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Naipaul's Representations of Islam and Culture in Among SARJANA Vol. 30, No. 1, December 2012, pp. 50-60 NAIPAUL’S REPRESENTATIONS OF ISLAM AND CULTURE IN AMONG THE BELIEVERS AND BEYOND BELIEF Sharmila Rajagopal1 Abstract V.S. Naipaul has often been under criticism for his dark, pessimistic and sometimes brash portrayals of Third World countries, specifically postcolonial societies like India, Trinidad, Africa and even South America. He has been critiqued for these same reasons for his Islamic travelogues, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted People (1998). It is the aim of this article to show how Naipaul’s multiple roles as a traveller, travel writer, an ethnographer, an intellectual, an interpreter, a narrator, and a Western representative, together with his new literary style that is a fusion between ethnographic and travel writing, play a crucial part in his interpretation and representation of foreign cultures. It is concluded that Naipaul’s portrayals are undertaken with a moral and social responsibility of representing those subaltern peoples who are without a voice, which arises from his own experiences as a colonial subject. Keywords: Culture, Ethnography, Islam, Portrayal, Representation, Travel Writing, V.S. Naipaul Introduction Theories of representation are as complex as the study of culture and religion. ‘To represent someone or even something has now become an endeavor as complex and as problematic as an asymptote, with consequences for certainty and decidability as fraught with difficulties as can be imagined’ (Said 1989, p. 206). Culture and religion are also complex subjects. Culture is an intricate system of living practiced by a group of people, small or large, inherited by tradition from generation to generation, which evolves constantly, while Asad notes that ‘there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific but because the definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes’ (Asad 1986, p. 29). Thus to undertake a comparative study of cultures and religions, one of the prerequisites would be to approach the study with an unbiased, unprejudiced and ethical view. As with Islam, Sayyid points out that ‘[t]here are not many Islams, one for each national or ethnic group or socio-economic group, but rather many interpretations of one Islam’ (Sayyid 2003, p. ix). Islam, which ‘denotes more than fourteen centuries of history, a billion and a third people, and a religious and cultural tradition of enormous diversity’ is not merely a religious doctrine but a distinctive identity for all Muslims regardless of their nationalities (Lewis 2003, p. 3). Although followers of Islam are from various nationalities and countries, they refer to themselves as Muslims and not as Iranians or Arabs, as they tend to see Islam as ‘a religion subdivided into nations’ Naipaul’s Representations Of Islam And Culture In Among The Believers And Beyond Belief 51 where they are united as one under the religion (Lewis 2003, p. xx). For centuries Islam has been a way of life where ‘all Muslims attach themselves and are attached by others, to one Islam’ (Sayyid 2003, p. viii). However the togetherness and ‘attachment’ amongst the Muslims is seldom understood by non-Muslims. This is because followers of other religions especially from the ‘Western World’, see themselves as ‘nation[s] subdivided into religious groups’ and address themselves as Americans or Germans based on their country of origin (Lewis 2003, p. xx). Thus while Westerners identify themselves by nationality or culture, Muslims identify themselves by religion. This disparity in beliefs among Islam and the rest, together with the lack of understanding has caused the religion (Islam) to be misunderstood across the globe. For example, after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in the United States by some radical and extremist Muslim group in 2001, a great deal of confusion and allegations has emerged regarding the role of Islam. To most Americans, Islam is now associated with terrorism and ‘To say that terrorism is Islamic, is an absurdity in the sense that Islam is a religion like other religions with an ethical and moral standard, and is opposed to terrorism as such’ declares Edward Said (2002, p. 307). This negative stereotype of Islam due to allegations and misunderstandings has spread across the globe even through various works of literature. Naipaul’s Islamic Journey V.S. Naipaul, at first glance, has also portrayed a disconcerting stereotypical image of Islam in his works Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1979) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998), depicting his travels to four prominent ‘non-Arabic’ postcolonial Islamic countries ‘gripped by Islamic fundamentalism’ (Michener 1997, p. 64). Naipaul’s first journey of just seven months to Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan, was sparked by the Islamic revolution in Iran: ‘the explosive clash between religious and political traditionalism and technocratic