THE CONVERTER OF OPINION - Part III

Tehelka - The People's Paper

Taking on VS Naipaul’s most violently contested opinions on Islam, Farrukh Dhondy defends their rationale and unsentimental gaze

Part I. WHAT DOES VS NAIPAUL DO RIGHT?
Part II. THE SEER AND THE SURGEON





“But few could see the obvious, being blinded by the glitter of the Mughal emperor’s mountainous hoard of gold and gems, his marble palaces, the Peacock throne, the Taj. But behind the imperial façade there was another scene, another life – people in mud hovels, their lives barely distinct from those of animals, wretched half-naked, half-starved, and from whom every drop of sap had been wrung out by their predatory masters, Muslim as well as Hindu…

“At the height of Mughal splendour under Shah Jahan, over a quarter of the gross national product of the empire was appropriated by just 655 individuals, while the bulk of the approximately 120 million people of India lived on a dead level of poverty. No one gave a thought to their plight. Famine swept the land every few years, devouring hundreds of thousands of men, and in its wake came, always and inevitably, pestilence, devouring hundreds of thousands more. In Mughal India the contrast between legend and reality was grotesque.”
This from the epilogue of Abraham Eraly’s history of the Mughal invasion and rule, The Mughal Throne. Curiously, the back cover of Eraly’s book has an endorsing quote from a review: “ An excellent introduction to this period and the sometimes forgotten moment of multicultural assimilation it represented….. one of the most crucial and misrepresented periods of Indian history.”

The review is by William Dalrymple.

Eraly’s history, 550 pages of it, is replete with the wars, the slaughter, the cruelty and finally the crushing poverty in which a foreign satrapy of central Asian monarchs, chieftains and their courtiers, those 655 individuals, left India.

One cannot presume to speak for Dalrymple but his remarks presumably mean that this era of Muslim rule has been characterised as other than the summation that appends Eraly’s history. It is also a new and startlingly original definition of ‘multiculturalism’.

One knows the word as defining the liberal aspiration of today’s Britain and Europe, which have over the last few decades imported millions of people from their ex-colonies to work, mainly in the lower reaches of their economies. The social programme to assimilate these people into a civil society free of racial strife has been dubbed ‘multiculturalism’.

Dalrymple points us to a more deeply historical use of the word. The imperial impulse, the conquest, slaughter, suppression, cruelty, shame, degradation and subsequent victimisation must be taken together with the benefits of having a braver, more intelligent, monotheistic, fratricidal race which brings all the pluses of kebabi cuisine and the flora of Central Asia – together with their sartorial, poetic and polygamous inclinations, to the culture. Multiculturalism is this rich amalgam, surely? The bottom line is what counts, what?

Black academics in America would profit from accepting the Dalrymple definition and revisitng the ‘multiculturalism’ of America and the benefits of the great cotton economy before and after the civil war. All that Jazz?

Perhaps all imperial endeavour ought to be seen as bestowing the benefits of ‘multiculturalism’.

And though the world has had centuries of imperialism and even more centuries of multicultural exchange and familiarity, since the Sumarians came to the Indus (or vice versa?, we have by no means laid the foundations for real multiculture in our modern world.

There are indeed as many definitions of ‘culture’ as there are cultures. And yet with the narrowing of the world, with the ability of information, people, armies and hatreds to get from one end of the earth to the other before the sun, these cultures have inevitably come into contact and conflict and in some instances to gentle co-existence.
At a meeting a few months ago in which V.S.Naipaul addressed members of the cultural wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (an organisation which may strike some people as oxymoronic and as full of enlightenment as the Pope’s sex manual, he was asked what he thought of the fundamental clash of civilisations in the world today. His reply was that he didn’t recognise that there was a clash of civilisations, though he said he could guess what the questioner intended. He articulated his guess. The intention was an invitation to see the central clash in the world today as that of the civilisation of the West pitted against the forces of fundamentalist Islam. And further, the question was perhaps an invitation to denounce the culture and intentions of Islam itself. Naipaul said he was going to do neither.

He didn’t himself believe in that clash of civilisations. He didn’t denounce the culture and intentions of Islam.

He never has.

Naipaul’s two books which deal with the stories of Islamic countries and the stories of people who live in them, have no exposition of the religion to offer. They are not in any respect theological tracts. They are journeys through four ‘convert’ countries undertaken in 1979 and 1997.

The books are made up entirely of encounters with people in Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia and Pakistan. They use the stories to explore the interstices of a thesis, the elements of which are modified and expanded as the stories provide new insights. These are stories of change. Nothing is fixed.

