Travel Narrative: Mystical Multan

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 12:54

Last November I had the unique opportunity to attend a week long wedding in the Megalopolis that is present day Karachi, Pakistan. After that first week I was able to travel around a part of the Muslim world for my first experiences inside the world of Islam with my handsome friend and guide, Umer. Without our chance meeting last summer I would never have started my exploration into the Islamic world that I had been longing to make for many years with the magnificent land of Pakistan. I had just seen last autumn on the BBC television a program on the Himalaya by Michael Palin which started in the northwest of Pakistan. This program revealed a Pakistan of immense beauty and diversity nothing like what the media normally chooses to imply with this land. I had not realized the second highest mountain in the world is in the far north of Pakistan and that the rest of the land slowly yields to sea level making Pakistan a self sufficient land worthy of its identity as the Citadel of Islam. Then I was convinced to go when Umer proudly told me that Pakistan was the very first Islamic Republic, so why not start there? Plus, it was his homeland so he invited me to the wedding of one of his cousins and on a lark at the last minute I went.

The first stop on my travels with Umer took me through the United Arab Emirates airport in Abu Dhabi where we met before ending up in Yemen where we had to part ways – he to Africa and me back to Northern Europe where I was finally dropped, rudely, back into the West within a Parisian airport. I say rudely because after the enthusiasm of the Pakistani people, followed by the unforgettable kindness of the Southwestern Arabian world, it was in Paris where I was greeted with a cold damp slap in the face much like the weather there in late December. My return was met with such Western styled heartless culture shock where I had a miserable time after and an exhausting flight just trying to purchase a simple train ticket back home to Brussels on the high speed TGV/Thallys. The thing is I am a huge fan of train travel whether it’s the totally mod and sci-fi like TGV or the more cozy vintage wooden trains (with windows that actually open) of Pakistan. On board the train between Karachi and Multan hints of graciousness and social kindness with strangers who are fellow travelers linger in ways that cannot with air and water (which are too capitalistic in nature). To say nothing of automotive transport that is now-a-days based in pre-civilized mass selfishness to be of any real use for a humane future.

Before I forget anything more about my time in Multan let me tell you about the rather mystical experience I had in waking up one morning to all the Multani calls to prayers. Even though I had been in Karachi for nearly a week I was staying nowhere near a Masjid with a minaret (the more appropriate Arabic word for what we in the west call a Mosque) - there was one being built nearby but somehow I never managed to hear it during the night despite its frequent solitary calls to prayer. After a very long train ride from Karachi to Multan - was it really fifteen hours on a board like seat that became a sleeping plank? It is the old pilgrimage city of shrines known as Multan where the Muslim world of old made its first unforgettable introduction into my soul. We arrived late in this city’s station after dark and I sort of had a creepy feeling because so many people were out and about even at that hour. Of course I was stupid and had packed way to much luggage for this trip so getting my bags on the auto-rickshaw was difficult and annoyed Umer to say nothing about carting the bag anywhere across dirt and gravel roads. “Live long, travel light” that was the slogan on my box cutter from my days of being a grocery stock boy back in retail America; that slogan should have been my mantra for this trip. Well, I learned that lesson on those four weeks with that massive bag being like a millstone strung around my neck. Now there is an expression much like wearing concrete shoes that doesn’t get much use anymore!

I didn’t want to leave Karachi as I really enjoyed the time there and the guys I had met were really happy and vivacious with this certain lust for life in that huge metropolis by the Arabian Sea. As we had arrived after dark to a strange city in south central Pakistan, which was considerably cooler if not down right cold that night had me feeling homesick for the more urban and reckless comforts of Karachi. We were going to be staying with one of Umer’s uncles and we had incomplete directions so we drove around in a noisy, cold, covered, auto-rickshaw getting lost and getting nowhere nearer a bed for the night. Our typically good natured Pakistani driver with patience and humor got us eventually to Umer’s Uncle’s home. The auto-rickshaws in Karachi are open air and you feel more like you are on a mo-ped or motorcycle when tooling around the city there. As you go farther north into Pakistan these rickshaws become covered with tarp like material inserted with little windows so you feel less connected to the outside street scene. For the tourist though the more southern open air auto-rickshaws are more fun like a dangerous and rickety state fair ride even if the enclosed northern ones are embellished to the point of sometimes being opulent in their sheltering privacy.

