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“Treacherous Travelogue: Representations of Malay Muslims in V.S PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION (2020) 57(8): 288-298 ISSN:00333077 “TREACHEROUS TRAVELOGUE: REPRESENTATIONS OF MALAY MUSLIMS IN V.S. NAIPAUL’S AMONG THE BELIEVERS” Lajiman Janoory1*, Abdul Ghani Abu1, Alya Farzana Shamshul Ariffin1, Arafat Abdali Rakhees2 1English Language and Literature Department, Faculty of Languages and Communication, Sultan Idris Education University, Malaysia 2English Department, Open Educational College in Basra, Iraq Corresponding author: [email protected] ABSTRACT: This article analyses representations of Muslims, in general and Malaysian Muslims, in particular, based on the travelogue by the Indian-Trinidad author, V.S. Naipaul and responds to some of the claims made by him. Naipaul’s two travelogues, Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1997) are based on his visits to four Muslim-majority countries, namely Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.Among the Believers is the first narrative of Naipaul’s visits and Beyond Belief is the sequel of the same countries he again revisited. The analysis is based on the theory of Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said but elaborated further to include the concept of Islamophobia as an extension of the same theory. This is in order to dissect contemporary phenomenon which now involves non- Europeans as the practiser of Orientalism. However, this article focuses on only Among the Believers in the way Naipaul misrepresents the Malay Muslims in his travel to Malaysiabased on meetings with a few Malay Muslims of different backgrounds. The article concludes that Naipaul’s narrative is mostly superficial and prejudiced interpretations of the religion and its people colored by his enmity towards Islam, in general. The implication of the study indicates that Naipaul has failed to be an objective observer as his narrative brush is tainted by his own Orientalistideology and Islamophobic views. Keywords: travelogue, Orientalism, misrepresentations, Islam, ideology, Islamophobia Article Received: 18 October 2020, Revised: 3 November 2020, Accepted: 24 December 2020 INTRODUCTION Quaderi&Habibullah (2012) assert “all the negative VidiadharSurajprasad Naipaul or simply V.S. qualities of the people whom he meets have their Naipaul has been considered one of the best writers origin in Islam” (p.24) writing in English. However, he has also been noted V.S. Naipaul was born in 1932 in Trinidad to Hindu as a controversial writer after the publications of his parents, and left for England to study and eventually two travelogues about four Muslim countries and settle there.His grandparents were indentured about Islam and Muslims in general. Depending on labourers who migrated to Trinidad from India to perspectives he has been commended for his “moral work on sugar plantations, not unlike the first integrity, fearless truth-telling and loyalty to the immigrants from Indiato Malaysia who worked in proof of evidence” (qtd. in O’Shea-Meddour, 2011; rubber plantations owned by the British. Fortunately Garcoa-Rubio et al., 2019; Minh, 2019). Hiscritics, for him, his father’s love for writers was the main such as Gayatri Spivak, however,describe him as “a influence for his becoming a writer himself, the false native informant” or a man “incapable of skill which he painfully developed when he was a restraining his loathing for the Islamic world and its student in Oxford, England. Naipaul died in 2018 in people”(qtd. in Al-Quaderi&Habibullah, 2012, London, England. By glimpsing at his life p.22). These contradictions are borne out of his background one can assume the sense of limitation of vision in making totalizing displacement/belonging of the author that may have assumptions about Muslims and Islam with their a bearing on the consistently pessimistic themes of diversified cultures and traditions. As Al- his novels, mostly set in developing countries and 288 www.psychologyandeducation.net PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION (2020) 57(8): 288-298 ISSN:00333077 the themes of hybridity and alienation that pepper Orientalism is a body of knowledge of Western some of his works (Paicu, 2011).We will not argue scholars and intellectuals about the East that over his writing prowess especially in his embodies the Manichean binary dichotomy of the fictions.The acknowledgement is evident by the superior-inferior and civilized- barbaric stance of Nobel Prize for Literature that he received in 2001 the West over the East. It developed, at first, out of and the many other accolades to his name by the encounter of the West with the Arabs especially renowned institutions. Ourargument is when he during the Crusades that saw the alliance of starts writing nonfictions especially those related to Christian powers defeated by Muslim armies in the Muslims and Islam thatit shows his Orientalist struggle for control of the Holy Land in Jerusalem ideology and Islamophobic views at work. between 1096-1271. However, during European However, since Naipaul was an Indian- Jamaican colonialism of the world at the beginning of the with British citizenship we have to contextualize his