Nobel author Naipaul explores growth of Islam

“The Chachnama [the chronicle of the Arab conquest of Sind, now part of Afghanistan and Pakistan] shows the Arabs of the seventh century as a people stimulated and enlightened and disciplined by Islam, developing fast, picking up learning and new ways and new weapons (catapults, Greek fire) from the people they conquer, intelligently curious about the people they intend to conquer. The current fundamentalist wish in Pakistan to go back to that pure Islamic time has nothing to do with a historical understanding of the Arab expansion. The fundamentalists feel that to be like those early Arabs they need only one tool: the Koran. Islam, which made the seventh-century Arabs world conquerors, now clouds the minds of their successors or pretended successors. ...”The West, or the universal civilization it leads, is emotionally rejected. It undermines, it threatens. But at the same time it is needed, for its machines, goods, medicines, warplanes. ... All the rejection of the West is contained within the assumption that there will always exist out there a living, creative civilization, oddly neutral, open to all to appeal to. Rejection, therefore ... is also, for the community as a whole, a way of ceasing to strive intellectually. It is to be parasitic; parasitism is one of the unacknowledged fruits of fundamentalism.”The new men of the villages, who feel they have already lost so much, find their past blocked at every turn. ... Their rage -- the rage of pastoral people with limited skills, limited money, and a limited grasp of the world -- is comprehensive. Now they have a weapon: Islam.”In public gardens and in other places in this new town [Kuala Lumpur] can be seen young village Malays dressed as Arabs, with turbans and gowns. The Arab dress ... is their political badge. In the university there are girls who do not only wear the veil, but in the heat also wear gloves and socks. ... The veil is more than the veil; it is a mask of aggression ... [T]hese are the clothes of uprooted village people who wish to pull down what is not theirs and then take over. Because an unacknowledged part of the fantasy is that the world goes on, runs itself, has only to be inherited.”-- Among the Believers”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. ... 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.”Iran never formally became a colony. Its fate was in some ways worse. When Europe, once so far away, made its presence felt, Iran dropped off the map. Its great monuments fell into decay (and never became as well known as the Indian monuments). And by the end of the 19th century its rulers were ready to hand over the country, and its people, to foreign concessionaires.”India, almost as soon as it became a British colony, began to be regenerated, began to receive the New Learning of Europe, to get the institutions that went with that learning. ... Iran was to enter the 20th century only with an idea of eastern kingship and the antiquated theological learning of places like Qom [Iran’s holy city]. Iran was to enter the 20th century only with a capacity for pain and nihilism.”Always in the background now [after the loss of Bangladesh] were the fundamentalists who ... wanted to take the country back and back, to the seventh century, to the time of the Prophet. There was as hazy a program for that as there had been for Pakistan itself: only some idea of regular prayers, of Koranic punishments, the cutting off of hands and feet, the veiling and effective imprisoning of women, and giving men tomcatting rights over four women at a time, to use and discard at will.”-- Beyond Belief”In the converted Islamic countries, religion has been turned by some into a kind of nihilism, where people wish to destroy themselves and destroy their past and their culture. ...”The idea of truth is beyond these people. The essence of the Afghani kind of conversion is almost Stalinist, it’s frenzy. [It is] something getting very close to being anti-civilization, anti-the mind, anti-institutions, something that deals in terror for the sake of terror.”You cannot converge with this [position] because it holds that your life is worthless and your beliefs are criminal and should be extirpated.”-- Conversation with Robert Dessaix at Melbourne International Writers’ Festival, late August-early September, quoted by Rowan Callick in Australian Financial Review, Sept. 22.”Many mullahs, who had helped to stifle intellectual life, were loathed by ordinary Muslims, said Lady Naipaul, herself a Muslim. However, many worshippers were too afraid to speak out.”I am disgusted and even bewildered at the recent media hype on his ‘stand against Islam’ shown on a major British television channel and in print, quoting academics and writers who sit cozily in the UK or the USA,” [said] Lady Naipaul, [who] met Sir Vidia in Pakistan. “My husband sees ground reality and can put it, unlike me, into an historical context which makes it bearable for many Muslims like me who passionately believe in the freedom and dignity of an individual as promised by the Prophet,” she said.She challenged her husband’s enemies, asking them what they knew of modern Islam and how it was used in “tyrannies like Pakistan.””Have they faced raging ‘Islamic’ clerics in their strongholds and asked them that our Holy Prophet did not promote this acute form of barbarism? Have they ever visited Pakistani jails and heard the shrieks of women being beaten for a ‘confession’ by the police?”I am also a Muslim woman who has written for 10 years against the oppression of her people, particularly women by clerics and the feudals of our sporadic, one-legged democracies. I am not a woman who ‘trashes’ her country to please outsiders.”-- London Telegraph, Oct. 15”I was horrified [by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11] and I remain horrified, and I am slightly appalled by the lack of a better response in England. The government is good ... but the people are being rather craven about it: ‘If we do nothing, it will walk away; if we do something, it will make them angry.’”[T]he democratic way is not part of the Islamic tradition. Islam began with a strong ruler who combined both roles, spiritual and political.”I wish I’d have it restated that the battle is against all terrorism. ... If you wish to eradicate terrorism you can’t have an ally who is in a way the paymaster of these movements, and you can’t have another ally who provides the foot soldiers.”-- Appearance at Inter-American Development Bank Cultural Center, Washington, Monday