Among Believers

Islam undoubtedly is the most controversial and talked about religion of our times. Due to the so called International Islamic terrorism, the religion has become the hottest topic in our living rooms, which each one of us would love to talk about, but some time scared even to think about: thanks to the rising intolerance of its practitioners towards criticism. Ever since the infamous 9/11 attack of AL Qaeda in 2011, and the mercuric rise of Osama bin Laden into the Summit of the most wanted list of  international Villainy, I was curious about the elements within this religion that creates most terrifying cold blooded terrorist on one side, and most calm saints on the other. What is the magic of this religion? How does it work? Being an atheist and serious non-follower of any kind of religion, I wanted one neutral approach in understanding the religion. What I most likely   had been searching was an outsider’s unbiased view on it.

‘Among the believers – An Islamic Journey’ was an easy answer to start with. Naipaul was my favorite ever since I read his Booker winner of 1971, ‘In a Free State’.

This book is special as it’s not written by some genius couch potato, sitting and relaxing on his chair, but by some one who took the pain to travel around the world to study about the religion before writing about it.

Naipaul wrote this in the year 1981 after travelling around Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia for seven months.

His journey starts in 1979 with a visit to Iran, where he visits the holy city of QOM and interviews number of famous authorities and practitioners of the religion.

There he meets, infamous Ayatollah Khalkhalli, the right hand of Ayatollah Khomeni who says,

“The mullah’s are going to rule now. We are going to have ten thousand years of the Islamic republic. The Marxists will go on with Lenin. We will go on in the way of Khomeini”

This was in the same year where Khomeini’s Islamic revolution succeeded in Iran after they over threw Shah to rule the country.

The intention behind each of such meetings, interviews, attending religious meetings and even talking to each one of the common men (Taxi driver, Restaurant waiter or who ever he comes across) that he meets there is clear. Naipaul wanted know, what religion (Islam) meant to them. That’s what a scholar does, and as it’s from some one who is essentially an atheist, the result is an unbiased report which is thoroughly trustable.

He goes to Pakistan and searches in vein for the hyped up ‘Islamic Bank’ (An Islamic idea of Banking with no Interest charged against cash loans) and he wonders, if it was an utopian idea which was never possible to implement, then what was the point behind the partition and forming up a separate Islamic country.

In Indonesia he visits ‘Pesantrens’ (traditional Islamic village schools) to understand what they taught in there to the villagers and how that teaching helped them to progress. The result of the expedition is controversial as he puts,

“The Sufi center turned school: the discipline of monks and dervishes applied to the young: it wasn’t traditional, and it wasn’t education. It was braking away from the Indonesian past; it was Islamization; it was stupefaction, greater than any that could have with a western-style curriculum. And yet it was attractive to the people concerned, because twisted up with it, was the old monkish celebration of the idea of poverty: an idea which applied to a school in java in 1979, came out as little more than the poor teaching the poor to be poor. “

Naipaul was very brave and we cannot take it like 1981 was, a haven of intellectual freedom and criticism on the religion was taken positively, though it seems to be much better time than our era of extreme intolerance.

                             (One of my favorite: Sir Vidia with his mistress- an old photograph)

Naipaul’s observations and his homework on the religion before he started his expeditions seemed to be deep. Take a sample from the introduction to the account of his trip to Malaysia.

“It was from India or the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent that religion went to south-east Asia. Hinduism and Buddhism went first. They quickened the great civilizations of Cambodia and java, whose monument- Angkor, Borobudur – are among the wonders of the world. These Indian religions, we are told, were not spread by armies of colonists but by merchants and priest. And that was the kind of Indian traveler who after Islam had come to the sub-continent began in the fourteenth or fifteenth century to take Islam to Indonesia and Malaysia.

Islam went to south-east Asia as another religion from India. There was no Arab Invasion, as in Sind; no systematic slaughter of the local warrior caste, no planning of Arab military colonies; no sharing out of loot, no sending back of treasure and slaves to a caliph in Iraq or Syria; no tribute, no taxes on unbelievers. There was no calamity, no overnight abrogation of a settled world-order. Islam spread as an Idea- a Prophet, a divine revelation, heaven and hell, a divinely sanctioned code- and mingled with older ideas. To purify that mixed religion the Islamic missionaries now come; and it is still from the sub continent –and especially from Pakistan that the most passionate missionaries come.”

I guess this is what missing from most of the books on religion. Religion is also ‘local’ and it’s different for each society. And this element needs to be reviewed better, before imposing certain rules and regulations on people who follow the religion. Naipaul studies the history first and then he observes the present. And he connects quickly what it meant to be and what it is now.

