Читать книгу The Tree of the Doves - Christopher Merrill - Страница 8

PART I

CEREMONY

Her symptoms were vague: aches and pains, a general feeling of despair. Yet the figure she cut in the circle of women seated on one side of the stage was regal. This was not her first main puteri (literally, “playing the princess”), a healing ritual performed in the northeastern Malaysian state of Kelantan despite the proscription, dating from a 1991 decree by Islamic authorities, against traditional ceremonies. And she betrayed nothing in her demeanor of the drama about to unfold on this hot, humid night in the jungle.

After evening prayers, the entire village or kampong assembled by the stage, an open-sided tin-roofed shed cleared of its tools, machinery, and motorcycles. The size of the gathering was the first surprise: hundreds of people of all ages sat on fallen palm trees or stood in the fringe of forest thickening the darkness. I had traveled here with Eddin Khoo, the director of Pusaka, a small organization dedicated to preserving Malaysia’s traditional art forms; and while his passion for indigenous ways of apprehending reality had spurred my journey it also raised questions in my mind about their true place in this society. Dislocation, a recurring theme of our conversation on the long drive from Kuala Lumpur, through lowland plains and rubber-tree plantations, then jungles and forests and craggy mountains, to the coastal city of Kota Bharu, the royal seat of Kelantan, explained some of the appeal of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), which ruled this conservative state: it offered a belief system to counter the uncertainties and encroachments of modern life. If I had assumed that PAS’s strictures would keep the villagers away, their numbers seemed to vindicate Eddin’s efforts to save the banned ceremonies. He had studied, documented, and promoted them for over a decade, defying the Islamists in an inventive fashion—apprenticing himself to a shadow puppeteer; sponsoring main puteri shamans and musicians; and training young people in indigenous dance forms. It was not hard to imagine him losing perspective in his enthusiasm for what remained of Malaysia’s old ways. He thought himself fortunate thus far to have avoided arrest.

“What we’re doing is basically illegal,” he said with feeling.

He was a short, fidgety man, half-Chinese, half-Tamil, with a lilting British accent (courtesy of Newcastle University in Newcastle upon Tyne); his pugnacious bearing did not issue from his black belt in kung fu as much as from a lifelong feud with his countrymen. Born during the Sino-Malay race riots of 1969, which left hundreds dead and part of Kuala Lumpur’s Chinese population homeless, he decided early on that there was no place for him in his society, and so he became a thoroughgoing Anglophile. He read David Copperfield at the age of seven; his parents would trot him out at parties to say the word “conflagration” ; asked to name the most important Malaysian writers, he said, “Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, and Anthony Burgess.” English on Eddin’s tongue had a marvelous ring, all flattened vowels and trilled r’s and cackles of delight punctuating his speech as he drove himself to exhaustion in a bid to change his culture through the word. He slept no more than four hours a night—his soporific was watching World Wrestling Federation TV shows—and in his insomnia he had devised an ambitious literary agenda. He was tinkering with his first collection of poems; writing books on the Muslim predicament and his shadow puppeteer master; translating literary works from English into Malay. His version of Moby-Dick was proceeding by fits and starts; he intended to do all of Shakespeare’s plays and publish them under his own imprint.

That was not the end of it. He planned to run in the Kuala Lumpur Marathon—a foolish risk, I thought, for a smoker with high blood pressure. Equally disturbing was his claim to be adept at catching king cobras—a skill acquired in childhood from the family gardener, which might be put to use during the main puteri: a swarm of king cobras had invaded the kampong earlier in the day; if they returned, the headman planned to spray them with ammonia. It is taboo to kill a king cobra, which for Hindus like Eddin is the incarnation of Shiva, and also unwise, since the scent of the dead snake could attract other snakes. Likewise the sound of the serunai (a reed instrument similar to an oboe), Eddin added as we took our seats behind the musicians, on a plank of wood laid on the sand. Not to worry, he said. Rubber tappers had discovered that spitting on a wad of tobacco made a poultice that, if applied to a king cobra bite, might keep you alive until antivenin serum—always in short supply—could be located.

“We have a Malaysian saying,” he said. “Fight poison with poison.”

The saying has a political dimension. This healing ritual, for example, was taking place against the backdrop of a Muslim insurgency in southern Thailand. Two weeks earlier, on April 28, 2004, rebels had coordinated attacks on ten police stations just over the border from Kelantan. Armed with machetes, the rebels were no match for the Thai military, which killed more than a hundred, many of whom had sought refuge in a mosque. The Thai government accused Malaysia of supporting the insurgency, which some believed was connected to al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah (the militant organization responsible for the Bali car bombings in October 2002); and while the border was closely monitored (preventing, among other things, a group of traditional Thai dancers from traveling to Eddin’s next festival, in Kuala Lumpur), no one thought that the bloodshed was over.

Meanwhile a story had just broken on the television news magazine 60 Minutes and in a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh of a scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where under the rule of Saddam Hussein thousands of dissidents had been tortured and executed. After the Iraqi strongman was deposed in the US-led invasion, the prison was used to inter suspected insurgents, and now photographs were circulating on the Internet of American military police torturing and abusing the prisoners—images of naked men stacked in a pyramid, punched by a soldier, and cowering before a German shepherd; of a woman with a cigarette dangling from her mouth giving the thumbs-up sign to a hooded prisoner’s penis; of corpses laid out on cement floors. The occupation of Iraq had taken a sadistic turn, the revelation of which was met with particular revulsion in the Islamic world; the photograph of a hooded figure standing on a box, with electrodes attached to his arms and genitals, was a fixture in political cartoons and graffiti from Egypt to Malaysia; Iraqis nicknamed the image The Statue of Liberty.

Eddin was scrutinizing the patient, as if to place her in his memory. She towered over the women attending to her—her sisters-in-law, Eddin guessed—and her features were as angular as theirs were round; her plaid sarong offset their bright yellows, blues, and greens; when she wrapped an orange scarf around her neck—the only colorful note in her attire—Eddin wondered aloud if her problems stemmed from barrenness. The success of the main puteri, he explained, depended upon the shaman discovering the source of her illness; part divination, part theater, this spirit-raising ceremony, usually undertaken as a last resort, would require her to surrender to his ministrations for two nights running, and the resignation etched into her face suggested that she was willing to try almost anything, if it would bring relief. She radiated a kind of fatalism familiar to Eddin.

“The Kelantan sensibility,” he said, laying his hand over his heart, “is located entirely in lament, in loss.” Tonight we would learn what was missing from this patient’s life, in a performance combining animist, Hindu, and Islamic elements. The magical spell woven by the main puteri, drawing on the oldest customs of the Malay Peninsula, was precisely what the purifying Islamists campaigned against. Kelantan is predominately Malay—hence Islamic—but its traditional rituals reflect a more complicated heritage of mixing and mingling than PAS acknowledged—a history of foreign influence dating back millennia. Malays descend from a variety of peoples: seafarers who migrated from China thousands of years before Christ, Indian traders who established kingdoms on the coasts, Arab travelers drawn to the Land of Gold, as it was called in Sanskrit records. The sea lanes fostered exchange with diverse cultures, attracting merchants, missionaries, and warriors from near and far, who helped to shape Malay customs, artistic expression, and religious practice—even as the original inhabitants of the peninsula, the indigenous people known as the Orang Osli, retreated into the interior. Thus Indians built Hindu and Buddhist temples for several centuries before Arab traders introduced Islam around 1400, a pattern repeated a century later with the arrival of Christianity, courtesy of Portuguese, Dutch, and then British colonizers; each group left a mark on Malay life; none destroyed its rival cultures; hence elements of each order contributed to the heterogeneous character of modern Malaysia—a history of exchange that some in power wished to eradicate. How would they react to such a large turnout tonight?

The air was still, the crowd rapt in the firelight of coconut husks burning in a sand pit beyond the stage. The faces of the villagers hunched by the trees were intermittently illuminated by flashes of lightning and the headlights of trucks and scooters arriving from neighboring kampongs. From the rafters hung jasmine flowers and a tray of sticky yellow rice topped with betel nut, coins, and an egg to attract the spirits; more food was set out on the reed mats covering the floor, along with bowls of ritual water and a pillow. The shaman, in a white shirt and blue vest, sat cross-legged before the musicians—the serunai player, ten percussionists arranging a variety of drums and gongs and cymbals, a man with a three-stringed rebab or spike fiddle—and recited verses from the Koran, swaying from side to side, a glass of water in one hand and a tray of food in his lap: a feast for the invisible powers of the earth, air, and water. And as he called on ancestral saints and jins and teachers to heal the patient, apologizing for any omissions, I did not know which to fear more: the arrival of the police or of the king cobra and her brood.

But the spectacle of the main puteri gradually dispelled some of my anxiety. First the shaman blessed the musical instruments with smoke from a burning coconut husk (a Hindu custom); and then, in time to the haunting melody of the serunai, which in my imagination carried far into the forest, and the complicated rhythms of one man striking a floor gong and another tapping a drum, he removed his vest and shirt and began to sing with the rebab player, who served as the minduk—the séance singer and dancer who for the next several hours would summon, interrogate, and appease the spirits from the world beyond the river. The minduk bantered with the shaman, coaxing the spirits to join them onstage, to inhabit the shaman, the medium for this elaborate production, who sank into a trance, and one by one the spirits took shape in his words and gestures, revealing different aspects of the patient’s personality, history, and character. Now he was whirling from the minduk to the musicians, now he was dancing slowly, seductively, around the patient, seated with her legs bent to the side at center stage, under a mobile of bananas, jasmine, rice cakes, bottlebrush, bougainvillea, a pink triangle, and an orange. She watched the shaman with a weary expression. I could not imagine the pain that had led her, or others acting on her behalf, to this very public examination of her soul.

The minduk and the shaman were divining what had upset her balance—and thus the harmony of the universe. The success of the ritual depended upon them discovering whether a hantu, a malign or unsettled spirit, had taken possession of her. Or had she lost the essence of her soul, her semangat? Did her malaise arise from unfulfilled desires? Act by act, the medicine men would summon spirits, populating the stage with a cast of characters from a cosmology rooted in the belief that divinity inheres in everything (in stones and trees, in the distant thunder and the water buffalo grazing by the rice paddies), one of whom might hold the key to healing the woman’s soul sickness.

