V. S. Naipaul’s Journeys: From Periphery to Center

IN PREVIOUS chapters, I have explored the ways Naipaul implicates himself in the situations he describes. His interpretation of his own past, as well as the prejudices he inherited, inform his writing. These features of his writing are present in Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998), Naipaul’s nonfictional accounts of his travel to four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries in 1979 and 1997, respectively.¹

When Naipaul first arrives in Malaysia, he meets Shafi, a successful Malaysian businessman from a rural village in the north of the country who is roughly the same age as he. Naipaul’s ostensible purpose in meeting Shafi is to understand the kinds of institutional and social reforms advocated by Islamic fundamentalists in Malaysia. The year is 1979, and the Iranian Revolution has just taken place. However, what stands out about Naipaul’s account of their encounter is his interest in Shafi’s village background and the syncretic form of Islam he practiced growing up in a rural area. Naipaul’s own beginnings lay in semirural Trinidad, and the friendliness that develops between that the two men can be traced to the fact that they share a degree of nostalgia for that simpler period of their lives.

Both men had grown up in plantation economies out of which the British had formed multiracial societies. Both came from working-class families, grew up during the twilight years of colonial rule, and achieved worldly success. Both had moved away from their rural pasts but remained attached to the memory of childhoods spent partly in the countryside. It is from this idea of a shared rural past, as well as a break with that past, that Naipaul attempts to understand Shafi’s turn toward a rigorous set of Islamic beliefs premised on an explicit rejection of the relaxed Islam he had known as a child.

Shafi belongs to the Malay Muslim majority in Malaysia, a prosperous country. He is closely connected to Anwar Ibrahim, a former Islamist student radical and a rising political star. Shafi’s political connections have won his construction company several lucrative state contracts. When Naipaul tries to understand why a successful and apparently well-adjusted man like Shafi is attracted to religious fundamentalism, he is surprised by his answer. Shafi claims that as a Malay, he “had nothing”: he lacked a cultural past that was his exclusively his, rather than one formed by diverse cultural practices. Shafi took such mixture or borrowing as a sign of a lack of cultural integrity. He regarded his belief in a fundamentalist Islam as a solution to this confusion. It was a way for him, as a modern and educated person, to carve out a less messy and therefore more rational relationship to his past. By becoming “nothing but his faith, a kind of abstract man,” Naipaul interposed, he would overcome the putative backwardness embodied by his cultural and historical background.2

Naipaul disagrees with this valuation and thinks it would be more correct to say that Shafi has a rich heritage that he simply rejects. By rejecting the Hindu, Buddhist, and animist influences that remain present in the practices of his rural Muslim community, by disavowing the sensuous pleasures that he associates with his childhood in the Kota Baru village in the northern state of Kedah, Shafi seeks to remake himself in a way that conflates modernity with a refusal to examine the historicity of his formation. Naipaul considers such an attitude the antithesis of a historical way of being, in which efforts are made to account for, rather than suppress, plural and conflicting strands of one’s past. In Naipaul’s conversation with Shafi, we see how two people growing up in far-apart colonial societies responded in diametrically opposed ways to the same predicament.

Shafi had turned to a purer, simplified idea of his past: “We are the first generation. It’s only a few who can understand the complete way of Islam. We want to change from the normal tradition [of ordinary Malay Muslims], which is not the true Islamic way of life. But the process is difficult and takes time,” he tells Naipaul.3 In other words, this is a form of postcolonial self-fashioning very different from the one to which Naipaul had subscribed in his effort to become a writer.

Believers comes across in this juxtaposition less as a metropolitan attack on Shafi’s ways than a portrait of competing visions of individual possibility as articulated by two postcolonial subjects. Like Naipaul, Shafi received a colonial education. Unlike Naipaul, Shafi rejected the secular and liberal principles inherited from the colonial past as the first step to remaking himself. One way people seek to make sense of, or regain control over, the psychological disorientation caused by modernity is by imposing a univocal interpretation of the past.

Shafi’s hope is to still the psychological dislocations he feels as a rural person who has made the journey to the city and become successful in a relatively short period of time. The new Islamic ideas and values he embraces as the means to this end require him to reject aspects of his own formation that are dearest to him. Because all things pre-Islamic are un-Islamic, according to the fundamentalist values Shafi now espouses, once treasured memories of local practices have to be revalued and condemned as transgressions, actions undertaken in a state of ignorance. Older notions of the sacred that Shafi had absorbed as a child are similarly devalued because they are mixed forms, partaking of Sufi and animist beliefs that are considered beyond the pale by Islamic fundamentalists and modernists alike.

In Naipaul’s view, Shafi’s strategy has not relieved him of the insecurity he feels about his mixed-up past. Instead, it has opened up new forms of inner turmoil that Shafi, a sensitive man who was deeply formed by his village years, struggles to put into words. Thus, although he frames his story as a journey from false to true religion, Naipaul cannot help reading his story in a manner unintended by Shafi:

This is the kind of self-fashioning that Shafi, also an educated, middle-class person, undertakes with a determination that Naipaul finds at once moving and abhorrent. Shafi’s struggle bears similarities to Naipaul’s own journey, except that it results in a set of resolutions that Naipaul finds unacceptable:

In Pakistan the fundamentalists believed that to follow the right rules was to bring about again the purity of the early Islamic way: the reorganization of the world would follow automatically on the rediscovery of the true faith. Shafi’s grief and passion, in multi-racial Malaysia, were more immediate; and I felt that for him the wish to re-establish the rules was also a wish to re-create the lost security of his childhood, the Malay village life he had lost.

Some grief like that touches most of us. It is what, as individuals, responsible for ourselves, we constantly have to accommodate ourselves to. Shafi, in his own eyes, was the first man expelled from paradise. He blamed the world; he shifted the whole burden of that accommodation onto Islam.⁵

Naipaul characterizes himself as being, like Shafi, formed by memories of peasant peoples and the disruptions resulting from their move to urban areas.6 He is therefore able to empathize with Shafi’s predicament. Naipaul also wonders whether Shafi took such radical steps to remake himself precisely because he was a sensitive and thoughtful person eager to give meaning and value to his existence that the simple Malay village life could not satisfy. Naipaul humanizes Shafi by repeatedly drawing attention to the pathos of Shafi’s struggle. In this sense, Shafi’s efforts parallel Naipaul’s own attempt to understand his past by writing about it.

In the long passage quoted earlier, Naipaul notes that Shafi is from the kind of “simple society” that Naipaul recognizes from his own past.⁷ The words “grief” and “accommodation” also recall Naipaul’s early novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961). Growing up in circumstances like those depicted in that novel, Naipaul writes, Shafi “knew nothing” about history: “From his parents he had heard about the Japanese occupation of Malaysia during the war…. At school he wasn’t interested in history. And now there wasn’t time for learning or reading; there was his work for the [Islamic] movement. The rich past of his people remained closed to him: Hinduism, Buddhism, animist belief.”⁸ Because of his ignorance of the past, Shafi is unable to reflect on how it has shaped him. Instead, what stepped into the breach, offering answers to questions that were inchoately yet urgently felt, was fundamentalist thinking. Fundamentalism gives disoriented men like Shafi a way to think. It provides them with a clear sense of moral purpose, identity, and most importantly perhaps, an unambiguous way of describing the past.

Naipaul shows that Shafi’s Malay village customs have been shaped by pre-Islamic customs associated with Hindu, Buddhist, and animist practices. But this is of no significance to Shafi, who takes it as a sign of his modernity that such practices should be denounced and banished. Naipaul notes, however, that Shafi is fully aware that these “pagan” or pre-Islamic practices, pervasive in Malay rural society, provide much of its anchoring norms and moral texture. Such practices also represent the deepest source of psychological nourishment for Shafi because they are connected to old ideas of belonging to the kampung (village) life of his childhood. In a quiet moment of understanding that passes between the two men, Naipaul senses that Shafi’s faith requires him to disavow the memory of the very things that sustain him psychologically in the big city.9 “The contradiction in Shafi’s thought had come out towards the end of our last conversation. The village way was the true Malay way; but that way had to be altered. Belief had to be purified, the old pagan traditions of the village uprooted.”¹⁰

The fracture that opens up within Shafi’s psyche accounts for something Naipaul perceives, a disjuncture between Shafi’s insistence on the correct course of action and his own existential dissatisfaction with such a prescribed course. Naipaul finds Shafi a compelling character because he lives out his life by overlaying psychological disjunctions he is aware of but is unable to adequately describe. He compounds the feeling of inner contradiction as he seeks to overcome it through more vigorous affirmations of religious orthodoxy.