fifteenth century Orientalism began to be utilized as travel writings about Islam within the scopes of scholarly endeavor by Western academicsto Orientalism and Islamophobia. understand the conquered natives. There were two This article will analyze the writings of V.S. reasons for this endeavor. First,in order to quench Naipaul based on his travelogueAmong the their thirst for knowledge especially during the Age Believers- An Islamic Journey(1981). The of Enlightenment during the 17th and 18th centuries. travelogue is selectedbecause of its relevance to the More importantly, it also served the military issue of Orientalism and its perspectives on Islam, objective because Orientalism, as a body of and more specifically, on Islam in Malaysia. This knowledge, was able to be repurposed as a form of discourse strives to uncover the principal doctrines understanding the conquered natives in order to of Orientalism and Islamophobia and what the tighten the colonial stranglehold upon the text’s seemingly innocent, neutral and rational localpopulations. comments and descriptions reveal about the real The ideology of Western Orientalism is discussed Orientalist nature of that body of knowledge which by Edward Said in his seminal text Orientalism finds its echoes through novels, analyses, (1978) and has garnered numerous discussions, intellectual discourses and travel writings. Naipaul’s papers, seminars and even polemics of the ideology. travelogue is chosen because of two reasons. The To Said (1978), Orientalism is first is due to his adversativeviews of other cultures a specific kind of knowledge about specific places, which he claims to have no real interest in. peoples and civilizations. For the Orient idioms Secondly, he shares the same intellectual became frequent, and these idioms took firm hold in perceptions as other Orientalist Western writers of European discourse. Beneath the idiom there was a the superior culture of the West and the inferior layer of doctrine about the Orient; this doctrine was culture of the East. Although Naipaul is of Indian fashioned out of the experiences of many origin (who grew up in Trinidad) his writings, Europeans, all of them converging upon such especially on Islam reverberates with the essential aspects of the Orient as the Oriental resonancesof Orientalists’ views. In general, character, Oriental despotism, Oriental sensuality, Naipaul’s serious and cynical style of traveler’s tale and the like. (p.203) only serve to misrepresents Islam as destructive, Thus, Orientalism is a European way of anti-modernity, repressive and hypocritical. perceivingthe non-European worlds based on his ORIENTALISM AND ISLAMOPHOBIA previous experiences of fear and wonder, and of 289 www.psychologyandeducation.net PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION (2020) 57(8): 288-298 ISSN:00333077 truths and distortions.But, after the ascendance of masters, not realizing that their minds are tied to a European power during colonialism, it became a new chain of enslavement. way of categorizing the European and non- But how do we define people such as Naipaul who European worlds into the Manichean binary was hardly the white-skinned, blue-eyed and blond- opposition of good/evil, civilized/barbarism, haired European? Since Orientalism was an mature/childish, rational/superstitious ideology or an idea it does not necessitate the race dichotomies.The consequence is illustrated by Said of the individual as requirement to be an Orientalist. (1978) who states that “Orientalism is a style of Orientalism is able to transcend race to retainthe thought based upon an ontological and ideology the way a male can be a feminist so long epistemological distinction made between the as he believes in the equality between the sexes. ‘Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” And in contemporary context, Orientalism has been (p.2). This connotes the idea that there is a incarnated into Neo-Orientalism which specifically mainstream idea of thought of the West regarding focuses on Islam and the Muslims as the binary the East which, compared to the West, will always opposition. As Anees (2015) mentions, there is “an play the subordinate role. This Western attempt to present neo-Orientalism in a theological epistemological thinking is persuasive due to its garb — as opposed to Orientalism as a way of seemingly intellectual analysis of the Orient which depicting people of the East in a condescending is supposedly written by ‘experts’ of the areas of manner (“the other,” “the savages”.In this respect, study. Orientalism has been transformed to suit The representations of the Orients, after frequent contemporary purpose of the West (and also non- repetitions, become facts and then institutionalized. West). As stated by Samiei (2010), Orientalism has Further, the ‘facts’ are accepted into the mainstream been“reconstituted, redeployed, redistributed in a mode of thinking of Western intellectuals. Later, it globalised framework and have shaped a new became a tool of domination for the colonial West paradigm which can be called ‘neo-Orientalism’ as an excuse for its extended hegemony of the (p.1148). This issue will be further discussed when world.
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