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PARTISAN REVIEW
landscapes of the developing nations in works like
Guerrillas, A Bend
in the River,
and most recently
Among the Believers
owes a great deal to
his prejudiced clear-sightedness.
Among the Believers,
Naipaul's latest book, is not his best work,
nor for that matter his most successful travel book, but it is
particularly interesting in the way it displays Naipaul's sensibility
confronting events that are of the most immediate interest to us. I
want to consider it then not simply as a report of Naipaul's Islamic
journey, but as an expression of that sensibility.
Naipaul visits Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia and
everywhere finds a "fever of faith." The medical figure is not
fortuitous. For the skeptical Naipaul faith is a disease. In the West
skepticism is the force that corrodes faith. And the absence of faith
often translates as a crisis of values, a failure of nerve. In
Among
the Believers
Naipaul observes the scenes of his travels with an
unremitting skepticism. In its encounter with resurgent faith in
Islamic countries, skepticism emerges as a value.
If
the alternative is
the "fever of faith," then we must prefer clear-seeing skepticism to
faith, as we prefer health to disease.
Temperament and personal circumstance both contribute to
the skeptical clarity that informs Naipaul's Islamic journey. As a
man of Hindu origins, he would be expected to be both knowing and
suspicious of Islamic claims. As a lapsed Hindu with a strong and
acknowledged aversion for all religious fanaticism, he would find all
that he needed in the Islamic revival to confirm his aversion. But
Naipaul is not fundamentally hostile to Islam, as we can see in the
following passage.
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 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.
It is Islam's "political incapacity" combined with its inordinate
political ambition that is dangerous. In Naipaul's account, Islamic
fervor is an ignorant and destructive force: "Political Islam is rage,
anarchy."