Eddin described what followed as a form of improvisatory poetry, in the manner of ancient Greek bards who employed stock phrases as mnemonic aids and added new verses to each performance: an oral literature long since vanished from Western practice. No doubt its proscription in Kelantan leant it a certain power, in the same way that some poets in the Soviet Bloc held a special place in their countrymen’s hearts, answering the strictures and tedium of state-sponsored art with more vital forays into the language. And I likened the shaman’s commerce with the spirit world to the modern poet’s role as intermediary between the visible and invisible realms of experience. For I subscribed to the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz’s notion that poetry “is dictated by a daimonion”; hence the hope “that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instruments.” Like shamans, like divines navigating between this world and the next, some poets work on the premise that good and evil spirits are abroad. Who can say which will possess them in the act of writing—and whether a given poem will heal or harm?

Just as a shaman can be a medium for good or ill, so this ritual preserved, for better or worse, the memory of a people who had inhabited the Malay Peninsula through successive waves of invaders and missionaries and traders, adapting ideas and customs from the larger world—Chinese and Indian, Khmer and Siamese, Portuguese and British. Main puteri called the crowd to its origins, descending through layers of history, through sultanates and empires and kingdoms, to remind the paddy farmers and their families that in Kelantan, the cradle of Malay civilization, where witchcraft was still alive, there were measures to take if they were felled by one of the black arts.

Thus the minduk interrogated the spirits revealing themselves through the shaman to diagnose the cause of the woman’s problems, which, Eddin said, seemed to stem from her angin, her inner winds. From birth these winds had blown through her, now stronger, now lighter, determining her personality, talents, desires. Like the humors of Greek and Roman theory, as well as medieval European and Muslim thought, the four bodily fluids governing individual temperament and health (black and yellow bile, phlegm and blood), the angin constitute for Malays a system of understanding human behavior—the inherited traits and inclinations, which can be expressed or not, depending on a variety of factors, including the environment in which one lives. Indeed the most common condition treated in main puteri, anthropologist Carol Laderman notes in her study, Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine, and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance, is blockage of the inner winds, sakit berangin, which tends to afflict artists and musicians, not to mention healers. Main puteri is thus a means of reckoning with sicknesses born of the inner winds, which must periodically be freed and refreshed.

It is also a branch of the secret knowledge that mystics have sought through the ages in various religious traditions: the direct experience of worlds beyond the self, made known through poetry and music and dance, often leavened with humor. I admired Eddin for his dedication to preserving the rituals integral to a system of belief that threatened the religious authorities. And in the chanting of the minduk I heard echoes of the haunting music and refrain—Allah, Allah—that accompanied the whirling dervishes I had seen perform some years before at a sacred music festival in Morocco: men in white gowns, wide black belts, and tall brown hats spun around and around an outdoor stage in the city of Fes, arms raised, heads cocked to one side, the singer seated behind them, leading an ensemble of percussionists. That spring evening had been stifling, and in the press of the crowd I had stood on tiptoes to watch the Sufis turning and turning toward the truth, toward God, following a mystical path that some Islamic clerics deem heretical. It seemed as if my mind and body, numbed by a trans-Atlantic flight and a wearying drive into the interior were no longer my own, and as the dervishes from Damascus whirled on and on I slipped into another realm of being, not quite a trance, though I felt as if I was falling. It was not an unpleasant sensation, and I was experiencing something similar now in the jungle.

A second shaman entered the stage by the circle of women—oblivious, it seemed, to the other performers. Tall and dark, he bore a family resemblance to the minduk, and it was with a ceremonial air that he unfolded and donned a blue-and-white-checked sarong, cinching a bright red cloth around his chest with a flourish. The first shaman changed his clothes and left the stage, while the second made a show of greeting Eddin, his patron. The music stopped when this shaman knelt before the musicians and closed his eyes. In a deep, rich voice he praised Allah, he recited verses handed down through the ages, he went into a trance. It turned out that the seductive approach had not gone far enough. For the spirits inhabiting the second shaman were harder, his dancing more robust, calling to mind the gestures of a martial-arts master. Evidently a firmer hand was needed to bring out the conflicting elements in the soul of the patient, the pesakit.

“In traditional Malay society,” Eddin told me, “there’s very little room for the individual. But the stage is a place of liberty, where you can move out of your customary ways of relating to others and acknowledge individuality.”

This was the moment when the shaman asked for, and received, permission from the pesakit’s husband to touch her, and now he told her that she could go into a trance, if she liked, or jump into the air. Her body went limp, her facial features softening, and her first words from the depths of trance brought forth laughter from the crowd.

“She said she hasn’t been felt up in a long time,” Eddin explained. “This can be very embarrassing for the husband!”

The shaman pretended to hump her feet for a minute or two before resuming his banter with the minduk. He danced in an exalted state, he brushed off the pesakit’s request to caress her, he rubbed up against the other shaman. Eddin laughed.

“Whoa,” he said, translating the first shaman’s words. “He said he wants to fuck her, but he needs some lubricants.”

The pesakit sat before the minduk, and the shaman took up a position behind her, gazing at her long hair. Then he said something that drew a gasp from the crowd.

Eddin turned to me. “This is becoming very interesting,” he said.

“It’s already very interesting,” I replied.

He shook his head. “He just asked her if she’s a man.”

“What?” I said, incredulous.

“What a crazy country this is,” he said.

“Is that common?” I said.

“There are lots of transvestites in the villages,” he said.

“No wonder the Islamists disapprove,” I said.

The pesakit rose uncertainly to her feet, and the shaman began to spin her like a top under the mobile, slowly at first then faster and faster, spurred on by the drums and gongs and cymbals. Nothing that I had witnessed during my travels could have prepared me for the shock that I experienced when the pesakit dramatically tore off her scarf and said that she was indeed a man. He leaned toward us, head down, panting.

All your life, the shaman sang in a soothing voice, you haven’t known what to do, where to go, how to dress. He turned solicitous, almost tender, as if to calm a child in the throes of nightmare, and what he sang went to the heart of the matter. You’re still hungry after you eat, you don’t really sleep, and when you bathe you don’t get wet.

With a loud sigh the pesakit suddenly collapsed, as though stricken, falling heavily to the floor, and lay his head down in the minduk’s lap, and closed his eyes. Eddin took note of his gold earrings and bracelets, which glittered in the soft light.

“Gold is haraam for Muslim men,” he whispered. “Forbidden.” Now the shaman tapped the floor with his fingers, marking time in what became an entrancing rhythm, and sang a lament that seemed to echo from the beginning of time, and now the pesakit rose up on his knees to dance, twisting and turning, rolling his head from side to side, shoulders swaying, transported into an exalted state.

For he had crossed the threshold between waking and dreaming, leaving the rest of us on that strange border between daily life and enchantment. What was ordinary had become extraordinary, or vice versa, and the sight of a man in a sarong rocking on his knees like a supplicant, a man who had spent his life pretending to be a woman, was, to say the least, unnerving. Trance is integral to religious practice; also ecstasy. And the knowledge gained by spiritual adventurers in altered states of mind had certainly shaped my life, alerting me, for example, to the poetic possibilities of things glimpsed at the edge of vision—the mineral quality of sunlight after rain, the hieroglyphs that birds inscribe in the sky. But I had never witnessed such complete surrender, such visible evidence of out-of-thebody travel, and the pesakit’s gyrations made me wonder if he would return whole. Eddin assured me that the medicine men would not lose control of what happened onstage, but even he seemed astonished by this revelation.

Tonight in this place you are the queen, the shaman sang, wiping sweat from his eyes, and the pesakit stared at him. Don’t be afraid.

There was good reason to be afraid. Homosexuality is forbidden in much of the Islamic world, punishable by death in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, and elsewhere by flogging, fines, and prison terms. Indeed the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, was serving a prison sentence for sodomy and corruption, charges that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International regarded as politically motivated; this week a panel of three judges on the highest court would hear his appeal to have his convictions overturned. This night in the jungle a banned ceremony had elicited a stunning confession, and I suspected that I was not alone in fearing what would become of the pesakit now that he had disclosed the secret of his sexuality.

The shaman rendered his diagnosis: the pesakit suffered from the thwarting of the wind associated with a young demigod, dewa muda, which makes the afflicted want to be the center of attention, to enjoy all the finery, flattery, and privileges of royalty. You want to feel grand, the shaman sang—a recurring problem in Kelantan, Eddin added. And since it is difficult to convince most sufferers to give up their delusions of grandeur dewa muda is the most common blockage of the inner winds treated in main puteri. But would this ceremony release the malevolent spirit from this tormented man?

A woman in a pink veil left the circle of the pesakit’s attendants to rinse his hair in a bowl of ablution water, and when she had patted it dry with a towel the shaman asked them to dance with him—the first movement of a communal dance that lasted for close to an hour, the minduk and the other shaman joining in, men dancing with men, women 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 Asia.

Muhammad was an ordinary man—the only miracle that he took credit for was serving as the vessel for God’s word—who emptied himself, through prayer, to receive a message preserved on a tablet in heaven, a continual surrender that may bring to mind Saint Paul’s account of Jesus emptying himself into human form to bear God’s word into the world. For mystical experience begins in emptiness, in humility; and if Islam differs from Christianity in its conception of Jesus, viewing him as a prophet, not the Son of Man, it is worth noting their common mystical source—a spring that periodically refreshes the faith and also waters creative work. The poet’s supplication (to the muse, the language, the beloved, God) is a form of prayer, and what Muhammad heard in his night-long vigils brings to mind visions vouchsafed to poets the world over. There is indeed a poetic quality to the Koran, which is not always apparent in translation ; hence Muslims are encouraged to recite it in the original Arabic—the divine version. This did not seem to hinder Islam’s appeal when Sufi traders introduced it to Southeast Asia.

Eddin liked to describe Islam’s penetration of the Malay Peninsula in the fifteenth century as a process of accretion and secretion, the pantheism of Sufi teachings falling in nicely with pre-Islamic beliefs; with the spice trade came an esoteric poetry and music congenial to the Malay sensibility, and Eddin attributed Islam’s spread to the syncretism of the Sufis, who incorporated into their practice elements of Persian, Chinese, and Indian thought; their belief in the possibility of a direct encounter with God was of a piece with the play of spirits central to Malay cosmology; hence its broad appeal.

Not until the turn of the twentieth century, Eddin continued, did some Muslims begin to blame the enervation of Islamic civilization, notably the decline of the Ottoman Empire, on the inwardness, the hedonism, of Sufism. Reformers urged the faithful to use their powers of reason to grapple with the problem of modernity, and Sufis were confined to small communities insulated from the society at large.

