A Dialogue with Islam
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers & Writing A DIALOGUE WITH ISLAM By Roger Draper Of the three systems of belief springing from the Mosaic root, Judaism is the most explicitly ethnic in its basis, Christianity the...
...But there are references to the public mood, by no means wholly sane, that must have given him his victory...
...it had, in the meantime, completely changed its attitude toward militant Islam for reasons that are never made clear...
...For these faiths the very landscape of the archipelago was not merely sacred but in itself divine...
...Only in Ramadan [the month of fasting...
...In religion, it had embraced the farrago of local cults collectively known as "Hinduism," as well as its Buddhist offshoots...
...By then, writes Naipaul, the Hindus had already "welcomed the New Learning of Europe and the institutions the British brought...
...No actual regime the Pakistanis could create had any claim to legitimacy...
...are larger," Naipaul concedes, "more human, more related to what men see as their pain, and more related to a moral view of the world...
...There could be no sacred places here...
...Naipaul's enthusiasm now veers strangely out of control...
...The racial anxieties...
...Iran proper was subdued in the 640s, followed in 710-12 by Sind, in modern Pakistan...
...Naipaul concludes bitterly that Pakistan, "still half serf, still profoundly uneducated," is "dedicated only to the idea of the cultural desert...
...Islam made no further progress in the Indian world until the 11th century...
...East and south of them lay a vast region dominated by speakers of the Malay languages...
...As her tone indicates, there is considerable opposition to this...
...Islam holds the middle—like Christianity, it makes claims upon all humankind...
...like Judaism, it is historically associated with a particular nation...
...In Hindu times the person who washed and interred corpses, known in Indonesia as the coum, was the lowest of the low...
...Curiously, he fails to mention the fact that this is hardly peculiar to Islam...
...The establishing of an Islamic state in Iran was an anti-Islamic plot by the Powers to teach Muslims a lesson, and especially to punish the people of Iran"—for what isn't clear...
...The Islam of the East is irregular...
...On this visit most of his ethnic Malay informants told him that, as a lawyer put it, the traditional insecurity had "been replaced by the idea of the Malays as a trading and manufacturing and innovative people...
...At the time of the Turkic invasions, what Naipaul calls "Greater India" had extended for about a millennium through Southeast Asia into Sumatra and Java...
...Those places were in another country...
...She hated the humiliation, and now she didn't like to go out...
...He himself tells a story suggesting that Islam in Greater India, like Christianity in Europe, was a better religion than its pagan competitors...
...Then a succession of Turkic conquerors from Central Asia, who had themselves freely accepted the faith, brought it to the rest of the subcontinent...
...Under the Muslim dispensation he came to lead the community in worship at ritual events...
...Our enemies are always responsible...
...Beyond Belief closes on an implausibly optimistic note, in Malaysia...
...This distance has grown with independence...
...The Malaysian government, dominated by ethnic Malays, had been encouraging the country's majority to enter business and the professions, he writes, "and over the last two generations it had succeeded...
...In Iran, the focus of the next group of chapters, his translator Mehrdad had an older sister who "was unmarried and had little chance of getting married, since too many men of suitable age had been killed in the eight-year war [with Iraq...
...had been swamped by the great new wealth...
...The Muslims, wounded by their loss of power, and out of old religious scruples, stood aside...
...they had come to understand that "in the last hundred years they had been supplanted by [the local] Chinese," who dominated the economy...
...The author's dislike of Islam does not hit its stride, though, until the book moves on to Pakistan, the western part of what was British India until 1947...
...were connected with the Prophet or his immediate successors...
...Speakers of Malay are now the single largest language group in Islam...
...In Indonesia, the plural marriages common among Muslims had produced "a kind of semi-orphaned society...
...Mehrdad said of this, "It's something habitual...
...Naipaul never mentions these Turks, arguably the most important of the converted peoples, but it would have been hard to conduct research in the USSR and China, where most of them lived, in 1979, when he embarked on the travels that produced Among the Believers...
...The world had narrowed for her just when it should have opened out...
...Specific groups in the extreme western part of this area—the Sindhis, Baluchis, Punjabis, and Pathans—submitted to Islam...
...The ideas of the revealed religions...
...During the 15th century most of the peoples in present-day Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines deserted Hinduism or Buddhism...
...So while Islam was arrested in the West," writes Naipaul enviously, "in the East it was spreading over the cultural-religious remains of Greater India...
...with glory—of every kind—elsewhere...
...He reflects moodily: "The overthrow of the old religions—religions linked to the earth and animals and the deities of a particular place or tribe—by the revealed religions is one of the haunting themes of history...
