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PARTISAN REVIEW
Freemason's hall of Rawalpindi , to talk of the English political
novel and the distortions of colonialism, when in that city
in a few weeks, in the name of an Islam that was not to
be questioned, the whipping vans were to go out, official
photographs were to be issued of public floggings, and one
of the country's best journalists was to be arrested and
photographs were to show him in chains.
Naipaul is not denying the existence of colonialism, but he is
denying the conventional Marxist understanding of it. The question
for the young man is not whether natives lie, a matter for observa–
tion, but how the necessarily false view that natives lie came into
existence. Reality for the ideologue is a deduction from ideology.
And, ironically, it is ideology or scraps of ideology derived from the
hated West, "ideas," in Naipaul's words, "twice removed ...
which the new Islamic missionaries had taken over and simplified in
their many publications." (In a recent conference of Soviet dissident
writers, the novelist Vladimir Voinovich remarked that the modern
history of Marxism is the history of a fashion, which moves from the
center to the periphery. As Marxism becomes discredited at its place
of origin, it becomes fashionable away from its origin.)
A form of conceptualization, ideology itself is a feature of
advanced societies. Ideology came into being in the Enlightenment,
when thought itself became a political action. One could hardly
deprive underdeveloped countries of opportunities that have long
existed for advanced countries. It is also true that advanced
countries have suffered the terrible consequences of ideological
arrogance, the lessons of which are av:ailable to revolutionaries
of underdeveloped countries. The willingness or capacity to learn
them, however, may depend upon circumstances far more potent
than the caveats of a writer like Naipaul. In any event, Naipaul is
without illusion about his capacity to do more than represent what
he sees.
Ideology may be too grand a term for what possesses the new
breed of Islamic revolutionaries.
It
may be more accurately caught
by the chara.cterization of Bezdan, the first person N aipaul
introduces us to in
Among the Believers.
Bezdan is "the kind of man
who, without political doctrine, only with resentments, had made
the Iranian revolution."
It
was Nietzsche who introduced resent–
ment into our understanding of modern personality. Precociously
sensitive to slights, tormented by feelings of exclusion, nourishing