There is always tension between the visible forms of faith, its ceremonies and institutions and hierarchies, and the interior journeys undertaken by seekers of the divine. Individuals and societies alike navigate between the demands of the temporal and eternal orders, the things of this world and the next; and while I had touched on the relationship between politics and religion in my last book, an account of my pilgrimages to the center of Eastern Orthodox monasticism, the Holy Mountain of Athos, in northern Greece, I wished now to explore the subject in greater detail, particularly as it related to Islam. The age-old argument among Muslim clerics and intellectuals over the role that religion plays in matters of state had, as far as I could tell, acquired new urgency after 9/11; an infidel could hardly gauge the multifarious ways in which a billion or more Muslims, pious or not, sought to make sense of their time here below, but I hoped to hear echoes of their debates, in mosques and universities and the halls of power, in cafés and kampongs, about their obligations to God and society. Husam’s answer to the changes wrought by modernity, for instance, was a changeless understanding of his faith.

“You can classify us as moderates,” he intoned, “but we believe in fundamentals: that Islam is the solution to everything. We were born before the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, and we can live as brothers.”

Not everyone agreed with him, certainly not his Chinese and Indian countrymen, and with more and more Malays rejecting his theocratic vision even in Kelantan, he might have adopted a different tone. But he remained defiant, blaming PAS’s electoral losses on UNMO’s control of the levers of power, including the judiciary, the security forces, and the media. UNMO had in his mind devised a form of autocratic government as corrupt as any in the Middle East, and Husam seemed to relish the disparity in power between the ruling party and PAS, seeing in it a metaphor for his province.

“Kelantan is so small,” he said, “small enough to free itself. Not Malaysia.”

I took him to mean that a theocratic ideal could serve as a model for the rest of his country, and I agreed with his idea that change comes from the periphery. This was, after all, one lesson of the Christian anchorites who settled in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, fleeing cities to devote their lives to God; what they made in solitude, a monastic system of prayer and fasting and the study of scripture, continues to shape Christian thought, including my own. I keep near my desk the sayings of the Desert Fathers, a compendium of wisdom born of their experience of faith; in their desire to live by the teachings of Jesus I recognized a mechanism of reform that may be universal: the center stagnates, corruption sets in, and from the periphery idealists seek to return to their origins—of a faith, a literary heritage, a political tradition. What the Desert Fathers discovered in their devotions was a corrective to the newly Christianized Roman Empire, in which a heretofore religious minority subjected to draconian forms of discrimination had assumed authority; the marriage of church and state made deviation from the ideals of the early church inevitable, as Christian rulers inevitably compromised on issues temporal and eternal; in the desert the religious sought to return to the purity of faith preached by Jesus, cultivating interiority in much the same manner that a later generation of reformers, Sufis disillusioned by the growing worldliness of Islam, tried to recover Muhammad’s message of liberty and love, the mystical heart of the faith. In both cases, Christian and Islam, reformers created a healing force.

But some reformers resort to violence, the David and Goliath narrative having inspired oppressed believers since—well, the time of David and Goliath, if not before. This was what led Osama bin Laden to send his men on a suicide mission to New York and Washington, hoping to rid Saudi Arabia, the holy land of Mecca and Medina, of the American military bases established there during the Gulf War. (In this he was successful : the Bush administration closed the bases in 2003.) And it was what prompted a band of Serbian terrorists to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, setting off the Great War. I asked Husam if he thought another world war was in the offing, this time between Islam and the West.

“I don’t believe there is a clash of civilizations,” he said. “America doesn’t have to worry about Malaysia. Our role is to bring people to understand Islam. From the beginning PAS distanced itself from terrorism. That’s our contribution to peace.”

And the proscription on main puteri?

Husam made a halfhearted attempt at humor. “We do not ban the traditional dances, we ben them,” he said, lazily pronouncing the word in the Malay style. “We bend them and blend them, because culture is a dynamic thing for us.”

But his idea of bending or blending, Eddin later explained, was to strip from the ceremonies all Hindu, shamanic, and fantastic elements. PAS had even instituted a code of ethics for shadow puppetry, which required the use of lifelike puppets to tell didactic stories. Once onstage, however, the puppet masters would take out their classical puppets and let their angin take over, literally throwing the code to the winds.

The dancer bent his fingers all the way back to his wrists and smiled. Eh Chom Eh Kuan, the legendary performer of the Buddhist dance drama known as manora, possessed the suppleness of a man half his age. And his smile broadened when the younger of his two wives served us tea in the living room of his house near the Thai border.

“Are Buddhists allowed to have two wives?” I whispered to Eddin.

He grinned. “Only if you are the master of manora!”

Eh Chom, who came from a long line of dancers, was Kelantan’s last remaining manora performer trained in the traditional style—which meant that at the age of nine he was sent to live in a Buddhist temple, and after four years of intensive instruction he was raised as a girl so that he could develop the grace required for the role of manora, a bird-woman in the Jataka tradition of tales about the previous births of the Buddha. Professor James Brandon retells her story in Theatre in Southeast Asia: how Manora, the youngest of seven daughters of the king of a mythical race of bird people, is bathing one day with her sisters in a mountain lake when a hunter, entranced by her beauty, steals her wings and tail; her sisters fly away, the hunter takes her to the palace of his own king, and there she falls in love with the crown prince. They marry in due course, and when he is sent off to war she is betrayed by a conniving minister, who convinces the king that she is a threat to him and must be put to death. The order is given to burn her alive, and as the flames rise around her she pleads to have her wings and tail returned. Her request is granted—what harm can there be in that?—and now, miraculously, she rises above the fire and ascends to the heavens. The prince’s triumphant return from war turns to tragedy when he learns that Manora has vanished, and so he sets out to find her, searching for seven years, seven months, and seven days, overcoming many obstacles, until he climbs to the summit of the Himalayas, home of the bird people, where no mortal has ever gone. There he is reunited with Manora, and they live happily ever after. In the last verse of the tale it is revealed that the prince is in fact a previous incarnation of the Buddha.

Manora is the most popular Buddha birth story performed in Southeast Asia, and for centuries all-male troupes played the roles of the bird-woman and the prince. But over time women were trained for the drama, and indeed Eh Chom’s second wife played Manora in his troupe, which for more than twenty years had performed for large crowds until PAS deemed the dance antithetical to orthodox Islamic teachings. Now she was embroidering headgear for the second of her two sons, who in two months’ time would be initiated into the troupe, carrying on his father’s work. Eh Chom’s soul would never rest if he died without passing on the tradition, said Eddin, who was documenting every aspect of manora—transcribing its repertoire, recording its catalogue of songs, plays, and music, detailing its rituals. Manora incorporates elements of Buddhist worship and Malay forms of storytelling and music making—a typical performance features both Thai and Malay dancers; the troupe of young men and women that Eh Chom was training, with Pusaka’s support, came from both sides of the border. The strange thing, Eddin added, is that Thais dominated on this side of the border, Malays on the other.

“Boundaries are ludicrous things,” he said.

Here the lines blurred between Buddhism and Islam, a mingling of discourses that might have intrigued the Trappist monk and contemplative writer Thomas Merton, whose dialogue with other religions was for me a model of spiritual inquiry ; his exploration of the mystical heart of faith fired my own thinking. On the day that I finished reading his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, in graduate school, my mind was set aflame with questions of faith. I set out on foot for a nearby canyon in Salt Lake City, where I was living. One of my creative writing professors happened to drive by me, and slowed to say hello. He must have seen something in my expression, for he asked if I was all right. I replied that I was trying to sort out my feelings about a religious vocation, which drew a curious response from him: he advised me not to read the King James Bible, the translation being unfaithful to the original, then drove away. I walked on, resolving to change my life. I began to read more Merton.

His writings became central to me when I abandoned graduate school not long after my encounter with the professor and moved with my wife to New Mexico. It was a critical juncture in our lives: we were the caretakers of an estate at the edge of the Santa Fe National Forest, with no money, health insurance, or prospects. Which is to say: we were free, even if we did not realize it at the time. I wrote in the morning, and in the afternoon I worked in the gardens, split firewood, and cleared the arroyo that irrigated the apple orchards in our canyon. At the end of the day I would hike among the junipers on the mesa rising above the estate, trying to figure out how to survive outside academia—to make a life in poetry, that is. In Merton’s versions of the sayings of the Desert Fathers I found a source of wisdom that seemed as fresh as the Zen koans dear to my Buddhist friends—parables and teachings illustrating the insight that poverty is integral to the spiritual life—and while it would be some time before I read Merton’s essays on Zen, and longer yet until I discovered his lectures on Sufism, his open-minded search for spiritual vitality convinced me that he was a reliable guide for what turned out to be a journey into the mystical ground of experience common to many religions.

He did not just strengthen the links between poetry and the contemplative life, building on the inheritance of mystical writers through the ages, but reached beyond the walls of his monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, to the wider world, lending his voice to the civil rights movement, articulating protests against the war in Vietnam, drawing connections between Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. He likened the Zen experience of the Void to Christ emptying himself into human form for our salvation, Christian consciousness to Buddhist mindfulness; the “deep ontological awareness” that Buddhists cultivate in meditation was in his mind akin to the awakening that Christians experience in their obedience to God or what Sufis discover at le point vierge, the secret place in the soul where God reveals himself. Yet Merton was careful to distinguish between the central tenets of each religious tradition, refusing to blur the differences integral to their practice, and this added another layer of meaning to his work: he saw into the heart of things, which is by its nature multiple, world upon world, and what he kept finding were different versions of the truth, the gift, bestowed upon him by his Christian faith—a new nature. The perfect poverty of a Christian mystic was not so distant from the perfect freedom granted to an enlightened Buddhist or Sufi master. Merton considered Mahatma Gandhi to be the ideal thinker and man of action, someone who used the Bhagavad Gita to dedicate his life to the nonviolent resistance of British rule; the study of Taoism and Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism, convinced the monk that East and West share “a unity of outlook and purpose, a common spiritual climate.”

