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Orientalism
Beyond Belief.
Critiquing the Problematics
of V. S. Naipaul's Islamic Excursion
1
Seyed Mohammad Marandi
2
& Hossein Nazari3
Received: 27/06/2015
Accepted: 27/11/2015
Abstract
This study aims to offer a critical analysis of V. S. Naipaul's second Islamic
travelogue
Beyond Belief Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples
(1998),
which chronicles the author's excursions to the 4 non-Arab Muslim countries of
Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. This critique is presented, firstly, through
problematizing the author's theorization on the theme of Muslim conversion
which, according to Naipaul, has bred nothing but neurosis and nihilism in Muslim
societies
an
d then through analyzing representations of the post-
Revolutionary
Iran of the late
90s. We argue that Naipaul's representations fall within an
Orientalist frame of reference in which Iran and its people are portrayed through
various tropes of Othering in
a narrative fraught with disinformation, exaggerations,
and
reductive treatment of complex sociopolitical phenomena. Finally, Naipaul's
reasoning in formulating conversion coupled with his myopic approach undermine
the
authenticity of his representations, resulting in what Said (1998) has dubbed "an
intellectual catastrophe of the first order" (p. 42).
Keywords:
Orientalism; Naipaul; Iran; Islam; Conversion
1. Introduction
Iran has often been subject to diverse orientalist representations in
mainstream Western culture. These (mis)representations are largely motivated by
the
two interrelated factors of the country being Oriental and Muslim and are often
generated by Western writers
as well as native informers
whose association with
the
West and its civilization apparently enables them to produce authentic
representations of the Iranian other. This privileged position itself is predicated upon
'Please cite this paper as follows:
Marandi, S. M., & Nazari,
H.
(2017). Orientalism
beyond belief
Critiquing the
problematics of V. S. Naipaul's Islamic excursion.
Journal of Research in Applied
Linguistics,
8(1), 3
-
21.
'Corresponding author, University of Tehran; mmarandi@ut.ac.ir
'University of Canterbury; hossein.nazari@canterbury.ac.n
z
4
RALs, 8(1), Spring 2017
the myth that encapsulates the essence of almost all Orientalist thought and
discourse: the essentializing binarism of Western superiority vs. Oriental inferiority
(Said, 2003).
The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran has, undoubtedly, been one of the
most
significant and influential decolonizing movements of the 21st century and, as
such, has
had a major appearance in Western cultural productions from the outset. In the realm of
lite
rature, a whole array of literary productions, particularly in the genre
of travel
narratives and more recently memoirs, has been produced by a significant
number of
Western, native, and hyphenated writers on Iran. The preponderance of such
productions ope
rates within an Orientalist discourse, theorized by Said in his
seminal
Orientalism
(2003) as a regime of representations and "a manner of
regularized (or
Orientalized) writing, vision and study, dominated by imperatives,
perspectives and
ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient" (p. 203). Such
representations are
perpetuated and reinforced each time they (re)appear in a new
text or in the media
primarily because they conform to the dominant discursive
practices on Iran and
Islam in the West and also to the existing latent Orientalism
specific to Iran. As far as
the questions of authenticity and credibility are concerned, such discursive practices are
widely regarded as authentic and reliable accounts th
at
reflect the literal truth about
Iran
(Marandi & Pirnajmuddin, 2009). This truth is
revealed by Western
or
Westernized
writers whose privilege of affiliation with a
Western intellectual and
cultural paradigm has afforded them the insight to get to
know the reality about
Oriental people and to offer an objective analysis of their
characters and predicaments.
This critique examines the representations of Iran in one of the most
controversial "nonfictions" of the Trinidad-born British-educated author V.
S.
Naipaul. We will begin by problematizing the author's formulation of the theme of
conversion and will proceed to examine his depictions of certain facets of post-
Revolutionary Iran.
