Term Paper on Among the Believers by V.S. Naipul

The 69-year-old Naipul’s non-fiction works include “Among the believers: an Islamic journey,” published in 1981, which was criticized by some Muslim readers who said it had a narrow approach to Islam. He is very critical of all religions. He considers religion as the scourge of humanity. Earlier this year, the novelist caused a huge outcry when he said Islam had a “calamitous effect on converted peoples” as it had both enslaved and attempted to wipe out other cultures. Naipul’s concern is the meaning of Islam and the place it has in people's lives; and, in particular, recurrently and inescapably, the tensions, which exist between the demands, made by the Muslim faith and the realities of the modern world. His use of the term "the converted peoples" will puzzle some, and be disputed by others. "Islam," he writes, "is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert." "Christianity is in its origins a Jewish religion which developed in the Graeco- Roman world. Everyone not belonging to that world who is a Christian is a convert. This includes the English, the Scots, the Germans, the Poles and the Russians."
 

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There is another difference. Islam was a religion of warriors, Christianity, in its early days, of slaves and poor people. Islam was carried beyond Arabia by the sword, for three centuries Christianity made its way against the sword, in face of persecution. Yet too much should not be made of this. Christianity has since been carried by the sword to other lands: the Teutonic Knights made Poland and Lithuania Christian by force of arms, long after Arab armies converted ancient Persia to Islam. Moreover, in two of the countries visited by Naipul - Indonesia and Malaysia - Islam was not established by force.

And there is one significant difference between Islam and Christianity that Naipul ignores: the former is more than 600 years younger. It is true that he does not actually have much to say about Christianity; yet for someone trying to understand the present state of Islam it is surely worth pondering on the fact that Islam is now where Christianity was in the 14th century. To point this out is not to draw attention to the technological and/or civic backwardness of Islam - the first of which is, as Naipul shows, being corrected in Indonesia and Malaysia at least - but rather to suggest that Islam has a certainty of its own rightness and an ability to answer all the questions which life raises, that Christianity once had, and has now lost. Islam today can have as complete and self-sufficient a view of the world as St Thomas Aquinas had - and as no modern European thinker can aspire to.
The two most interesting sections of Naipul’s book are those dealing with Iran and Pakistan. It is there that he makes clear his view (although this is not a book of opinion) of the insufficiency of Islam. Both Iran, since the Revolution, and Pakistan, since its creation, represent attempts to regain the original purity of Islam. They have sought to create a state, which "came as a kind of religious ecstasy", a state where there could be no distinction between the law of the Koran and civil society, and a state indeed in which "civil society" was actually an incomprehensible, even meaningless, concept.

Here too, comparisons with the Europe of the middle Ages, and indeed of the century of the Reformation, offer at least an aid to understanding. Theocracy is not an idea foreign to Christian Europe. The Scots Covenanters who fought against Charles I, and refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of Charles II, claiming that they had no king but Jesus, would have had no difficulty in understanding the Ayatollah Khomeini, or his hanging judge, the Ayatollah Khalkhalli (now a back-number in Qum and visited by Naipaul), at the same time as regarding them as heathens.

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Naipul’s method is to recount, often at great length, conversations with a diversity of people. He then tries, mosaic-fashion, to form a picture of the society, and its state of mind as it emerges from these - as it often seems - haphazardly chosen representatives. The result is compelling, even as one wonders at the author's patience and good humor. It is also convincing, although one cannot stifle the thought that a different set of conversations would paint a very different picture. The strength of the book is the sense it gives of Naipul’s penetration of an alien culture, in which he has become thoroughly absorbed. Yet that also reveals the book's limits - the fact that here, far more than in his earlier study of the converted nations, he draws so little from the world beyond. Islam is different, but it is not unique. Actually, Naipaul reveals this, too, in giving a voice to those, like his student interpreter in Iran, who reject the theocratic Islamic state. Yet the somberness of Naipul’s tone suggests that they are losing the battle. He dwells more heavily on the dark, and only reluctantly, it seems, admits the light. The result is a book almost as depressing in its evidence of human obstinacy and perversity, cruelty and bigotry, as it is fascinating by reason of the author's unremitting curiosity and intelligence.

One of Naipul’s complaints against Muslims is that they systematically repress or distort history. The irony is striking, and bitter. Thus Naipaul seems to take delight in stories of horror and cruelty from the era when Islamic Mughal emperors ruled India. This may be a corrective to the romantic glorification of that time by some Indian Muslim writers. But Naipul’s denigration of the period is all too easily compatible with the claims of the Hindu zealots who unleashed the lethal sectarian conflict over the Ayodhya mosque, and whose allies now dominate India' s government. The idea of Islam as alien implant, child of conquest and coercion, fuels the furies of such people as it does those of ethnic cleansers in the Balkans. Naipaul is in no way complicit with such horrors, but his historical assertions are disconcertingly close to those, which legitimate them.

Among the Believers is not a great book, as some of Naipul’s novels are; but its rhetorical and evocative power is undeniable. Naipul remains one of the finest living writers in English. On other levels, though - in what it chooses to stress and what to omit, the vision of history it embodies - this is a deplorable and even dangerous work.

 

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