Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 12:35:57 -0600 (MDT)
From: Muhammad Deeb <mdeeb-AT-gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
Subject: An Intellectual Catastrophe




=09An Intellectual Catastrophe

=09      Edward W. Said

=09Al-Ahram Weekly, Issue 389,
            6 - 12 August 1998




=09=09=09  ------------------------------------------
=09=09=09| Said provides more insights into Naipaul's
=09=09=09| travelogues & critiques his recent book,
=09=09=09| *Beyond Belief.*
=09=09=09  ---------------
=09=09=09=09=09 MD


The strange fascination with Islam in the West continues.

=09Most recently, the originally Trinidadian but now British author V
S. Naipaul has brought out a massive volume about his travels in four
Islamic countries -- all of them non-Arab -- as a sequel to a book he wrote
on the same four places about 18 years ago. The first book was called Among
the Believers: An Islamic Journey; the new one is Beyond Belief: Islamic
Excursions Among the Converted Peoples. In the meantime Naipaul has become
Sir V S Naipaul, an extremely famous and, it must be said, very talented
writer whose novels and non-fiction (mostly travel books) have established
his reputation as one of the truly celebrated, justly well-known figures in
world literature today.

=09In Paris, for example, Sonia Rykiel's fancy showrooms on windows on
the Boulevard St Germain are filled with copies of the French translation of
Beyond Belief, intermixed with the scarves, belts and handbags. This of
course is one kind of tribute, although Naipaul may not be very pleased
about it. On the other hand, the book has been reviewed everywhere in the
prestige English and American press, paid tribute to as the work of a great
master of shrewd observation and telling detail, the kind of demystifying,
thorough exposé of Islam for which Western readers seem to have a bottomless
appetite. No one today would write a similar kind of book about Christianity
or Judaism. Islam on the other hand is fair game, even though the expert may
not know the languages or much about the subject.

=09Naipaul's, however, is a special case.  He is neither a professional
Orientalist nor a thrill seeker. He is a man of the Third World who sends
back dispatches from the Third World to an implied audience of disenchanted
Western liberals who can never hear bad enough things about all the Third
World myths -- national liberation movements, revolutionary goals, the evils
of colonialism -- which in Naipaul's opinion do nothing to explain the sorry
state of African and Asian countries who are sinking under poverty, native
impotence, badly learned, unabsorbed Western ideas like industrialisation
and modernisation. These are people, Naipaul says in one of his books, who
know how to use a telephone but can neither fix nor invent one. Naipaul can
now be cited as an exemplary figure from the Third World. Born in Trinidad
he is originally of Hindu Indian stock; he emigrated to Britain in the
l950s, has become a senior member of the British establishment and is always
spoken of as a candidate for the Nobel Prize -- someone who can be relied on
always to tell the truth about the Third World. Naipaul is "free of any
romantic moonshine about the moral claims of primitives,"  said one reviewer
in l979, and he does this without "a trace in him of Western condescension
or nostalgia for colonialism."

=09Still, even for Naipaul, Islam is worse than most other problems of
the Third World. Feeling his Hindu origins, he recently has said that the
worst calamity in India's history was the advent and later presence of Islam
which disfigured the country's history. Unlike most writers he makes not one
but two journeys to "Islam" in order to confirm his deep antipathy to the
religion, its people, and its ideas. Ironically, Beyond Belief is dedicated
to his Muslim wife Nadira whose ideas or feelings are not referred to. In
the first book he does not learn anything -- they, the Muslims, prove what
he already knows. Prove what? That the retreat to Islam is "stupefaction".
In Malaysia, Naipaul is asked "what is the purpose of your writing? Is it to
tell people what it's all about?" He replies, "Yes, I would say
comprehension." "Is it not for money?" "Yes. But the nature of the work is
important." Thus he travels among Muslims and writes about it, is well paid
by his publisher and by the magazines that run extracts of his books,
because it is important, not because he likes doing it. Muslims provide him
with stories, which he records as instances of "Islam."

