a paperback reprint of the English translation first published in 1900 in Karachi-tells a less apocalyptic story.
The Arabs had to fight hard. They turned their attention to Sind at some time between 634 and 644, during the reign of the second caliph or successor to the Prophet, and in the next sixty or seventy years made ten attempts at conquest. The aim of the final invasion, as the Chachnama makes clear, was not the propagation of the faith. The invasion was a commercial-imperial enterprise; it had to show a profit. Revenge was a subsidiary motive, but what was required from the conquered people was not conversion to Islam, but tribute and taxes, treasure, slaves, and women.
The invasion was superintended from Kufa by Hajjaj, the governor of Iraq. When, in the middle of the campaign, he received the head of the defeated king of Sind, together with sixty thousand slaves and the royal one-fifth of the loot of Sind, Hajjaj "placed his forehead on the ground and offered prayers of thanksgiving, by two genuflections to G.o.d, and praised him, saying: "Now have I got all the treasures, whether open or buried, as well as other wealth and the kingdom of the world." " He summoned the people of Kufa to the famous mosque of that town, and from the pulpit told them, "Good news and good luck to the people of Syria and Arabia, whom I congratulate on the conquest of Hind and on the possession of immense wealth ... which the great and omnipotent G.o.d has kindly bestowed on them." It was open to the conquered people to accept Islam. But the conquerors were Arabs, and the kingdom of the world was theirs.
There are resemblances to the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru, and they are not accidental. The Arab conquest of Spain, occurring at the same time as the conquest of Sind, marked Spain. Eight hundred years later, in the New World, the Spanish conquistadores were like Arabs in their faith, fanaticism, toughness, poverty, and greed. The Chachnama is in many ways like The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, the Spanish soldier who in his old age wrote of his campaigns in Mexico with Cortes in 1519 and after. The theme of both works is the same: the destruction, by an imperialist power with a strong sense of mission and a wide knowledge of the world, of a remote culture that knows only itself and doesn"t begin to understand what it is fighting. The world conquerors, the establishers of long-lived systems, have a wider view; men are bound together by a larger idea. The people to be conquered see less, know less; their stratified or fragmented societies are ready to be taken over. And, interestingly, both in Mexico in 1519 and in Sind in 710 people were weakened by prophecies of conquest.
There is this difference between The Conquest of New Spain and the Chachnama. Bernal Diaz, the Spaniard, was writing of events he had taken part in. The Chachnama is Arab or Muslim genre writing, a "pleasant story of conquest," and it was written five hundred years after the conquest of Sind. The author was Persian; his source was an Arabic ma.n.u.script preserved by the family of the conqueror, Bin Qasim.
The intervening five centuries have added no extra moral or historical sense to the Persian narrative, no new wonder or compa.s.sion, no idea of what is cruel and what is not cruel, such as even Bernal Diaz, the Spanish soldier, possesses. To the Persian, writing in 1216, the Arab conquests-"the conquests of Khurasan, Ajam [Persia], Iraq, Sham [Syria], Rum [Byzantium] and Hind"-are glorious; they are the story of the spread of true civilization. Conquest is pleasant to read about because conquest is "based on spiritual rect.i.tude and temporal excellence ... of which learned philosophers and generous kings would be proud, because all men attain advancement to perfection by acknowledging as true the belief of the people of Arabia." There is an irony in this praise of conquest: not many years after those words were written, the invading Mongols were to arrive in Persia and Iraq, and the Arab civilization which the Chachnama celebrated was to be shattered, stupefied for centuries.
The Chachnama begins with an account of the native dynasty of Sind that is to be overthrown by the Arabs. In this part of the narrative dates are few, and there are elements of the fairy tale. The dynasty was founded by Chach. Chach was a Brahmin ascetic who lived with his brother in a village temple. One day he went to the palace of the king and offered his services as scribe and secretary to the chamberlain. Chach was tall and handsome; he spoke well and wrote a beautiful hand. He became first a correspondence clerk; then chamberlain when the chamberlain died; then prime minister.
It happens one day that the queen, normally secluded in the private apartments of the palace, sees the handsome Brahmin prime minister. She falls in love with him and makes a declaration to him. He is nervous. He tells the queen that there are four things men should never trust or take for granted-a king, fire, wind, and water. But the queen pleads; she asks only to be allowed to look at Chach once a day. And in the end she has her way. Chach, the Brahmin ascetic, becomes the queen"s lover, and his power in the kingdom of Sind is second only to that of the king.