Shafi had grown up in a politically stable Muslim-majority nation. Malaysia had been rewarded for being a staunch ally of the United States in its fight against communism. Mass poverty or violence did not cause Shafi’s turn to fundamentalism. It came, rather, out of the disorientation brought about by rapid prosperity. Nothing in Shafi’s technical education taught him how to study or reflect on his formation.

Naipaul’s record of his conversations with Shafi represents one of the most thoughtful and empathetic efforts by a writer to examine how postcolonial subjects might learn to think through the conditions by which they are formed. Remarkably, however, Edward W. Said interpreted Naipaul’s engagement with Shafi as a cynical attempt to depict Muslims in a negative light:

Said accuses Naipaul of condescension and bad faith in his responses to Shafi’s questions. He takes Naipaul to be saying that Shafi lives in a state of “stupefaction” because he is a Muslim and is therefore unable to appreciate that Naipaul regards writing as a vocation. In this way, Said implies that Naipaul does not treat Muslims as individuals but as mindless automatons.

But Said misreads the spirit in which the conversation between Naipaul and Shafi takes place, as Said’s own quotation of Believers illustrates. When Shafi decides to take over the role of interviewer and subjects Naipaul, as a fellow colonial with a comparable past, to questioning, Naipaul takes Shafi’s questions very seriously and answers them as honestly as he can. It is not Naipaul’s fault that Shafi does not seem to comprehend his view of writing as a vocation or a calling that is not prompted solely by a desire to become rich. Because writing is not a religious activity, Shafi assumes it can only be a moneymaking enterprise.¹² A lack of discernment that has its roots in class, not religious, background partly explains Shafi’s limited view of the world.

Shafi drew on fundamentalist ideas to make sense of his own development in part because the wider society did not foster historical reflection, Naipaul suggests. Fundamentalism answered a need; it provided an encompassing way of looking that would restore wholeness not by reconciling Shafi to the peasant world he had lost, but by proposing a completely novel idea of a homogeneous national community made up exclusively of pious Muslims. Malaysia’s multi-religious population, as well as the cultural norms of a thriving society, presented a challenge to Shafi’s preferred reality.

When Naipaul visited Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution, he was struck by the immense appeal that the idea of Jamé Towhidi (a pure society exclusively made up Muslim believers) had even among educated and middle-class individuals. Among these individuals was Mr. Jaffrey, the editorial writer for the English-language Tehran Times. In order to become a part of this imagined community, Mr. Jaffrey, a Shia Muslim, had left his native Lucknow in India and moved to Iran after the revolution. Naipaul was mystified that Mr. Jaffrey was convinced that as soon as an Islamic state was established people would automatically become good. Historical reason seemed alien to this way of thinking.

What is striking about Naipaul’s account is his suggestion that the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism is a symptom of the historical disorientation I have discussed in previous chapters. Although Naipaul begins by suggesting that Islam makes “imperial demands”13—a claim that Said justifiably criticizes—it seems significant that Naipaul’s sweeping statement gives way to the more interesting insights that grow out of his conversation with individuals in different countries. What emerges out of these exchanges are not categorical statements about Islam, but the contradictory aspirations or convictions of individuals living through a period of rapid and disorienting change.

Naipaul notes, for instance, that while Mr. Jaffrey welcomes the Iranian Revolution, his own colonial education in India has also made him a supporter of individual rights. Mr. Jaffrey belatedly acknowledges that the authoritarian legislation adopted by the new state may be inimical to his own professional survival as a journalist. In Naipaul’s view, Mr. Jaffrey becomes paralyzed in the face of his contradictory desires. Naipaul comes to like Mr. Jaffrey, and even sympathizes with his struggle, but the two do not meet again. When he goes looking for him some time later, Naipaul learns that Mr. Jaffrey’s paper has been closed down and Mr. Jaffrey himself had fled Iran.

