File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0110, message 269


Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 17:08:01 +1000
From: saeed urrehman <saeed.urrehman-AT-anu.edu.au>
Subject: (Edward Said, 1998) on Naipaul


An intellectual catastrophe
Edward W. Said
http://web.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1998/389/cu1.htm

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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The 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.




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