Among the Believers Quotes

“There was an unspoken corollary: everything outside that community was shut out, everything outside was impious, impure, infidel. They were the righteous and the secure; they were happy in their reinforced faith.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers : An Islamic Journey

“To be a devout Muslim was always to have distinctive things to do; it was to be guided constantly by rules; it was to live in a fever of the faith and always to be aware of the distinctiveness of the faith.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

“And Islamic rule has been like that ever since?”
“Yes, I think so. So if you want to practise Islam right now you have to build a state on the basis of a republic.”
“Aren’t you saying that Islam has failed?”
“No, not Islam. The people. The Muslims.”
“You think you can get them to do it now?”
― V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers : An Islamic Journey

“No religion is more worldly than Islam. In spite of its political incapacity, no religion keeps men’s eyes more fixed on the way the world is run. And in the poetry of the doctor’s son, in his fumbling response to the universal civilization, his concern with ‘basics’, I thought I could see how Islamic fervour could become creative, revolutionary, and take men on to a humanism beyond religious doctrine: a true renaissance, open to the new and enriched by it, as the Muslims in their early days of glory had been.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

“He had spent a year in England. And he had read a lot in English. It was about his English reading that I got him to talk. And I was so taken by his account of his approach to the outer civilization – a pioneer journey in many ways, and a contrast with the blanket dismissal of ‘the West’ by people who often, even after travel and a picked-up profession (a single, isolated skill), had the thinnest idea of what they were dismissing – that I asked for paper and noted down Syed’s words.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

“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.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

“A small woman came with a child on her hip. She was pregnant again. And then I saw that she was herself hardly more than a child, twelve or thirteen, but excited at the idea of already being adult enough to experience important needs. Everyone was acting (though the man with the djinn, after his flash of vanity, seemed a little too far away); everyone knew his role. But was it acting when the whole world, or the world you knew, was in the play?”
― V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

“He asked me about myself and my travels. I told him I had been to Iran. He said, ‘Khomeini is a good man. He is Islamic.’ ‘Why do you say that?’ I had expected him, so orthodox and fierce, to disapprove of Khomeini’s Shia Islam as a deviation. He said, ‘He has banned women from appearing on television.’ It was all that he knew of Iran since the revolution.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

“Wouldn’t it have been better for Muslims to trust less to the saving faith and to sit down hard-headedly to work out institutions? Wasn’t that an essential part of the history of civilization, after all: the conversion of ethical ideals into institutions?”
― V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey