Review of Beyond Belief: Islamic excursions among the converted people, by V.S. Naipaul

18/07/1998

The Islamic government in Iran operates a particularly cruel, and doubtless effective, form of book censorship. Publishers must submit a copy of any book they intend to publish for state scrutiny, but only when the entire print-run has already been produced. It makes, says V.S. Naipaul, for a passionate and self-searching censorship.

The detail is typical of Naipaul's new book, a return visit to the Islamic battlefields of Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, described in his 1981 Among the Believers: typical in both its incisive quality and in its selection of what it tells us about the society in general. In Iran Naipaul finds a country of billboard slogans and prisons, in which religion and state power come together in the all-pervading concept of martyrdom. That martyrdom found its most potent means of expression in the suicide battalions of the Iran-Iraq war, but even in the revolutionary upheaval against the Shah the concept of religious self-sacrifice was a powerful, and sometimes deadly, force. Those who were only slightly wounded by the Shah's police faced additional dangers as their fellow demonstrators pushed hands into their wounds, in search of a martyr's blood.

Naipaul is fascinated and horrified by the irrational and irresistible movements that he sees at the centre of fundamentalism. As a sceptical, liberal observer, more aware than most of the weight of history (his remarks on the Caribbean's supposed lack of authentic historical experience have earned him a certain notoriety in his native Trinidad), he is also struck by the way in which imported Islam erases the historical and cultural past of what it so definitively dislodges. The Shah's imperial fantasy of lineage with the Persian Cyrus the Great has given way to an entirely rewritten version of nationhood, based exclusively on the perceived purity of the Islamic Republic. In Pakistan, similarly, Islam was intended to provide a new, all-inclusive identity that would forge a new state on top of the ancient and disparate Hindu and pagan cultures, which would accordingly wither away. In its worst manifestations, this tabula rasa has entailed the malign neglect of pre-Islamic sites and the deliberate vandalism of Buddhist treasures. The imposition of Islam thus involves a truly revolutionary break with the past, an abrupt and complete redefinition of self, both religious and political.

Naipaul's stock-in-trade has long been that sense of cultural dislocation, of d?racinement, that he, as the descendant of Indian migrants in the Caribbean, has experienced on a personal level. The advent of Islamic state power, or a strongly fundamentalist political movement, creates such a dislocation for those who live through it, as it necessarily entails an end to an old order and the beginning of a new society. Many of the individuals whom he interviews in the course of his travels express a sort of bewilderment about their conversion and the imposition of what is essentially an alien faith. The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism, writes Naipaul, is that it allows only to one people ? the Arabs, the original people of the Prophet ? a past and sacred places, pilgrimages and earth reverences. To embrace Islam is hence to strip oneself of one's past, to submit to the most uncompromising kind of imperialism.

Such submission is born, according to Naipaul, out of rage and despair. The obscene inequalities of the Shah's Iran fed the resentment and thirst for revenge among a poverty-stricken population excluded from his model of modernisation. Islamic fundamentalism provided the vehicle for the bloodthirsty score-settling of the poor and embittered. In Pakistan, the creation of a breakaway Muslim state was in many ways an act of revenge against those wealthy Hindus and Sikhs who were forced out. In Indonesia (presciently in view of recent events), Naipaul sees Islam as a panacea eagerly seized upon by a people alienated by a harsh colonial history and a dizzying and fragile economic boom. Complex and disturbing realities require the reassurance of fundamental truths; disorder whets the appetite for the strictest forms of order.

Inevitably, the fundamentalist sees enemies all around, and some are politically convenient. The Iran-Iraq conflict and Pakistan's (now nuclear) enmity with India are symptomatic of militant Islam's need for self-justifying war or jihad, but internal adversaries - non-believers, different ethnic groups, enemy factions - are just as important for the tireless vigilance of the fundamentalist state, a vigilance directed against polluting outside influences. The helicopters that buzz over Tehran, Naipaul observes, are on the lookout for concealed TV satellite dishes, while roadblocks check for banned CDs or jeans.

This powerful and persuasive book leaves one in little doubt as to Naipaul's distaste for the theocracies of Iran and Pakistan and his apprehension concerning developments in South East Asia. But it is by no means a polemic and indeed is remarkable for the absence of direct intervention by the author. Its structure is instead based upon life stories of individuals, interviewed by the narrator but for the most part allowed to tell their own stories. Most are perhaps typical in some way; others, such as Ayatollah Khalkhalli, the hanging judge of Iran, are anything but typical. It is a book about people, not opinion, he remarks in the prologue, and it is undoubtedly the case that Naipaul has developed a narrative stance so discreet as to be almost invisible. Yet the largely missing first person and the reluctance to editorialise should not mislead us into believing that this is not a highly individual - and all the more compelling - insight into one of the next century's great challenges to liberal democracy.