Naipaul's most recent book, titled Beyond Belief, is dedicated to his Muslim wife, the well-known Pakistani journalist Nadira Alvi. Subtitled "Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples," Beyond Belief follows up on his acclaimed 1981 publication, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey. Both books provide a deeper insight into the phenomenon called Islamic Fundamentalism through extensive interviews in Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia. Many of the interviewees are repeats from the earlier volume, but not without purpose. They provide a continuity of thought and analysis.

Naipaul mentions in his prologue to the book that he is a "manager of narratives," and, therefore, he has written "a book about people... not a book of opinion." Indeed, in this engrossing book, memorable people there are aplenty and Naipaul successfully deploys his formidable narrative skills in delineating the principal interviewees and their family backgrounds. However, his claim that it's "not a book of opinion" is somewhat doubtful. Of course, he has opinions and is not shy of expressing them in his writings on in interviews.

Naipaul's thesis in Beyond Belief is: "There probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs....Islam seeks as an article of the faith to erase the past; the believers in the end honour Arabia alone, they have nothing to return to." In the Indian context, Naipaul views Islam as far more disruptive than the British rule.

The section on Pakistan subtitled "Dropping Off the Map" begins with a vignette in Iran: A busload of Parsi pilgrims from India, descendants of Iranians who had fled Iran to escape forcible Islamic conversion a millennia ago, travel to the ruins of Cyrus's palace, a seat of world power a millennia before Islam. They stand before a pillar with a cuneiform inscription at the top -- "I am Cyrus, son of Cambyses, and this is my palace." The Parsi pilgrims read the words and wail for some time before returning to their bus.

Unlike Iran, in India there never was a complete Islamic conquest. Although the Muslims ruled much of North India from 1200 A.D. to 1700 A.D, in the eighteenth century, the Marathas and the Sikhs destroyed Muslim power, and created their own empires -- before the advent of the British. The British rule in Bengal lasted almost two centuries and in the Punjab a little less than a century. The British introduced the "New Learning of Europe," to which the Hindus were much more receptive than the Muslims, resulting in the "intellectual distance” between the two communities. This distance has grown with independence... Muslim insecurity led to the call for the creation of separate homeland for Muslims of the subcontinent, called Pakistan. This dream of a Muslim homeland was woven with an idea of old glory, of the invaders sweeping down the northwest and looting the temples of Hindustan and imposing faith on the infidel. The fantasy still lives: and for the Muslim converts of the subcontinent it is the start of their neurosis, because in this fantasy the convert forgets who, or what he is…… and becomes the violator."

Similar analyses have recently been published by several writers, most notably Anwar Shaikh, Ibn Warraq, S.R. Goel, and Koenraad Elst. However, Naipaul makes no reference to these or other scholars. Instead, his approach is to encourage his interviewees to express themselves at length. For example, Naipaul quotes Salmãn, a Pakistani journalist:

"We have, nearly all sub-continental Muslims, invented Arab ancestors for ourselves. Most of us are Sayeds, descendants of Mohammed Himself, through his daughter Fatima and cousin and son-in-law Ali. There are others--like my family--who have invented a man called Salim al-Rai. And yet others who have invented a man called Qutub Shah. Everybody has got an ancestor who came from Arabia or Central Asia. I am convinced my ancestors would have been medium to low-caste Hindus, and despite their conversion they would not have been in the mainstream of Muslims.

If you read Ibn Battuta and earlier travellers, you can sense the condescending attitude of the Arab travellers to the converts. They would give the Arab name of someone, and then say, 'But he's an Indian.' This invention of Arab ancestry soon became complete. It had been adopted by all families. If you hear people talking you would believe that this great and wonderful land was nothing but wild jungle; that no human beings lived here. All of this was magnified at the time of Partition, this sense of not belonging to the land, but belonging to the religion. Only one people in Pakistan have reverence for their land, and that's the Sindhis."

Naipaul's choice to exclude references to publications that focus on similar topics weakens his book. He could have cited, for example, the widely discussed books of Anwar Shaikh, which brought a fatwa on the author's head. Anwar Shaikh, a U.K.-based thinker of Pakistani origin, wrote in Islam: The Arab National Movement (U.K., The Principality Publishers, 1995. ISBN: 0- 9513349-4-8):