progressivism’ (Barnouw 2003, p. 54). Naipaul was intrigued by the revolution and found it interesting. But more than that, he was puzzled by the reactions of Iranians on American television towards the revolution in Iran. He was confused by their passionate and overwhelming support for the new Islamic state and Islamic laws in Iran, because he wondered how these seemingly patriotic Iranians, who commended the overthrow of the Shah and the fall of US imperialism, had ironically chosen the United States as their home instead (Naipaul 1982, p. 12). Hence, it was then that Naipaul decided that he needed to travel to Iran. He undertook the journey to discover and understand the culture of the Islamic people in Iran and then the other three different non-Arabic Muslim countries. However, Naipaul admits that he began his journey with little understanding of Islam or the people: ‘What I knew about Islam was what was known to everyone on the outside. They had a Prophet and a Book; they believed in one God and disliked images’ (Naipaul 1982, p. 11). He rationalizes that he did not need to have first hand knowledge of the religion as he had ‘wanted an open mind’ (Jussawalla 1997, p. 71), to be able to observe and absorb what he saw without any preconceived notions or knowledge. But his lack of understanding has had some negative implications on his perceptions and subsequently his representations of the Islamic religion, its people and their cultures leading him to make several generalizations about Islam such as: In this religion of fear and reward, oddly compounded with war and worldly grief, there was much that reminded me of Christianity… The glories of this religion were in the remote past; it had generated nothing like a Renaissance. Muslim countries, where not colonized, were despotisms; and nearly all, before oil, were poor (Naipaul 1982, p. 12). Almost twenty years later, in Beyond Belief, he again makes accusations and wild statements such as that Islam is the most imperialist movement in history for ‘[i]t makes imperial demands’ (Naipaul 1999, p. xi). Although critics like Daniel Pipes said that Beyond Belief was ‘a pleasure to read’ and that it offered ‘an unusual opportunity to assess the progress of political Islam’ (Pipes 2010), others like like Edward Said, Barathi Mukherjee, Derek Walcott, and Chinua Achebe were enraged and disappointed by Naipaul’s unchanged generalisations of Islam because it has added on to the great deal of existing misconceptions and misunderstandings on Islam, the people and their culture. In his review of Beyond Belief, Said lashes out at Naipaul for his portrayal of Islam: Naipaul… [a] very talented writer whose novels and non-fiction (mostly travel books) have established his reputation as one of the truly celebrated, justly well-known figures in world literature today …is a man of the Third World who sends back dispatches from the Third 52 Sharmila Rajagopal World to an implied audience of disenchanted Western liberals who can never hear bad enough things about all the Third World myths. ... [because] for Naipaul, Islam is worse than most other problems of the Third World (Said 1998). However it must be noted that Naipaul’s unkind depictions are not limited to the Islamic nations and includes most Third World societies like India, the Carribean and Africa. In An Area Of Darkness, a book on his much anticipated first visit to his ancestral homeland, India, much to the chagrin of critics, Naipaul was able to only focus on the filth and squalor of India, and found it to be an ‘area of darkness’ where he saw only ‘dereliction’ and a degenerating society which was ‘defecating’ everywhere (Naipaul 2004, p. 21). Similarly, Guerrillas and A Bend in the River ‘hold up an utterly desolate vision of the world’ while Mystic Masseur and Suffrage to Elvira ‘served mainly to highlight the social tensions inherent in the colonial world which he portrayed’ (Mohan 2004, p. 117-118). Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian scholar also shares Said’s sentiments when he declares: I do admire Mr. Naipaul, but I am rather sorry for him. He is too distant from a viable moral centre; he withholds his humanity; he seems to place himself under a self-denying ordinance, as it were, suppressing his genuine compassion for humanity (Achebe 1997, p. 90- 91). Thus it is clear that Naipaul is admired for his literariness and his intelligence, but abhorred for his perceptions and outlook of Third World societies. It is also evident that Naipaul sees and portrays the cultures, religions, and the people of almost all postcolonial societies with great anxiety and tends to focus on their poverty, squalor, political turmoils and social decadence, and his unfavourable views are certainly not limited to only Islam. Although Said is also a diasporic writer like Naipaul, who has been in exile, in search of his identity and has had his fair share of rootlessness and colonial anxieties, Said has a more compassionate approach towards postcolonial societies, compared to Naipaul.
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