The Islamic identity crisis

V.S. Naipaul writes of Pakistan in Among the Believers, his account of a seven-month journey through Islamic countries in 1979-80: “The dream of the Muslim homeland had had strange consequences. And strangest of all was this: the state which had appeared to some as God itself, a complete earthly reward for the faithful, lived not so much by its agricultural exports or by the proceeds of its minor, secondary industries, as by the export of its people.”

The passage raises a core theme that Naipaul returns to again and again in his book: of a confusion among Muslims in the modern world. On one hand they are drawn towards the West, to its possibilities and opportunities, its freedoms and inventions. On the other they pull themselves away through trenchant rejection and hostility of its laws and customs, by re-asserting their faith and its dogmas.

Pakistan has a claim to be the original Islamic state of the modern era. And, as Naipaul points out in his book, it was a failing state, subsisting only on remittances sent from abroad:

The state withered. But faith didn’t. Failure only led back to the faith. … If the state failed, it wasn’t because the dream was flawed, or the faith flawed; it could only be because men had failed the faith.

Pakistan’s people and leaders could only respond to failure with more assertion, more Islam. They didn’t organise durable political and economic institutions. And so, while professing their faith, “its gifted people, “close to hysteria”, Naipaul says, were desperate to get away. 

Naipaul starts his journey for the book in Iran, six months after the completion of the Revolution and four months after the Islamic Republic was declared. The ayatollahs were in their element, travelling the country to oversee executions and clamping down on their erstwhile revolutionary allies on the left, closing newspapers and attacking protestors. The country showed that same dynamic that he found in Pakistan: its people fervently embracing the Revolution and opposing the West while keen to get out as soon as they could.

We are generally confused about this dynamic in the West. Why would you move from a country whose culture and laws you exalt to places that don’t have these things, for which you enjoy professing contempt? The suspicion remains — nurtured by the assertions of ideologues like Yusuf Al-Qaradawi and Ayatollah Khomeini — that the purpose is conquest for Islam, emigration as a duty to spread the faith. And there is some truth to that story, what Naipaul calls the “imperialism” of Islam. But it’s not the full story. 

As his book points out, the failure of Islamic polities to provide (or, you might say, allow) opportunities for their people is another aspect. And a large part of that failure stems from the rigidity of dogma and intolerance for individual thought and reflection, leading to stasis and a chilling of intellectual life. Naipaul shows again and again how Muslims in Iran and Pakistan reacted to failure by asserting their faith even more strongly than before, casting all blame outside it. And the lack of distinction between religion and politics in Islam meant that politics became prone to purity spirals:

The faith was full of rules. In politics there were none. There were no political rules because the faith was meant to create only believers; the faith could not acknowledge secular associations or divisions. For everyone in open political life Islam was cause, tool, and absolution. It could lead to … worldly violence.

Naipaul speaks of “the thuggish public life of the Muslim polity, where in practice the only morality (and also the eternal balm) was the possession of the faith.” 

It is impossible not to spot the same dynamics now in Britain and other Western countries as large Muslim populations take their religion into the political arena, bringing shouting, intimidation and violence of word and deed to the fore. And in doing so, their representatives tend to neglect the necessary, plodding work of government administration: providing public services, keeping the streets clean, enforcing the law of the land. Instead we constantly see the reversion back to Islamic law and sectarian causes like Palestine, Islamophobia and Islamic schooling.

Intimations of other troubles can also be found in Naipaul’s text. In one passage he tells us of an encounter with a man in the lobby of a hotel in Karachi who, it transpired, was there to get close to the foreign, uncovered women who were staying in the hotel. Naipaul’s guide and translator Ahmed told him that other men booked rooms overlooking the swimming pool to ogle the women in their bikinis. But their sexual fascination was blended with hostility: “When people here talk about the emotional rejection of the West,” he said with regret, “they usually mean one thing. Women.” 

Jason Cowley has written of Naipaul: “Not since Conrad has a novelist so completely absorbed himself in the shifting complexities of his age, or written more sharply about the dark places of the world.” In Among the Believers, one of his non-fiction works, it is stunning to see how the themes which pervade Western Muslim discourse in the 2020s are largely unchanged from those that were alive in Iran and Pakistan in the 1970s and 80s. Namely: the primacy of Islam; the unique victimhood of Muslims; the corruption of the West; the need to cordon off Muslims, especially women, from this corruption; anti-Zionism merging into anti-Semitism. 

The language and positioning has barely changed. And, as Naipaul shows, there is a great confusion attached: disgust and separatism co-existing with a movement towards the West, into it, exploiting its opportunities. The solution to the predicament of Muslims, it seems, now just as it was in 1979-80, lies in moving away from where belief is dominant, away from actual attempts to rule according to God’s will. 

Fundamentalist Islam, it almost goes without saying, is not at home in the present moment. It must always be striving to get somewhere else, to conquer somewhere else just as Mohammed’s forces did in the remarkable early expansion of Islam. It must offer heroism, booty, glory in victory. It must strike out and conquer. Naipaul’s book makes us wonder if that is because it has little to offer at home. 

All the striving and demands for special status often end up recreating, in miniature for the moment in Britain and other places, the failed polities that emigrants escaped from. This religious politics has little to offer Muslims except assertion of the faith, its disciplines, demands and solidarity (not to be sniffed at), while lashing out against non-believers. Someday, we may hope, a concerted body among Muslims might decide that this is no way to live. But it looks doubtful whether such a thing could arise any time soon given the risks attached to non-conformity. 

His voice is one that Muslims in particular should be reading and reckoning with

“Reading Naipaul can be desolating,” Cowley writes, as “he lifts the scab off the surface of decolonised societies and reveals festering wounds.” That is indeed so. But he is precious for giving us a true sighting, an honest account of the known-but-unknown, the hostile-yet-attracted. Naipaul seems to have had prejudices against Islam, associated with his Hindu family background in Trinidad. But few can match his critique, which is based in reality, sympathetic to people in their situations and fluently written. 

He shows us the role that Islam is playing as a rallying point for those who are confused, displaced and threatened by the forces of modernity as represented by Western countries. And he shows us the dangers of Islamic doctrines taking hold in the West, potentially destroying the freedoms which Muslims move towards in deed if not in word. His voice is one that Muslims in particular should be reading and reckoning with.