Behind the Veil

In today’s world, the yearning for simple solutions to complex political and economic problems is palpable. Nationalism and other forms of identity politics are everywhere; communism in various forms has not completely lost its appeal despite the collapse of the Soviet Union; and “free market fundamentalism” is a new gospel. Many people are especially troubled by Islam, often regarded as an inherently intolerant religion.

Milton Viorst is a long-time American correspondent for a variety of publications, most recently the New Yorker. His informative book provides vivid accounts of the political and religious factors that have fostered Islamic fundamentalism in several Arab countries, Iran and among the Muslims of France. He examines the intricacies of Islamic politics while avoiding the trap of believing that such politics arise from a single homogenous source. He is a reporter who prefers facts to prejudice. This disposition served him well as he made his way through several Arab countries, Iran and France.

In Egypt and Algeria, the rise of Islamic extremism has caused violence and many deaths, but Viorst notes that in both countries, popular opinion has turned against Islamist politics. In Saudi Arabia, Viorst found that the government’s Islamic conservatism has given rise to both fundamentalist and liberal opposition but that the country still has enough economic and political stability to avoid major crises. Even Sudan is less purely Islamist than outsiders might suppose, with a cultural division between the Muslim Arabic-speaking northerners and the religiously diverse southerners. This division--which was much exacerbated by British colonialism, which did much to encourage it--accounts for much of Sudan’s seemingly endless civil war.

The difficulties and divisions of the French Muslim community and its relations with France’s secular government are similarly complex and described by Viorst with admirable empathy for all the actors in a drama that continues to unfold.

Viorst found Iran and Jordan more politically tolerant and varied than he had at first supposed. Iran, having lived through its Islamic revolution and subsequent disillusionment, surprised him with the variety and vigor of oppositional and critical views. And in Jordan, with its considerable electoral democracy and freedom of speech, he found a counter-trend to the rise of illiberal Islamist politics elsewhere.

Viorst combines a good knowledge of the politics of the countries he visited with a vivid eye and knack for obtaining informative interviews, both with ordinary people and with such leaders as Hasan Turabi in Sudan and King Hussein of Jordan.

Like Viorst, V.S. Naipaul has long been a trenchant observer of the upheavals of fundamentalism and what could be called modernism and its discontents. Well known for his fiction, which includes such remarkable novels as “A Bend in the River,” and for such works of nonfiction as “Among the Believers,” Naipaul is regarded by many as a keen and insightful critic of colonialism and its consequences for the mentality and character of the colonized. Thus one approaches his new book, “Beyond Belief,” hoping for enlightenment about the background of events and ideas now roiling Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia--all countries to which Naipaul traveled and which have been much in the headlines in recent months.

Unlike Viorst, however, Naipaul sacrifices his superb skills as a reporter on the altar of his prejudices. For example, though he well describes, say, the technobabble of the pro-Habib Muslim intellectuals in Indonesia, or the disillusionment, nihilism and despair of some Iranians or the murderous ethnic and religious battles in Pakistan, he is silent when it comes to trying to understand the factors causing these problems. Nor does he seem much interested in the many people in all of these countries who are working to end or resolve them. Thus his portrait of these diverse countries and peoples is fatally skewed.

Naipaul, perhaps anticipating criticism, declares in his prologue that his book is free of opinion. Yet he writes such uninformed statements as: “Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam . . . makes imperial demands. A convert . . . rejects his own [history]; he becomes . . . a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. . . . [I]n the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism.” Such sentiments display both prejudice and ignorance. He seems not to know that, in today’s world, the term “Arab” merely describes someone whose native language is Arabic. Most Arabs are not descended from the earliest Arab Muslims from Arabia, as he seems to think, but rather from converts among other peoples in the Middle East. Even the early Arabs of the peninsula were converts. Many customs and laws of pre-Islamic peoples from the Middle East and further afield entered into that combination of law, theology, practice and philosophy called Islam. Most people in Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere retain much knowledge of, and attachment to, their own local traditions, as Naipaul’s stories themselves indicate. Yet, inexplicably, he seems deaf to the implications of the data he has so painstakingly gathered.