Beyond Belief Islamic Excursions Among the Converted
Peoples
(1998) relates the author's journey across the non-Arab Muslim countries of
Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. Naipaul's travelogue is, in effect, a sequel to
and a reiteration of his first travel to the same four countries in 1979. In his first
excursion,
Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey
(1981), Naipaul sets out to
witness how Islam actually functions within the Islamic societies he visits. In his
second journey, he revisits the same four non-Arab Muslim societies to examine the
theme of "conversion," the ultimate outcome of which he contends to be nothing but
"neurosis" and "nihilism" (p. 1).
Following the publication of his two Islamic travelogues, Naipaul has
emerged as a major critical voice and a cognoscente on the issues related to the
Muslim world, whose accounts "will 'enable' Western readers to gain an 'insight'
Orientalism
Beyond Belief.
Critiquing the Problematics . . .
5
into the life of Muslims" (O'Shea-Meddour, 2004, p. 59). Naipaul's authority and
enthusiastic reception in the West was soon followed by official recognition, leading
to a
knighthood in
1989
("Knights Bachelor,"
1989) and the Nobel Prize for
Literature in
2001
(one month after 9/11). The Nobel Prize press release described
him as a
"mo
dern
philosophe,
carrying on the tradition that started originally with
Lettres
persanes
and
Candide
("Nobel Prize," 2001). Be that as it may, this study
will
illustrate how, as O'Shea
-
Meddour
(2004)
has
observed,
Naipaul's
"Islamophobia has
been disturbingly misinterpreted as expertise"
(p.
57)
and
reductionist treatment of complex sociohistorical phenomena construed as
incorruptible scrutiny.
2. Constructing (Non)fictional Authority
The best preamble to introducing Naipaul's second Islamic travelogue is the
one
he has penned as the prologue to his narrative because it contextualizes the
composition of his itinerary and its overarching theme of conversion.
Almost the whole gamut of Naipaul's assertions on authorship and the
theme of conversion, which he presents in his prologue, is profoundly problematic.
The
first set of Naipaul's assertions addresses the questions of authorship and
authorial
intention. The travelogue opens with the pr
oclamation that "This is a book
about people.
It is not a book of opinion. It is a book of stories"
(p. 1). It goes
without saying that
Naipaul's narrative is largely based on his interviews with various people.
Nevertheless,
the
author's choice of interviewees, as O'Shea-
Meddour (2004) has
observed, is far from "representative. In fact, Naipaul's style of narration is
characterized by a highly selective approach towards his interlocutors as
well as the
foregrounding of those parts of the conversations that serve to
corroborate the
author's preconceptions and interpretations of the events he
describes. Instances
of such partial selectivity will be presented in the ensuing
discussions of the
Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. In a similar fashion,
Naipaul avers that,
compared to his first Islamic travelogue,
Beyond Belief
is:
Less of a travel book. The writer is less present, less of an
inquirer. He is in the background, trusting to his instinct, a
discoverer of people, a finder-out of stories. These stories . . .
make their own pattern and define each country and its
promptings. (pp. 1
-
2)
Notwithstanding Naipaul's (1998) positioning of himself as an observer
in
the
background, it is almost impossible to overlook "the extent to which Naipaul's
preconceptions determine both his choice of conversation partners and his
presentation of his conversations with them"
(p. 835). It is apt, for instance, to point
out
the fact that among the many people Naipaul interviews in Iran, not one seems to
6
RALs, 8(1), Spring 2017
be genuinely sympathetic to the Islamic Revolution and its leader or the Iran
-
Ir
aq
war.
Such impressions of apathy or opposition to the Revolution and the war are
contrary
to the evidence of such public expressions of support, as the participation of
millions of
people in demonstrations against the Shah, the enormous number of
volunte
ers
fighting against the Iraqi invasion of Iran, and the millions of people who
attended
Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral, not to mention the continued public support
displayed in
the anniversaries of the Islamic Revolution. This alleged lack of support
is, fu
rther,
contradicted by Naipaul's description of "the excitement of the immense
crowd at
Friday prayers at Tehran University (crowds so great that their footsteps
roared like
the sea, and dust could be seen to rise above them as they walked)"
(1998, p.