Some years pa.s.s. The king falls ill and then is near to death. The queen, who has no children, fears that she will now be displaced and degraded by the king"s relations. Through Chach she orders fifty sets of chains to be secretly brought to the palace. The king dies; the news is not given out; the physicians are detained. All the claimants to the throne are summoned to the palace in the king"s name. As they arrive they are fettered and imprisoned. Then the king"s poor relations are summoned. They have grievances; each poor relation has his particular enemy among the claimants, and now he is given the chance, as though on the king"s order, to cut off the head of his enemy and take possession of his property.
When all the claimants are killed, it is announced that the king has appointed Chach as his regent; then it is announced that the king has died. Gifts are made to powerful n.o.bles; the queen places the crown on Chach"s head; and the people acclaim Chach. The dead king"s brother (a ruler himself in a neighbouring state) disapproves. He marches into Sind, claims the throne for himself, and challenges Chach to single combat. Chach says, "I am a Brahmin. Brahmins do not fight on horseback." The dead king"s brother dismounts. Chach jumps on a horse and cuts off his challenger"s head. And that is that.
Power is power; a king"s first duty is to keep himself in power. There are no rules. A king, as Chach now is, has constantly to pacify his subjects, high and low, baron or outcaste. And in this pacification any means is permissible. "Among the rules of conduct prescribed for kings, one is that an enemy should be reduced to submission by tricks and deceit." A king has to be on the move; his presence must be felt in every corner of his kingdom. People must never get the "haughty notion in their heads ... that there is no one to exact revenue from them." Kings need revenue, because the day may come when an enemy is too strong to be fought off and peace will have to be bargained for.
"Remember it is for a day like this that kings collect treasures and bury them underground, for by means of gold troops are collected ... and war is carried on ... in which they sacrifice their lives for the sake of their country and their good name. In other ways also by means of gold an enemy can easily be made to retreat. With the help of gold a man can settle all the affairs of this world satisfactorily, repulse an enemy, and satisfy his vengeance. At the same time, with its help, he can make the necessary provision for his journey to the next world."
Chach-the queen soon disappears from the story-rules for forty years. It is Chach who repulses the first Arab attack, a sea attack on the port of Debal (which might be Banbh.o.r.e). On Chach"s death the kingdom pa.s.ses to Chach"s brother, and then to Chach"s son, Dahar.
Dahar is told one day of a wonderful Brahmin astrologer. And since it is good for a king to consult wise Brahmins, Dahar gets on his elephant and visits the astrologer. For Dahar himself the astrologer predicts nothing but good fortune; but this is clouded by what the astrologer says about Dahar"s sister. The man Dahar"s sister marries, the astrologer says, will rule the kingdom. Dahar is perplexed. His prime minister (who is a Buddhist) has a solution: since a king"s first duty is to his throne, Dahar should go through a form of marriage with his sister. There are five things, the prime minister says, that "have a sorry look" when they lose their proper place: a king who has lost his kingdom, a minister who has lost his post, a holy man who has lost his disciples, hair and teeth when they drop out, a woman"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s when they droop with age.
Dahar is shocked by his prime minister"s advice. The prime minister goes home, takes a sheep, scatters earth and mustard seed in its wool, waters it. After some days the mustard seed sprouts, the sheep turns green. The sheep is then driven about the town and people rush to see it. But after three days the wonder abates; the green sheep is taken for granted. The prime minister says, "O king, whatever happens, whether good or evil, the people"s tongues wag about it for three days. Thereafter no one remembers whether it was good or evil." So Dahar goes through a marriage ceremony with his sister.
Much is made of this incident, though it has no important sequel. It serves only-in this Persian-Arab narrative-to stress that the kingdom of Sind is morally blighted, and the cause of the dynasty of Chach cannot prosper.
Attention shifts now to the Arabs. The narrative alters, becomes more historical, begins to depend on the narrator-chains of Arab history ("It is related by Hazli, who heard it from Tibui son of Musa, who again heard it from his father ..."). We are at once in a more organized, more disciplined, and less arbitrary world, a world of law, where men, however anxious for power, fame, and wealth, also serve a cause above themselves. The soldier obeys the general, the general the governor, the governor the caliph; and all serve the Prophet, Islam, and G.o.d.