Naipaul’s books on the Muslim world do not depict people as if they are solely defined by their religious identity.¹⁴ The manner of his engagement with the people he meets in Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia is similar to the stories of his encounters in other parts of the world, with their primary focus on individual lives. Naipaul’s view of the Muslims he meets is also colored by a sense of historical affinity; he shares a colonial past with most of them.

In these books, he mostly writes about people he grows to like and with whom he wishes to spend as much time as possible. His affection and sympathy for people like Mr. Jaffrey and Behzad (in Iran); Shafi and Syed Alwi (in Malaysia); Abdurrahman Wahid, Goenawan Mohamad, and Dewi Fortuna Anwar (in Indonesia); and Syed (in Pakistan) is plain. When he returns to these countries in 1995, more than a decade after his first 1979 visit, he makes every effort to meet with the same people to see how their thinking might have evolved (as his own has). This is especially true of Imaduddin, whom Naipaul describes meeting in 1979 in Believers. It is clear from Naipaul’s account in Beyond Belief in 1995, when he returns to Jakarta to look up Imaduddin again, that his affection for Imaduddin is reciprocated. The two men warmly reconnect as if little time has elapsed. Conversely, when Naipaul is prevented from meeting with Shafi again because the latter has possibly fallen into disfavor with his organization, he expresses genuine regret. Such an investment in individuals and how they have developed, constitutes an important part of Naipaul effort to make visible how his own evolving understanding of his formation can be brought into conversation with the way others reflect on their pasts.

In Pakistan, Naipaul observes that some of his educated interlocutors appear to disavow the hybrid and plural aspects of their past and seek instead to reimagine their social order along the lines of socially purified and monolithic order defined by orthodoxy. Instead of seeking to reproduce the rules of a previous time, Naipaul suggests that modern people must find ways of responding creatively to their present challenges. One instance of a creative response can be found in an earlier era of Islamic civilization. Here is Naipaul’s characterization of the Chachnama, the famous thirteenth-century Persian-language account of the Arab conquest of Sind (a region in today’s Pakistan) in 712 CE:

In Naipaul’s view, the predicament of contemporary Muslims requires more skeptical habits of mind. What is needed is a dynamic rather than a mechanical response to modern challenges. This, Naipaul implies, is the lesson the Chachnama holds for present-day readers. He argues that whereas the early Muslims of the seventh century were “enlightened” and open to external influences, those of modern-day Pakistan have their minds “clouded” by longing to return to the state of their seventh-century Arab predecessors. In contrast to these contemporary Muslims, the Chachnama activates a dynamic relationship to its own time. What is required of modern Muslims is not an unhistorical retrieval of a bygone world but a historically conscious response analogous to the one exhibited by the Chachnama.

Passages like these implicitly reveal Naipaul to be less interested in reifying Islam as an ahistorical and “imperial” force than in studying it as an historical institution, not least by revealing a sympathy for its internal diversity. We recall that this perspective prompts Naipaul to wonder why Shafi is so disapproving of his Muslim fellows in his Kedah village for subscribing to an older, supposedly less “pure” kind of Islam. In other words, Naipaul’s position presupposes that Muslim practices and beliefs are plural and that Islam is responsive to and shaped by different contexts, which is why he thinks that it is only Shafi (not fellow Muslims in his birthplace) who can be described as subscribing to this “imperial” view. Naipaul’s criticisms are directed primarily at late-twentieth-century Islamic fundamentalism, not Islam as such.

In Naipaul’s view, the fundamentalist urge self-consciously mimicked the modern appearance of historical consciousness only to neutralize its inquiring and critical impulse. Thought existed solely as an instrument for the enforcement of orthodoxy. It was a circular and closed form of reasoning.

