Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  V S. NAIPAUL

  BEYOND

  BELIEF

  V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932, of Indian ancestry, and emigrated to England in 1950. He began writing in 1954, winning numerous awards, including the Booker Prize in 1971. In 1981, Naipaul’s Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, an account of his travels in Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia, was published to universal acclaim. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature in 1990.

  Also by

  V. S. NAIPAUL

  NONFICTION

  India: A Million Mutinies Now

  A Turn in the South

  Finding the Centre

  Among the Believers

  The Return of Eva Perón with The Killings in Trinidad

  India: A Wounded Civilization

  The Overcrowded Barracoon

  The Loss of El Dorado

  An Area of Darkness

  The Middle Passage

  FICTION

  A Way in the World

  The Enigma of Arrival

  A Bend in the River

  Guerrillas

  In a Free State

  A Flag on the Island

  The Mimic Men

  Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion

  A House for Mr. Biswas

  Miguel Street

  The Suffrage of Elvira

  The Mystic Masseur

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, DECEMBER 1999

  Copyright © 1998 by V. S. Naipaul

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1998.

  Vintage is a registered trademark, and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Published in Great Britain by Little Brown & Company (UK).

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

  Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad)

  Beyond belief: Islamic excursions among the converted peoples/V. S. Naipaul.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82841-5

  1. Islam—Asia. 2. Islamic countries—Description and travel. 3. Islam—Controversial literature. 4. Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad)—Journeys—Islamic countries. I. Title.

  BP63.A1N35 1998

  297’.095—dc21 97-37350

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For Nadira Khannum Alvi

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE INDONESIA

  The Flight of the N-250

  1. The Man of the Moment

  2. History

  3. A Convert

  4. A Sacred Place

  5. Kampung

  6. Below the Lava

  7. Oh Mama! Oh Papa!

  8. Ghosts

  PART TWO IRAN

  The Justice of Ali

  1. The Foundation of the Oppressed

  2. Mr. Jaffrey’s Round Trip

  3. The Great War

  4. Salt Land

  5. The Jail

  6. The Martyr

  7. Qom: The Punisher

  8. Cancer

  9. The Two Tribes

  PART THREE PAKISTAN

  Dropping off the Map

  1. A Criminal Enterprise

  2. The Polity

  3. Rana in His Village

  4. Guerrilla

  5. Penitent

  6. Loss

  7. From the North

  8. Ali’s Footprint

  9. War

  PART FOUR MALAYSIAN POSTSCRIPT

  Raising the Coconut Shell

  1. Old Clothes

  2. New Model

  3. The Bomoh’s Son

  4. The Other World

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  THIS IS A BOOK about people. It is not a book of opinion. It is a book of stories. The stories were collected during five months of travel in 1995 in four non-Arab Muslim countries—Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia. So there is a context and a theme.

  Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.

  This book is a follow-up to a book I published seventeen years ago, Among the Believers, about a journey to the same four countries. When I started on that journey in 1979 I knew almost nothing about Islam—it is the best way to start on a venture—and that first book was an exploration of the details of the faith and what looked like its capacity for revolution. The theme of conversion was always there; but I didn’t see it as clearly as I saw it on this second journey.

  Beyond Belief adds to the earlier book, takes the story on. It also moves in a different way. It is less of a travel book; the writer is less present, less of an inquirer. He is in the background, trusting to his instinct, a discoverer of people, a finder-out of stories. These stories, opening out one from the other, make their own pattern and define each country and its promptings; and the four sections of the book make a whole.

  I began my writing career as a fiction writer, a manager of narrative; at that time I thought it the highest thing to be. When I was asked—nearly forty years ago—to travel about certain colonial territories in South America and the Caribbean and to write a book, I was delighted to do the traveling—taking small airplanes to strange places, going up South American rivers—but then I wasn’t sure how to write the book, how to make a pattern of what I was doing. That first time I got away with autobiography and landscape. It was years before I saw that the most important thing about travel, for the writer, was the people he found himself among.