After the failure of the first two expeditions against Sind, the third caliph, Osman or Uthman (644a56), orders a detailed report on the affairs of "Hind and Sind"-its rules of war, its strategy, the nature of its government, the structure of its society. The order goes to Abdullah, and Abdullah pa.s.ses it on to Hakim; and Abdullah is so impressed by what Hakim has to say that he sends Hakim direct to the caliph.
"O Hakim," the caliph says, "have you seen Hindustan and learnt all about it?"
"Yes, O commander of the faithful."
"Give us a description of it."
"Its water is dark and dirty. Its fruit is bitter and poisonous. Its land is stony and its earth is salt. A small army will soon be annihilated there, and a large one will soon die of hunger."
"How are the people? Are they faithful, or violators of their word?"
"They are treacherous and deceitful."
The caliph takes fright at this last piece of information and forbids the invasion of Sind.
But under the later caliphs the idea comes up again and again. The seventh expedition is led by Sinan, whose distinction now-time is pa.s.sing-is that he was born in the lifetime of the Prophet and had been given his name by the Prophet. There was a tradition that the Prophet had said to Sinan"s father, Salmah: "O Salmah, I congratulate you on the birth of a son." But though the Prophet appears to him in a dream, Sinan is killed in Sind. And two expeditions after that also end badly.
Towards the end of the seventh century Hajjaj becomes governor of "Iraq, Sind and Hind." Hajjaj has first to deal with religious-racial disaffection in Kufa and Iraq. Then he, too, sends an army to Sind: King Dahar of Sind has been encouraging Muslim rebels.
Hajjaj"s army is defeated by King Dahar"s son. The Arab commander is killed, and Arabs are taken prisoner. The reigning caliph wants to hear no more of Sind. The country is too far away, he writes Hajjaj; the people are too cunning, the expeditions are too expensive, and too many Muslims are being killed. But Hajjaj asks for another chance; he promises to pay back to the royal treasury double the sum spent on a new invasion. The caliph agrees; he gives a written order for the invasion of Sind. Hajjaj selects six thousand experienced soldiers from Syria, appoints as general his seventeen-year-old son-in-law, Mohammed Bin Qasim, and superintends every detail of the preparations.
The army-with a full complement of pack-camels and camelmen (one camel for every four soldiers)-is to go by land. The siege supplies-including naphtha arrows, coats of mail, battering rams, and a special catapult that requires five hundred men to operate it-are to go by sea. Bin Qasim is to do nothing without the authority of Hajjaj; a system of runners ensures that letters get from Sind to Kufa in seven days. In his letters Hajjaj constantly mixes military instructions with religious exhortations. "Dig a ditch around your camp.... Be awake for the greater part of the night; and let those of you who can read the Koran be busy reading it...." The army must always camp in open ground; at times of battle the army must always be divided into five sections: centre, vanguard, rear guard, left wing, right wing, with cavalry on the wings.
Bin Qasim arrives at the port of Debal. The supplies sent by sea arrive the same day. But Hajjaj doesn"t give the order to engage in battle until the eighth day. At the end of that day a Brahmin comes out of the town. He tells the Arabs that the town is guarded by a talisman: the four long flags of green silk that hang down from the arms of the flagstaff on the dome of the great temple of Debal. While the flagstaff stands, the Brahmin says, the people of Debal will fight.
It is the first of the betrayals that will a.s.sist the Arab conquest. But they are not betrayals, really. They are no more than the actions of people who understand only that power is power, and believe they are only changing rulers; they cannot conceive that a new way is about to come.
Bin Qasim asks his catapult engineer, Jaubat, whether he can knock down the flagstaff.
Jaubat says, "If we remove two ramrods from the big catapult, with three stones I will blow off the flag and the pole and break the dome of the temple."
"Ten thousand dirams for you if you do that," Bin Qasim says. "But if you fail? And if you spoil the caliph"s catapult?"
Jaubat says, "Let the hands of Jaubat be cut off."
