Partisan Report

By Paul Gray

AMONG THE BELIEVERS: AN ISLAMIC JOURNEY

by V.S. Naipaul Knopf; 430 pages; $15

What do the militant Muslims really want? This question, which began to vex the West with special urgency as the Iranian revolution unfolded, piqued the curiosity of V.S. Naipaul. Instead of simply clucking in wonder, he decided to look for an answer at the source. He mapped out a six-month itinerary that only a journalist or a masochist could love. In August 1979, it was off to Iran, a nation still rejoicing in the fall of the Shah, still tumultuous under the evolving rule of Khomeini. Then to Pakistan, the troubled state founded in 1947 as a homeland for Indian Muslims and still brooding over the loss of 15% of its land and more than half of its people in the early 1970s, when Bangladesh was born. From there, he traveled to Malaysia and Indonesia, both former European colonies, both nominally Islamic and both feeling the impact of new wealth and restlessness. His quarry: people who would talk to him about their dream of remaking the world in the image of a 7th century Arabian state.

He found plenty of them, thanks in part to his physiognomy. Naipaul's Indian heritage made him appear sympathetic to some who might otherwise have mistrusted him. Ayatullahs in Qum found his looks puzzling but nonthreatening; in Pakistan he was taken for a Pakistani; a teacher in Indonesia remarked admiringly: "You look like our Prophet." Such appearances were deceiving. Naipaul is a man of the West, through and through. He may have grown up as an alien in Trinidad, then a British colony, but his escape from that subjugation came not through mysticism or political revolution but through secular education, a mastery of Western intellectual traditions and the English language. His unique combination of experience and skills helped make him a distinguished novelist. In such non-fiction works as India: A Wounded Civilization and The Return of Eva Peron, he also emerged as an impressive interpreter and critic of the Third World.

Given his background, Naipaul was bound to wind up at loggerheads with people who renounce logic, humanism, skeptical inquiry and the notion of progress.

Since that is what Islamic fundamentalists do, Among the Believers reads like a long-drawn-out standoff. Naipaul's report is indeed filled with fascinating details. He carefully questions his subjects about their pasts and often evokes poignant sketches of uprooted lives leading to inchoate yearnings. His prose evokes obscure places that few will ever see: a mountain pass in the shadow of the Himalayas, where Afghan nomads drive and tend then-flocks; a small village in central Java, "an enchanted, complete world."

On a few occasions, Naipaul even approaches the religious satisfaction he senses in his subjects. At the end of one long day, sitting in the courtyard of a mosque in Pakistan, he feels "that Islam had achieved community and a kind of beauty, had given people a feeling of completeness--if only the world outside could be shut out, and men could be made to forget what they knew."

That "if is the block on which all the book's dialogues stumble. Naipaul thinks that the rest of civilization cannot be ignored; his partners disagree. He argues that the Koran alone is an inadequate blueprint for a functioning state.

He asks: "Wouldn't it have been better for Muslims to trust less to the saving faith and to sit down hard-headedly to work out institutions? Wasn't that an essential part of the history of civilization, after all: the conversion of ethical ideals into institutions?" Again and again he is answered: No.

Repeated encounters with those impervious to his logic turn Naipaul cranky.

Although he tries to limit his criticism to Islam's political extensions, its alarms and excursions, he begins sniping at the religion itself: here, an offhand reference to the "open-and-shut morality of Islam," there, a disparaging allusion to the devotional habits of its most fervent believers, "the five-times-a-day prayers, the unnecessary fasts." He forgets that all religious observances are "unnecessary," except to those who practice them. In his judgments of the new fundamentalism, he begins to sound as harsh as any ayatullah railing at the great satan in the West: "This political Islam was rage, anarchy."

It is possible to agree with every word of Among the Believers and to feel, still, that something is missing. Naipaul gets the lyrics, but the music is dim. His book has clearly been written for Western eyes, a preachment to the unconverted. Muslim fundamentalists who were not persuaded by Naipaul in person are not likely to be swayed by his narrative or, in fact, to read him at all. They are busy with a struggle that they think will lead to their salvation; their chosen enemies, Naipaul included, can be forgiven for regarding them with some enmity and considerable dread.

Naipaul's journey was grueling and intellectually brave; he has returned, not with a history but with a partisan report of battles present and to come.

--By Paul Gray

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