SIR VIDIA NAIPAUL’S ISLAMIC TRAVELS
The late V.S Naipaul contained multitudes: there was the sublime prose stylist, measured and resonant, who created the memorable and tragic Mr. Biswas, as well as those early comic novels Miguel Street and The Mystic Masseur; there was also Sir Vidia, the country squire, the exile from Trinidad, son of the journalist and writer, Seepersad, brother of the late, talented writer Shiva; and there was Naipaul the literary critic, travel writer, Nobel laureate, self-revealing subject of that biography by Patrick French; there was Naipaul the bearer of grudges, the sneerer at other people’s cultures, the supreme egotist, simmering always with snideness; and there was Naipaul the maker and breaker of friendships with Derek Walcott, Paul Theroux, and Diana Athill, among a great many others.
All of these facets of his personality and creative life are fascinating, but our interest in the life arises because of the art, so in this essay I will be concerned essentially with Naipaul the travel writer. His travel writing can be classed roughly by theme and geography into the South American/Caribbean books, the Indian trilogy, and the Islamic books. The Masque of Africa, about his travels on that continent, appeared in 2010. By a further process of selection, I intend to consider only the books which record his travels in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, his Islamic journeys.
The first of these books, Among the Believers, was published in 1981, and was the outcome of a seven-month excursion across four countries. It was a timely book, germane to the inquiring mood occasioned by events in the Arab world. It is also, in the view of some, a timeless book, insightful and vivid. In Iran, the revolution that overthrew the Shah had just occurred; in Pakistan, General Zia was in the process of further Islamizing a nation fractured after the hanging of “poor Mr Bhutto”; Malaysia and Indonesia were experiencing milder forms of an Islamic reawakening. Enter Naipaul, clutching notebook. Beyond Belief, his second chronicle of Islamic journeys, appeared in 1998, seventeen years after Among the Believers. Its purpose was to undertake the exploration once again and see what time and circumstance had wrought in those same countries.
Naipaul came to travel writing equipped with his novelist’s sense of narrative momentum, his eye for the particulars of a place, his comic timing, his ear for telling dialogue, his talent for character sketches. He also came imbued with his instinctive irreverence for dogma, religious or political, his need to scour the sheen off other people’s golden calves.
In the closing passages of his Nobel address, “Two Worlds”, Naipaul insists that he has really written without a “guiding political idea”. Invoking his father Seepersad Naipaul and the Indian writer R.K Narayan as two other exemplars of this indifference to politics, he explains that “perhaps it is because we have been far from authority for many centuries. It gives us a special point of view. I feel we are more inclined to see the humour and pity of things”. There are those who insist that the humour was leached long ago from Naipaul’s work and that there is not enough pity now.
Travel writing invariably reveals as much about the observer as about the people and places he observes. It provides dry kindling for fiery debates about representation, about how and why people and cultures should be written of. Paul Theroux’s hero, Alfred Munday, in The Black House, poses the invidious situation of the explorer-observer superbly when he tells a lecture audience in England:
Mr Kurtz said his Africans were brutes; what did those Africans make of Mr. Kurtz? What did Schweitzer’s patients make of that shambling old man playing his pipe-organ in the jungles of Gabon? Imagine if you can the opinions of Livingstone’s porters, Burton’s guides, Mungo Park’s paddlers…..
Critics like William Dalrymple have taken issue with Naipaul for “his relentlessly negative assessment of Islam”, and for “the now comprehensive nature of his contempt for everyone and everything he writes about”, Edward Said, reviewing Among the Believers in 1981, referred to Naipaul’s “half-stated but finally unexamined reverence for the colonial order”. The reader acquainted with all these controversies therefore comes to Naipaul driven to pore over the pages in search of evidence to refute or confirm the charges. Memory and innuendo insidiously haunt the present context, the present reading.