Except the given historical fact that the societies that Naipaul is examining are ‘convert’ societies, made up of people who were converted to Islam after the initial formation of the religion in Arabia. I don’t know if Naipaul would consider the Arab diaspora, which stretches to Morocco as a partially ‘converted’ society, but that remains an academic question. The non-Arabs, the Zoroastrians of Persia, the Hindus of Pakistan, the Hindu, Buddhist and animistic populations of South East Asia were converted to Islam. Iran and the Indian subcontinent by bloody conquest and conversion. South East Asia by the missionaries who in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries took this third religion from India, after Hinduism and Buddhism, further east. The Muslim conversion of Malaysia and Indonesia was the doing of missionaries from the subcontinent.

“There was no Arab invasion, as in Sind; no systematic slaughter of the local warrior caste, no planting of Arab military colonies; no sharing out of loot, no sending back of treasures and slaves to a Caliph in Iraq or Syria; no tribute, no taxes on unbelievers. There was calamity, no overnight abrogation of a settled world order. Islam spread as an idea – a Prophet, a divine revelation, heaven and hell, a divinely sanctioned code – and mingled with older ideas. To purify that mixed religion the Islamic missionaries now come; and it is still from the subcontinent- and especially from Pakistan- that the most passionate missionaries come.

“They do not bring news of military rule, of the remittance economy, the loss of law, the Bihari Muslims, now wanted neither by Bangladesh or Pakistan. These events are separate from Islam, and these men bring only news of Islam and the enemies of Islam.”

That too is in broad brush-strokes a story of change, of the arrival of a religion and of a real and unforced multicultural amalgam.

Very different from the multiculturalism of the Mughal emperors, the best of whom, Akbar, could boast after his several wars of attrition, “some of my best wives are Hindu”.

Naipaul admits that he knew nothing of Islam before his first journey began. His idea that he was travelling among converted peoples who perhaps carried in their folk memory in their traditions, something of the people they had been before their conversion, came as he travelled. As Muslims and as Muslim nations they took on the history of the conquerors and convertors. They became turkeys rooting for Christmas and spread its message of birth and rebirth. Pakistani history texts judge their history from the invasion of India by Arabs, not from the remains of Mohenjodaro and the civilisation of the Indus Valley that lie within their state. The Taliban blow up the Bhumiyan Buddhas as remnants of the heresy of a past which by definition is innocent of the coming of prophecy.

This obliteration of the past has a very particular effect on the convert societies. Their ‘culture’ may consist of kebabs and courtesans, of verse and venery, but their ‘civilisation’ is finally the tenets and observances of Islam.

Critics of this idea of converted people observe that all religious people are converts. The Arabs are themselves the first converts, Christians in England and Germany were converted to a religion born in Bethlehem.. and so on.

Fair enough. But for Christians all over the world there has never been a surrender of their own history to that of the Middle East. Their national allegiance defines them more clearly than their Christian religion and their secular texts and history probably more so than the bible and all its interpretations. The ‘civilisation’ of the Russian peasant six centuries ago may have been circumscribed by that of the Russian Orthodox church, but that narrative ended some time ago. In the Islamic world it has been revived time and again and lives. In the boastful words of the Indian poet Iqbal, whose Hindu grandfather was the family’s first Muslim convert, “phir kissney zinda keeya tasgara-e-yezdaan ko?” -- Who resurrected the tales of the supreme God?

For a writer like Naipaul, who travels to discover, the central value is that of civilisation which he defines implicitly as the progress of human ideas -- ideas that refresh the possibilities of life.

Such a dedication must arise from faith in a universal human culture or at least from faith in a common humanity beyond belief.

Naipaul’s yardstick for behaviour is that common shared humanity though he never stoops to define it, as defining such a tremulous creature would cause it to fly away.
Instead the stories make their own appeal in terms that any reader, idiosyncratically inclined or religiously dedicated can understand.

The stories of the people he meets in the convert countries contain the narrative of the past, present and possible future of those countries.

In 1979 he meets the editor and publisher of the Teheran Times. Iran has undergone a revolution. Students who call themselves the followers of Imam Khomeni have seized the American embassy and are holding its diplomats hostage. Naipaul talks to the newspaperman:

“I said ‘ Mr Parvez, you are a good Muslim and good Shia. Your paper used to be full of criticism of materialist civilizations. Why are your sons studying in the United States?’

“It wasn’t the time to push the question. He was too weary. He said, speaking of the second son, the one who hadn’t been able to get the visa, ‘It’s his future. He’s studying computer engineering. And Britain—it’s expensive.’

“So, deep down, he was divided. With one part of his mind he was for the faith, and opposed to all that stood outside it; in a world grown strange, he wished to continue to belong to himself for as long as possible. With another part of his mind he recognized the world outside as paramount, part of the future of his sons. It was in that division of the mind – as much as in the excesses of the Shah – that the Islamic revolution had begun in Iran. And it was there that it was ending.”