134).
Naipaul's
(1998) authoritative view of his narratives as the definitive
account of the countries he (re)visits is also manifest in the following excerpt:
It may be asked if different people and different stories in each
section of the book would have created or suggested another kind
of
country. I think not: The train has many coaches and different
classes, but it passes through the same landscape. People are
responding to the same political or religious and cultu
ral
pressures. The writer has only to listen very carefully and with a
clear heart to what people say to him, and ask the next question,
and
the next. (p. 2).
The fact remains, however, that in his choice of interviewees, Naipaul is
predisposed to converse with people from a certain ideological mindset that often
favors secularism and westernization. When, on very rare occasions, he interviews
people who are more sympathetic to Islam and the Revolution, he finds in them
unmistakable contradictions, confusions, delusions, diversions, pain, and regret.
Thus, rather than being positioned on a wide spectrum of various ideological and
political affiliations, an entire nation is reduced to the two Naipaulean antitheses of
the
unsympathetic
opposition vis-a-vis the deluded, the confused, and the
hypocritical. It seems fairly strange, for instance, that Naipaul sets out to find out as
much as he can about the war but never actually engages in a conversation with any
of
the martyrs' families. He prefers to feel pity for them, though, every time he
mentions the war but it seems he does not want his preconceptions challenged by
engaging in a serious dialogue with them. Furthermore, Naipaul's analogy, that is,
comparing his interviewees to train passengers is, at best, misguided and naïve. To
begin with, different people are not observing, or experiencing, a monolithic
landscape, as both religion and sociocultural sea changes such as revolution and
war
can leave totally different imprints on different societies and individuals.
Moreover, even if all people were hypothetically experiencing the same landscape, it
Orientalism
Beyond Belief.
Critiquing the Problematics . . .
7
goes without saying that they would still have very different reactions to and views
about the same phenomenon.
In a similar vein, Naipaul's assertion (1998) that
Beyond Belief
is not "a
book of opinion," but "a book of stories" (p. 1) is problematic. As 0' Shea-
Meddour
(2004) has observed, the statement is meant to guarantee that 'the truth' will be
presented to us in an undistorted manner" (p. 59). Naipaul's let-
the
-
facts
-
speak
-
for
-
themselves pretense, however, seems far from scrupulous because even a cursory
perusal of the text would reveal that it is fraught with all manners of theorization,
judgment, and commentary. One could only grant that compared to Naipaul's first
Islamic travelogue, its sequel contains relatively fewer opinions. As far as Iran is
concerned, Naipaul's assertions on almost every aspect of the Iranian and Islamic
culture, religion, history, and politics permeate the entire chapter. In this light, Greer
(1998) ha
s observed that Naipaul:
Asserts that it is not a book of opinion, which in the circumstances
of
his narrative is a bit disingenuous. Though he pursues his
narrative in terms of people and their experiences . . . a distaste for
the
legacy of Islam and its destructive consequence fairly oozes
from
every chapter of the story. (p. 283)
The assertions about Naipaul's (1998) authorial role are apparently meant
to
indicate the author's learned awareness of the manners in which a narrator's
obtrusive intermediation can undermine the nonfictional authority of a text.
Nevertheless, it has to be noted that even though travel writing is generally
perceived as belonging to the nonfiction genre, there is a consensus view among
literary critics that the nexus between travel narratives and fiction is often a complex
and
intertwined one, wherein the boundaries are often indistinct and blurred. Thus,
one
could argue that, at least as far as Naipaul's nonfictions are concerned, the
appellation nonfiction is misleading as it overlooks the fact that "travel writing is an
established literary genre full of narrative conventions and fictional devices"
(O'Shea
-
Meddour, 2004, p. 58).