This was the unity that he sought to explore when in December 1968 he traveled to Bangkok for a monastic conference, stopping en route to visit the exiled Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, in northern India; to see the giant statues of the Buddha in Sri Lanka; to listen to Vedic scholars chanting in Madras and Sufi music in Delhi. In Bangkok, he gave a lecture on Marxism and monasticism, concluding with a Zen saying: “Where do you go from the top of a thirty-foot pole?” Then he returned to his room, where some hours later his body was discovered in the bathtub—electrocuted, apparently, by the frayed cord of an electric fan. His death shocked a world still reeling from the assassinations earlier in the year of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, for now the spiritual voice of the civil rights and antiwar movements was also gone. Merton had written in his short life over a hundred books and pamphlets, a number of which I read sitting by the woodstove in the converted chicken coop that served as our caretaker’s residence, and when I climbed the mesa his words often seemed to guide my footsteps.

Which makes it all the more mysterious to me now that when I lived in New Mexico I did not visit the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, north of Abiquiu, a crucial place for Merton in the last years of his life. I knew that he had considered leaving his monastery to live in the Benedictine community tucked in a red rock canyon along the Chama River, which he had visited twice in 1968 (the second time at the outset of his fateful journey to Asia), and I imagined that traces of his restless spirit lingered in that spare landscape, which he credited with helping to clear his mind. Merton’s biographer reports that when he washed in the cold waters of the Chama he felt clean and awake; and when he met the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived nearby, he deemed her one of those rare people “who quietly does everything right”—an insight that governed the composite biography that I was assembling about O’Keeffe, collecting scholarly essays and reminiscences by those who had known or worked for her.

What began as a geographical convenience (a local symposium on O’Keeffe’s life and work had inspired an editor to commission the book) became for me an affair of the heart. Her paintings taught me to see flowers and canyons and bones in their essential strangeness; her letters opened new vistas on the nature of the artistic vocation; her physical beauty (preserved in photographs taken by her husband Alfred Stieglitz) left me spinning. She was for me the embodiment of art as well as desire, living as authentically as she painted, and when I visited her house in the course of my research I convinced myself that I could not afford an extra hour to drive to the monastery in which Merton might have produced yet more enduring works if his life had not been cut short. In fact I had more time on my hands in those days than in any other period of my adult life, and now I realized that what I lacked was the courage to explore the intimate connection between artistic and religious impulses—to make a true pilgrimage.

One summer day, not long after I had turned in the manuscript for my book about O’Keeffe, I was digging up a new garden, when to my consternation I found that I had to stop every few minutes to get a drink of water—which, curiously, did not slake my thirst. I wondered if I was getting sick—did this signal the onset of diabetes, which runs in my family?—or if living in the desert had somehow changed my metabolism. Through the afternoon and evening I worked, and drank water from the well, and only grew thirstier. The next day, though, I felt fine, and because I never experienced such a thirst again it came to stand in my imagination for the unquenchable thirst of the spiritual life.

This all came rushing back to me in Eh Chom’s living room, when he rose to his feet, citing another obligation. During the proscription, he worked as a traditional healer, a bomoh, counseling couples with marital problems (his specialty, Eddin whispered with a grin). He was thus a busy man, and there was only time for him to take us on a quick tour of the temples by his house, a small dilapidated Thai structure and a larger, sturdier one, combining Thai and Chinese elements. He made a dismissive remark about the Chinese merchants whose donations were critical to the temples’ upkeep, then led us along a path lined with garish statues of the Buddha and across the road to the largest sitting Buddha in Southeast Asia—a brown, golden-lipped figure ten stories tall surrounded by Chinese figures, pillars, and carvings. Eh Chom’s second wife arrived on a motor scooter to take him to his appointment, and as they drove off Eddin said that while the Islamists despised this giant statue of the Buddha, which was ten years in the making, they had not forbidden its inauguration, in September 2001. The week-long celebration commenced with hundreds of Chinese Buddhists burning joss sticks and pinning pieces of gold foil to a teardrop-shaped heart displayed on a stage, and then they inserted into the heart a pair of gold and silver needles to signify their release from worldly attachments and rejection of hatred and greed—a symbolic act far removed from that of the al-Qaeda operatives who two days later crashed their planes into the Twin Towers. Like millions of people on 9/11, I had stared in disbelief at the carnage broadcast on television, wondering if, as the commentators kept saying, profound change was upon us. This Buddhist ceremony had continued, though, concluding with Thai monks installing the heart in the statue: a sign of the realm of pure light in which the enlightened dwell beyond change. And if I had thought that my travels in Malaysia would be undertaken in the light of a new dispensation now it occurred to me that from a Buddhist perspective perhaps nothing had changed at all. Back at my hotel, I sat down to make some notes on what I had seen since arriving in Kuala Lumpur the week before.

There was a crude swastika painted on the shrine to Ganesha, the elephant god, and as we started down the dirt path the sweet scent of a jasmine tree gave way to the smell of curry and then the stench of sewage. A dog barked, two chickens pecked at grain by a small house, and a baby crawled toward the door. We entered the Kali temple in which Eddin performed his monthly ritual bath, a shed the size of a walk-in closet lined with shelves on which were laid offerings for the goddess: silver canisters filled with red or yellow dye, jars of honey and spirits, bowls of jasmine blossoms and dried flowers, a coconut, three bottles of milk, lemons stuck to the prongs of a trident. Eddin said that during one ceremony a king cobra had slithered into the temple and right back out again.

He had become a devotee of Kali during the troubles in 1997. The Asian financial crisis, Anwar Ibrahim’s arrest, a clampdown on the media—these were connected in his mind to the mysterious rash he developed at that time. Repeated visits to the doctor over the course of seven months brought no relief, and just when he despaired of getting well something providential happened, or so it seemed to him. The newspaper he was working for sent him to the Brickfields neighborhood of Kuala Lumpur to do a feature on a Hindu temple saved from demolition by its priestess, an illiterate old woman who had returned from shopping one day to find a crew of men preparing to raze the shrine to make room for another apartment building to house the burgeoning Indian population. Eighty years before, an indentured Tamil railway worker, inspired by a dream to plant his trident here, had invited Kali, the mother goddess, the goddess of death and destruction, to enter this space, and now his spirited granddaughter told Eddin that in an age of incessant strife she had to preserve the temple; for Kali devours delusion, evil, and ignorance. Once she had answered his questions, she demanded to ask one of her own.

“You know why you really came here, don’t you?” she said. His suffering, she explained, was caused by Kali, Shiva’s consort, who was inside him: Kali, the dark goddess of time and change, customarily adorned with a necklace of severed heads, earrings of children’s corpses, and bracelets of serpents, her long hair in a wild tangle, blood smeared on her lips. The priestess advised Eddin to devote himself to the goddess, who danced on the battlefield after slaying the demon king—and within three months his rash was gone.

It was around this time that the paper put him in cold storage. Every day he would write a story, and then he would be summoned to the editor’s office to watch him spike it. How the editor relished pushing the delete button, and reprimanding him for the tie he wore, his worsening attitude, anything at all. The final straw for Eddin was the order to attend the Basic English classes convened for Malay speakers.

“Fuck that,” he said, and quit.

Providence entered the picture again, now through the British Council, which sent him to London to do his MA, and on his return he threw himself into his work at Pusaka, the origin of which he traced to a shadow puppet performance that he had attended in 1992, when he was studying politics at the University of Malaya. The spectacle of one man conducting an orchestra, improvising dialogue for scores of characters, and playing seven puppets at a time convinced him to apprentice himself to this master. So he took a bus to Kelantan, ignoring his mother’s warnings that he might fall victim to black magic, and asked a taxi driver in Kota Bharu if he knew where the puppeteer lived. The taxi drove him straight to his house—which Eddin interpreted as a sign that this was the right thing for him to do. Then the puppeteer accepted him as a student, though for the first eighteen months of his apprenticeship he was not allowed to touch a puppet.

“It was all banter,” he said, which is an essential part of instruction in traditional theater. But the puppet master was always observing him—how he held a cigarette, a cup of coffee—in order to discern his individual style.

“He told me from the beginning that I would never perform like him,” said Eddin, “but in my own way. After ten years of studying, I still haven’t performed.”

For acquiring the technical skills of puppetry was only part of his apprenticeship. More important was his immersion in Kelantan’s culture, which led to the founding of Pusaka. Eddin’s ambitions for his organization went beyond documenting and saving the traditional ceremonies: he wanted to expand their purview to engage urban communities and offer to the disaffected creative outlets rooted in the indigenous art forms of the land—admittedly a controversial idea.

“The government’s strategy is to create a climate of fear,” he said, “but Pusaka is here to ruffle the leaves, in the Malay phrase.”

And ruffle them he did. His organization took its name from his childhood home (putra pusaka, “princely heritage”), and if he would not say whether he was the prince of the house he did recall with love the nurse who had taught him to speak Malay. (He had more complicated feelings about the gardener who had taught him to catch the king cobras nesting under the staircase and to smoke.) In the mixed heritage of the Malay Peninsula, with its varieties of religious experience and cultural practice, he looked for solutions to social problems, which neither the single-minded Islamists nor the inertia-bound ruling party knew how to address. Amok was a Malay word, he liked to tell me, insisting that in such a constricted society it was only natural for some to run amok, to go mad with rage, taking a dagger or a machete to anyone they met. The papers carried stories of men going on killing sprees for no apparent reason, but Eddin suspected that their suicidal frenzies were linked to a lack of creative means by which to express their disillusionment, their fundamental powerlessness. Take the bored young men of Kelantan, who had nothing better to do than visit prostitutes in Thailand and return infected with HIV or sign up with Jemaah Islamiyah: the traditional ceremonies offered imaginative spaces in which to work out one’s anxiety or despair. Eddin’s devotion to Kali (who was, not coincidentally, the patron goddess of Kelantan) served a similar purpose.

In the temple, Pauline Fan, his helpmate and partner (another providential figure in his life, he said), took the flowers that he had bought from a street vendor and suggested he change into his ceremonial attire. She is a delicate Eurasian woman, a translator of Paul Celan and the manager of Pusaka, the calm eye in the storm that is Eddin Khoo. She laid the flowers on the altar, while he put on a white wrap, cinching it below the tattoo of a king cobra on his chest. The assistant to the priestess tolled the bell twice—the signal for Eddin to pour a canister of dye over the statues of Kali, Ganesha, and the snake goddess—and then the priestess held a candle made of camphor before him and Pauline. This ritual was repeated several times until the floor was covered with dye, and when Eddin went outside to wash off the priestess cleared the altar, wiped the tiles with a rag, mopped up the dye. Then she stopped to look at me, and after a moment she asked Pauline to translate for her. She said that although I was inclined to be a priest I need not worry about the external trappings of religion since I carried the spirit of faith in my heart; that I had two daughters; that there were tensions in my marriage; that I should resolve differences in my life quietly; that I should devote myself to my writing, having lost precious time in the last years because of other obligations; that my back and chest hurt; that I should not trust others too much; that whatever I put my mind to in the next five years would likely be successful, though for my own happiness I should spend my time writing; that I should drink more water. The priestess said that Kali was speaking through her, and that she had no choice but to tell me what Amma, the Mother, was reading in my soul.