Visiting Pakistan in 1979, Naipaul had several dispiriting encounters that reminded him of the Hindu golden-ageists of India he had met a few years earlier, who “look[ed] back to the past and speak of the present Black Age.”¹⁷ Naipaul discerns a likeness between Hindu nationalists and fundamentalist Muslims: in the stultifying Islamic “fundamentalist scheme,” Naipaul writes, with Hindu India also in mind, “the world constantly decays and needs to be recreated. The only function of our intellect is to assist that recreation.”¹⁸

Naipaul wondered whether there existed, in local traditions and customs, resources of thought that might bring about a relaxation of ways of seeing and feeling. Could this prompt a reevaluation of the great monotheistic religions that had become so dominant the world over? The scenario Naipaul sought to examine in his travels was whether these newer and more absolutist claims of the great world religions might, through such efforts, come to be regarded not as superseding but only as “complementing” the “old faiths.”²⁰ Naipaul is drawn to a vision in which the central beliefs of the great religious traditions coexist without conflict and believes that it may have found expression in some places in Indonesia:

The religion of the village was a composite religion; the idea of the good life was a composite idea. People lived with everything at once: the mosque, the church, Krishna, the rice goddess, a remnant of Hindu caste, the Buddhist idea of nirvana, the Muslim idea of paradise. No one, Umar Kayam said, could precisely say what he was. People said, ‘I am a Muslim, but—’ Or, ‘I am a Christian, but—.’²¹

Wahid draws on his father’s example to argue that Islamic practices need to be embedded in local histories and cultures. He is also adamant that the new Indonesian president Habibie (whose policies are supported by the modernist Muslims) is wrong to promote “political Islam,” a divisive force in Indonesia’s multireligious society. Wahid believes that Islam is “a moral force which works through ethics and morality,” and that it should be strictly separated from politics. “I feel it personally,” Wahid declares, “because my father participated in the writing of the constitution, which gives equal status to all citizens. People should practice Islam out of conscience, not out of fear. [President] Habibie and his friends create a fear among non-Muslims and non-practicing Muslims to show their identity. This is the first step to tyranny.”22

By contrast, Imaduddin, who is a friend of President Habibie, is convinced that strong institutions will arise when people are made into strict Muslims. In Indonesia, Naipaul writes, “the historical sense [is] falsified,” and intellectual self-consciousness disturbingly implies that “history has to serve theology.”²³ This influential, technocratically minded generation of fundamentalists look down on the traditional religious leaders of the sort represented by Abdurrahman Wahid, whose syncretic faith is regarded as a symptom of their backward or non-modern mindset. Some of these fundamentalists, including Imaduddin, are engineers whose prestige as religious ideologues derives partly from the fact that they received their degrees from American universities.

Imaduddin sees himself as a modernizer, and this feeds his fixed views. He is “determined to erase local errors, all the customs and ceremonies and earth reverences.”24 In a “mental training” class Imaduddin devises for young middle-class urbanites in Jakarta, Naipaul notices that the game the students play emphasizes cooperation and collectivity. The point of the game is to impress the group with the idea of unity, itself a stand-in for the utopia promised by the Islamic state. Yet attractive as the game is, it denies historical realities because it invokes a pure society made up exclusively of believers, operating on the assumption that Indonesia is not a multireligious society. There is, Naipaul notes, “an unspoken corollary: everything outside that community was shut out, everything outside was impious, impure, infidel.”²⁵

In the debt-fueled boom years leading up to the Asian financial crisis of 1997, public intellectuals like Imaduddin made statements that confidently linked economic development to religious orthodoxy: “When [the students abroad] become devout Muslims and good leaders of Indonesia they will not think about revolution but about accelerated evolution.”²⁶ In response, Naipaul recalls the poet Gunawan Mohamed’s comment on the way the Indonesian language had been degraded by public figures: “It sounded like a slogan, something worked over, words, to be projected as part of the program: development, but with minds somehow tethered: ‘We have to overcome our backwardness and become one of the new industrial countries by 2020.’”²⁷

Naipaul had first observed Imaduddin leading a “mental training” exercise in Jakarta in 1979, shortly after he had been released from jail as a political prisoner of the Suharto regime. Over the next decade, Imaduddin’s fortunes rose as Indonesia economy boomed. By the time Naipaul returned to Indonesia in 1995, Imaduddin was famous and had been appointed head of the prestigious Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI), a politically connected outfit that combined religious devoutness with a modernizing ideology. Imaduddin was also a close associate of the new president, Habibie. He belonged to a group of technocratic, modernizing, fundamentalist Muslims who found themselves closer to the center of power than ever before.