  So in these travel books or cultural explorations of mine the writer as traveler steadily retreats; the people of the country come to the front; and I become again what I was at the beginning: a manager of narrative. In the nineteenth century the invented story was used to do things that other literary forms—the poem, the essay—couldn’t easily do: to give news about a changing society, to describe mental states. I find it strange that the travel form—in the beginning so far away from my own instincts—should have taken me back there, to looking for the story; though it would have undone the point of the book if the narratives were falsified or forced. There are complexities enough in these stories. They are the point of the book; the reader should not look for “conclusions.”

  It may be asked if different people and different stories in any section of the book would have created or suggested another kind of country. I think not: the train has many coaches, and different classes, but it passes through the same landscape. People are responding to the same political or religious and cultural pressures. The writer has only to listen very carefully and with a clear heart to what people say t
o him, and ask the next question, and the next.

  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 and social concerns. Hindus say that Hinduism is less coercive and more “spiritual”; and they are right. But Gandhi got his social ideas from Christianity.

  The crossover from the classical world to Christianity is now history. It is not easy, reading the texts, imaginatively to enter the long disputes and anguishes of that crossover. But in some of the cultures described in this book the crossover to Islam—and sometimes Christianity—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.

  PART ONE

  INDONESIA

  The Flight of the N-250

  1

  THE MAN OF THE MOMENT

  IMADUDDIN WAS A LECTURER in electrical engineering at the Bandung Institute of Technology. He was also an Islamic preacher. So in the 1960s and 1970s he was unusual: a man of science, one of the few in independent Indonesia, and at the same time a dedicated man of the faith. He could draw the student crowds to the Salman Mosque in the grounds of the Bandung Institute.

  He worried the authorities. And when, on the last day of 1979, I went to Bandung to see him, driving up through the afternoon along the crowded smoky road from coastal Jakarta to the cooler plateau where Bandung was, I found that he was a man more or less on the run. He had not long before finished fourteen months in jail as a political prisoner. He still had his little staff house at the Bandung Institute, but he was not allowed to lecture there. And though he was still being defiant, giving his courses in Islamic “mental training” to small groups of middle-class young people—holiday groups, really—he was, at the age of forty-eight, getting ready to go abroad.

  He was to spend many years abroad. But then his fortunes changed. And this time I found—going back to Indonesia more than fifteen years after that meeting with him in Bandung—that Imaduddin had money and was famous. He had an Islamic Sunday morning television program. He had a Mercedes and a driver, a reasonable house in a reasonable part of Jakarta, and he was talking of moving to something a little better. The very mixture of science and Islam that had made him suspect to the authorities in the late 1970s now made him desirable, the model of the Indonesian new man, and had taken him up to the heights, had taken him very nearly to the fount of power.

  He had become close to Habibie, the minister for research and technology; and Habibie was closer than anyone else in the government to President Suharto, who had ruled for thirty years and was generally presented as the father of the nation.

  Habibie was an aeronautical man and his admirers said he was a prodigy. He was a man with a grand idea. It was that Indonesia should under his guidance build, or at any rate design, its own airplanes. The idea behind the idea—as I had read in some newspapers—was that such a venture wouldn’t only deliver airplanes. It would also give many thousands of people a high and varied technological training; out of this would come an Indonesian industrial revolution. Over nineteen years almost a billion and a half dollars—according to The Wall Street Journal—had been given to Habibie’s aerospace organization. One kind of airplane had been built, the CN-235, in collaboration with a Spanish company; it hadn’t been commercially successful. But now something more exciting was about to fly, the N-250, a fifty-seat commuter turboprop, wholly designed by Habibie’s organization.

  The aircraft’s inaugural flight was to be in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesia’s independence, on August 17, for which, for weeks before, the streets of Jakarta and other towns had been strung with the same kind of colored lights and hung with flags and banners. Against this background of celebration—which was like the state’s gift to the people—the Jakarta Post, like a lecturer handling the beginners’ class, one day took its readers through stage by stage of the N-250’s trials: the taxiing at low speed, to check ground maneuvering; then at medium speed, to check wing and tail and brake systems; and then at high speed, to make sure that the N-250 could fly just above the ground for five or six minutes.

