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.”