Many today say that what Islam needs most is “reform.” Those who know it best, however, regard that as wishful thinking

How Islam Set Back Western Civilization

By Matthew Hanley

In his travel writing, V.S. Naipaul parlays personal encounters, to great effect, into expositions of the underlying cultural forces that impact whole peoples. This has often meant puncturing received multicultural wisdom. Among the Believers, for instance, plumbs the undercurrents of life in Islamic lands, taking the reader well beyond the headlines and into people’s worlds. Though much has changed since 1981 when it appeared, there is still much to absorb from his conversations in four non-Arab nations: Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. (In the 1998 sequel, Beyond Belief, he converses again with some of the same figures).

Always engaging and insightful, though not necessarily edifying, his withering gaze is capable of coexisting with poignant accounts of actual persons. The latter quality notwithstanding, it came as somewhat of a surprise when this first rate diagnostician actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature, particularly as unflattering aspects of his life, rather than the merits of his piercing prose, could have easily derailed the process. With those strikes against him, you might suppose that there must be something to his writing. And there is.

In his hands, the inner grappling and motives of individuals, humble or privileged, surface because he deftly elicits their spiritual outlook. Though he professes to be an atheist, he sees that a sense of self, and life’s meaning, derives to great extent from religious orientation.

Themes of social dislocation and lost personality dominate his observations of these lands. With one of his interlocutors, a well-positioned Sumatran who had studied in the United States, Naipaul brought up the magnificent ninth-century Buddhist and Hindu temples of Borobudur and Prambanan – treasures of Javanese culture. Utterly disinterested, the man responded by saying they are “something for the international community to look after.” Would a Roman dismiss the Coliseum in such a manner; a Greek say the same thing about the Parthenon; a Peruvian about Machu Picchu?

He further tells Naipaul that his role was “preparing the next generation of leaders of Indonesia.” They would eventually “replace all this” – “this” being anything not sufficiently Islamic. His only prescription was that the emerging leaders be true Muslims. For him, Naipaul writes, “Indonesia was a place to be cleansed.” Its particularities could not coexist with his faith.

Another figure, of more humble station, “lived with beautiful mysteries” surrounding his country’s rich pre-Islamic past, for that was simply the only manner in which it survived. “Scholarship, applied to his past,” Naipaul discerns, “would have undermined what had become his faith.”

Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: 

The History of a Controversy

By Emmet Scott

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