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PROSPECTS FOR LIVING TOGETHER LOOK DIM An essay based on a reading of V. S. Naipaul's Beyond Belief.
See also Will Islam and the West learn to live together? Can Islamic lands end the blame game and make a future themselves? Edward W. Said slammed the views on Islam expressed by V. S. Naipaul
26 March
2002; last modified 11 July 2004 Richard P. Richter
the
"globalization" homepage 
V. S. Naipaul. BEYOND BELIEF: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples. New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 1998.
Ever since the attack on America on 11 September 2001, I have tried to make up, however haphazardly, for my abysmal ignorance of the motive forces driving Muslims to destroy us.
In the course of reading, I developed the thought that the West and Islam finally could not avoid a colossal engagement with one another. In the beginning it would have to be military, to be sure. But in the longer term, it would become cultural and political. My early take on this was that we would get into the heads of Muslims as we have never done before. And Muslims would finally see Westerners as they had never seen them before. My optimistic opinion came to be that this human engagement would lead to a new world order with potential, never seen before, for comity on a global scale. I developed that working opinion in an essay, Islam & the West: Will they learn to live together?
My optimism gradually weakened as I read on. Bernard Lewis's little book, What Went Wrong?, identified what seemed to me an obsessive need of Muslims to escape responsibility for their fall from power in the world. Lewis traced the ins and outs of their elaborate "blame game," in which the West--mainly now the USA--comes out as their master villain, or Great Satan.
My veneer of optimism disappeared almost entirely after I finished reading V. S. Naipaul's report on individual Islamic lives in Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia--Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples.
The key to grasping Naipaul's nuanced report is that "converted peoples" make up the populations of these countries. As he sees them, they have tried to expunge their traditional, local pre-Islamic identities. They have tried to establish an ersatz Arabian legitimacy for their families and communities. They have tried to throw off the meaning of their ancestral cultures and graft over them the Arabian culture of Islam, the culture of their conquerors. It is as if the Germanic tribal denizens of early Europe established fictitious Roman origins for themselves as the classical civilization moved up from the Italian peninsula.
(Saddam Hussein in Iraq currently is forcing Kurds to take new Arab names so that the traces of their Kurdish ancestry will disappear. In this he presumably is following time-honored Arabian-Islamic imperial practice.)
Naipaul found that the "crossover" to Islam from "old beliefs, earth religions, the cults of rulers and local deities" (xii) is in some areas still unfinished. "It is the extra drama in the background, like a cultural big bang, the steady grinding down of the old world." (xiii)
Naipaul examines the Pakistani manifestation of this, where he found a profound indifference to the ancient Mogul past. He attributed this indifference in part to "the Muslim convert's attitude to the land where he lives. To the convert his land is of no religious or historical importance; its relics are of no account; only the sands of Arabia are sacred." (256) (One recalls the Taliban regime's maddening destruction of beautiful Buddhist artifacts in Afghanistan because they were not Islamic.)
Naipaul's insight makes a deafeningly loud impact on an American mind. Here we sit, wondering how globalization--the spread of free-market capitalist practice and the culture that surrounds it--will encircle the earth and make a new era in human history. We sit wondering how secular, postmodern, Western values will blend with the persistent folk and religious values that they perforce must meet. We theorize on ways in which the Lexus will hum comfortably by the ancient olive trees, to use the metaphor from Thomas Friedman's book. We watch "the dance of categorical opposites" as Identity and Difference circle one another on a global stage. We enjoy the game of guessing how the dance will come to a climax. We have a pretty confident idea about the outcome, and of course it favors us.
Naipaul is here to say how naive and shallow are our globalization games. In vast regions of the world, people are trying to make transitions, to be sure. But they are not transitions from traditional to modernist Western ways of living. They are transitions from local folkways with roots centuries deep to the culture of the Islamic conquerors who came centuries ago!
Naipaul's talks with representatives of these regions challenge our glib way of imagining the change process at the start of the 21st century. From these people he gleans motives and behaviors that render the American "let's roll" attitude ludicrous. He places the dynamics of Western globalization in a yeasty cultural and religious brew that resists our efforts to understand.
Consider Naipaul's first specimen from Indonesia, Imaduddin (3-20). Imaduddin was an ambitious and ingenious operator who had a television program aimed at carrying Islam of a certain tilt to the people. He seemed to resemble an Islamic Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. He was also chairperson of a new Association of Muslim Intellectuals.
Imaduddin had an "in" with the Suharto government. (This was in 1995, before the regime's troubles.) The regime looked to him to "educate" the people in Islam. This took the form of "mental training," which was a thin veneer of expert technique on the traditional Islamic faith.
Imaduddin was an electrical engineer who had done graduate work in industrial engineering at the University of Iowa in the US. Imaduddin, like his government patrons, saw technological development based on modern science as a national goal. However, his mission when Naipaul interviewed him was to develop the human resources of the country.
Only with "devout and good" people could Indonesian technology develop properly. Indonesians were scientifically backward, in Imaduddin's view, because the Spanish, the British, and the Dutch had colonized them. They would overcome their handicap through a peculiar blend of Islamic religious uplift and technological development.
Naipaul sees Imaduddin's efforts to shape Indonesian society as a vivid example of the working of Islam in a converted land. Islam came to Indonesia in about 1400, at about the same time that Christianity arrived. Indonesia was thus one of the most recent regions to fall under the Islamic yoke. Islam, he says, "had not completely possessed the souls of people. It was still a missionary religion." (19)
Through the program run by Imaduddin, the government was seeking to "dismiss old ritual ways" native to the population and implant the Islamic worldview in this non-Arabic people. Says Naipaul, "The ambition was stupendous: to complete the Islamic takeover of this part of the world, and to take the islands to their destiny as the leader of Islamic revival in the twenty-first century." (19)
Imaduddin had a positive social and educational experience at the University of Iowa. Naipaul thought that he would credit this experience as a source of his effectiveness. But Imaduddin had been a believer among unbelievers in the US.