She went into her house and returned with wedges of watermelon, which we ate at a table outside the temple, and then it was time for us to drive through heavy traffic to the weekly night market near Pauline’s apartment, where hordes of shoppers looked over the goods on display in the stalls—fruits and vegetables and spices, clothes and utensils, balloons, toys. One man offered back scratchers for sale. A leper begged for money. A man in a white skullcap asked for donations for the construction of a mosque. We drifted along in the crowd, eating pancakes made of flour, sugar, and crushed peanuts, and washed them down with coconut milk. Eddin recalled his visit to an astrologer in India.

“You’re three million years old,” she told him, “and sometimes you feel it, don’t you?”

“This will take fifty years for the United States to live down,” said the Western official.

We were having drinks by the pool at the Hotel Intercontinental, in Kuala Lumpur, and as the sun sank through the haze of fires set by farmers clearing jungles in Sumatra the diplomat was considering the repercussions of the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Americans, he said, might forget the horrific crimes committed in their name, but the evidence—the images circulating on the Internet—might inflame passions in the Islamic world for generations. On the day that US senators examined photographs and videotapes of American soldiers abusing, humiliating, and torturing inmates at Abu Ghraib, Iraqi insurgents retaliated in a gruesome manner, Webcasting the beheading of an American businessman, Nicholas Berg. This was the backdrop to our conversation about cultural diplomacy, the exchange of information and ideas to enhance mutual understanding, a subject that I was researching for a report to the State Department—an all but impossible task, argued the official, without regime change in Washington.

“People like to talk about a neoconservative cabal in the White House,” he said, referring to the chief architects of the Iraq War, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. “But what you really have is an ineptocracy: these people can’t do anything right.”

Talleyrand, France’s prince of diplomats, observed that “The greatest danger in times of crisis comes from the zeal of those who are inexperienced.” He was describing the need to curb the zeal of a young man in his employ at the embassy in London. But there is even greater danger in the zeal of the experienced: when youthful ardor goes unchecked, when idealism is not tempered by pragmatism but instead acquires political savvy and knowledge of the inner workings of government, then the chances of disaster increase. This is when people may run amok, as the wise elders surrounding a callow president in the Bush administration made plain; for now their dark vision was there for all the world to see.

Exhibit A was Abu Ghraib, which for the diplomat pointed to the White House’s failure to prepare for the occupation of Iraq. The litany of decisions, which in the coming years would be recited to explain a foreign policy debacle unrivaled in American history (allowing Iraqis to loot their ministries—except oil—and museums, disbanding the Iraqi military, purging the government of Baath Party members, and so on), stemmed from the arrogant belief, said the diplomat, that we could remake the world with impunity. And if he thought that cultural diplomacy could mitigate some of the damage to our reputation he also feared that Bush’s refusal to heed what Thomas Jefferson called “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” or to consider the consequences of his actions might doom the republic. From the vantage point of KL, as locals refer to Kuala Lumpur, which means “big muddy” in Malay, it looked as though the images from Abu Ghraib had forever muddied our good name. And we had no one to blame but ourselves.

“Torture’s harvest,” writes the journalist Mark Danner, “whatever it may truly be, is very unlikely to have outweighed [the] costs”—legal and moral. For the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s prosecution of its war on terror—a system of military prisons at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, and Abu Ghraib, and secret prisons or “black sites” in Jordan, Thailand, and other countries, some with dubious human rights records, in which tens of thousands of men were interrogated, sometimes brutally—flouted the ideals of the American experiment in liberty. Details would eventually emerge about the depths to which the country had fallen. Indeed the CIA inspector general was about to issue a damning report on the agency’s interrogation practices, concluding that it had repeatedly violated the Convention Against Torture. What “truths” were gleaned in confessions elicited by force, beyond US legal jurisdiction, were nothing compared to the consequences of the decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. Indifference to criminality had corroded the soul, hollowed out the body politic, and diminished the country in the eyes of the world. I wondered how the president, a self-described born-again Christian, could sanction a policy that strayed so far from Christ’s message.

“When you act alone,” said the official, “you make mistakes.”

What came to mind was the story of a friend who had lost his job not long before 9/11. On that September morning he was leaving his brownstone in the West Village—a short cab ride from the World Trade Center—to go to his lawyer’s office and sign the paperwork for his severance package, when the first hijacked plane crashed into the Twin Towers. My friend, shaken by his professional setback, reacted to the national tragedy as if it was a personal affront: dust from the fallen buildings was hanging in the air thick with the stench of death when he fled with his family to their summer house on Long Island, convinced that more terrorist attacks were imminent. He resolved not to return; and as the days of his self-imposed exile turned into weeks he seized on rumors—of radiological bombs planted in Grand Central Station, of bridges and tunnels targeted by Islamic radicals, of smallpox released in Times Square—to justify his refusal to go back to the city that he had once loved with what I considered to be a humorous passion. That his wife and children missed their friends, their routines, seemed only to harden his attitude.

One night my friend’s wife called to ask me to persuade him to return to the city, and so I told him that he could not allow terror to govern his life, invoking the example set by countless individuals I had met in Sarajevo—writers and professors, engineers and civil servants, ordinary men and women—who during the terrible years of the siege did not surrender to their fear but discovered instead new reserves of courage. This was crucial not only to their own survival, I said, but to the survival of their city. My friend angrily replied that no analogy could be drawn to his unique circumstances.

“September 11th is something new,” he said. “Nothing can be compared to it.”

Our conversation ended soon after.

Which in time prompted me to reflect more systematically on terror—and on the power of art, literature, and ceremony to counter it, to bolster the spirit in the presence of fear. The argument that I developed, which started with identifying the body’s responses to fear (to flee, to lash out, to become paralyzed, to focus on the source of danger, to seek solutions, to rise to the occasion—reactions that for better or worse define individuals as well as societies), went something like this: poetry works by correspondence, linking one thing to another, past, present, and future, in order to enlarge the reader’s sensibility; fiction cultivates empathy, inspiring us to imaginatively inhabit other lives, other ways of being; and sacred ceremonies, which in many traditions are exercises in analogy, serve to mitigate various forms of terror, from individual existential anxieties to societal threats, such as what Americans experienced on 9/11, when a new paradigm took shape—a cultural framework whose parameters were still becoming clear the day that I sipped scotch by the pool in KL, catching occasional whiffs of smoke from the fires. The diplomat said that fear informed the American body politic, making it easier for my countrymen to think the worst of Muslims. For terror is the chief impediment of empathy and analogy, without which it is difficult to make sense of what seems foreign or strange; when terror blunts the mind’s ability to find analogies, to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, it becomes easier to fall for justifications of appalling deeds, like torture—“enhanced interrogation,” in Bush administration parlance, a distortion of the language integral to preparing Americans to accept hitherto unimaginable excesses, like torture.

In the American response to 9/11 some Malaysians found sanction for their darker impulses. Thus a cartoon on the front page of the PAS party newspaper likened the scandal at Abu Ghraib to the treatment of Islamic militants locked up in the Kamunting Detention Center: “Ini bukan Iraq tetapi ISA”—“This is not Iraq but the ISA” (Malaysia’s internal security service). Inside the paper was another cartoon: from behind the bars of a prison cell a shrouded figure cries, Arrgh! Adoi! Two men walk by. Prisoners of the USA? one asks. No, says the other, ISA! Indeed Human Rights Watch was about to issue a report connecting Malaysian prison abuses to the war on terror. In August 2001, when Malaysia arrested several members of PAS, the White House condemned the government for its violations of human rights. After 9/11, though, Malaysia and other US allies were given a free hand to deal with Islamic militants as they wished. That some of the 9/11 hijackers had met in KL in January 2000 to discuss plans for the attack reinforced the argument that to secure information about terrorist plots quickly, the gloves had to come off. The ISA had videotaped the al-Qaeda summit, but without audio no one recognized the seriousness of the threat. More forceful action might have prevented 9/11, though the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib called into question the wisdom of the argument that there should be no limits in the war on terror.

The eighteenth-century writer Edmund Burke summed up the British failure to understand the American Revolution with words that still rang true for the diplomat: “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” To which one might add this insight from the contemporary poet Geoffrey Hill: “Terror is opportune as is relief from terror.” In my clearest moments I understood that it was but a step from terror to courage, but how difficult it is to take that step when terror grips the soul. Literature and faith, art and ceremony—they only go so far.

“Another round?” said the diplomat.

“Definitely,” I said.

“Religious or cultural purity is a fundamentalist fantasy,” V. S. Naipaul argues in Beyond Belief : Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, his follow-up account of travels in Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia first detailed in Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism alarmed the writer, and if I admired the precision of his descriptions of the people he met and the places he visited, his storytelling, and his elegant synthesis of information, I was also struck by his assertion that “the zeal of converts outside the Arab world is more fervent.” It was the sort of sweeping generalization that inspires suspicion, even as I admired his attempt to explain the ferment in the region: “Islam is in its origins an Arab religion,” he writes. “Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert.” That is the problem, according to Naipaul. He describes himself as “a manager of narrative,” and the most problematic narrative for him is conversion, no doubt because his own biography, well known to his readers, is such a story: how a precocious schoolboy from Trinidad goes to Oxford on a scholarship and, by dint of hard work, transforms himself into a major English prose stylist, earning for his labors riches, a knighthood, the Nobel Prize in Literature. But religious transformation is another story—an act of erasure for which he has little sympathy:

Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.

Of course the same holds for Christianity, which from its origin made conversion central to its theology, as Paul learned on the road to Damascus: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold all things have become new.” Conversion stories, like stories of healings and miracles, provide the foundations of Christian belief. Moreover, Christianity’s holy places are located mainly in Arab and Jewish lands, only a handful of people read the languages in which the foundational texts were written, and in many societies that converted to Christianity the disturbances occasioned by the change of belief remain unresolved. Witness the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom, or the bloody aftermath of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. What tribe cannot be brought to a boil? The Hundred Years’ War, which some thought might be a model for the “long war” sparked by 9/11, proved that the converted peoples of Europe could be just as savage as anyone in the defense of faith. Naipaul’s thesis, then, was as suspect as any essentialist argument which blurs individual differences. But what is more individual than matters of religion? The individual is the locus of literature, as the Nobel laureate brilliantly showed in his novels.

