God and Mud in Pakistan

ALI SETHI, author of the novel “The Wish Maker”
NYT

Lahore, Pakistan

In July, deep in the heart of Pakistan’s flooded countryside, a miracle mosque was proclaimed: it was the only structure in the small village of Jinnah Colony that the savage waters spared. While the land was still a swamp, I went out to meet the people who had survived by crouching for days on its terrace.

Most of their mud houses had crumbled; those still standing had been destroyed from within. But the villagers were hopeful: I had brought food in a truck, and they had heard that the military was sending tents. As the water receded, they would return to the fields and start sowing winter crops.

Proudly they led me to their mosque, a squat white thing with three turquoise doors and a stump of a minaret — it was built on a platform, which had kept it above the water. The villagers said it had been given to them some years ago by a follower of the Ahl-e-Hadith sect, the Pakistani affiliate of Saudi Arabia’s prohibitive Wahhabi strand of Islam.

“Now,” said an old man with bright eyes, “we are all Ahl-e-Hadith here.”

(More here.)