That is the compact (but it has to be ratified by Hajjaj). And on the next day, while the Arabs attack the town from four directions, the big catapult is placed where Jaubat says, the five hundred catapult men pull on the ropes, and the stones are shot off and the flagstaff and the dome are shattered. And it is then as the Brahmin said: the defenders of Debal open their gates and ask for mercy. But Hajjaj has issued precise instructions for this first victory: the residents of Debal are not to be spared. The Arab army has to slaughter for three days: this is what Bin Qasim tells the people of Debal.
After the slaughter, the booty: the treasure and the slaves. One-fifth, the royal fifth, is set aside for the caliph, "in obedience to the religious law"; Hajjaj"s treasurer takes charge of that. (And it is odd to reflect that the Spanish royal fifth, set aside by Columbus and Cortes and others in the New World, should have had its origin in the religious laws of the Arabs.) The rest of the booty of Debal is distributed fairly, according to Arab practice: a cavalryman getting twice as much as a camelman or a foot soldier.
The war is far from over. Sind is big, and has many fortified towns. But Debal sets the pattern: the siege, the betrayal by n.o.bles or Brahmins or Buddhist priests who do not believe in killing; the entry by the Arabs; the killing; the checking and distribution of the booty, after the caliph"s fifth has been deducted (and in one place the sharing out of the booty takes as long as the killing).
It is in the district of Siwistan that the people get to understand the nature of the invader. A spy from the Chanas tribe sees the Arabs at prayer in their camp: the whole army standing up, a picture of equality, unity, and union, the general leading his men in prayer, but at one with them. The effect on the Chanas people is immediate. They go in a body to the Arabs-who are now having supper-and surrender. (Pakistanis today who have seen the Chinese soldiers building the SinkiangaPakistan Silk Road in the far north are similarly awed by the discipline and unity of the Chinese.) After the ma.s.sacre at Debal the killing is more selective. Traders, artisans, and peasants are allowed to continue in their occupations and practise their religion; Brahmins continue to be administrators. All that is required of unbelievers is the tribute and the special tax. But Hajjaj insists on the killing of the warrior cla.s.s and the enslaving of their dependents. When he gets Dahar"s head and Bin Qasim"s report of victory he writes sternly: "My dear cousin, I have received your life-augmenting letter. On its receipt my gladness and joy knew no bounds.... But the way of granting pardon prescribed by the law is different from the one adopted by you.... The Great G.o.d says in the Koran: "O true believers, when you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads." The above command of the Great G.o.d is a great command and must be respected and followed.... Concluded with compliments. Written by Nafia in the year 93." And he returns to this point even later in the campaign. "My distinct orders are that all those who are fighting men should be a.s.sa.s.sinated, and their sons and daughters imprisoned and retained as hostages."
So at the big town of Brahminabad, after his entry, Bin Qasim "next came to the place of execution and in his presence ordered all the men belonging to the military cla.s.ses to be beheaded with swords. It is said that about six thousand fighting men were ma.s.sacred on this occasion; some say sixteen thousand."
And King Dahar never understood the nature of the war, never understood that more than his throne was at stake. There was for him, in war, an element of chivalry and deadly play. He could have prevented Bin Qasim from crossing the Indus River; it was what he was advised to do. But he thought that undignified. He could have retreated even then, and left the desert to deal with the invaders; it was again what he was advised to do. But again he thought that undignified. He died in battle. Naphtha arrows set the litter on his elephant alight. There were two women servants in the litter, one preparing betel leaves for the king to chew, one pa.s.sing him arrows; there was also a Brahmin. The elephant, frightened by the fire on its back, plunged into the shallow lake beside the Indus; and mounted Arab archers killed King Dahar while he was still in the litter. Like a warrior, Dahar had gone into battle prepared for death and the funeral pyre. His body, when it was found (betrayed by the Brahmin who had been in the litter), smelled of musk and attar of roses. The women servants were captured; they later identified the king"s severed head for Bin Qasim.
The sister Dahar had nominally married for the sake of his kingship burned herself to death with other women of her household. Dahar"s real wife (now the property of the Arab caliph and state) was bought by Bin Qasim with part of the loot of Sind. And Dahar"s two daughters were sent in the charge of Abyssinian slaves to the caliph.
