Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey is a book by the Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul. Published in 1981, the book describes a six-month journey across the Asian continent after the Iranian Revolution. V.S. Naipaul explores the culture and the explosive situation in countries where Islamic fundamentalism was growing. His travels start with Iran, on to Pakistan, Malaysia and end in Indonesia, with a short stop in Pakistan and Iran on the return to the UK.
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Naipaul traveled from Iran to
Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and back in 1979-80, seeking the meaning
of "Islamization"--an exceptional writer/observer/commentator
intersecting with an epic anti-intellectual, anti-modernist upheaval. Or
is it? Naipaul the writer doesn't tip his hand: in transit, he is the
tireless interrogator; the collector of persons, their life-stories,
their outlooks--without the scorn he has directed toward his own in the
past, in writing of India and the Caribbean. In Iran, he exposes himself
to the leading ayatollas in their holy cities, notes the attendant
stupor or frenzy; but his companion throughout is his interpreter
Behzad, and Behzad is another kind of revolutionary, a communist: two
distinct strands, sustained by different faiths, but by "absolute faith"
nonetheless. "And both were fed by the same passions: justice, union,
vengeance." By resentment against "a great new encircling civilization,"
to be depended on but not mastered. Pakistan does not fall so readily
into a pattern: carved out of colonial India as a Muslim homeland, its
people attribute their woes to their own imperfections, to being
insufficiently "pure"; yet they live by the export of their own people
too--"by appealing to the ideals of the alien civilizations whose
virtues they denied at home." Still, Naipaul warms to the purest of the
pure, the suspect minority Ahmadis; and to the plight of the
in-betweens--like Islamicist newspaperman Nusrat, who'd like to be a
Third-World media expert . . . and, recognizing the contradictions, is
vulnerable to reproach. As Naipaul moves further East, into the complex
civilizations of Malaysia and Indonesia where the past is ever-present,
the tone of the narrative becomes gentler. In Malaysia, the villagers
have grown up as strangers in a country built and run by the British and
Chinese; so religion is race, race is religion; and Shaft, a stalwart
of the Muslim youth movement--with whom Naipaul has the book's most
searching conversations--is both grieving and aggrieved: in his own
eyes, Shaft "was the first man expelled from paradise. He blamed the
world; he shifted the whole burden of that accommodation upon Islam."
Indonesia presents Naipaul with the remarkable personality of
56-year-old poet Sitor--recently wed in a tribal ceremony to comely
young Dutch Barbara, promoter of Indonesian crafts: "The glamour of
Indonesia and Sitor, the poet, for Barbara; for Sitor, the glamour and
security of Barbara and Europe." Indonesia also brings the stellar
anecdote: Naipaul has gone to see a celebrated pesantren, or Muslim
village commune/ school; and, amid the aimlessness and disorder, he is
besieged by shouts of "Illich! Illich!" Everything outside is shut
out--but it is the outside (per one-time visitor Illich) that certifies
success. And so the book turns back, in a way familiar to Naipaul
readers, on the delusions of both the West and the Islamic world: "It
was the late twentieth century that had made Islam revolutionary, given
new meaning to old Islamic ideas" . . . which, in themselves, supplied
no answers. But whether or not one accepts Naipaul's final judgment in
its entirety (the leftist Behzads will multiply, he foresees), the
journey proceeds on many challenging, absorbing levels.