Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V.S. Naipaul

Perhaps it is this absence of the sense of sacredness – which is more than the idea of the ‘environment’ – that is the curse of the New World, and is the curse especially of Argentina and ravaged places like Brazil. And perhaps it is this sense of sacredness – rather than history and the past – that we of the New World travel to the Old to rediscover. So it is strange to someone of my background that in the converted Muslim countries – Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia – the fundamentalist rage is against the past, against history, and the impossible dream is of the true faith growing out of a spiritual vacancy.

The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only to one people – the Arabs, the original people of the Prophet – a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages and earth reverences. These sacred Arab places have to be the sacred places of all the converted peoples. Converted peoples have to strip themselves of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such a thing can be arrived at), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism.

The British period – two hundred years in some places, less than a hundred in others – was a time of Hindu regeneration. The Hindus, especially in Bengal, welcomed the New Learning of Europe and the institutions the British brought. The Muslims, wounded by their loss of power, and out of old religious scruples, stood aside. It was the beginning of the intellectual distance between the two communities. This distance has grown with independence; and it is this – more even than religion now – that at the end of the twentieth century has made India and Pakistan quite distinct countries.

Islam is not like Christianity, Iqbal says. It is not a religion of private conscience and private practice. Islam comes with certain ‘legal concepts’. These concepts have ‘civic significance’ and create a certain kind of social order. The ‘religious ideal’ cannot be separated from the social order. ‘Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.’ In 1930 a national polity meant an all-Indian one.

The Arab faith, the Arab language, Arab names, the fez: twelve hundred years after the conquest of Sindh, this affirmation of separateness, of imperial and racial and religious authority: there probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs. The Gauls, after five hundred years of Roman rule, could recover their old gods and reverences; those beliefs hadn’t died; they lay just below the Roman surface. But Islam seeks as an article of the faith to erase the past; the believers in the end honour Arabia alone; they have nothing to return to.

These multiple Muslim marriages, though often comic to people outside, caused untold pain to many of the people involved, and the pain could travel like disease from generation to generation, with people seemingly driven to pass on the abuse – the jealousy, the torment, the neglect – from which they had suffered.