  Four days before the inaugural flight a generator shaft (whatever that was) broke down during a medium-speed taxi. A replacement was, however, to hand; and on the appointed day the N-250 flew for an hour at ten thousand feet. The front page of the Jakarta Post showed President Suharto applauding and Habibie embracing a smiling Mrs. Suharto. Plans were announced for a midrange jet, the N-2130, for March 2004. It was going to cost two billion dollars. Since this program stretched far into the future, Habibie’s thirty-two-year-old son, Ilham, who had done an apprenticeship course at Boeing, was going to be in charge.

  Three weeks later, after the climax of the fiftieth-anniversary independence celebrations: a great French-produced firework display, and in an atmosphere of national glory, Habibie proposed that August 10, the day on which the N-250 flew, should be observed as National Technological Reawakening Day. He made the proposal at the Twelfth Islam Unity Conference. Because there was another side to Habibie: he was a devout Muslim and a passionate defender of the faith. He was chairman of a new body, the aggressively named Association of Muslim Intellectuals. And when he told the Islam Unity Conference that mastery of science and technology had to be coupled with stronger faith in Allah, it was accepted that he was speaking with both religious and secular authority.

  If it wasn’t absolutely certain how the designing and building of airplanes with imported components could lead to a general technological or scientific breakthrough; so, too, it wasn’t absolutely clear how Islam had been ennobled by the success of the N-250, and the hundreds of millions that had gone to serve one man’s particular talent or interest.

  But this was precisely where Imaduddin’s faith—as scientist and believer—had coincided with Habibie’s, where the careers of the two men had crossed, and Imaduddin had been taken up by his new patron to the sky of presidential favor.

  Imaduddin, some time after his return from exile, had been one of the principal early movers behind the Association of Muslim Intellectuals. And now he served Habibie in a special way. Habibie, or his ministry, had sent very many students to study abroad. It was Imaduddin’s duty—as scientist and preacher—regularly to visit these students at their foreign universities, to remind them of their faith and where their loyalties should lie. In 1979, when he had been on the run, the Islamic mental training courses he had been doing at Bandung hadn’t been approved of by the government, nervous of the beginnings of any populist movement it couldn’t control. Now—in an extraordinary reversal—these mental training courses of Imaduddin’s, or something like them, were being used by the government to win the support of the important new intelligentsia or technocracy that Habibie was creating.

  It was out of his new freedom and security, the new closeness to power, which to Imaduddin was only like the proof of the rightness of the faith he had always served, that he told me how, in the bad old days of persecution, he had been picked up one night by the police from his little house at the Bandung Institute of Technology, and taken to jail for fourteen months.

  He didn’t want to make too much of it now, but he had been provocative, had brought trouble on his own head. He had spoken against some plan of President Suharto, the father of the nation, for a family mausoleum. Gold was to be used in some part of the mausoleum, and Imaduddin spoke now as though it was the use of gold more than anything else that had offended his Islamic puritanism.

  So he was expecting trouble, and it came. On the twenty-third of May, 1978, at a quarter to midnight, someone rang the bell of his little house. He went out and saw three intelligence men in plain clothes. Imaduddin could see a gun on one of them. Many people were being arrested at that time.

  One of the men said, “We come from Jakarta. We would like to take
you to Jakarta to get some information.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “We cannot tell you. You have to come with us immediately.”

  Imaduddin said, “Give me a few minutes.”

  And, being Imaduddin, he prayed for a while and washed, while his wife prepared a little prison bag for him. She didn’t forget his Koran.

  All at once Imaduddin felt that he didn’t want to go with the men. He felt that as a Muslim he couldn’t trust them. He believed that the intelligence people in Indonesia were under the control of the Catholics. He telephoned the rector of the Bandung Institute. The rector said, “Let me talk to them.” He talked to them, but the intelligence men insisted that Imaduddin should go with them. The rector began to hurry over to Imaduddin’s house, but by the time he got there Imaduddin had been taken away in a taxi.

  The intelligence men left the house with Imaduddin about twelve-thirty, forty-five minutes after they had rung the bell. Imaduddin sat at the back of the taxi between two of the men; the third man sat in the front. They got to the Central Intelligence Office in Jakarta at four-thirty in the morning. Imaduddin, with the serenity of the believer, had slept some of the way. It was time for the dawn prayers when they arrived, and they allowed Imaduddin to do the prayer. Then they asked him to wait in a kind of waiting room. They gave him breakfast.