We did arrive after I had a few bouts with fear and I confess paranoia – what was I doing in this part of the world at this time in history traveling and getting lost after dark in a strange city down unpaved roads and unfamiliar looking streets? This kind of fear would set in at times like this and if it had not been for Umer being there calm, cool and with his thoughts collected I would not have been able to enjoy Pakistan as I did then. We did eventually arrive at Umer’s uncle and auntie’s home where we were greeted with plates of hot food and endless steaming cups of chai. You haven’t eaten until you have had home cooked spicy Pakistani meals with sweet milky chai! It seems everyone in Pakistan knows English much more so than even back home in Belgium. So our hosts had lots of questions for us about our travels where we had been and where we were going and of course being family with Umer lots of family gossip regarding the wedding. Pakistani weddings take the better part of a week and are so happy and colorful that they will make any western wedding look like a funeral for the groom by comparison.

Round about four or five in the morning I awake to find myself in a strange room, in a strange house, in a strange city in a far away land – my heart pounding right out of my chest from a surge of adrenalin as I had been awaken in so many senses of the word by the pre dawn or Fajr call to prayer. There was, however, not one call but hundreds! The prayers overlapping as each call starts at its own time creating an uncanny sound that my western ears had never heard. I had heard the call from the minaret from the media back home via radio or television programming but nothing, and I mean nothing, sounded like what I heard that first morning in Multan! These calls awoke something else in my body deep within and my soul understood the message. Thus that morning in Multan a part of me long since dead came to life and I will never be the same! These words I grab onto here are not doing justice in explaining all this. It was a moment that will be with me for the rest of my life and I will always be grateful for Pakistan and especially the Mystical city of Multan, a city of shrines and pilgrimages and such history, for finding me there quite by chance. It is the invincible generosity of the people of Pakistan that gave me my soul back that morning. For Umer and his Auntie and Uncle in Multan and their help and hospitality toward the wayfaring Western stranger are why Islam and the Muslims are in reality happy, generous and kind people which I am ever grateful for.

I will always remember how I awoke with such fear at unfamiliar sounds, all those haunting calls from near and far! All those staggered calls of the same Arabic words, and so many, lasting much longer than I expected. I didn’t have a clock and didn’t know the time but there was no dawn light visible out the window and suddenly I became afraid that this was no ordinary announcement – it sounded as if the sky had broken open and that this was ethereal music radiating to earth from Heaven! Then I feared that something terrible had happened somewhere on the planet like the U.S. invading yet another land and this was a special call to awaken the faithful to prayers for peace. I tried to shake Umer awake but he was not going to wake up as the morning calls to prayers were nothing new to him and with our travel exhaustion he was quite capable of sleeping through it all. Eventually I calmed down and opened the window to better grasp the scale of the fantastic moment. It felt good to hear all these minarets broadcasting to the faithful piercing the nighttime with their praises to Allah and calling the Muslims into His presence. There I sat alone in a shared but dark room next to the open window experiencing nothing like what we have in the West thinking God is not dead while I was feeling more alive at that moment than at any other time or any other place previous.

It’s all about location and the house we happened to be staying in was geographically situated that it could easily receive all these calls from a pleasant distance while not being too far from the Minarets either. If our rooms had been located beneath a Minaret it would have been overkill. Or like in Karachi where our rooms were too far out in a new still being built suburb with no Masjid nearby where the mornings passed like in the West in silence. That night in Multan and the nights that followed - I will always remember with gratitude as the city of Multan gave me back something of myself lost to the West.