They were admitted into the caliph"s harem. He allowed them to rest for a few days. Then he asked for them to be brought to him at night. He wanted to know who was the elder; he wished to take her first. He found out through an interpreter. The elder was called Surijdew. When the caliph tried to embrace her she jumped up and said: "May the king live long! I, a humble slave, am not fit for your majesty"s bedroom, because the just amir, Imaduddin Mohammed Bin Qasim, kept us both with him for three days and then sent us to the caliph. Perhaps your custom is such, or else this disgrace should not be permitted by kings."
The caliph bit his hand. He immediately ordered a letter to be sent to Bin Qasim, ordering him to "put himself in raw leather and come back to the chief seat of the caliph."
Bin Qasim was on the Indian border. He obeyed. He asked his men to put him in a fresh hide, to put the hide in a box, and to send the box to the caliph. He died within two days. The body, when it came to Baghdad, was displayed by the caliph to the daughters of King Dahar. "Look," he said, "how our orders are promptly obeyed by our officers." And then Surijdew said she had lied, to be revenged on Bin Qasim. She and her sister were both virgins; they had not been touched by Bin Qasim.
"The caliph immediately ordered the two sisters to be buried alive in a wall. From that time up to our own days, the banner of Islam has been rising higher and higher and gaining greater and greater glory day by day."
With that apparent inconsequentiality the narrative ends. The recall of Bin Qasim speaks of some political change in Iraq and Syria at the time; but the Arabian Nights fabrication, and the degeneracy it implies, is a reminder that five hundred years separate the Chachnama from the conquest of Sind: the Mongol storm is about to break over minaret and seraglio.
THE Arab conquest of Sind is distinct from the Muslim invasions of India proper, which began about three centuries later. But the Sind conquered by Bin Qasim was a big country, roughly the area of present-day southern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan; and the Chachnama might be said to be an account of the Islamic beginnings of the state. But it is a b.l.o.o.d.y story, and the parts that get into the schoolbooks are the fairy tales. An Arab ship was taking gifts to the caliph; the ship was seized by King Dahar, and Muslims were made captives. The women among them called out, "Hajjaj, save us!" To rescue them (rather than the soldiers captured during the previous Arab expedition), Hajjaj invaded Sind.
Little things have to be changed even in the fairy tales. The flags on the temple of Debal-the talisman knocked down by the catapult-were green (in my 1900 translation, by a Sindhi, Kalichbeg). But green is the Islamic colour; so, in at least one textbook, the flags are made red, for the children. In little things, as in big, the faith has to be served.
In September 1979, on Defence of Pakistan Day, there was a long article in the Pakistan Times on Bin Qasim as a strategist. The a.s.sessment was military, neutral, fair to the soldiers of both sides. It drew a rebuke from the chairman of the National Commission on Historical and Cultural Research.
"Employment of appropriate phraseology is necessary when one is projecting the image of a hero. Expressions such as "invader" and "defenders," and "the Indian army" fighting bravely but not being quick enough to "fall upon the withdrawing enemy" loom large in the article. It is further marred by some imbalanced statements such as follows: "Had Raja Dahar defended the Indus heroically and stopped Qasim from crossing it, the history of this sub-continent might have been quite different." One fails to understand whether the writer is applauding the victory of the hero or lamenting the defeat of his rival?"
The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology. The excavated city of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley-overrun by the Aryans in 1500 B.C.-is one of the archaeological glories of Pakistan and the world. The excavations are now being damaged by waterlogging and salinity, and appeals for money have been made to world organizations. A featured letter in Dawn offered its own ideas for the site. Verses from the Koran, the writer said, should be engraved and set up in Mohenjo-Daro in "appropriate places": "Say (unto them, O Mohammed): Travel in the land and see the nature of the sequel for the guilty ... Say (O Mohammed, to the disbelievers): Travel in the land and see the nature of the consequence for those who were before you. Most of them were idolaters."
So theology complicates history for the people of Pakistan. And for people who feel that their country hasn"t worked, that in the Muslim homeland they are still strangers, or dispossessed, or threatened with dispossession, for such people the wish to claim kinship with a triumphant Islam makes for further disturbance.