Naipaul's (1998) final assertion about his role as the author is an attempt to
further elaborate on his formulation of authorial authority in the formation of his
narrative:
In these travel books or cultural explorations of mine the writer as
traveler steadily retreats; the people of the country come to the
fron
t; and I become again what I was at the beginning a manager
of
narrative . . . there are complexities enough in these stories.
They
are the point of the book; the reader should not look for
"conclusions." (p. 2)
8
RALs, 8(1), Spring 2017
A close perusal of the text would reveal that Naipaul's (1998) alleged self-
effacing modus operandi in his interviews and the leeway afforded to the characters
to
come to the fore of discussions is hardly ingenuous. One could argue that through
Naipaul's preferential treatment of the interviewees, as well as the leading questions
asked, interview subjects are persistently deprived of their full voices and stories
,
which, in turn, deprives the readers of the full picture of the societies and the
religion Naipaul purports to present objectively. The result, indeed, is the
construction of an image compatible with that with the Western reader has come to
exp
ect of Iran and its dominant religion.
3. Manufacturing Conversion
Naipaul's (1998) next set of assertions focuses on the question of Muslim
conversion. In his theorization of conversion, the principal assumption is that
conversion to Islam has precipitated the degeneration of the four non
-
Arab nations
into
"nihilistic" (p. 1) Muslim societies suffering from a collective loss of identity,
history,
culture, language, and even mental stability. Naipaul's purportedly a
po
steriori
assertion is predicated upon his contention that "Islam is in its origins an
Arab religion"
(p.
1). The misnomer "Arab," however, is inaccurate because it
"gives the impression
that Islam was meant only for the Arabs. A priori, it may also
imply that those
non
-
Arabs who converted to this faith were somehow illegitimate
or inferior in doing
so" (Anjum, 2002, p. 3). It is hard to overlook the naiveté of
identifying any religion
with a particular race or ethnicity. This racialization of
Islam is parti
cularly flawed
when examined against the fact that much of the
religion's appeal to early Muslims
was its rejection of all modes of racial and class
-
based supremacism (prevalent among
pre
-Islamic Arabs) and its promulgation of a
code of conduct that valued human
virtues as opposed to ethnic identification
(Alharbi,
2011). Thus, Naipaul's
statement, quite ironically, serves to reinstate the
very Arab racialism that Islam strived
to combat at its inception.
The same logic is extended to conclude that "everyone not an Arab who is
a
Muslim is a convert" (p. 1); a contention that is historically unsound because Arab
Muslims themselves were converts from their mostly idolatrous, polytheistic, and
pagan faiths. Problematizing Naipaul's (1998) reasoning, Anjum (2002) has asked
if,
drawing on Naipaul's argument, it would be logical to "call the Europeans
converted Christians or the American Jews as converts?" In a similar fashion,
Ahmad (2000) has disputed Naipaul's definition of a convert, arguing that "If
Ira
nians are converted Muslims, Americans are converted Christians, the Japanese
and
large numbers of Chinese are converted Buddhists"
(p.
109). Naipaul's inference is
further undermined by the verity of all existing religions having, at their outset, bee
n
founded upon conversion from one creed to another, hence, making all initial followers
of any new religion converts by definition. In this light, as Ahmad
Orientalism
Beyond Belief.
Critiquing the Problematics . . .
9
(2000) has argued, one cannot but conclude not only that "everybody is converted"
but
also that "Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, especially all the prophetic
religions, developed through conversion and have produced an entirely distorted
humanity.
In that sense, his organizing thesis should not exclude anyone" (p.
109).
Furthermore, the same arguments can also be extended to include atheists and
nonbelievers who have converted to secular ideologies because the renunciation or
rejection of religious faith itself implies allegiance to a secular creed in its own right.
Therefore, Naipaul's line of reasoning in his conceptualization of conversion, as
Gilsenan (1998) has observed, rests upon "shallow stuff, which seems to imply that
only some autochthonous group which has never converted can have 'their own'
faith" (p. 3).
