Naipaul's Civilization
BROOKS, DAVID
Naipaul's Civilization What this year's Nobel Laureate saw more than a decade ago. BY DAVID BROOKS Two of the most brilliant explanations of Osama bin Laden were written eleven years ago. The...
...They destroy all their inheritances but Islamic fundamentalism...
...Naipaul goes on to describe his journeys through non-Arab Muslim lands...
...To believe that the time before the coming of the faith was a time of error distorted more than an idea of history...
...Naipaul calls it "philosophical hysteria...
...Seven months later his son was trying to get a visa to study in the United States, but the hostage crisis was underway and he couldn't get in...
...In the virulent form of Islam that Naipaul found in, say, Iran, the glories of Persia were being denied and abolished...
...The Taliban recently destroyed a 1,500 year-old Buddhist shrine, but the Islamic radicals commit the same sort of vandalism within themselves...
...They believe in only one history, and it was defined and perfected long ago...
...The father in him could not quite accept that his son would live as a slave to the past...
...It was passed down through the ages...
...Those who believe that almost all fundamental political disputes are really arguments between theories of history will find much to their liking...
...Having her son tell her that he wanted to be a poet was akin to having him tell her he wanted to grow up and write the Bible...
...This man, who had supported the Khomeini revolution, was lamenting his son's predicament...
...More than anywhere else, it is a country with a multiplicity of histories intertwining...
...All of which helps us understand bin Laden...
...And when they face a world in which they confront the pluralism of histories, they grow disoriented...
...To possess the faith was to possess the only truth...
...In fact, the concept of an unknown and desirable future is something of an insult...
...In Lincoln's words, it's the "last best hope of earth...
...At 18 he won a scholarship to Oxford, and he has lived in England since...
...man he met in Java who wanted to be a poet...
...America stands for the future...
...The young man replied, "She wouldn't have even a sense of what being a poet is...
...In the beginning was error, apostasy, disgrace...
...It's the place where the different pasts of the world come together to bring human freedom to fruition...
...It's his future," he said...
...The first is an essay that appeared in the September 1990 issue of the Atlantic Monthly by Bernard Lewis called "The Roots of Muslim Rage...
...Naipaul was born in Trinidad to a Hindu family...
...In bin Laden's crackpot version of history, everything since the decline of the Ottoman empire and its alleged greatness is an additional outrage and insult to God...
...It's the land of promise...
...In this worldview the future is not especially important (so why not go blow yourself up in a plane...
...What was striking about these places was that they were not originally Islamic...
...and possession of this truth set many things on its head...
...So America's conception of history is the antithesis of bin Laden's conception...
...Not a lot of money in that, but Naipaul asked him, "Isn't your mother secretly proud you are a poet...
...He recognizes an enemy when he sees one...
...But the Islamicists he met in his travels repressed all their histories but one...
...The style of religion he found was a complete way of life...
...what lay outside of it was to be in another...
...What lay within the faith was to be judged one way...
...The second is a lecture delivered by VS...
...The lecture was called "Our Universal Civilization," but it is really about time and perceptions of time...
...In her worldview, all poetry had been written...
...They had been something else...
...When Naipaul used the phrase Universal Civilization, he was talking about the civilization that believes in the future, in progress, in the unfolding of human accomplishment...
...Naipaul as part of the Manhattan Institute's annual Wriston Lecture series on October 30, 1990 in New York...
...This woman's conception of history was static, whereas her son had moved into a different culture...
...It has enemies, however...
...Lewis is one of the great intellectuals of our age, but Nai-paul won the Nobel Prize for literature two weeks ago, so let's review his thinking...
...Then came Islam and truth...
...Faith abolished the past," Naipaul reported...
...End of story...
...During his trip through Iran, Naipaul met a newspaper editor who had been at the center of the 1979 revolution...
...Everything since is decline...
...Naipaul starts by describing a young David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...In other words, he has many different cultures in his heritage, many histories flowing through his veins: Trinidad, India, England, the culture of the global intellectual class...
...That's what the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" means, a phrase Naipaul dissects in his speech...
...He and his followers have mutilated themselves, by destroying all but one of their cultural inheritances...
...The emphasis in that phrase is on "last...
...But that pre-Islamic past had been everywhere denounced and erased...
...It's hard to imagine a time when America settles back into the realm of unimportant middle rank nations, because America is about chasing the future fastest, whatever that future is...
...That civilization started in Europe, and once had racialist overtones, but it has spread...
Vol. 7 • October 2001 • No. 7
