Word: naipaul
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Given his background, Naipaul was bound to wind up at loggerheads with people who renounce logic, humanism, skeptical inquiry and the notion of progress...
...found plenty of them, thanks in part to his physiognomy. Naipaul's Indian heritage made him appear sympathetic to some who might otherwise have mistrusted him. Ayatullahs in Qum found his looks puzzling but nonthreatening; in Pakistan he was taken for a Pakistani; a teacher in Indonesia remarked admiringly: "You look like our Prophet." Such appearances were deceiving. Naipaul is a man of the West, through and through. He may have grown up as an alien in Trinidad, then a British colony, but his escape from that subjugation came not through mysticism or political revolution but through secular education...
Since that is what Islamic fundamentalists do, Among the Believers reads like a long-drawn-out standoff. Naipaul's report is indeed filled with fascinating details. He carefully questions his subjects about their pasts and often evokes poignant sketches of uprooted lives leading to inchoate yearnings. His prose evokes obscure places that few will ever see: a mountain pass in the shadow of the Himalayas, where Afghan nomads drive and tend then-flocks; a small village in central Java, "an enchanted, complete world...
...occasions, Naipaul even approaches the religious satisfaction he senses in his subjects. At the end of one long day, sitting in the courtyard of a mosque in Pakistan, he feels "that Islam had achieved community and a kind of beauty, had given people a feeling of completeness-if only the world outside could be shut out, and men could be made to forget what they knew...
That "if is the block on which all the book's dialogues stumble. Naipaul thinks that the rest of civilization cannot be ignored; his partners disagree. He argues that the Koran alone is an inadequate blueprint for a functioning state...