Burke summed up the British failure to understand the American Revolution with words that still rang true for the diplomat: “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” To which one might add this insight from the contemporary poet Geoffrey Hill: “Terror is opportune as is relief from terror.” In my clearest moments I understood that it was but a step from terror to courage, but how difficult it is to take that step when terror grips the soul. Literature and faith, art and ceremony—they only go so far.
“Another round?” said the diplomat.
“Definitely,” I said.
“Religious or cultural purity is a fundamentalist fantasy,” V. S. Naipaul argues in Beyond Belief : Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, his follow-up account of travels in Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia first detailed in Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism alarmed the writer, and if I admired the precision of his descriptions of the people he met and the places he visited, his storytelling, and his elegant synthesis of information, I was also struck by his assertion that “the zeal of converts outside the Arab world is more fervent.” It was the sort of sweeping generalization that inspires suspicion, even as I admired his attempt to explain the ferment in the region: “Islam is in its origins an Arab religion,” he writes. “Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert.” That is the problem, according to Naipaul. He describes himself as “a manager of narrative,” and the most problematic narrative for him is conversion, no doubt because his own biography, well known to his readers, is such a story: how a precocious schoolboy from Trinidad goes to Oxford on a scholarship and, by dint of hard work, transforms himself into a major English prose stylist, earning for his labors riches, a knighthood, the Nobel Prize in Literature. But religious transformation is another story—an act of erasure for which he has little sympathy:
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.
Of course the same holds for Christianity, which from its origin made conversion central to its theology, as Paul learned on the road to Damascus: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold all things have become new.” Conversion stories, like stories of healings and miracles, provide the foundations of Christian belief. Moreover, Christianity’s holy places are located mainly in Arab and Jewish lands, only a handful of people read the languages in which the foundational texts were written, and in many societies that converted to Christianity the disturbances occasioned by the change of belief remain unresolved. Witness the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom, or the bloody aftermath of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. What tribe cannot be brought to a boil? The Hundred Years’ War, which some thought might be a model for the “long war” sparked by 9/11, proved that the converted peoples of Europe could be just as savage as anyone in the defense of faith. Naipaul’s thesis, then, was as suspect as any essentialist argument which blurs individual differences. But what is more individual than matters of religion? The individual is the locus of literature, as the Nobel laureate brilliantly showed in his novels.
The problem for a writer with a thesis is that anecdotes, facts, and insights may be arranged to support a story line at odds with a nuanced rendering of the material: one mark of an enduring literary work. The history of Islam, like that of Christianity, another conquering state religion, is too complicated to support a simplistic narrative, at least not in literature, which functions by complexity, gradations of tone and hue. Islam spread to Southeast Asia via trade, not conquest, and though it has the same universal aspirations as Christianity it also has a tradition of tolerance for other faiths, other ways of negotiating one’s time here below—a necessity for the preservation of Malaysia’s cultural mosaic. Near my hotel in KL, for example, was an Anglican church, where I attended mass one Sunday morning. The congregation was Chinese, the language of the service English, the guitar-playing minister a familiar spirit from my childhood. The history of religion in Malaysia is a history of shared space—a fact that Naipaul glosses over in his bid to speak in grander terms about the failings of the converted and of the faith itself.
He is on firmer ground in his portraits of individuals. “For Anwar Ibrahim,” he writes of the politician in Among the Believers, “Islam was the energizer and purifier that was needed in Malaysia; true Islam awakened people, especially Malays, and at the same time it saved them from the corruption of the racialist politics of Malaysia, the shabbiness of the money culture and easy Western imitation.” Anwar was then at the start of his career, directing a Muslim youth movement which had become a potent political force. He was an attractive man, Naipaul decided; “and it added to his attractiveness that in spite of his great local authority he gave the impression of a man still learning, still thinking things out.” The sketch of Anwar ends with Naipaul voicing regret that he did not have more time to talk with him. He wanted to travel with him, to see the country through his eyes, but there was no time.
I was also keen to speak with Anwar, who was still in prison during my first stay in Malaysia, and so it was Naipaul’s image of a politician in his ascendency that I held in mind until I met him on a second visit to KL, in the summer of 2005. His fall from power had been dramatic, the overturning of his sodomy conviction a triumph, his release from prison a promise—of what, no one could say. He and his wife were packing up their house in an upscale neighborhood, preparing to move to a new residence, and the furnishings gave the impression of a work in progress. In the front hallway, on a table by a mirror, was a vase of peacock’s feathers; the kilim in the next room was furled among cardboard boxes of books. Anwar served tea and chocolate cupcakes at the dining room table. Through a glass door I could see a guard on the patio performing his evening prayers, making prostrations in the shade.
“I went through the Riverside edition of Shakespeare four and a half times in prison,” said Anwar, his eyes full of mirth. “If they had kept me for another six months I would have finished it five times!”
He cut a regal figure in his brown jubah, betraying no signs of the abuse that he had suffered in prison or of the back surgery that he had undergone in Germany upon his release ten months before. His 1998 arrest, on charges of corruption and sodomy, was widely seen as politics run amok, his true crime having been to challenge the authority of Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, the country’s guiding force for over two decades. Mahathir had been Anwar’s patron, helping him rise through UNMO’s ranks, grooming him to be his successor, until the Asian financial crisis forced their differences in governing philosophies out into the open. How to solve what looked like the beginning of a global financial meltdown? Anwar favored the free market recommendations put forth by the International Monetary Fund, Mahathir imposed currency and capitol controls, and when Anwar promised to investigate corruption in the ruling party, Mahathir responded in kind. A book was published in KL, titled 50 Reasons Why Anwar Cannot Become Prime Minister, which accused him of engaging in sexual misconduct with his former speechwriter and his adopted brother—allegations that led to their arrest, imprisonment, and forty lashes of the rattan cane. Anwar was arrested on the strength of their confessions, later recanted, and tens of thousands of his supporters took to the streets in protest; his conviction was an occasion of national disillusionment and international outrage.
During his first six months in prison, when the guards abused him daily and he was not allowed to watch television or listen to the radio, Anwar established a routine to preserve his sanity, rising at five in the morning to perform his prayers, after which he would take breakfast, exercise, and read until dark. (Soon after his release from prison, at a conference of Muslim scholars in Istanbul, he rattled off the titles of several books, and then, fearing that he might sound pretentious, noted his special credentials: six years in solitary confinement. He advised the scholars to consider a stint in prison,