Naipaul's
(1998) extends his theorization of conversion, arguing that
"Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial
demands"
(p. 1). Characteristically, no concrete details or evidence are presented to
specify the alleged imperial demands of Islam. Nevertheless, even if one were to
concur with Naipaul's assertion, the fact remains that far from being an exclusively
Islamic agenda, the same holds true for all other religions and secular ideologies.
Along these lines, Gilsenan
(1998) has remarked that "quite apart from the
intellectual emptiness of Naipaul's writing, you wonder at the willful censoring it
takes to pass over in silence the history of different forms of imperial and eagerly
conversionist Christianity in Africa, the Americas, and Asia" (p. 9). Like much of
Naipaul's (1998) argumentation, the statement attests not only to his ignorance of
Islam, but also his lack of familiarity with, or deliberate circumvention of, other
religions.
Further developing his thematization of conversion, Naipaul
(1998)
proceeds to infer that "a convert's worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab
lands; his sacred language is Arabic"
(p.
1). Once again, conversion is
overemphasized as the principal determinant of a convert's worldview and identity.
Furthermore, attributing the alteration of one's worldview solely to conversion is
simplistic
as it overlooks the role that a complex nexus of socioeconomic factors
plays in the formation of one's character and ideological paradigm. Moreover, as far
as
Iran is concerned, the existence in the country of many sites sacred to all Shia
Muslims
such as those in the cities of Mashhad and Qom invalidates the
reductive view of Muslim holy places. On a broader plane, one could argue that
even a local mosque is considered holy in Islam. Indeed, the irony of Naipaul's
statement is that he has travelled to some of these sites in both of his Islamic
excursions. More importantly, it should be noted that most of the land that is called
Arab today did not have an Arab identity at the time of the birth of Islam
a fact that
further highlights the author's historical nescience. Also, based on Naipaul's
10
RALs, 8(1), Spring 2017
logic, one might ask if Christians and Jews could be equally criticized for having
their holy places in the occupied Palestinian territories? Furthermore, whereas it is
true
that the language of the Qur'an is Arabic, it remains unclear how this fact
per se
implies
a problem. Naipaul's line of reasoning, then, raises significant questions
about what
he deems Arab linguistic sovereignty in Muslim lands: Are we to
conclude,
by
implication, that if the Qur'an were revealed in a language other than Arabic, it would
not be problematic? Also, can the same logic be extended to fault
Judaism, for
instance, for regarding the Hebrew language as sacred? Or what is one
to make of the
fact that the Bible was once sacrosanct only in Latin (Sutherland,
2015)? Naipaul's
assertion is further undermined by the fact that none of the native
languages of the
four non-Arab countries he visits have been supplanted or
overtaken by Arabic.
As far as
the influence of Arabic on native languages is
concerned, the fact remains
that the native languages of the same countries are also
significantly influenced by the
languages of their Western colonizers.
The next array of assertions is even more problematic:
[A convert's] 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
disturbanc
e for societies is immense, and even after a thousand
year
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 the converted countries there is an element of
neur
osis
and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the
boil. (p. 1)
Similar assertions reappear throughout the text: "Converted peoples have to
strip themselves of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest
faith
(if such a thing can be arrived at), Islam,
submission.
It is the most
uncompromising kind of imperialism" (p. 72) .
The idea of a convert's inexorable repudiation of his own past, history,
religion, and culture suffers from the same logical lacuna as Naipaul's
(1998)
arguments regarding the Arabic language and Muslim sacred places. No evidence is
offered, for instance, to prove that Iranians have rejected their pre-Islamic past. Such
general
izations are, further, contradicted by Naipaul's reference elsewhere in the
text to what he sees as Iranians' pride in their Persian past. This pride is manifest,
among other things, in the fact that pre-Islamic Persian art and culture continue to
fl
ourish
in contemporary Iranian cultural, architectural, and literary landscapes, to
name but a few. Furthermore, descriptions of the peoples of the four countries he has
visited vividly illustrates that they have retained much of their pre
-
Islamic history
and
cu
lture which they do not deem as conflicting with their Islamic faith. There are
Orientalism
Beyond Belief.