...slavery and caste are their natural complements...
...By the mid-1990s, Naipaul observes, Malaysia "was extraordinarily rich...
...It is not, however, Islam's Arab founders but rather the "converted peoples" of its eastward march that interest V S. Naipaul in Beyond Belief (Random, 408 pp., $27.95), a sequel to his Among the Believers (1981) and, similarly, an account of conversations with Muslims he met in Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia...
...and it is this— more even than religion now—that at the end of the 20th century has made India and Pakistan quite distinct countries...
...But in the late '80s, early '90s, this Muslim thing is not only in Ramadan, but more and more all the time...
...The author undertook the research for this book from July 1995 to May 1997...
...As for a younger girl, she "had already learned that she could be stopped by the [Revolutionary] Guards and questioned if she was alone on the street...
...What remained was Islam, on the one hand, and Pathan, Baluchi, Punjabi, and Sindhi particularism, on the other...
...These provinces had come under British control in the mid-19th century, much later than the rest of the subcontinent...
...the sacred places of Christianity and Judaism, after all, are in the Holy Land...
...Failing to make many converts in India's central Hindu (or Cow) Belt, Islam nonetheless won over Bengal, the region immediately to the east...
...Haunting, perhaps, but surely not sad...
...Writers & Writing A DIALOGUE WITH ISLAM By Roger Draper Of the three systems of belief springing from the Mosaic root, Judaism is the most explicitly ethnic in its basis, Christianity the most explicitly universal...
...Naipaul visited Iran before the landslide election of Mohammed Khatami as its president and never mentions him...
...But no such democratic tendency can be detected in the condition of women in modern Islam, another ongoing theme of Naipaul...
...Both also share with Muslims a common view of a sacred place as a site of commemoration, not a god...
...A couple of months later, Malaysia's currency collapsed...
...The Burmese and the Thais, who were next in line, held fast to Buddhism...
...The Prime Minister blamed the Jews...
...A Muslim evangelist who had spent 14 months in jail just before he was interviewed for Among the Believers figures in the new book as a man of influence supported by the same government that imprisoned him...
...Can the Chinese be far behind...
...Yet as recently as the middle of the past decade, an Indonesian explains to Naipaul, "there was no preaching in the mosque or on television...
...In demanding that British India be partitioned into separate Hindu and Muslim states before 1947, argues Naipaul, the peoples of the future Pakistan rejected the only nontribal, secular identity they had ever had, as Indians...
...Among "many" Iranians the author met, "certain fantasies had taken hold...
...The beautifully told story of Beyond Belief begins in Indonesia, a "half-converted" land where Islam seemed less imposing than it did elsewhere because, until the end of Dutch control in 1949, it was forced to share the stage with Christianity...
...In 1979 the overwhelmingly Muslim ethnic Malays "felt they had almost lost their country...
...At a meeting in Guadeloupe, it seems, "the Powers had decided to foist Khomeini on the Iranian people...
...In Iran the heretical Shi' ite sect is dominant...
...She simply stayed at home when she came home from work: silent, full of inward rage...
...A family abandoned by a father in order to start a second or third: It was a story that was to come up again and again...
...From the 1830s onward, the author suggests plausibly, oceangoing steamships speeded up the ongoing process of conversion by enabling the inhabitants of Java and Sumatra to make the pilgrimage to Mecca...
...Thus "the modern state is withering away," and the population is "beginning to live again with the idea of clan and fiefdom...
...For Islam, as Naipaul repeatedly complains, "The sacred places...
...A true Islamic state, as opposed to a government of Muslim ethnic groups, would have to embrace all believers everywhere, as in the Prophet's day...
...The most extraordinary was that [the Ayatollah] Khomeini had been a British or European agent...
...Born in Trinidad of Indian Hindu parents, the author is drawn to the pantheism of his ancestors...
...In Indonesia, a strong undercurrent of pantheism survives from Hinduism and the animism native to the region...
...In 637 CE, after breaking out of the Arabian Peninsula, the Muslim armies seized Mesopotamia from Iran, its ruler since the sixth century BCE...
...Although it may seem charming to deify rivers and mountains, pantheistic cults see not only creation but also the received social order as organic and divine...
...Just as in Christianity the execution of Jesus as a common criminal was "the most moving symbol of human pain and redemption, so it was possible here [in Indonesia] to see how early Muslims, looking for converts, might have used this outcast to do a karate throw on the long-established faith: The washer and burier of the dead was to lead the community of the new faith in prayer: The untouchable, at one bound, scaled the caste pyramid and became the equivalent of a priest...
Vol. 81 • May 1998 • No. 6