When Naipaul is accused of lacking sympathy for his subjects or for not showing enough objectivity, do his critics have a point, or are they looking for these qualities in the wrong place? What value do the perceptions of Naipaul the native informer have? It seems the case that he has made enemies for himself by refusing to indulge in the language of post-colonial rage, for refusing to see the nations he visit as products, victims even, of a nexus of forces, including the colonial order of which he seems so enamored. In his portraits of postcolonial Asia or Africa or the Antilles, there is apparently no half-full glass in sight, no creation, no achievement. For this reason the sometimes justified anger directed at him is partly political; and in spite of his protestations to the contrary, Naipaul is seen as writing with a palpable political idea in mind, pandering to what Said calls “the audience that now regards him as a gifted native informer’.
It is all reminiscent of the letter in Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, where the Israeli journalist Shuki Elchanan pleads with his friend, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, not to write about a rabid Zionist: “Moreover they will be able to say a Jew wrote the bloody thing and he’s telling the truth at last”. Naipaul’s imprimatur as a major figure in world letters, his origins as a Trinidadian Indian, and the persona he has cultivated over the decades as an incisive if dyspeptic observer, mean that to a certain audience his every contrary phrase, every cynical clause, is a stake in the heart of the Third World emerging form the nightmare of its past. When Naipaul therefore writes with such distaste for the violence in Iran during the revolution, he sounds like nothing so much as those Frenchmen in Algeria whom Fanon describes holding “ serious dissertations on the relationship between the Muslim soul and blood”
In Beyond Belief, Naipaul writes that “there probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs”. This is the sort of rhetoric, unrelieved by the use of the qualifying “probably”, which so incenses some of his critics. Reflecting on Pakistan, he declares:
It was Muslim insecurity that led to the call for the creation of Pakistan. It went at the same time with an idea of old glory, of the invaders sweeping down from the north — west and looting the temples of Hindustan and imposing the faith on the infidel. The fantasy still lives; and for the Muslim converts of the subcontinent it is the start of their neurosis, because in this fantasy the convert forgets who or what he is and becomes the violator. It is as though — switching continents — the indigenous people of Mexico and Peru were to side with Cortes and Pizarro and the Spaniards as the bringers of the true faith.
In Beyond Belief, as in Among the Believers, Naipaul frames the predicament of his converted Muslims as one of cultural self-rejection, a disregard for their pre-Islamic past in favour of what one Walcott poem calls “borrowed ancestors”. His considered view is that faith in Islam is no substitute for the serious mental effort required to build a humane, well-oiled modern society. Political Islam is seem as offering no realistic, empirical solutions to the problems of a developing nation, nothing save, as in the Ayatollah’s Iran, “rage, anarchy”. Clifford Geertz, writing on Indonesia in 2000, pointed out that the Islamic parties there did not have “much of a program beyond moralism and xenophobia”. Naipaul’s use of the medical term neurosis conveys a lot about his view of Islamic faith. Visiting an Indonesia pesantren (village boarding school) in Among the Believers, Naipaul is scathing about the learning method: “…it was Islamization; it was stupefaction, greater than any that could have come with a Western- style curriculum”. Adding to the dim view he takes is the perceived hypocrisy of Muslims loathing the West while clutching Harvard and Oxford degrees and seeking aircraft technology.
But to accuse Naipaul of offering merely animus is to miss the complexity that he reports, and is sometimes puzzled by. When he visits Indonesia he is struck by the contrast between two of his interviewees: “Mr (Abdulrahman) Wahid with his pesantren education and pesantren family pieties, had become more internationalist and liberal. Imaduddin had remained committed to the holy war”. The Mr Wahid to whom Naipaul refers is the man who later became president of Indonesia, after the chaos that followed the fall of Suharto. Imaduddin, when Naipaul wrote about him in Among the Believers, was an Islamic ideologue and engineering professor jailed by the Suharto regime. Seventeen years later, in Beyond Belief, he still has his strong Islamic beliefs, an advanced degree from Iowa State University, and has become, quite improbably, a protégé of Suharto’s Vice President Habibie.