 "Islam has caused more damage to the national dignity and honour of non-Arab Moslems than any other calamity that may have affected them, yet they believe that this faith is the ambassador of equality and human love. This is a fiction, which has been presented as a fact with an unparalleled skill. In fact, the Prophet Muhammad divided humanity into two sections, the Arabs and the non-Arabs. According to this categorisation, the Arabs are the rulers and the non-Arabs are to be ruled through the yoke of Arab cultural imperialism: Islam is the means to realise this dream because its fundamentals raise superiority of Arabia sky-high, inflicting a corresponding inferiority on the national dignity of its non-Arab followers. From the Arabian point of view, this scheme looks marvellous, magnificent and mystifying . . . yet under its psychological impact the non-Arab Muslims rejoice in self-debasement, hoping to be rewarded by the Prophet with the luxuries of paradise. The Islamic love of mankind is a myth of even greater proportions. Hatred of non-Moslems is the pivot of Islamic existence. It not only declares all dissidents as the denizens of hell but also seeks to ignite a permanent fire of tension between Moslems and non-Moslems; it is far more lethal than Karl Marx's idea of social conflict which he hatched to keep his theory alive."
(See http://www.hindutva.org/anwar.html)

Or take Salman's statement to Naipaul (quoted above) about inventing Arab ancestory--"most of us are 'Sayeds,' [also written as Said, pron. Sa-eed] descendants of Mohammed through his daughter Fatima and cousin and son-in-law Ali." Naipaul could have cited the well-known disavowal of the great Punjabi Sufi poet Bullhe Shah (1680 - 1758):

“Jehrã sãnû Sayed ãkhay dozakh milan sajãiyãn/

Jehra sãnû Arãi ãkhay bahishte pînghãn pãiyãn."

[Those who call me "Sayed" will be punished in hell/Those who call me "Arai" will enjoy heaven. ("Arai" refers to the low-caste of Bulleh Shãh's Sufi mentor, Shãh Inãyat Qãdiri. Bulleh Shãh preferred this low caste-affiliation to the "Sayed" pretensions of his family and of many other converts.)]. A number of books on Bulleh Shãh's writings are available in Pakistani and Indian bookshops and public libraries.

On the other hand, it's evident that Naipaul's focus on people does make his book more engaging. Here's another segment from Salmãn's narrative:

Salmãn had a high regard for his brother's intellect. The worry he had felt about losing his faith dropped away. He didn't feel he was letting down the people who had died in the riots in Jalandhar in 1947.

All three of the children of the family had lost religion. But, as his business had gone down, Salmãn's father had grown more devout and more intolerant. One of the festivals the family had celebrated when Salmãn was a child was the Basant, or the Spring Festival. Now Salmãn's father banned it as un-Islamic, something from the Hindu pagan past. There were great quarrels with his daughter when she came from Karachi, where she lived. She was not as quiet as Salmãn and his brother. She spoke her mind, and the arguments could become quite heated."

Among the people whose stories are told in similar novelistic detail are Rãnã, a lawyer whose family's background is feudal; Shahbãz, a U.K.-raised Marxist, who spent ten years as a guerrilla in Baluchistãn; Mushtãq, a teacher of English literature in Karachi, a city torn by factions in-fighting resulting in murderous gun-battles almost daily.

Commenting on the origin of the idea of Pakistan by the poet Mohammed Iqbãl in a speech to the Muslim League in 1930, Naipaul  reveals—"Iqbãl came from a recently converted Hindu family; and perhaps only someone who felt himself a new convert could have spoken as he did...Iqbãl said in an involved way that Muslims can live only with other Muslims."

It may sound surprising that same poet Iqbãl also composed many poems in praise of Hindu venerable ones  and also modern India’s second National anthem:

Sãre jahãn se achchhãHindostãn hamãrã!

Iqbãl's ancestry is detailed in Ram Nath Kak's Autumn Leaves (New Delhi: Vitasta, 1995, ISBN: 81-86588-01-9): "His grandfather, Sahaj Ram Sapru, a revenue collector, [allegedly] embezzled funds and when discovered, the Afghan governor, Azim Khãn, gave him the choice of death or conversion to Islam. Sahaj Ram chose life, and assuming new names, he and his family moved to Siãlkot in the Punjab. Later, Iqbãl never acknowledged his native Kashmiri, Hindu or Indian tradition that his grandfather had been forced to renounce. Perhaps this reveals that terror wins. The victims wish to be like their tormentors."

Naipaul concludes his opinion of Iqbãl: "Poets should not lead their people to hell.... in its short life, Iqbãl's religious state, still half serf, still profoundly uneducated, mangling history in its schoolbooks as well, undoing the polity it was meant to serve."

Naipaul's chapters on Iran and Indonesia are as detailed as the chapters on Pakistan. In spite of Naipaul's odd choice to exclude all citations from other publications, Beyond Belief emerges as a first-rate humanistic study of the contemporary world of Islamic converts.

                                                        ―Shashi-Bandhubh