The problem for a writer with a thesis is that anecdotes, facts, and insights may be arranged to support a story line at odds with a nuanced rendering of the material: one mark of an enduring literary work. The history of Islam, like that of Christianity, another conquering state religion, is too complicated to support a simplistic narrative, at least not in literature, which functions by complexity, gradations of tone and hue. Islam spread to Southeast Asia via trade, not conquest, and though it has the same universal aspirations as Christianity it also has a tradition of tolerance for other faiths, other ways of negotiating one’s time here below—a necessity for the preservation of Malaysia’s cultural mosaic. Near my hotel in KL, for example, was an Anglican church, where I attended mass one Sunday morning. The congregation was Chinese, the language of the service English, the guitar-playing minister a familiar spirit from my childhood. The history of religion in Malaysia is a history of shared space—a fact that Naipaul glosses over in his bid to speak in grander terms about the failings of the converted and of the faith itself.

He is on firmer ground in his portraits of individuals. “For Anwar Ibrahim,” he writes of the politician in Among the Believers, “Islam was the energizer and purifier that was needed in Malaysia; true Islam awakened people, especially Malays, and at the same time it saved them from the corruption of the racialist politics of Malaysia, the shabbiness of the money culture and easy Western imitation.” Anwar was then at the start of his career, directing a Muslim youth movement which had become a potent political force. He was an attractive man, Naipaul decided; “and it added to his attractiveness that in spite of his great local authority he gave the impression of a man still learning, still thinking things out.” The sketch of Anwar ends with Naipaul voicing regret that he did not have more time to talk with him. He wanted to travel with him, to see the country through his eyes, but there was no time.

I was also keen to speak with Anwar, who was still in prison during my first stay in Malaysia, and so it was Naipaul’s image of a politician in his ascendency that I held in mind until I met him on a second visit to KL, in the summer of 2005. His fall from power had been dramatic, the overturning of his sodomy conviction a triumph, his release from prison a promise—of what, no one could say. He and his wife were packing up their house in an upscale neighborhood, preparing to move to a new residence, and the furnishings gave the impression of a work in progress. In the front hallway, on a table by a mirror, was a vase of peacock’s feathers; the kilim in the next room was furled among cardboard boxes of books. Anwar served tea and chocolate cupcakes at the dining room table. Through a glass door I could see a guard on the patio performing his evening prayers, making prostrations in the shade.

“I went through the Riverside edition of Shakespeare four and a half times in prison,” said Anwar, his eyes full of mirth. “If they had kept me for another six months I would have finished it five times!”

He cut a regal figure in his brown jubah, betraying no signs of the abuse that he had suffered in prison or of the back surgery that he had undergone in Germany upon his release ten months before. His 1998 arrest, on charges of corruption and sodomy, was widely seen as politics run amok, his true crime having been to challenge the authority of Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, the country’s guiding force for over two decades. Mahathir had been Anwar’s patron, helping him rise through UNMO’s ranks, grooming him to be his successor, until the Asian financial crisis forced their differences in governing philosophies out into the open. How to solve what looked like the beginning of a global financial meltdown? Anwar favored the free market recommendations put forth by the International Monetary Fund, Mahathir imposed currency and capitol controls, and when Anwar promised to investigate corruption in the ruling party, Mahathir responded in kind. A book was published in KL, titled 50 Reasons Why Anwar Cannot Become Prime Minister, which accused him of engaging in sexual misconduct with his former speechwriter and his adopted brother—allegations that led to their arrest, imprisonment, and forty lashes of the rattan cane. Anwar was arrested on the strength of their confessions, later recanted, and tens of thousands of his supporters took to the streets in protest; his conviction was an occasion of national disillusionment and international outrage.

During his first six months in prison, when the guards abused him daily and he was not allowed to watch television or listen to the radio, Anwar established a routine to preserve his sanity, rising at five in the morning to perform his prayers, after which he would take breakfast, exercise, and read until dark. (Soon after his release from prison, at a conference of Muslim scholars in Istanbul, he rattled off the titles of several books, and then, fearing that he might sound pretentious, noted his special credentials: six years in solitary confinement. He advised the scholars to consider a stint in prison, if they wanted to get some reading done!) His favorite play, of course, was Hamlet, though he also loved The Tempest. Like the young prince, he had broken with a corrupt father figure, Mahathir; like Prospero, he had bid farewell to his audience, the Malaysian body politic, over which he had all but reigned for sixteen years. Now he was about to go to Australia to lecture on what he had learned from Shakespeare, notably the virtue of humility, and he was quick to acknowledge limits in his ability to understand others. If policy makers started from that premise, he said, they might have more sympathy for the Other.

“The problem,” he said, “is that because the focus is on the Middle East we have no other lens through which to view our divisions.”

Hence the need for a new vision of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which for Muslims was the primary issue—a fact that American policy makers ignored at their peril. He counseled the White House to play the role of honest broker in the region, engaging ally and enemy alike to resolve not only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but to bring to an end the Iraq War, which enraged Muslims the world over; against the infamous “axis of evil” invoked by George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address, which singled out Iraq, Iran, and North Korea for their defiance of the international community, Anwar called for an “axis of engagement” with Iraq’s neighbors—Syria, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Jordan—in the common cause of peace.

But there was no sign of the White House removing its blinders about the failures of its policies in the region, said Anwar—which surprised him. He expected dictators to be in a state of denial, not American political leaders.

“Until you accept facts as they are,” he said, “there will only be death, not just to Americans but to Iraqis. If you continue to reject facts, then the policy will be flawed.”

Against this shortsightedness he set the wisdom of the Bard, who delighted and instructed him in his darkest moments, above all on the meaning of free will. For what prison taught Anwar to value most was freedom. The dehumanization of the individual, the systemic degradation of innocent men and women, the regimen of terror—these were the costs of Malaysia becoming a prison, he said, and vowed to liberate his countrymen. Unlike Hamlet, he seemed capable of acting on his beliefs, chief among them that Islamic governments had to carve out more space for freedom.

It was true that in drawing up UNMO’s Islamic agenda he and Mahathir had been inspired by the Iranian Revolution (among other things, as minister of education, Anwar had banned the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses). But it was also true that Anwar hoped to create a Southeast Asian model for Islamic governance in keeping with the more tolerant interpretation of the faith introduced by the Sufi traders. We were speaking on the first anniversary of the Muslim terrorist bombings in London, which had killed more than fifty people—continuing proof of the crisis in modern Islam, according to Anwar. He insisted that radical Islam bore no relation to the teachings of the Prophet, to the traditions of tolerance and learning and love, to the interior journeys undertaken by the Sufis who had brought from Arab lands the message to surrender to Allah. And he had taken a leading role in articulating a moderate vision of his faith.

“Who Hijacked Islam?”—this was the title of a well-known essay that he wrote in his prison cell just after 9/11 and published in Time. Islamic civilization, he argued, was forged in part by wealthy men who supported universities and hospitals and by princes who patronized scientists, philosophers, and writers. And it was despair at the futility of political struggle in autocratic Islamic countries that drove Osama bin Laden to use his personal fortune “to wreak destruction rather than promote creation.” Anwar believed that the project of modernity had suffered in Muslim countries because of its complicity with illegitimate power: “The great suspicion of modernity by Muslims is often because it came without liberty,” he said in a lecture at Oxford; “it came with exploitation and brutal oppression first with colonialism, and later with indigenous military or civilian authoritarianism.” Where the state maintained total control, blocking the development of a civic space in which to work out a different destiny for the ulama, the community of the faithful, there was bound to be resistance. And the alienation that marked Islamic society, the bitterness spawned by the perception that modernity had left Muslims behind, led to acts of desperation, like the 1998 fatwa issued by bin Laden:

The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country where it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the holy mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslims. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.”

For American allies read Israel; the despotic rulers of Saudi Arabia (who had allowed the American military to build bases on the holy land), Egypt, and other autocratic regimes in the Middle East; and any Muslims who opposed al-Qaeda, which sought to restore the caliphate that once stretched from Morocco to Malaysia. Thus Muslims like Anwar who spoke out against the dream of a theocracy rooted in the most extreme interpretation of sharia law (amputations, stonings) were judged to be apostates—subject, that is, to the death penalty. If bin Laden divided the world into Dar al-Islam (the Realm of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (the Realm of War), Anwar had a more nuanced approach, seeking to create Dar al-Salaam (the Realm of Peace). And he would begin in Southeast Asia, since it had no nostalgia for the caliphate, no myth of greatness. In Indonesia, for example, Islamists, Hindus, nationalists, and secularists had worked together to craft a constitution, debating ideas like the framers of the American constitution.

“Yes, there were tensions between the different groups,” Anwar said. “There were huge debates and disagreements. But because they were all seated at a big table, like in Philadelphia, the arguments were more substantive.”

He looked to Indonesia for inspiration, believing that the success or failure of the world’s largest Muslim country to create a workable democracy was crucial to the international order. “This is the true and unprecedented drama of faith and freedom of Islam in modern times,” he said at Oxford. And it held more promise than what was playing in the Middle East, where in the absence of a civic space Islamists exploited the sanctity of the mosque (where the authorities dared not intrude) to gain adherents, fueled by hatred of the West. The modern founder of radical Islam, the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, executed in 1966, argued that all Westerners carried in their blood “the Crusader spirit”—a perception reinforced by George W. Bush’s cavalier description of the war on terror as a crusade. Out of such infelicities of speech are clashes of civilization made, with writers on both sides furnishing arguments to harden attitudes—e.g. the British historian Anthony Pagden’s assertion that in Islamic countries, “The present is linked to the past by a continuous and still unfulfilled narrative, the story of the struggle against the ‘infidel’ for the ultimate Muslim conquest of the entire world.” But conquest is the dream of ideologues of every stripe. And if Anwar could not lift the scales off the eyes of the Islamists he would nonetheless work to ensure that their dogmatism did not blind the majority of Muslims, who wanted only to live in peace.

