Beyond Belief by V.S. Naipaul

June 10, 2007

It is hard to know how to classify V.S. Naipaul's Beyond Belief, awkwardly situated as it is with respect to his earlier effort Among the Believers. Is Beyond Belief an update, an expansion, or a replacement for the earlier book? I began reading Beyond Belief expecting it to take me someplace new. What else could be the motivation for revisiting the same countries and even talking (in many cases) to the same people? But I was disappointed when I found Naipaul's views on the Islamic world restated and elaborated.. but hardly changed or renewed. I could not finish the book.

On the back of the book there is a note about Naipaul's methodology: "V.S. Naipaul deliberately effaces himself to let the voices of his subjects come through." I find it hard to understand how Naipaul can be said to efface himself when there is constant description and framing. Naipaul is quite present.

What may be unique is the way Naipaul's commentary arises from his own personal sense of the world. At no point does Naipaul make reference to other opinions about the Islamic world. He is not about to give the reader any alternative Western frames for the people they will meet in the course of these travels. We encounter the stories of various individuals from Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Iran.. and then we get Naipaul's often critical frame. Those individual stories have to stand or fall on their own with no interpretive or contextual help.

There are many places where Naipaul could have made use of alternative approaches to these regions. To illustrate what I mean we can look at the paragraph that made me decide to put the book down:

The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only to one people—the Arabs, the original people of the Prophet—a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages, and earth reverences. These sacred Arab places have to be the sacred places of all the converted peoples. Converted peoples have to strip themselves of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such a thing can be arrived at), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism. [64]

These ideas are already crystalized in Among the Believers, from 15 years earlier.. raising the question for me as to why I should go through the newer book? It is also worth noting how Naipaul as judgment-maker is present in this passage.

More important are the actual fallacies in this passage. Naipaul sees himself as traveling among "converted peoples" to the East of the central Islamic lands (although there is no reason to view Iran as somehow more "converted" that Egypt). According to him these converted peoples must look to the land of the Arabs for sacred places. But Islamic fundamentalism is hostile to sacred sites in Arabia itself.. along with other places in the Arab world. Islamic fundamentalism is a destroyer of sacred sites, wherever they might be. Read about the Wahhabis and their tearing down of shrines in Arabia!

In traditional versions of Islam the landscapes are littered with sacred places. This is true from Morocco to Indonesia and everywhere in between. Naipaul talks to people that have a very modern skin-and-bones version of Islam.. and neglects to show us the undergrowth of popular belief in these places. It would be like showing up at Cairo and talking to members of the Muslim Brotherhood but missing the wide flow of Islamic practices that are alive there. The view of Islam in Egypt would be strangely bare. Why could Naipaul not read just a few anthropologists who have the language skills to make sense of Islam as it is practiced among people that he could not talk to? This contextualization of his narratives would have been immensely helpful.