In orthodox theology only the first four caliphs were rightly guided. After that the caliphate becomes a dynasty; the Islamic ideals of brotherhood are betrayed. Sind, therefore, was conquered by the Arabs in the bad time; but the Arabs brought the faith, so the bad time becomes a sacred time. The Mongols destroyed the Arab empire in the East. So the Mongols were bad. But the Mongols became Muslims and established the great Mogul empire in India; so that becomes a wonderful time. The Turks displace the Mongols; but the Turks also become Muslims and powerful, and they, too, cease to be bad. So history-which begins as a "pleasant story of conquest"-becomes hopelessly confusing. And out of this more-than-colonial confusion some Pakistanis fabricate personalities for themselves, in which they are Islamic and conquerors and-in Pakistan-a little like people in exile from their glory. They become Turks or Moguls. Or Arabs.
The Chachnama shows the Arabs of the seventh century as a people stimulated and enlightened and disciplined by Islam, developing fast, picking up learning and new ways and new weapons (catapults, Greek fire) from the people they conquer, intelligently curious about the people they intend to conquer. The current fundamentalist wish in Pakistan to go back to that pure Islamic time has nothing to do with a historical understanding of the Arab expansion. The fundamentalists feel that to be like those early Arabs they need only one tool: the Koran. Islam, which made the seventh-century Arabs world conquerors, now clouds the minds of their successors or pretended successors.
It was the poet Iqbal"s hope that an Indian Muslim state might rid Islam of "the stamp that Arab imperialism was forced to give it." It turns out now that the Arabs were the most successful imperialists of all time, since to be conquered by them (and then to be like them) is still, in the minds of the faithful, to be saved.
History, in the Pakistan schoolbooks I looked at, begins with Arabia and Islam. In the simpler texts, surveys of the Prophet and the first four caliphs and perhaps the Prophet"s daughter are followed, with hardly a break, by lives of the poet Iqbal, Mr. Jinnah, the political founder of Pakistan, and two or three "martyrs," soldiers or airmen who died in the holy wars against India in 1965 and 1971.
History as selective as this leads quickly to unreality. Before Mohammed there is blackness: slavery, exploitation. After Mohammed there is light: slavery and exploitation vanish. But did it? How can that be said or taught? What about all those slaves sent back from Sind to the caliph? What about the descendants of the African slaves who walk about Karachi? There is no adequate answer: so the faith begins to nullify or overlay the real world.
The military rule; political parties are banned. There is 15 percent literacy, and fundamentalism stifles the universities. There is no industry, no science. The economy is a remittance economy; the emigrants, legal and illegal, pour out. But in the social studies textbook in the sixth cla.s.s in English-language schools the child reads: " "Uncle," said Salman, "I have read in my history book that in old times the caste system had a very firm hold in India. Everyone had to adopt the occupation of his family. He could take no other work." "Oh!" said the uncle. "Conditions in India are much the same to this day. But we are a democratic country. Here everyone is free to adopt the occupation of his choice. This is the secret of our progress." "
5.
Hyderabad Boogie-Woogie
Ahmed wanted me to go to the interior of Sind, to a famous shrine near the town of Hyderabad. Sind was full of the shrines of Muslim saints. Islam had long ago taken over the old holy places of Buddhists and Hindus; but memories of old religious att.i.tudes adhered, and Islamic purists didn"t always approve of the mystical or ascetic or near-idolatrous practices of some of these places.
But Ahmed had his own reasons. The shrine or sufi centre he wanted me to see was a.s.sociated with an order or brotherhood-some centuries old, he said-who had renounced the world to live in the desert and serve the poor. They ran a dispensary; every day at lunchtime they fed all the poor who came. It was the idea of sacrifice and service that attracted Ahmed. And one morning he put me in a car and sent me a hundred miles north to Hyderabad.
It was desert all the way from Karachi. The "superhighway" was flat and fast. The Indus River, where it was crossed, was wide, its muddy waters choppy; little fishing boats with dingy white sails gave an abrupt antique feel to the unremarkable desert. Hyderabad-a nondescript desert town with low, ochre-distempered concrete buildings-baked. But there were pools of stagnant water here and there: the desert was waterlogged.
And when I got to the Circuit House, where I thought I was staying, there was trouble. Two civil servants, with little English, greeted me and told me that a minister had unexpectedly arrived, my booking had been cancelled, and I was to stay in a hotel. "A cla.s.s, A cla.s.s," they repeated. But the place they took me to was-in spite of the central air conditioning-rough and dark, with a broken lavatory seat in my bathroom.