Critiquing the Problematics . . .
11
many pre-Islamic ceremonies, occasions, and customs still alive in Iran, as well as
other countries, which are commonly and widely practiced. Nowruz, the Persian
New Year, to which Naipaul also refers in
Beyond Belief,
is one such pre-
Islamic
occasion that was approved of and even encouraged by the Prophet (Shahbazi,
2009). In fact, Naipaul is informed by his guide, Mehrdad, that the Nowruz
celebrations are so fundamental a part of Iranian culture that he speculates whether,
Arash, one of the war veterans Naipaul interviews, had overstayed his time off the
war
front only to celebrate the o
ccasion with his family. Furthermore, even if one
were to
hypothetically agree with Naipaul's arguments about the influence of Islam
in the
convert Muslim societies, one could not concur more with Greer (1998) that:
Islam is not the only force undermining older cultures in
Indonesia, Iran, and Pakistan. From Naipaul's account it is almost
inadvertently clear that the impact of Western culture was a major
factor in the breakup of these civilizations. The shock of East-
West confrontation in colonial times left fractures that
though
Naipaul barely acknowledges this fatally weakened older
cultures and disoriented the populations that they served. (p. 282)
As far as the alleged maladies of neurosis and nihilism in convert Muslim
societies are concerned, O'Shea-Meddour (2004) has demonstrated that Naipaul's
(1998) discourse of the mind derives from his "allegiance to nineteenth-
century
fiction", wherein "mental instability became a preoccupation"
(p.
67). Thus, in
Naipaul's Orientalist worldview, mental derangement, skepticism, identity crisis,
and violent predilections become defining denominators of all converted Muslims
Drawing on Naipaul's earlier logic, then, one cannot but conclude that the converted
members of all other faiths must also be afflicted with the same mental and
psychological disorders concomitant with their conversion. Similarly, one is tempted
to
ask if Muslim neurosis and nihilism is a corollary of conversion to Islam, what is
one to
make of the same malaise in the secular nonconvert societies or is one to
repudiate
their existence altogether?
4. Portraying Iran: An Orientalist Pastiche
In
Beyo
nd Belief,
Naipaul's (1998) quest takes him to Iran after his visit to
Indonesia. The subtitle of the section on Iran,
The Justice of Ali,
hints at the Shia
version of Islam practiced in Iran, and as one would have come to expect from
Naipaul's prologue
th
e manner in which it has allegedly distorted the identity and
culture of the converted Iranians. Be that as it may, in the descriptions of the status
quo
in Iran of the time, the author's failure to pursue the asserted theme of
conversion
is impossible to miss. Instead, what the text offers is a reiteration of the
same
representations of Iran, Islam, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which Naipaul had
previously presented in
Among the Believers,
only with the addition of discussions
12
RALs, 8(1), Spring 2017
around the Iraqi-imposed war. Thus, one could argue that both travelogues are
almost thematically identical, with the latter lacking in anything that would
substantially complement the former. The only difference, perhaps, is that in
Beyond
Belief
the author's attitude towards both the country and its main religion has grown
even
more cynical and belligerent. In lieu of elucidating how Islam has allegedly
severed
Iranians from their pre-Islamic Persian past and how Iranians have
metamorphosed into a nihilistic and neurotic people, Naipaul launches a virulent
diatribe on the manner in which the fundamentalism and fanaticism bred by the
Islamic Revolution and the imposed war have wreaked havoc on the Iranian
society
topics to which he has already devoted the entire chapter on Iran in his first
Islamic travelogue.
The chapter on Iran in
Beyond Belief
opens with a flashback to the author's
observations of the Indonesian capital. Naipaul
(1998) draws a close parallel
between what he sees as the elegance and opulence of Jakarta and that of
prerevolutionary Tehran, generated as a result of what he refers to as "the new
wealth" (p.