Meeting him again after many years, Naipaul found that Imaduddin had only grown more confident in his religious values. He remained as indifferent to Indonesia’s heterogeneous, pre-Islamic past as he had been in 1979, when he surprised Naipaul by expressing indifference to the fate of Borobudur, the famous ninth-century Buddhist temple in Java.28 He was one of those “colonial students, often the first in their families to travel abroad for university degrees, [who] were to go back home with borrowed ideas of revolution; so these Sumatran students and pilgrims in Mecca, influenced by Wahhabi fundamentalism, and a little vain of their new knowledge, were to go back home determined to make the faith of Sumatra equal to the Wahhabi faith in Mecca.”²⁹ From this standpoint, Java’s richness in “the monuments of the pagan past” might have been, to Imaduddin, an unhappy reminder of a benighted culture that was far removed from truth and morality.³⁰

There might have been other reasons for Imaduddin’s indifference to his past or his inability to grasp the value of historical consciousness—namely, the lack of material and intellectual development in Dutch Sumatra, where he was born. Shortly after independence, authoritarian rule resulted in the murder and incarceration of thousands of intellectuals, an incident that was still not open to public discussion more than three decades later. For many decades, censorship and conformity prevailed. Gunawan Mohamed, the poet referred to above, elaborates his view of how colonialism and authoritarian rule had combined to degrade the Indonesian language itself:

I don’t think educated Indonesians speak any language which can be used to express and develop their thinking. In Sukarno’s time the language was steered into a totalitarian use, and in Suharto’s time it has been bureaucratized. I wrote poetry in the 1960s, and I discovered that all the language had big abstract connotations—nation, people, revolution, socialism, justice…. Even some adopted liberal ideas. Like free market. They are dead, not derived from experience, the soil, the street.³¹

As part of his desire to retain his relationship to this complex past and not give in to the modernizing fundamentalisms of Imaduddin, Abdurrahman Wahid had maintained the pesantren schools—religious boardinghouses set up to educate peasant children in rural areas.³³ Schools for Muslim students, but with their origins in pre-Islamic, possibly Buddhist, education, they would, according to this view, serve as an important site for formulating and disseminating an alternative to the fundamentalist idea of Islam.

When Naipaul first visited Wahid’s pesantrens in 1979, however, he could not imagine how these schools, with their rote learning and rigid curricula, could ever represent an improvement over the high-tech stultification enacted through the educational policies of the fundamentalists. At one of Wahid’s rural schools, Naipaul recalls seeing “boys sitting about bamboozling themselves with simple textbooks of religious laws which they would have known by heart, with some boys even sitting in the dark before open books and pretending to read.” Nevertheless, Naipaul tries to offer a vaguely hopeful assessment of this dispiriting scene:34

Perhaps religious teaching had to come with this repetitiveness, this isolating and beating down and stunning of the mind, this kind of pain. Perhaps out of this there came self-respect of a sort, and even an idea of learning which—in the general cultural depression—might never have otherwise existed. Because out of this religious education, whatever its sham scholarship and piety, and its real pain, there also came a political awakening.³⁵

Naipaul later adds, “Mr. Wahid, with his pesantren education and pesantren family pieties, had become more internationalist and liberal. Imaduddin had remained committed to the holy war.”³⁶ But this may have more to do with Wahid’s unusual family background, which is not reflected in the quality of education overseen by his organization.

What becomes clear through conversations with Wahid is that those individuals who oppose the Islamization of the state are themselves reliant on intellectual tools that are out of date or are also designed to “bamboozle.”³⁷ Those who would respect the internally diverse and historically situated forms of Islam in the country are unlikely to provide a viable alternative to the fundamentalist goal, which is to deliver technological advancement with true faith.³⁸ At the end of the century, it is Imaduddin, not Wahid, who is able to tap into the deepest aspirations of postcolonial nationalism.

