January 22, 2002

Mahmood Jamal is a poet and film maker of Pakistani origin living in London

“I DON’T believe it!” V.S. Naipaul has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In the citation the awarding committee praises his writing on Islam and Muslims, particularly in non-Arab countries. But anybody who has the most basic knowledge of Islam in India, Pakistan or the Far East would know that Mr Naipaul’s insights and views on Islam are often misleading and superficial. Take for example his last book on Islam, Beyond belief. Mr Naipaul is careful enough to state in the introduction that what he writes is not opinion but stories. The stories are enjoyable but where he does opine, in spite of himself, the logic is deeply flawed.

For example in the chapter on Pakistan he laments the state of decay of the Mughul monuments in Lahore, then adds to support his thesis, that the reason for this neglect is the ‘convert’s’ indifference to the land and customs and traditions he inhabits. (Most fundamentalists in Pakistan, however, lament the fact that Pakistani Muslims are far too immersed in the traditions and customs of the regions, but let’s ignore them for a while). Mr Naipaul then transfers to Sindh and says exactly the opposite when he points out the Sindhis’ (who are also ‘converts’ to Islam) attachment to tradition and custom and land as opposed to their Mohajir counterparts.

In a general sense his flimsy thesis is that Muslim ‘converts’ not only mess up the culture they are in but also have no attachment to any thing sacred in their own locale. They only look to Arab lands for that. Anyone who knows anything about the Indian Muslim’s attachment to Ajmer or Data Darbar can only laugh at this assertion. Not only that, if Muslims in India did not hold anything sacred there then there would be no hullabaloo over the Babri mosque.

The book is subtitled as “a journey among converted peoples”. He illuminates this in the introduction by saying that Islam is an Arab religion and all other Muslims are converts, a self-evident truth. I am sure he is well aware that even the Arabs had to be converted to Islam. That is the whole point of Islam to convert people to what it considers the right way of thinking as do Christianity and Buddhism and other philosophies. These conversions did not take place yesterday. They happened over a thousand years ago.

So that is no big deal. So what is he really saying. Well, the point he is making is that somehow ‘converts’ have a certain mindset that spells trouble.

Why is this so. Because ‘converts’ try to obliterate the culture and tradition which they have emerged from. A look at the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Muslim world immediately belies that claim. In fact Islam has been extremely adaptable to geography and has survived in a variety of cultures with consummate ease that is why it was not always imposed from the top but spread across all layers of society.

The paradox is that while Mr Naipaul opines that ‘converts’ are essentially fundamentalists, all his stories point in the opposite direction showing that most Muslims are not fundamentalists.

Where he does get it right is the critique he makes of fundamentalism as an unrealizable dream — because it ignores geographical and traditional reality. The fundamentalists themselves see this fact. They know that the vast majority of Muslims are rooted in their particular customs and traditions which constantly defeat their efforts to straitjacket people. This is also true of Hindu fundamentalism which is today trying to wipe out a thousand years of Muslim presence in India. The most brutal and graphic example of this is the destruction of the Babri mosque by Hindu fanatics hell-bent on eradicating the past from their midst.

Incidentally, and quite surprisingly, Mr Naipaul on several occasions betrays his own Hindu bias as when talking of Indonesia he not only refers to it as Greater India, another Hindu fundamentalist fantasy, but also points to the fact that the light of Hinduism was extinguished in Indonesia by Islam. As if it was all right for Hinduism to impose itself on Indonesia. Perhaps he should ask the Indonesians why they abandoned their Hinduism in favour of Islam and he may get more rational answers.

There is another subtext to Mr Naipaul’s book. The term ‘convert’ is misused deliberately. The present generations of Muslims in Iran, Pakistan or Malaysia are not converts. They were born Muslims. A convert in simple language means someone who has converted in his own lifetime. That’s what it means. So here there is an attempt at provocation, much like that used by the BJP to describe Indian Muslims.

Mr Naipaul justifies his use of the term by suggesting that somehow the conversion is still going on and the process is still not complete. This is wishful thinking. Behind this is the hope of some Hindu fundamentalists that somehow the Indian Muslims might reconvert to Hinduism and shed off foreign Islam — an idea far more racist and intolerant than anything the Muslim fundamentalist can dream of.

The theme that runs through most of Mr Naipaul’s travel novels is his bafflement and amusement at the way people combine irrational faith with rational modernism. The reductionist thrust of his modernism is as much a straitjacket as fundamentalism which leads to incomprehension. For most people combining faith, be it Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or Christianity, with modern scientific thought comes more easily and is not such an unforgiving nightmare as it is for Mr Naipaul.

Great ideas are great because they transcend geography. Sir Vidhya Naipaul himself is an illustrious convert to Western thought from Brahmanism which thousands of years ago imposed itself on the original Dravidians of South Asia.

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