In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 assault, America, egged on by its liberal intelligentsia, went through a typically oversensitive and overgenerous phase of wondering what we had done to cause such hatred of us in the Middle East.  However, the level of public anger that the murders awoke greatly shortened this period of angst and left only a few inveterate self-haters asking these questions : Susan Sontag, Barbara Kingsolver, Norman Mailer, Ted Turner, and the rest of the loathsome Leftist detritus that lingers from last century.  Meanwhile, the rest of America quickly moved on to the more accurate question of, as Bernard Lewis put it in his latest book, "What Went Wrong?" with Islam to reduce a once great religion to an ideology of little more than hatred of the West.  Oddly enough, the search for answers to this question sent us scurrying back twenty years, to a couple of books and essays by V. S. Naipaul that were roundly condemned at the time they were written, particularly in the Muslim world, but which can now be recognized as brilliant and prophetic.  In fact, for all his great novels, it is hard not to interpret the Nobel Prize that he won just one month after the attacks as a kind of tacit acceptance of his critique and a slap in the face to those who had for so long opposed awarding him the prize on the basis of his supposed Indian chauvinism and anti-Islamic bigotry.

Among the Believers recounts the author's seven month sojourn across Muslim Asia, from Iran to Pakistan to Malaysia to Indonesia and back again to Iran.  It should be remembered that he traveled in the immediate wake of the Iranian fundamentalist revolution that had overthrown the Shah, with at least implicit approval from Western intellectual elites, and ushered in a supposed new dawn of reform.  But instead of finding cause for hope in the post-Colonial muscle flexing of Islamic regimes, Mr. Naipaul warned instead that the Islamic world was unreconciled to modernity and perhaps irreconcilable.  Here we find Naipaul's assessment of Islamic fundamentalism, one that is finally coming to be accepted, though two decades too late for the folks murdered last September :

    In the fundamentalist scheme the world constantly decays and has constantly to be re-created. The only function of intellect is
    to assist that re-creation. It reinterprets the texts; it re-establishes divine precedent. So history has to serve theology, law is
    separated from the idea of equity, and learning is separated from learning. The doctrine has its attractions.  To a student from
    the University of Karachi, from perhaps a provincial or peasant background, the old faith comes more easily than any
    new-fangled academic discipline.  So fundamentalism takes root in the universities, and to deny education can become the
    approved educated act.  In the days of Muslim glory Islam opened itself to the learning of the world.  Now fundamentalism
    provides an intellectual thermostat, set low.  It equalizes, comforts, shelters, and preserves.

    In this way the faith pervades everything, and it is possible to understand what the fundamentalists mean when they say that
    Islam is a complete way of life.  But what is said about Islam is true, and perhaps truer, of other religions--like Hinduism or
    Buddhism or lesser tribal faiths--that at an early stage in their history were also complete cultures, self-contained and more
    or less isolated, with institutions, manners, and beliefs making a whole.

    The Islamic fundamentalist wish is to work back to such a whole, for them a God-given whole, but with the tool of faith alone--
    belief, religious practices and rituals.  It is like a wish--with intellect suppressed or limited, the historical sense falsified--to work
    back from the abstract to the concrete, and to set up the tribal walls again.  It is to seek to re-create something like a tribal or
    a city-state that--except in theological fantasy--never was.  The Koran is not the statute book of a settled golden age; it is the
    mystical or oracular record of an extended upheaval, widening out from the Prophet to his tribe in Arabia.  Arabia was full
    of movement; Islam, with all its Jewish and Christian elements, was always mixed, eclectic, developing.  ...

    The West, or the universal civilization it leads, is emotionally rejected.  It undermines; it threatens.  But at the same time it
    is needed, for its machines, goods, medicines, warplanes, the remittances from the emigrants, the hospitals that might have
    a cure for calcium deficiency, the universities that will provide master's degrees in mass media.  All the rejection of the West
    is contained within the assumption that there will always exist out there a living, creative civilization, oddly neutral, open to all
    to appeal to.  Rejection, therefore, is not absolute rejection.  It is also, for the community as a whole, a way of ceasing to strive
    intellectually.  It is to be parasitic; parasitism is one of the unacknowledged traits of fundamentalism.

There in a nutshell, an idea-filled nutshell, is as good a description as anyone is offering today, some two decades later, of why Islam has turned so radical, so violent, so anti-Western : it has come to be a kind of retrograde utopianism which locates its Utopia not in some bright and idyllic future but in the temporary medieval community created by the Prophet Mohammed fourteen hundred years ago.  It is not the West per se that Islam is at war with, but the progressive tendencies of the West which keep bearing the whole world ever further away from a past that Muslims long to return to.  At first glance the attacks of September 11th may appear to be a kind of mindless nihilism, but from the perspective that Naipaul grants us, we can see that they were a thoughtful form of nihilism.  It becomes obvious that at least fundamentalist Muslims believe that for Islam to return to its former glory, the West must be destroyed.

I've enjoyed several of V. S. Naipaul's novels, found others less effective, but this is the best book of his that I've read.  He combines a novelist's gift for characterization, with the observations and scene-sketching of the very best travel writers, then adds to the whole the kind of insightful religio-political analysis that too few Middle East experts have offered us over the last quarter century of Islamic confrontation with the West.  It is altogether fitting that he was given his long overdue Nobel Prize in 2001, because this book does so much to explain the horrid events of that year.

(Reviewed:17-Feb-02)

Grade: (A) Orrin C. Judd

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