I didn"t have to spend the night there, though. Razak, the young man who was to take me around, had another programme for me. Ahmed"s sufi centre was to wait until the next day. Razak intended that evening to show me other shrines and religious places, hours away, and in an opposite direction. We started in the middle of the afternoon.
Razak was a Sindhi. On this religious tour with a visitor he was at once a pilgrim, who couldn"t have enough of the holy places, and a bureaucrat, firm about his programme and schedule. He was intelligent and kind, but language was our mutual irritant.
I strained him right from the start. I said, seeing a man in Sindhi costume by the roadside, "So you have Africans here, too, Razak." He said sharply, "They are not Africans. They are Negroes, local Negroes." Razak"s English was precise, as precise as that. But several Pakistanis-a Pakistani teacher-chain-separated him from the spoken language, and what came out required a lot of attention. I said, "Do they do anything with these reeds, Razak?" He said, "Bar skates." I struggled with that. After a while I said, "What are bar skates, Razak?" And now he struggled with his irritation. He said, "Bar skates are used for putting domestic articles in." Baskets: a precise, but no doubt for him also a taxing, definition. And it could be like that: I being Harpo to his Chico Marx, or Chico to his Harpo.
So, though there was much that Razak could have told me, I drove ignorantly through this ancient, peopled part of Sind, hardly knowing why Razak became excited at certain places: understanding only later, for instance, that the desolation of Mansura was the site of King Dahar"s great city of Brahminabad.
We drew a blank at the first shrine. The holy man here, Razak told me, had a hundred thousand followers. We arrived a couple of hours after dark, and to enter the compound was like entering a medieval town. Boys opened the main gate for us and closed it behind us. The lanes were paved, with central gutters. People were sitting on tiled platforms outside the great man"s courtyard. One man took our request inside; another man came out to answer it. He was thin and oldish, in blue, with a cloth glove on his left hand. He said the great man received only in the mornings; he was now resting.
So we left and drove on to the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif. In the dark, tiled courtyard of the mosque there was music: the saint"s 250-year-old devotional songs. And listening to the music at the end of the long day-a small crowd, some asleep, people coming and going-I felt, as I had felt in the garden of Ayatollah Shariatmadari"s house in Mashhad, that Islam had achieved community and a kind of beauty, had given people a feeling of completeness-if only the world outside could be shut out, and men could be made to forget what they knew.
In my room in the rest house the air conditioning didn"t work. If I opened the window, insects came in. And it was because of the insects that I didn"t sleep outside, like Razak and the others. To sleep in the open you had to wrap yourself up like a mummy, from head to toe; that took practice. So I stayed in my hot room and rested and waited for the morning. We were to make an early start, going back to Hyderabad and then beyond, to get to Ahmed"s sufi centre in time for the midday feeding of the poor: Ahmed had been particular about that.
Beyond Hyderabad there were patches of cultivation, patches of scrub, patches of sand. The brightness hurt; the heat hurt. Village dogs stood still in yellow waterlogged pools. We were in one of the famous river valleys of early civilization. But there was no feeling of a valley; the land felt like an immense plain, until you noticed that the flat land was at different levels and that the upper levels were capped with rock, so that it seemed that the Indus was the merest remnant of a vaster flow of water that had flattened everything not protected by rock. For some miles we drove on the west bank of the river. In the distance were jagged hills. They were of pure rock, fractured in parts. Some great convulsion had created this mountain range, forcing up and folding over the rock strata like pastry; and then some water cataclysm had punched through the rock. The river made a bend here. And not far away was the town with the shrine.
The stalls in the main street were hung with photographs of Mr. Bhutto. Mr. Bhutto, during his time in office, had given or caused to be given new gilt gates for the shrine. They could be seen from the outside, beyond the outer iron gates. A plaque on the wall recorded Mr. Bhutto"s gift; but since his death the plaque had been covered over by a gold-fringed green cloth. Pilgrims looked both at the gates and at the green cloth before they went in.
We left our shoes with the man who sat below a sheet awning. He was turbanned and dignified, brisk, a professional; he tied up each pair of shoes, gave each pair a number, and charged half a rupee a pair. The fee seemed high; there was no compet.i.tion; and I asked Razak whether the pitch was hereditary or somehow protected. He said these shoe-keeping shrine pitches were auctioned by the government, and the bidding could go as high as four thousand rupees, four hundred dollars. The successful bidder was, in more than one way, in business.
