Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 12:36:02 -0800
From: "C. J. S. Wallia" <cjwallia-AT-indiastar.com>
Subject: Edward Said on Naipaul's "Beyond Belief"


===================================================


>An Intellectual Catastrophe

	      by Edward W. Said

>The strange fascination with Islam in the West continues.
>
>	Most 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.
>
>	In 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 expos=C8 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.
==========================================================
Numerous books criticizing Christianity and Judaism have been published
in the West without incurring "death sentences" on the writers. For example,
 Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" diagnoses the psychopathology that
afflicted Moses.

In contrast,  Anwar Shaikh, a U.K.-based philosopher of Pakistani
 origin, published his books in the 1980s and 1990s, he has ever since
been subjected to a fatwa on his head.
In "Islam: The Arab National Movement" (U.K., The Principality
 Publishers, 1995. ISBN: 0- 9513349-4-8), Anwar Shaikh argues
a thesis similar to Naipual's.

                             "Islam has caused more damage to the
                             national dignity and honour of non-Arab
                             Moslems than any other calamity that may
                             have affected them, yet they believe that
                             this faith is the ambassador of equality and
                             human love. This is a fiction which has
                             been presented as a fact with an
                             unparalleled skill. In fact, the Prophet
                             Muhammad divided humanity into two
                             sections, the Arabs and the non-Arabs.
                             According to this categorisation, the Arabs
                             are the rulers and the non-Arabs are to be
                             ruled through the yoke of Arab cultural
                             imperialism: Islam is the means to realise
                             this dream because its fundamentals raise
                             superiority of Arabia sky-high, inflicting a
                             corresponding inferiority on the national
                             dignity of its non-Arab followers. From the
                             Arabian point of view, this scheme looks
                             marvellous, magnificent and
                             mystifying...yet under its psychological
                             impact the non-Arab Muslims rejoice in
                             self-debasement, hoping to be rewarded by
                             the Prophet with the luxuries of paradise.
                             The Islamic love of mankind is a myth of
                             even greater proportions. Hatred of
                             non-Moslems is the pivot of Islamic
                             existence. It not only declares all dissidents
                             as the denizens of hell but also seeks to
                             ignite a permanent fire of tension between
                             Moslems and non-Moslems; it is far more
                             lethal than Karl Marx's idea of social
                             conflict which he hatched to keep his theory
                             alive."
==================================================================
>	Naipaul'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."
>
>	Still, 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."
>
>	There 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."
>
>	Remember 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.
========================================================
 Edward Said says, "It's all very
tiresome and repetitious."
 How about refuting Naipaul's assertions instead
of stating your emotional response to them?
======================================================
>	Why 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.
===========================================================
The  propagation of the "two-nation theory" and the subsequent partition of
India
fully exemplifies how much the Muslim converts of the subcontinent were cut off
from their native traditions.
=============================================================

>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.
----
-------------
See Anwar Shaikh's paragraph quoted above.

Matter of fact, Latin Americans and Philipinos ARE
cut off from their traditions and this they themselves
are beginning to recognize.
----
----------------------

>
>	In 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.
===========================================================
Edward Said's phrases above -- "idiotic and insulting theory," "stupid and
boring book,"
"Naipaul...suffered a serious intellectual accident,"  "mental suicide," --
but
no attempt at refutation, suggest to me that the  "intellectual
catastrophe" that Said
says has fallen on Naipaul has landed on himself, not Naipaul.

======================================================
------------------------------
C. J. S. Wallia,  Ph.D.
Publisher, IndiaStar: A Literary-Art Magazine
http://www.indiastar.com
Phone and Fax: (510) 848-8200
P.O. Box 5582, Berkeley, CA 94705, U.S.A.
--------------------------------




     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---