=09There is very little pleasure and only a very little affection
recorded in these two books. In the earlier book, its funny moments are at
the expense of Muslims, who are "wogs" after all as seen by Naipaul's
British and American readers, potential fanatics and terrorists, who cannot
spell, be coherent, sound right to a worldly-wise, somewhat jaded judge from
the West. Every time they show their Islamic weaknesses, Naipaul the Third
World witness appears promptly. A Muslim lapse occurs, some resentment
against the West is expressed by an Iranian, and then Naipaul explains that
"this is the confusion of a people of high medieval culture awakening to oil
and money, a sense of power and violation and a knowledge of a great new
encircling civilization [the West]. It was to be rejected; at the same time
it was to be depended on."

=09Remember that last sentence and a half, for it is Naipaul's thesis
as well as the platform from which he addresses the world: The West is the
world of knowledge, criticism, technical know-how and functioning
institutions, Islam is its fearfully enraged and retarded dependent,
awakening to a new, barely controllable power. The West provides Islam with
good things from the outside, because "the life that had come to Islam had
not come from within." Thus the existence of one billion Muslims is summed
up in a phrase and dismissed. Islam's flaw was at "its origins -- the flaw
that ran through Islamic history: to the political issues it raised it
offered no political or practical solution. It offered only the faith. It
offered only the Prophet, who would settle everything -- but who had ceased
to exist. This political Islam was rage, anarchy." All the examples Naipaul
gives, all the people he speaks to tend to align themselves under the Islam
vs. The West opposition he is determined to find everywhere. It's all very
tiresome and repetitious.

=09Why then does he return to write an equally long and boring book two
decades later? The only answer I can give is that he now thinks he has an
important new insight about Islam. And that insight is if you are not an
Arab -- Islam being a religion of the Arabs -- then you are a convert. As
converts to Islam, Malaysians, Pakistanis, Iranians, and Indonesians
necessarily suffer the fate of the inauthentic. For them Islam is an
acquired religion which cuts them off from their traditions, leaving them
neither here nor there. What Naipaul attempts to document in his new book is
the fate of the converted, people who have lost their own past but have
gained little from their new religion except more confusion, more
unhappiness, more (for the Western reader) comic incompetence, all of it the
result of conversion to Islam. This ridiculous argument would suggest by
extension that only a native of Rome can be a good Roman Catholic; other
Catholic Italians, Spaniards, Latin Americans, Philipinos who are converts
are inauthentic and cut off from their traditions. According to Naipaul,
then, Anglicans who are not British are only converts and they too, like the
Malysian or Iranian Muslim, are doomed to a life of imitation and
incompetence since they are converts.

=09In effect, the 400-page Beyond Belief is based on nothing more than
this rather idiotic and insulting theory. The question isn't whether it is
true or not but how could a man of such intelligence and gifts as V S
Naipaul write so stupid and so boring a book, full of story after story
illustrating the same primitive, rudimentary, unsatisfactory and reductive
thesis, that most Muslims are converts and must suffer the same fate
wherever they are. Never mind history, politics, philosophy, geography:
Muslims who are not Arabs are inauthentic converts, doomed to this wretched
false destiny.  Somewhere along the way Naipaul, in my opinion, himself
suffered a serious intellectual accident. His obsession with Islam caused
him somehow to stop thinking, to become instead a kind of mental suicide
compelled to repeat the same formula over and over. This is what I would
call an intellectual catastrophe of the first order.

=09The pity of it is that so much is now lost on Naipaul. His writing
has become repetitive and uninteresting. His gifts have been squandered. He
can no longer make sense. He lives on his great reputation which has gulled
his reviewers into thinking that they are still dealing with a great writer,
whereas he has become a ghost. The greater pity is that Naipaul's latest
book on Islam will be considered a major interpretation of a great religion,
and more Muslims will suffer and be insulted. And the gap between them and
the West will increase and deepen. No one will benefit except the publishers
who will probably sell a lot of books, and Naipaul, who will make a lot of
money.

______________________________________________________________________________

=09=09=09Source: Al-Ahram Weekly
=09=09=09http://web.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1998/389/cu1.htm
=09=09=09URL: http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/











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