It was crowded and close inside. People were sleeping on the worn marble floor. They had come from far, and for the poor there was no other place to stay: the wretched of the desert, of those scattered poor fields and villages beside the Indus, people for whom the shrine-and all the shrines that had stood here, even before Islam, between the river and the shattered hill-range of rock-had always provided shelter and comfort. The marble floor was grimy; there were babies, and many flies, seeking always to settle on the floor and the bodies.
The shrine-the tomb of the saint-was railed around in silver, beautifully worked, worn by the hands of the faithful. One corner post had been broken, perhaps by a crush of pilgrims on a particular day; there was a kind of frenzy even now. There were several canopies, one above the other, and just below the ceiling was a wire net, perhaps to catch bird droppings. A stone, clamped around with a silver band, hung by a short cord from the canopy bar. The stone was heart-shaped; it was pale-brown, and so smooth and shiny from being touched that it did seem to have a fleshy quality. I thought there was some significance in the shape. But Razak said the saint had carried this stone on his belly while he lived; the Prophet had done the same thing. (Probably, though, it was an ascetic adaptation of an old Arabian torture: Bilal, the Abyssinian slave who was one of the first to accept the Prophet"s message, was exposed and tied down in the Meccan desert with a heavy stone on his chest.) People pa.s.sed their hands over the stone, caressed it, and then brought their hands to their lips and eyes, or touched their heart; or they appeared to hug themselves. Outside, the Indus Valley town, blazing with heat; here, this pa.s.sion. It was important to touch: not only the stone and the silver railing, but also the cloth draped over the saint"s tomb, at one end of which were a mitre and cope, curiously Christian-looking, and a turban which seemed to stand for a head. It was a land of faith, but it was also a land of dust and sand and dry nostrils and nose-picking; and the peasant woman who rubbed her hand on the rail before touching her young sons" mouths with her hand, also in between scoured and sc.r.a.ped at her nostrils.
We went on to the koli, or sufi centre. It lay at the end of a short bazaar lane. The dirt surface of the lane had turned to black mud, with washing-up and other water from the food stalls on either side, which were in business and active, although at the koli it was feeding time for the poor: brown rounds of flatbread were in many hands at the entrance.
To the right, as we entered to noise and bustle and music, was the shrine: the tombs of the pirs, the holy men who had settled here to celebrate the saint and had become rulers or governors of the brotherhood. A Mondrian of the desert had been at work with modern bathroom tiles on the shrine walls, creating a bigger and more direct version of the abstract painter"s Broadway Boogie-Woogie: a kind of Hyderabad Boogie-Woogie, with stepped lines of yellow, white, blue, red, black, and so on, delightful to come upon because it was an expression of such pure delight.
Directly in front was the feeding place, an open, pillared pavilion. One man stood guard over pyramids of brown flatbread covered with a cloth, bread that by its colour suggested more than the wholesomeness of whole grain, suggested also the Indus Valley earth. One man was ladling out a thin lentil soup from a big black iron pot. In the porch of the building to the left another man was doling out water; a boy, aware of his importance, was holding the hose that led from the tap to the water barrel.
Razak had become involved with a man in a blue gown who appeared to be of authority. The man in blue was short, squarely built, with a shaved head; there was a touch of Central Asia in his features. He said that the pir was out and would be back in three hours. In Pakistan the standard unit of stated delay was half an hour; three hours meant not that day. So there was no one to talk to? The man in blue said the munshi, the secretary, was available. He asked for our names and details. When Razak gave them, the man in blue said in English, in a curiously flat way, his eyes still a.s.sessing us, that he was inviting us to stay as his guests, to spend the night, to stay as long as we liked. The pir would be back in three hours; in the meantime we would see the munshi; we would be given food; we were his guests.
He deputed someone to lead us upstairs. We picked our way past puddles (from the water hose) and were led, through a confusion of small verandahed quadrangles on the upper floor, to a clean room spread with bedding, and with two sets of bolsters and cushions. A fan was turned on; a window was opened. It was cool and inexpressibly relaxing. Two record players or amplified radios were on outside, but the fan m.u.f.fled the noise; the songs-not film songs, Razak said: devotional songs-cancelled each other out; and in the coolness it made a distant, pleasing background.