“Beyond Belief” has such disdain for historical accuracy that it undermines one’s confidence in Naipaul’s judgments. To take one example of many, Naipaul views Indonesia’s relatively recent Islamic conversion as a consequence of Arab imperialism. Nowhere does he state why pre-Islamic conversions of Indonesians to Buddhism and Hinduism, both from India, were not imperialistic, though Islamic conversions were. It is a bizarre misreading of history: Few Arabs were involved in the Islamicization of Indonesia; conversions were voluntary, and the entire transformation occurred not by conquest but via Muslim traders. Even in Pakistan, Naipaul gets it wrong. There, where conquest was involved, conversion was only partial, mostly voluntary, and not done by Arabs. The subsequent crises attributed by Naipaul to conversion result much more from far more recent events and conditions, including the political and economic failures of secular nationalist governments.

Naipaul seems so wedded to a doggedly grim view that he failed to notice anything that might disturb or undermine his thesis. For example, even in 1995, the year he traveled to the countries treated in this book, important reformist trends had emerged. Though he discusses a small organization of technologically optimistic Muslim intellectuals in Indonesia, for instance, he says nothing about the most important Muslim organization in the country, the modernist Muhammadiya, or its leader, Amien Rais, whose leading role in the political and intellectual opposition recently brought him to international notice. This organization, which claims 30 million members throughout Indonesia, has combined Islam with many modern and liberal ideas and is far more important than the groups Naipaul describes.

In Iran, though we learn of the disillusionment of many who once favored the revolution, we hear nothing of oppositional trends, which dramatically became known to a wider public in 1997 (after Naipaul’s visit but before the publication of this book) with the overwhelming election of President Mohammad Khatami. Khatami’s main supporters were young people and women, yet Naipaul ignores them almost entirely. Young people typically favor greater freedoms, as is the case in Iran, but Naipaul interviewed only one person under 25--a Nazi, who is no more typical in Iran than such a person would be in the United States. Similarly, women and women’s groups have forced changes in the Islamic republic’s restrictive laws and practices, but such women are not discussed. Nor are liberal intellectuals such as Abdul Karim Soroush, who is well described in Viorst’s book. Many such reformers, in Iran as elsewhere, consider themselves good Muslims, and many were present when Naipaul was in Iran.

In Pakistan, Naipaul gives us vivid pictures of Baluchistan guerrillas, Pathan feudal society and ethnic conflict in Karachi, but he does not show how these problems can be attributed to Islam or the Arabs. Similar communal conflicts are widely found in non-Muslim countries. Naipaul also makes an uninformed reference to Fazlur Rahman, describing him as a “Pakistani fundamentalist fanatic” who enjoyed, “bizarrely, academic freedom at the University of Chicago, and sleeping safe and sound every night, protected by laws, and far away from the mischief he was wishing on his countrymen.” Rahman was, in fact, an eminent Islamic modernist, forced to leave a prestigious position in Pakistan by an Islamic extremist minority, who garnered a distinguished record of scholarship and teaching in the United States. Only a person who sees virtually all Muslim believers as “fundamentalist fanatics” could have written the above description. As elsewhere, Pakistani reformers get no mention, though the country does have active women’s rights and human rights groups and a strong oppositional press.

Both Viorst and Naipaul believe that Islamic politics will continue to grow in strength. But the modern history of the Muslim world to about 1970 reveals periods when nationalism, liberalism (both Islamic and secular) and Marxism were much stronger trends, and Islamic trends much weaker. Today, the Islamic trend is in the ascendance. Coming decades may well see a weakening, perhaps even a decline and reversal in places. Neither author adequately addresses the nonreligious sources of current politics in the Muslim world, including the failures of secular nationalists, Israel’s complicating role in the region and the history of British, French and American support of unpopular regimes, which have made the West and its ways suspect in the eyes of generations of Muslims. Of the two books, however, the one to read is Viorst’s: It is a welcome, readable and informed contribution to a subject too much obscured by ignorance and prejudice--even among those, like Naipaul, who should know better.