with women, the pesakit spinning from one partner to another or whirling alone, flinging his hair around and around, still in a trance. A man from the crowd entered from the side of the stage, the drums beat faster, the serunai sounded deep in the night. Lightning flashed, people danced in the trees, and in the frenzy the pesakit fell to his knees, and rose to dance with the shaman who had caught out the malevolent spirit tormenting him, and fell, and rose again, up and down, up and down, and then crawled toward the minduk, the shaman looming at his back, swinging his hips, leering, as if to take him from behind.
It was after midnight when the minduk brought the music to an end. He bantered for a while with the shaman, who coaxed the pesakit out of his trance and instructed him to stay calm when he went home: he needed all his energy for the next performance. The shaman sang a benediction, the minduk crept away on his knees, tossing jasmine over his shoulder to close the stage, and from a nearby house women brought out cups of coffee layered with condensed milk. How to remain calm after this?
“Politicians are a terrible people,” Anthony Burgess declares in his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, recalling his service as an education officer during the Malayan Emergency (1948–60), which included a stint in Kota Bharu. He wrote his first novels in Malaya and Brunei, and upon his return to England, his tour cut short by the diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor, he set out to write enough books to provide for his wife after he was gone. In the year that doctors gave him to live he finished nine novels—and then discovered that he was perfectly healthy, by which time he had learned how to live by his pen. Had an incorrect diagnosis spurred the development of a great novelist? Perhaps. A shaman might have divined that he suffered from a blockage of his angin, but Burgess was in all likelihood never treated by a shaman. And no one ever would be again, if the PAS leader tipped to become Kelantan’s next deputy prime minister had his way. Husam bin Musa was the sort of politician that Burgess despised.
Eddin and I went to visit Husam the morning after the main puteri. In the lobby of his office, in the provincial parliament building in Kota Bharu, a small old man greeted us in a friendly manner—a PAS official whose son was in prison for his ties to Jemaah Islamiyah, the militant group bent on turning Indonesia, Malaysia, the southern Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, and Brunei into an Islamic caliphate, like the dynasties that once ruled much of the Islamic world. It would not be long before three Indonesian members of the group were tried, convicted, and shot for their role in the Bali bombings, which had killed over two hundred people, the majority of them tourists; their bid to scare off Western visitors and investors and thus reduce the island to penury inspired some in Kelantan who also wished to be free of the infidels. Oh, to have listened in on the conversation between the terrorist’s father and the PAS leader.
Husam, tall and lean in his olive Iranian shirt and black pants, struck me as a humorless man, and there was something in his cold black eyes that brought to mind my one encounter with the Serbian military commander, Ratko Mladić, orchestrator of the siege of Sarajevo. On New Year’s morning 1993, a filmmaker I was with spotted him in the lobby of a Belgrade hotel, on his way to Geneva to negotiate an end to the fighting in Bosnia, and when we asked him about the prospects for peace he fixed his eyes on us, growling that he was in no mood for compromise. His troops occupied two thirds of the republic, and he calculated, rightly, that the Western powers would take no action against him. In fact the war dragged on for thirty more bloody months, culminating in his order to slaughter thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, before NATO finally intervened, preparing the ground for the Dayton Peace Accords and Mladić’s indictment by the International War Crimes Tribunal for genocide and crimes against humanity. But justice remained elusive: Mladić was on the run, rumored to be hiding in Serbia or Montenegro, a hero to some Serbs who saw him as a defender of the homeland, just as some Muslims hailed Osama bin Laden for defending Islam against the West: his outlaw stature grew as long as he remained free. And it was his glare of certainty that I saw in Husam’s eyes now. When I asked the PAS leader if his party was providing support to the Islamic insurgents in southern Thailand, he bristled.
“It is very strange,” he said. “We never interfere outside our border.”
“Never?” I said.
“We believe in argument, not force,” he insisted. “If Islam is a true religion, it can win the argument by open debate.”
This line of defense he repeated several times, which led me to speculate that if he was not involved in the insurgency he probably knew who was—though a glance from Eddin prompted me to move on to another subject: PAS’s setback in the recent elections. Perhaps the theocratic argument has lost its power to persuade? I said, hoping to spark a conversation about the relationship between Islam and democracy, which in the view of al-Qaeda was “a man-made infidel religion,” and between Malays (who make up half of Malaysia’s population) and their countrymen—aboriginal, Chinese, Indian. It was no secret that Malays had an advantage: Malay was the official language, Islam the state religion, and one political party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), had ruled the country in coalition with smaller parties, including PAS, since independence in 1957, in a constitutional arrangement that favored Malays in business, education, and government. Religious and ethnic tensions were built into the system.
It was a point of pride for Husam that Kelantan had avoided bloodshed during the 1969 race riots, PAS having warned the village headmen that they would be held responsible for any fighting. Nonviolence, said Husam, is a basic principle of Islam, a word that means both peace and surrender. And Eddin added that Islam had spread to Southeast Asia by peaceful means, through the preaching of Sufi traders who did not raze the Hindu temples they found in Java, Malacca, and elsewhere, as happened in the early centuries of the Muslim conquest of India; some missionaries had used shadow puppetry (another art form banned by PAS) as a medium of propagation, translating themes from the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, into an Islamic idiom—a process of borrowing and adaptation common to the dissemination of ideas throughout human history.
But if Islam is the peace that comes from surrendering to God, a darker vision of the faith possesses the Western imagination, a legacy of centuries of conflict between Muslims and Europeans; in the aftermath of 9/11, with American forces on the march in Afghanistan and Iraq, it seemed to me that a clearer picture of the world’s second largest religion might serve as a foil to the fear and ignorance driving much of the debate in the American media about the relationship between Islam and the West. For the history of Islam, its triumphs and defeats, reforms and counterreforms, is like that of Judaism or Christianity: a study of inspiration, inertia, and the mundane ; the record of its responses to changing circumstances, to the work of time and space, resembles that of every human endeavor—sometimes wise, sometimes foolish, always partial.
The history begins one night in 610, in a cave outside Mecca, when Muhammad, an Arab trader deep in prayer, received a call from the angel Gabriel to recite. What shall I recite? he said. Twice again the angel called on him to recite, and twice again he asked what he should say. “Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, who by the pen taught man what he did not know,” said Gabriel—the first in a series of revelations, over more than twenty years, dictated to the trader, memorized by his followers, and eventually written down on palm leaves and stones to form the Koran: that is, the Recital. God’s “standing miracle,” in Muhammad’s words, consists of a hundred and fourteen verses, arranged not chronologically but in order of length, mostly longest to shortest, and Muslims believe that what the prophet recited in trance was the final set of divine instructions revealed to mankind, a perfect transcription of God’s word to complete the revelations of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus; hence Jews and Christians are regarded as fellow People of the Book, whom God commands Muslims to respect. For God speaks throughout the Koran, defining the obligations of the faithful and meaning of the faith that united the warring Arab tribes; within a century, Muhammad’s followers had conquered the Levant, North Africa, Persia, and Spain, spreading the new religion to the edge of the known world, and it was not long before Islam had gained a foothold in India and Southeast