Naipaul said to him that Americans obviously had shown him much kindness during his time at Iowa. Imaduddin's stiff-necked reply was, "God loves me very much." I could not help but think that this small exchange measured the vast gulf in values that lies between the believers who reside in the House of Islam and the infidels who dwell in the House of War. If the faithful have an opportunity to take knowledge from the infidels, they should take it--not as a gift from the unbelievers but as a gift from Allah.
Reading about Imaduddin and the many other Muslims interviewed by Naipaul, I grew increasingly burdened. It was not that most were not striving to make something good of their lives. It was the overwhelming power of the Islamic paradigm to fix the terms of striving. It was the sinking sense that I, as a mere liberal humanist Westerner, could not even begin to empathize with their vision of good in their world.
It was weighted down with shariah, the Quranic law that resurrects punishments that seem to me cruel and inhuman, not God-inspired. Its complicated treatment of women simply mystifies. The exclusionary sense of being Muslim hems it in. I realized that while Western colonialists had dehumanized Muslims through the optic of Orientalism, Muslims had cast their occupiers as infidels worthy only of contempt. At best Muslims would patronize them, covertly or otherwise. Later, with independence and the rise of Islamism, they would shun them and then kill them. Here one glimpsed the profound flip that the Islamic mind performs: because a Muslim abases himself, heart and soul, to Allah, he attains a superiority over all others in the world who do not do the same.
The Islamic paradigm is unremittingly hierarchical. All human endeavor is meaningful only as a sign of surrender to a personal God at the top of the pyramid. That personal God and his agent on earth, the Prophet Mohammad, seemed in my reading more often than not to resemble the militant Christian hammer that for centuries pounded a swath of inhumanity across Europe and even through Pilgrim New England.
My sense of sadness grew as I read on. Naipaul's interviews in Iran and Pakistan led me to see the vast failure of the Islamist dream. In that dream, Muslims return to the purity and wholeness of life as it flourished in the time of the Prophet. Contemporary Muslims find the way to live with traditional dignity and to shun the modernist secular world surrounding them. Religion and politics meld into a single fabric woven by Allah.
It was that dream that Iranians bought into when they got behind the Ayatollah Khomeini and toppled the Shah in 1979. The Islamist dream, to be sure, contradicted the equalitarian socialist vision of the vocal Marxist groups that allied themselves with the Islamists. But it was not until after the revolution that the Islamists set about eliminating the contradiction by tyrannizing the Marxist groups. It was not until after the revolution that the harsh arbitrariness and political absurdity of purist Islamic governance dawned on the Iranians who had been suckered into supporting Khomeini.
It was that dream that earlier fired the imagination of the Indian Muslim poet Mohammed Iqbal. Iqbal as early as 1930, while the British Raj was ascendant, had the romantic vision of an Islamic state to which the Indian Muslims would gravitate when India finally gained independence. (251) And behold, Pakistan did come into being under the pressures of British withdrawal after WWII. It was a poem that turned into a political reality. And it quickly turned into a political, social, and economic nightmare that bore little resemblance to the Islamic dream. The "state as God" became the state as a corrupt freeloader, taking the aid of the US in the Cold War as a staple of its economy.
Iqbal's dream of carving a purely Muslim state out of colonial India bore the curse of exclusivity that today hampers the relationships between Islamic states and the West. Iqbal, as Naipaul observes, was saying that "Muslims can live only with other Muslims." (251)
After reading this book, I had to declare a moratorium on my efforts to learn more about Islam. The prospects of our creating a modus vivendi with Muslims in Islamic lands across a third of the world's surface have become so dim in my mind that I need some lighter fare for a while. Clearly, the sins of the West's colonialist fathers are just now being visited on our heads full force. The West has been grandly indifferent to the inner meaning of Islamic culture through the past couple of centuries. Above all, the West seems to have missed the exclusivity at the heart of Islam. Muslims must hold non-Muslims at a distance. Since Westerners had no great desire to get close to Muslims, this defining characteristic could easily go unnoticed or, if noticed, applauded.
The political impasse in Israel defines the gap between Western and Islamic values in a uniquely terrible way. Unless and until the US can bring the parties to some peace settlement, all the efforts to fight terrorists inspired by the Islamic paradigm and all the efforts to win peace with bread and Peace Corps volunteers will count for virtually nothing.
The democratic exuberance and entrepreneurial push of the West, exemplified in Israel and carried to the limit in the US, evidently curdle the blood of many Islamic leaders. The openness and diversity of our style of life probably look to them like the works of Satan. I grossly exaggerate here. The shades of difference in perspective across the Islamic world surely vary. I assume that Muslims exist who can accommodate themselves to a life side by side with good-willed non-believers in the West. Presumably some American Muslims are showing how to do that. But, wherever they are, my impression to date is that Muslims of that sort make up only small islands of sanity in seas of cultural dysfunction.
So, I'm on leave for a while from reading about Islam!
Maybe a hopeful light will come in from somewhere sometime and lead me back to some new reading. Maybe the US will succeed in bringing the parties to a settlement in Israel. Maybe that breakthrough will lead to others.
I'm not planning to sit out the war against terrorists. I'm just planning for now not to beat my head against the wall. I'm quitting the game of trying to imagine the grand answers to cultural engagement between Islam and the West. They're not in the woodwork at the moment, as far as I can see.
Naipaul's Beyond Belief has to be one of the most depressing books I have ever read.