Naipaul criticizes the religion in an extremely honest but often flavored with that typical Trinidad’ ian arrogance of his, through out the book. He is unbiased and he is careless how others take his views. After all, he was born in Trinidad to a family that had Upper cast Hindu roots in India, had a semi-Christian upbringing, happily married to a Muslim woman, and was also infamous for finding some controversial way to unleash his verbal fury on anyone who dared to initiate an argument with him.

He ends the book this way,

“High words still; but in Iran and elsewhere men would have to make their peace with the world which they knew existed beyond their faith. The life that had come to Islam had not come from within. It had come from outside events and circumstances, the spread of Universal civilization.”

the Curious Incident of the dog at the night time....

It  was in my teens that I read 'Delilah';  a Malayalam short story of which I cannot recollect much now except that, the story was ended with an actual computer pseudo code depicting an infinite loop.

 While True

Print "Delilah";

End;

Story was a modern adaptation of the Biblical legend of Samson and Delilah (?)  and The context was like; Some one (Samson?) falls into a well and screams the name of his love, "Delilah" and the author wanted to convey that the scream went on and on and he thought the best way to describe this, was through a computer program with no ‘break’ statements written.

(Maythil Radhakrishnan)

That story was written by ‘Maythil Radhakrishnan', a computer geek turned writer who was also a genius in other fields like photography, entomology and so on. He also edited the science supplement of a leading English daily called 'Indian Express' in those days.Ever since ‘Delilah’, I became a serious ‘Maythil’ reader, who would go any length to collect his books and devour it in no time. I remember visiting a book publisher’s warehouse in search of his books those were printed in 70’s and disappeared from the book houses as no one liked to read them. ‘Maythil’ revolutionized Malayalam Literature with a series of books and loved to describe himself as the first eco-political poet of Malayalam. A big number of people were deeply attracted to that Neo-intellectual wave and I was on of them. We were called ‘Maythilians’   in our circles as most of our conversations were started or ended with a ‘Maythilian’ quote.

Many years passed and slowly my reading habit gave way to more interesting pastimes like 'chess'.

And now, after all these years I got a similar ‘Maythil’-ian kick from one little novel which I read recently.

That was, 'The Curious incident of Dog at the night time', a book written by the Brit, Mark Haddon, which was published in the year 2003, and won many reputed awards like ‘Whitebread- Book of the year’ , ‘Commonwealth writer’s prize’ and many other reputed awards and nominations.

(Mark Haddon)

'Unputdownable' is the word which I would steal from a regular book reviewer's terminology to describe the reading experience. The book is presented as a diary that a 15 year old boy keeps and it’s about his investigation on the mysterious murder of a dog in his neighborhood. As he uncovers, the truth behind this, he also unknowingly uncovers some facts which are much more mysterious than the dog and its death itself, which would also change his life for ever. Our hero is not like any other kid that you find in your neighborhood or in some Enid Blyton books. He is Christopher, an unusually talented boy, who is deeply inspired by ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (He loves Holmes, but he dislikes Arthur Conan Doyle as he thinks Doyle was a stupid as he believed supernatural things). What makes him more special is the fact that he suffered from Asperger’s syndrome which is a genetic disorder that falls under the wider spectrum of Autism. Children suffer from this disorder show intense interest in certain things. Wiki has an interesting article on this.

The back cover of the book reads;

“Fifteen-year-old Christopher has a photographic memory. He understands maths. He understands science. What he can’t understand are other human beings.”

  Mark usually writes children fiction and this book was an exception; a book which can be thoroughly enjoyable to people of any age.

Just take some samples from the book.

“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

Let’s see how he debates with a priest on the existence of ‘Heaven’;

“I said that there wasn't anything outside the universe and there wasn't another kind of place altogether.

Except that there might be if you went through a black hole, but a black hole is what is called a

singularity, which means it is impossible to find out what is on the other side because the gravity of a

black hole is so big that even electromagnetic waves like light can't get out of it, and electromagnetic

waves are how we get information about things which are far away. And if heaven was on the other side

of a black hole, dead people would have to be fired into space on rockets to get there, and they aren't or

people would notice.”

I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on

living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the

rubbish. “

(A child suffering from Asperger's Syndrome staring at
a molecular model that he is obsessed with-Wiki)

And in the same chapter, among all these grey verses of rationality, you suddenly find the lyrical beauty of his innocent thoughts on his dead mother.

“But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the crematorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the

Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere”

I don’t intent to be a total spoiler here but strongly suggest this book to every one who loves a ‘different’ and quick read for a refreshing experience.