Naipaul’s conclusion is not that the Islamic revolution is breathing its last in Iran, but that “In Iran and elsewhere men would have to make their peace with the world which they knew existed beyond the faith.”

It is an optimistic conclusion to the harrowing journey, to the narrative of a half-made world in turmoil. And the duality, the internal dilemma that faces the zealot, the faith on the one hand and the world as it insists on being, beyond faith, is the clash that Naipaul sees. This, rather than the ‘clash of civilizations’ about which he was asked at the BJP meeting.

And the fate of the revolution?

“It was the late twentieth century – and not the faith – that could supply the answers – in institutions, legislation, economic systems.”

For the fundamentalist there are no answers outside the faith and it is heresy to look for them. The prediction that Islamic countries would have to look beyond the revealed text for modern answers for the ordering of modern society and the generation of a modern culture, is self-evident. It can’t be the basis of a reputation for being ‘anti-Islam’.

In his second book of travel through the same countries, Naipaul meets some of the same people and takes their stories on. He also comes to the conclusion that

“There is another way of considering the theme of conversion. It can be seen as a kind of crossover from old beliefs, earth religions, the cults of rulers and local deities, to the revealed religions – Christianity and Islam principally – with their larger philosophical and humanitarian social concerns…. In some of the cultures described in this book the crossover to Islam is still going on. It is the extra drama in the background, like a cultural big bang, the steady grinding down of the old world.”

Since that sentence was written the world has seen increased turmoil in the Middle East where militant Zionism lays claim to lands given to the Jews in revealed texts. It has witnessed the war of terror waged by a confederation of Muslim fundamentalist groups against the West, again going by the book; and against insufficiently fundamental rulers of Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Algeria and the Yemen – more prompting from text.

And yet the war of terror is brutally ‘modern’ in its use of information and the media to organise and coordinate its finances, its raids and its videoed execution of civilian captives such as the journalist Daniel Pearl and the two American Engineers in Iraq who had their heads severed with blunt knives.

Freedom for Palestine, Chechnya or Kashmir are quoted as their passing aims. But the others are beyond the politics of nation states fighting to be. They have declared that their final aim is to live in a world ordered by their own beliefs, in which there will be no unbelievers – a universal Islamic state. Dream on, one may say in a society in which thought and expression are free, except that this dream has turned to the recurrent bloodletting of the innocent.

By the text of course.

In what seems an apparent paradox, this murder, the bombings and the beheadings are planned, controlled and carried out by men who have in other ways embraced the modern world. They are engineers, scientists, economists, university graduates, some of them trained in the USA. They are by now means the wretched of the earth pushed into the corner of rebellion.

They too must live a divided existence – on the one hand the lure of modernity through all they have learnt and all that reading or knowledge of the wider world may have brought, and on the other: the faith. And if they claim and declare it’s their faith that has taken them there, who can condescend to attribute other motives to such highly motivated assassins? In their case, divided souls though they are - faith won.

And they were ‘ordinary blokes’ as their astounded erstwhile neighbours in Germany and Newcastle later said.

But doesn’t that mean that there are millions who suffer the same divide, experience the same dilemma in different degrees and in whom the opposite forces will win – despite and without destroying faith?

In Iraq in September the British Engineer Ken Bigley was captured by a jihadi group who demanded the release of all women prisoners held by the US or UK in Iraq as the price of his release. A video of him blindfold, pleading for his life and calling on Tony Blair to negotiate his release was sent by his captors to an Arab TV channel and was transmitted all round the world.

The Muslim Council of Britain joined the rest of the country in pleading for his release and sent two respected teachers of Islam to Iraq to try and make contact with kidnappers and plead for Bigley’s life. It was the first time since the Rushdie affair that a Muslim religious body came out on the side of a hostage held by men calling themselves jehadis. The Muslim Council even declared the kidnapping illegal under Sharia law.

On the face of it, this is the furthest that a British Muslim body has gone in support of a non-Muslim hostage. They declared that killing the innocent was strictly and expressly forbidden by Islam.

The two-man delegation was careful to say that they also condemn the killing by the US and its allies of Iraqi civilians and such a declaration presumably goes some way to providing them cover for asking for Mr Bigley’s release. They need the cover. It is by no means certain that all Muslims in Britain accept their leadership or agree with their initiative.

It is very doubtful that the Muslim council will go further than that. They are not about to call on Hamas to stop the suicide bombing of innocent civilians who may be Israeli citizens and Jews. Or are they?

Is their theological declaration about the slaying of innocents a strategic move to demonstrate that ‘ordinary’ Muslims whom the Council purports to represent are as British and concerned about the headline case as anyone else? Silence in this case was not an option.

And yet their declaration, supported by theological judgement or not, is not representative. A book of discovery among the Muslims of Britain, delving into the very divide that Naipaul identifies in Mr Parvez the newspaper editor of the Teheran Times, could certainly be.