Despite or because of his sophisticated understanding of the past, it is Wahid who appears out of touch with the times. A complicated picture emerges in Naipaul’s account, to which there appears to be no clear solution. Naipaul’s reluctance to draw a conclusion on this issue is itself intriguing. It may be because of his unstated conviction that, for all its shortcomings, Wahid’s method represents a more desirable local way of moving forward for people of limited background and education.

Naipaul here seems to believe, in ways that he will go on to explore in The Masque of Africa, that local Islams, like African belief systems, are engaged in 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.”39 Viewed in this light, Naipaul possibly defers to Wahid’s instincts because of a hope that his method prepares the way for historical thinking, albeit in a circuitous manner embedded in local practices. This is also the impulse behind Naipaul’s later writings on Africa, where he is on the lookout for the ways local forms of thought and practice can complement or supplant the modernizing or exclusionary practices of monotheisms like Christianity and Islam.

Naipaul uses the metaphors “crossing over” and “grinding down” to describe the way older beliefs and practices give way to the more energetic and universalist ideas associated with the most global of monotheistic faiths, Christianity and Islam.⁴⁰ He seems to be saying that the only way to combat the mind-quelling tendencies of Islamic fundamentalism, which he first encountered in 1979, is by enabling more reflective practices and institutions to emerge from local initiatives such as Mr. Wahid’s, grounded in Javanese tradition. This would make it possible for a more capacious kind of Islamic practice to emerge. These speculations are only hinted at, however leaving the reader guessing at the reasons for the subtle but important differences that separate Believers from its less assertive and more internally conflicted counterpart, Beyond.

In the Malaysia section that concludes Beyond Belief, it becomes evident that Naipaul is drawn to people not so much because of their religious beliefs but because he finds their stories moving. These people tell of the alternately sustaining and debilitating power of the village, the practices and values it encourages and inhibits. The stories of Nadezha, Syed Alwi, and Rashid, the Chinese bomoh (or shaman), have nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalism or with the theme of conversion to Islam, both of which have, by this point, faded into the background. These individuals are more concerned with the complexity of village practices and how individuals from such backgrounds find a way to take on the challenges of the world, striking once again the theme that was explored with Shafi years before, and that Naipaul himself returned to obsessively over his long career.

In the Malaysia of the late 1990s Naipaul sees hopeful signs of the integration of village-based practices with the new fundamentalist strains of Islamic belief.41 However, this insight goes unelaborated in the jumble of inconclusive but affecting stories Naipaul strings together at the end of the book. It is as if the many Malays he meets in 1995, like Syed Alwi, Nasar, and Nadezha, as well as Chinese converts to Islam like Rashid the bomoh’s son, have found a way to ease themselves into modernity without feeling any of the turmoil that Naipaul had sensed in people like Shafi in 1979.

The book dissolves, rather than concludes, in two stories of great family suffering resulting from war and communal violence. What stands out in both stories are the images of two sons, Rashid and Syed Alwi, who visit their estranged and embittered fathers as they lie dying. Naipaul did not return to Trinidad to visit his sick father before he died in 1953. Trying to finish a book, short of money, Naipaul did not, despite his assurances, make the slightest effort to find a publisher for his father’s stories. When his father died, Naipaul did not return to Trinidad for the funeral. In the stories of displaced Muslims like Rashid and Syed Alwi, one a Chinese convert to Islam and the other a putative descendant of the Prophet, Naipaul seems to be searching for a way of making peace with his past as he draws on their experiences to reflect indirectly on his own intimate betrayals. Hearing of the personal regrets and sorrows expressed by people with mixed and fractured backgrounds like his gives him comfort.

Naipaul finds secret sharers who have learned to make peace with the worlds that they have lost. These are interlocking and richly contradictory narratives that feel open-ended. The older, more accomplished Naipaul is willing to let the loose ends remain visible. It testifies to a journey that ultimately raises more questions than it can provide answers to.