Presently we were joined by his wife, Dr. Wan Azizah Ismail. She is a beautiful woman, an ophthalmologist by training, who headed Keadilan, a coalition of parties that formed the main opposition to UNMO, and she would serve three terms in parliament before turning her seat over to him. (Anwar was not allowed to run for office until 2008, his corruption conviction having been upheld.) She teased him about serving chocolate cupcakes, and after fetching another pot of tea from the kitchen began to banter with him with what seemed to be unfeigned amusement. Whether there was any basis in fact for the sodomy charge leveled against him (he would be charged with the same crime some years hence, on the verge of his return to power, in what many saw as another politically motivated campaign), it struck at the heart of their marriage—and yet she betrayed no sign of bitterness. On the contrary. She finished his sentences with a light touch, which made him smile; their playfulness with each other suggested a deep bond. No one ever knows what goes on inside a marriage, but it is not easy to pretend to be playful, even for a politically savvy couple well versed in Shakespeare. She was witty, and the stories that he told to punctuate his points grew funnier in her presence.

For example, he once traveled to Pahang to give a speech for a cabinet minister who hoped to turn the province into a tourist destination. To prove that the area was free of crocodiles, the minister dove into the river, which prompted Anwar to quip that he was safe since crocodiles don’t attack other crocodiles—a joke with a barb: the Malay word for crocodile also means “lecher.” At lunch he was seated next to the minister’s wife, who complained about her husband’s wandering eye. Do you know how I survive? he said to her. My wife’s an ophthalmologist, and every morning she puts a drop in each of my eyes so that only she is beautiful to me. The minister’s wife said, Give me two drops!

When I asked Anwar what had become of the minister and his scheme to attract tourists to Pahang, he replied that in league with Mahathir the minister had managed to squander all the timber in his province, and now he was its governor.

“He sounds like all politicians,” I said.

“Almost all,” Anwar corrected me.

He was determined to rise above partisan politics. Unable to air his views in the local media (“We have freedom of speech,” he explained with a grin. “We just don’t have freedom after speech!”), he had started a blog to answer questions on any subject from his countrymen. Nor was he afraid to take them to task for criticizing atrocities committed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib while ignoring or even condoning problems in their backyard—censorship, innocent people detained without trial, rampant corruption. This was a forum for him to work out his ideas about Islam and freedom, which he had first tested in his political career, then reflected upon in prison, and now hoped to put into practice. In dark circumstances he had discovered that clarity of vision is an effective counter to terror, and in his new life he was trying to rally his countrymen to see that it was in their interest to heed the call of their better selves.

His theme was courage—which put me in mind of Georgia O’Keeffe’s confession that she was always afraid, and that her fear had never stopped her. At the opening of her museum in Santa Fe this had rattled around my mind. I was to appear on a panel to discuss her work, and in the vestibule outside the auditorium a man struck up a conversation with me. His father had worked for O’Keeffe as her gardener, and he was eager to describe a ritual of hers: how every fall she would gather hundreds of paintings that did not measure up to her exacting standards and burn them in a bonfire. It was a ceremony of liberation, predicated on the realization that these works lacked the clarity of line and color that she demanded. He remembered how delighted she was to watch them go up in smoke—and it occurred to me that this was how she freed herself to see anew, to figure reality afresh, to strike out into unclaimed aesthetic terrain. At every stage of her painting life she had transformed herself, discovering new ways to render the world in images of flowers, and bones from the desert, and ladders propped against the adobe wall of her house, and clouds glimpsed from above: step after step, always afraid, always alert to the next insight (in + sight). She aged gracefully in her paintings, fearless in her explorations.

It was time to leave—Anwar had to pack for his trip—and I suspected that when I went over my notes about our meeting it would seem natural to invoke Shakespeare, not Hamlet or The Tempest but Julius Caesar, the consummate drama of honor: “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” Caesar tells his wife in the second act. “The valiant never taste of death but once.” Anwar was still very much alive.

Palms lined the road to my hotel on the outskirts of KL. Laborers rested on the construction site of a new high-rise. The odor of rotting leaves and sewage wafted up from the metal grates on the sidewalk, along which I would walk in blazing heat to an Internet café, where for two ringgits (about fifty cents) I could check my e-mail. The café was filled at all hours of the day and night with young men playing video games, the most popular of which featured an American soldier walking down a street in Baghdad, shooting insurgents.

One day I joined an official from an opposition party for lunch at a Kelantan-style restaurant near a public housing project in KL. The official, who was preparing to run for parliament, brought along several volunteers—a toothless man who introduced himself as the president of the housing project’s residential commission; a student from the University of Malaya; an insurance claims processor; a Chicago Bulls fan who worked as a clerk for a German company; a one-armed man who never spoke—all of whom welcomed the chance to tell me about the corruption of the ruling party, which was preventing them from organizing the residents of the project. What to do? said the official. We sat cross-legged at a low table, with a video of traditional musicians performing on the screen above, and feasted with our fingers on beef, chicken, fish, petai (a paste made from pungent seeds wrapped in curry leaves), sticky rice, various vegetable dishes, fried bananas. Over coffee the official criticized the government for its inability to tamp down the ethnic tensions, which had newly risen over the fate of a national hero, the first Malaysian to climb Mount Everest—a Hindu, as it happened. Crippled later in life, the mountaineer was confined to a hospital bed until a Muslim shaman healed him—a miracle, the story went, that inspired him to convert to Islam. But there was evidence that he was delusional at the time of his conversion, and in any event his healing was short-lived, for he suffered a fatal stroke. When the religious police claimed his body, his widow filed an injunction in civil court asserting that he had been a practicing Hindu until his death. The matter was referred to a sharia court, which forbade her attendance, and so her husband was buried in a Muslim graveyard—which enraged the Indian and Chinese communities.

“What to do?” the official repeated.

What the volunteers next wanted to discuss, though, was a DVD being circulated of a documentary purporting to show that 9/11 was a plot devised by the CIA and Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service). How else to explain the fact that television cameras had been positioned to record the destruction if bombs had not been planted in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? The clerk who idolized Michael Jordan led the anti-American charge, and nothing I said could convince him that al-Qaeda had hijacked the planes flown into the buildings, not even when I reminded him that Osama bin Laden had taken credit for the attack. We parted on a sour note.

When we were out of earshot the official took my arm. “Do you see how their thinking has been corrupted?” he said. “And they’re more enlightened than most people in this country.” He did not expect to win his election.

Later that night, I hailed a taxi to take me to my hotel. The Tamil driver stopped at the light to pick up a young woman in a brown T-shirt and jeans, and at once began to lecture her, as if resuming a conversation, which seemed to verge on argument. From time to time she nodded, which led the driver, a wiry man with long hair and a thin mustache, to talk even faster, waving his hands, his two-inch-long fingernails gleaming in the headlights of the passing cars. The air conditioner was broken, gasoline fumes filled the taxi. Suddenly the driver turned to ask me where I was from and if I was a Christian. He gave my answers some thought, and then, pointing at the woman, said in a thick accent, We are anti-Muslim. I asked if he was Christian or Hindu. TOG, he replied, an acronym he had to repeat several times until I figured out that he was saying Tool of God—though something may have been lost in translation.

He fell silent, and then, inexplicably, turned onto an unlit road, which wound through a park or a rubber plantation. There were no cars or houses in sight, and when I asked him where we were going he pulled over to the side of the road and got out. The woman waited until she saw him light a cigarette before she reached for my hand. Do you want a massage? she said. Not tonight, I said. No problem, she replied, and called to the driver. He grimaced, stubbing out his cigarette, and drove me to my hotel without another word. The fare was sixty ringgits. He said he had no change for a hundred.

Khalil Ibrahim’s self-portrait, in a retrospective exhibition at a gallery in the Petronas Twin Towers, was an essay in double vision: the artist stood before a table, an unfinished floral painting at his back, the left side of his face in such thick shadow that only the arm of his eyeglasses could be seen. But it was impossible to tell where the light came from, since the blank part of the canvas behind him, which was as bright and harsh as sunlight, had a shadow of its own—as if another figure were lurking somewhere in the studo—or what the source of the different shadows might be. The artist’s lips were turned downward, few of the paintbrushes wedged into a dark can were illuminated, and it was difficult to decide which was more disturbing, the penetrating gaze of his lit eye or the speck of light in his dark one. The painting spoke to something essential about my experience of KL: it felt as if every conversation, gesture, and silence contained a shadow.

Yet the self-portrait seemed to bear little relationship to the droll, round man who warmly greeted me and his old friend Eddin, or to the other sketches and paintings drawn from fifty years of work for A Continued Dialogue, a whirl of flowing lines and vibrant colors, in images of dancing women and fishermen, of palm groves and boats on the sea, spread over all the flat and curving walls of the gallery. I took the title to mean that the artist’s dialogue was not only with his materials but with the complicated issue of identity that shaped so much of the national discourse, and I was intrigued by the stylistic variety of his land- and seascapes, which ranged from the abstract to the figurative. He painted in oil, acrylic, and watercolor; he made batiks and gouaches; he celebrated the human body, notably in a series of ink drawings titled The Spirit of the East, which featured groups of women on the beach, spinning and swirling and stretching toward the sky.

“Malays are a very sensual people,” said Eddin.

Ibrahim was born in a kampong near Kota Bharu, the son of a Sumatran sent to Kelantan to be educated in an Islamic school, and from an early age he yearned to be an artist, despite the traditional Islamic suspicion of figurative representation. (It is written in the Hadith, the stories and sayings attributed to the Prophet, that “He who creates pictures in this world will be ordered to breathe life into them on the Day of Judgment, but he will be unable to do so.”) Ibrahim drew, made shadow puppets out of cardboard, and took classes with a Singaporetrained art teacher. Ignoring his father’s wish for him to become a teacher, he devoted himself to painting, selling his works to British colonial and army officers; when his family moved to a kampong in Pahang his work brought him to the attention of a district officer, who convinced him to seek formal training abroad. And so it was that in 1959, two years after independence, Ibrahim won a scholarship to Central Saint Martins College of Art in London, and there he learned the elements of composition, color, and anatomy, tutored by artists steeped in the European academic tradition. He drew still lifes, worked with models, visited galleries and museums in London and on the Continent. A decisive encounter with Rubens: the Flemish artist’s portraiture fed his developing interest in the human form, and by the time he returned to Malaysia in 1965 (with a Swiss-born wife) he had not only internalized the history of Western art but discovered the rudiments of his artistic vision—in the body.