So what is the task, the obligation, of any travel writer, any stranger in a foreign place, anyone who even merely passes by and remembers in words later? Elsewhere in his Nobel address Naipaul suggests that “what was most important about a travel book were the people the writer travelled among. The people had to define themselves”. Perhaps this is what is responsible for the wealth of characters in his travel writing. Perhaps this is why, in the 1977 travelogue, India: A Wounded Civilisation, he queries Gandhi for not recording more about his arrival in Britain in 1888, except the fact that he disembarked from the ship dressed in white. Naipaul would have liked to read (and one can share his curiosity) details of what the weather was like, how the landscape and architecture and people appeared to the Brahmin sensibilities of a young Indian freshly arrived in the capital of the British empire. Naipaul would have liked a sense, if not of “the enigma of arrival” , then at least of the ordinariness of arrival.
For all its stated willingness to cede the authorial presence, to forego the opinionating which marked Among the Believers, Beyond Belief shows Naipaul still in sniper mode. Visiting the village of Shamozai in Pakistan, he sees a young girl playing, and notes: “Purdah was soon going to fall on her; the rest of her life was going to be spent in that void where time was without meaning”. On another page he ventilates his distaste for “the cutting off of hands and feet, the veiling and effective imprisoning of women, and giving men tomcatting rights over four women at a time, to use and discard at will”.
There is a certain personal note, now chilling, now poignant, which pervades Beyond Belief. Seventeen years after their first meeting, there is a telling exchange between Naipaul and Ayatollah Khalkalli, Khomeini’s hangman; “Did I have children? I said no. He asked why. I said if I had had children it would have been hard for me to do my work. He said many Persian writers had had a hundred children and written a hundred books.” Later on, in Pakistan, Naipaul is taken to a brothel by some local fixers, and reflects, uninterested in the fleshly offerings: “In the old days I would have grown dizzy with excitement here. Up to my mid — thirties I had been attracted to prostitutes and sought them out. My memories of these times were not really of pleasure, however; they were more of the enervation that came after the dizziness”. It is in passages like this that Beyond Belief becomes in part the memoir of an ageing libertine, chastened and wearied by indulgence.
When Bruce Chatwin’s biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, went to the Argentine province of Patagonia as part of his research, he found people there still apoplectic, two decades on, at what they saw as Chatwin’s condescension and sensationalism and embroidery in his book about the region. Chatwin himself, regarding an account of his travels in West Africa, had written that his use of the word “story” was “intended to alert the reader to the fact that however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work”. Both episodes illustrate the peculiar fate, and the peculiar methods, of the travel writer.
In Naipaul’s case we have, running parallel with his scepticism about the purpose and achievement of Islam in the political sphere, his raconteur’s interest in character and episode. “The Bomoh’s Son”, from the Malaysian chapter of Beyond Belief, is a classic example of Naipaul’s skill in portraiture, his talent for drawing, with patient, subtle strokes, individual lives that refract the experience of a whole society.
Taken together, Naipaul’s two books on the world of Islam offer a compelling and controversial glimpse of life under a certain climate of thought. Among the Believers coincided with the apparently irresistible emergence of Islam as a force in global geopolitics, the irruption into the view and consciousness of people far away of the smoke from the fires in Tehran and elsewhere in the Muslim world. The French theorist Michel Foucalt, who preceded Naipaul in Iran, had written rhapsodically about the “political spirituality” ushered in by the 1979 revolution. Naipaul’s account provides a stark, unillusioned contrast to Foucalt. In Naipaul’s version we see the fervour of the executioners and the eager efforts to efface the Shah’s secular legacy. But already there were fissures in the house Khomeini built, beneath the rhetoric of unanimity. It is no surprise when Naipaul’s guide and interpreter, a young communist named Behzad, tells him, “There will have to be another revolution”.
Perhaps the most ironic encounter in Naipaul’s Islamic travels is recorded in Among the Believers. He goes to an Indonesia pesantren and is told by the voluble headman that he looks like “our Prophet”, like Muhammad himself. Prasojo, Naipaul’s chaperone and interpreter, is outraged, given the latent blasphemy of the suggestion, given the Islamic prohibition of pictorial representation and idolatry.
Naipaul’s travel writing (and here I include everything in his corpus) remains a vexed, insightful and provocative reminder of history’s eternal triangle: victims, perpetrators and diabolically gifted reporters.