His subject, broadly speaking, was life in the coastal villages of Kelantan—fishermen and their boats, women walking by the sea, swirling figures in bright greens, yellows, reds, and blues: the lives of ordinary people, set against the lush backdrop of the tropics, and the communities that they form.

“I am deeply involved in the activities of people in groups,” he once said.

While Eddin asked him about friends they had in common, I took another look around the exhibit. From a painting of six women strolling into a splash of sunlight I turned to gaze through the window at the women passing by, laden with bags of designer clothes, and then it hit me: the planners of 9/11 had probably been here, had perhaps even wandered down this gleaming hall—a realization that made me shudder. I remembered how the ash was still falling when I visited Ground Zero late one afternoon in November 2001. The wooden walkway I climbed to peer into the twisted wreckage was slippery with soot; the stench of death filled the cold air. Men and women wept. Sidewalk vendors hawked American flags, T-shirts, hats emblazoned with NYFD and NYPD insignia. A young woman embraced a policeman. I circled the site, conscious of what was missing—and of how absence can be described through what is there: the skeletal remains of a building; a makeshift shrine of plastic flowers and teddy bears; a chamber orchestra rehearsing in a church with plastic sheets covering the pews. The mind reels before such destruction—which is why so many turned to poetry in the days following 9/11. For poetry, Robert Frost reminds us, offers a temporary stay against confusion.

By way of contrast, the Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest twin buildings on earth, completed in 1998 (just after the Asian financial crisis) to house the state oil and gas company and its subsidiaries, were beacons of prosperity, with the rest of the office space leased to Boeing, IBM, Microsoft, and other Fortune 500 companies, and all six levels of the shopping mall crowded on a weekday afternoon. The Petronas Group, one of the so-called “New Seven Sisters” of the petroleum industry (along with companies in Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil), played a huge role in the national economy—exploring, refining, and distributing oil and natural gas; operating pipelines; manufacturing petrochemicals; trading and shipping and developing real estate—and was helping to integrate it into the international economy. It was fueling globalization, that is, as relentlessly as the financial service firms located in the World Trade Center in New York City had once moved capital around the globe.

Two pairs of towers celebrating economic might, two visions of modernity: a double-sided mirror of the international order.

What could not be seen in this mirror before 9/11, what remained in shadow, was the backlash against the forces of dislocation unleashed by globalization—the uncertainty that, for example, contributed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Nor were those who walked the corridors of power and money (not to mention the majority of intellectuals and writers) always alert to the potentially violent link between dispossession and fervency: acts of terror in the service of the divine have shaped civilization sometimes as decisively as the ethical codes and ideals of justice vouchsafed to prophets. For faith and terror are inextricably linked, inspiring some to create works of genius and some to take up arms. It was no accident that al-Qaeda operatives finalized plans for their attack on the World Trade Center in the shadow of the Petronas Twin Towers. If only the import of their summit had not eluded the intelligence community—and yet how often we fail to comprehend the meaning of something until it is too late.

Ibrahim lifted the plastic cover off a table displaying a selection of his sketchbooks, every page of which seemed to burst with ideas—figures in every conceivable pose, with notes scrawled in the margins: a microcosm of a world in flux, I decided, caught in the act of disappearing. Ibrahim said that he was always drawing, and from a side pocket of his combatstyle trousers he pulled out a sketchbook filled with pictures of the visitors to his exhibition, all of them, men and women, rendered in the nude.

“I naked them,” he said with a smile, “because I love the body.”

This seemed to me to be a good definition of any work of the spirit.

On the road to Kota Bharu, at the sight of a policeman flagging down a pickup truck, Eddin took pleasure in describing the ritual about to unfold: the policeman would sidle up to the truck, demand to see the driver’s license, and say, How to solve this?—the signal for a bribe. The amount was negotiable, like everything in this crazy country, my friend said, including the proscription on traditional ceremonies in Kelantan. It turned out that performances could be arranged for educational and research purposes, a tourist version of shadow puppetry was put on every week in Kota Bharu, and the authorities knew that ritual healings like main puteri took place in some of the remotest villages. What was not negotiable, said Eddin, nodding at the driver and the policeman across the road, was the fact that until a certain sum traded hands the journey would not continue.

How to solve this? This is a question constantly posed to individuals and nations; our answers, personal and collective, determine how posterity judges us. After 9/11, the American body politic answered the question in dramatic fashion, with the vice president declaring that the government would now work “on the dark side,” Congress granting the White House license to devise its war on terror with minimal oversight, the media and the public largely acquiescing to the administration’s violations of international treaties, infringements on civil liberties, and so on. Utilitarian arguments acquired the patina of grandeur, at least in the eyes of their defenders, and as ad hoc arrangements hardened into permanent structures the worst excesses of human behavior emerged.

How to solve this? Abu Ghraib was one answer.

Eddin sped up, but soon had to pull over to the side of the road—not to pay off a policeman but to change a flat tire. We worked in the withering heat to jack up the car, the melting tar sticking to the soles of our shoes, the lug nuts almost instantly becoming too hot to touch, and my shirt was soaked with sweat by the time we resumed our journey. My heart sank when I learned that we were some distance from the next town, where we could stop for tea, and the watery quality of the light on the long stretch of road that took us through paddy fields and rubber plantations made me thirstier yet.

“Water, water everywhere,” Eddin said. “Nor any drop to drink.”

It was not unusual for him to invoke The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to describe a situation. Coleridge’s tale of an ill-fated sea voyage was a touchstone for Eddin, and there was something in his manner that reminded me of how the Mariner buttonholes the Wedding-Guest to tell his story of sailing on a ship toward the South Pole, through mist and snow and ice, until the Albatross appears, bearing good luck, it seems. For the ice entrapping the ship splits apart, the helmsmen finds a passage through, and a south wind pushes them onward, with the Albatross following—to the delight of the crew—until the day that the Mariner inexplicably shoots it with his crossbow, setting in motion a tragedy he is condemned to “teach” to strangers like the Wedding-Guest.

His shipmates all agree that killing the bird was “a hellish thing,” since it brought a fair breeze. Yet when the breeze keeps blowing they convince themselves that the Albatross actually brought the fog and mist, and so they justify its sacrifice until the ship enters the Pacific, where at once it is becalmed, the sun parching every tongue, the water burning “like a witch’s oils,” death-fires dancing in the rigging at night. The sailors hang the Albatross around the Mariner’s neck to ward off its avenging spirit. Then a ghost ship arrives bearing a Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate to slay the crew, two hundred men in all. Only the Mariner is spared, and for a full week he lies on deck surrounded by the dead: a ghastly scene capped by the appearance of weirdly beautiful water-snakes coiling and swimming, leaving tracks like flashes of golden fire. “A spring of love gushed from my heart,” he tells the Wedding-Guest, “and I blessed them unaware”—the prayer that frees him of the yoke of the Albatross, which sinks “Like lead into the sea.”

Into a deep sleep he sinks, and when he is roused from a dream of buckets filling with dew his thirst is slaked by rain, the wind rises, and his dead shipmates return to their positions, a ghostly crew to sail him home. Now he falls into a trance, in which he hears two voices discussing the penance that he has done—and his obligation to do more. He prays to wake, the ship enters the harbor, and at the sight of crimson shadows rising from the depths he turns to see the deck littered once more with corpses, atop each of which is a man in white: a band of seraphs signaling to the land. A boat approaches with three figures onboard, splitting the bay, and when the ship, like the Albatross, “went down like lead,” they fetch the Mariner from the water. His first words cause the Pilot to faint, and when he takes up the oars the Pilot’s boy concludes that he is the Devil. Only the praying Hermit possesses the wits to ask: “What manner of man art thou?”

The Mariner recounts the story of his crime and punishment, the telling of which frees him momentarily from the agony that in the future will periodically overcome him, forcing him to travel from land to land until he chances upon someone like the Wedding-Guest, who “cannot choose but hear.” It is true that the Wedding-Guest’s reactions to his story are like unto what many feel before the sublime: indifference gives way to impatience and anger, then to fear and fascination and finally, perhaps, to gratitude. Who can bear to hear such an awful tale? Yet we yearn for its truth with the desire of the parched sailors who dream of slaking their thirst, which is why The Rime of the Ancient Mariner endures in the imagination, like Coleridge’s other dream work, Kubla Khan.

The poem defies rational analysis, demanding that readers surrender to its musical and mysterious logic, which carries them into a supernatural world, where a different set of rules applies—no less stringent than what we imagine governs daily life. Told in the popular form of a ballad, which is rooted in oral tradition, the narrative unfolds at a brisk pace, luring the ear from rhyme to rhyme, dramatizing the strangest events in what seems to be an inevitable sequence. The willing suspension of disbelief : this phrase, coined by Coleridge to justify in the name of a larger truth the fantastic elements in his poem, is a useful formula for explaining the structure of belief, which depends upon giving oneself over to a story that can both enchant and explain the meaning of one’s walk in the sun. The more implausible the tale, the more rigorous the writer must be to make it believable: In the beginning was the Word. . . . And the formula applies not just to poetry and religion but to every aspect of experience. We want to believe, hoping against hope that what we believe is true: that our beloved feels as we do; that our calling is the right one; that our time here below matters. Most of our decisions—to attend a particular school, a house of worship, a film; to marry, take a job, raise children; to travel to one place instead of another; to vote for someone; to launch a war; to negotiate for peace; to make a record of our deeds—are predicated on hope, however misguided, for ourselves and our families, for our tribe and country, for posterity and the planet, for God.

The willing suspension of disbelief leads some to clarity, others to blind faith. In Coleridge’s waking dream lie truths of a philosophical and religious order—that we are judged and punished for our actions; that prayer and love are intertwined; that expiation requires confession, a story—that a fanatic can translate into a nightmare. But clarity and faith need not be at odds, as writers in every religious tradition make plain, and an idea shared by most faiths—that vision is always partial—can instill the humility required for the marriage of clarity and faith: one theme of Coleridge’s poem. He strikes a balance between what he knows and what he does not know, leaving unexplained certain crucial matters, beginning with the Mariner’s decision to kill the Albatross. Why did he commit the crime? The poet lets the reader imagine that the Mariner is afflicted by some anxiety, the only relief for which is to kill the bird that in sea lore carries the souls of lost sailors. Nor does he explain how the Mariner’s silent blessing of the water-snakes restores him to human society, what compels him to stop certain strangers to tell his tale of guilt and redemption, or why the Wedding-Guest stays to listen. We cannot presume to understand everything, he seems to say, and therein lies hope for our salvation.