143). Recollecting the
nouveaux
arrives
of Indonesia, he speculates on
what
Iran might have been like in the pre-Revolution era, "so grand and
overwhelming that it seemed wrong to see the sham or to imagine the great city
collapsed or decayed" (p. 144). Such romanticization of prerevolutionary Iran as a
Westernized and progressive polity is characteristic of many of literary productions
on
post
-Revolutionary Iran, which engage in "distort[ion] of historical facts"
(Behdad & Williams, 2010, p. 291). Glamorization of the past is also one of the
denominators of Orientalist depictions of Muslim countries in which all that is
"glorious" belongs to a long bygone past (Keshavarz, 2007, p. 70; Said, 2003, p.
35),
which, in the case of Iran, is either the a
ge of the Persian Empire or the reign of
the last
Shah. What, however, makes Naipaul's claims sound absurd is the fact that
he had never
visited the country under the Shah.
Idealization of prerevolutionary Iran is often contrasted with the post-
Revolution era as a time of social decay, mayhem, and violence. This is articulated,
among many other instances, in Naipaul's juxtaposition of the "revolutionary
shabbiness" of Iranian urban landscapes with the "glittering time of the Shah" (p.
142). Naipaul's views of the Islamic Revolution are rooted in the Orientalist belief
that
Orientals, not least Muslims, are essentially incapable of a revolution founded
on
non
-
Western political doctrines. This belief is best expressed in Vatikiotis'
(1972
)
Revolution in the Middle East and Other Case Studies
(1972), wherein he
contends:
All revolutionary ideology is in direct conflict with man's rational,
biological and psychological make-up. Committed as it is to a
methodical metastasis, revolutionary ideology demands fanaticism
Orientalism
Beyond Belief.
Critiquing the Problematics . . .
13
from its adherents. Politics for the revolutionary is not only a
question of belief, or a substitute for religious belief. It must stop
being what it has always been, namely, an adaptive activity in time
for
survival. (p. 8)
Unlike its European and American counterparts, the Iranian Revolution is
depicted not as a result of complex sociopolitical dynamics, but as merely driven by
unbridled
mass sentiment and religious fervor and is rendered anachronistic.
Furthermore, the Revolution and the succeeding governments are not portrayed as
made up of individual people with different viewpoints and agendas dealing with
internal dissent and foreign intervention, sociopolitical changes, or internal
dynamics. Instead, they are represented as a monolithic and homogeneous entity,
rather than as the struggles of a traditional society undergoing a major sea change
and
a
sociopolitical paradigm shift.
As Keshavarz (2007) has aptly noted, in the (neo
-
)Orientalist accounts on
the
Middle East, it seems that Muslim societies like Iran "have been disembodied of
their
treasures, which have been replaced with unrelenting religious fanaticism" (p.
70). In
Beyond Belief,
building on his earlier depictions of the odd life of Tehran,
Naipaul
commences his descriptions of the capital by a flashback to the time of the
Sh
ah where
the city supposedly enjoyed an elegant and glamorous lifestyle that was
apparently
shattered in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. The life of Tehran
after the
revolution, Naipaul tells us, had been "miraculously suspended," the cranes
"arre
sted"
on unfinished towers, "bad meals in empty restaurants" where "sullen black-
tied
waiters whispered and grumbled together, like people who knew their
talents and
style were no longer needed." In short, we are told, there were
"premonitions of
decay" ev
erywhere (p. 144).
Paramount in any discussion of postrevolutionary societies is the fact that,
as
Keshavarz's
(2007) axiom has it, "in general, revolutions do not present their
perspectives politely and peacefully. They throw them at you. Where peaceful
means have not failed, a revolution does not take place. In Iran of the
1970s,
peaceful means had failed" (p.
10). Even though Naipaul (1998) refers to the fact
that
the Revolution was what "the people of Iran had passionately wanted and voted
for in a
ref
erendum" (p.
152), he does not represent it as a result of the collective
will of a
nation and characterized by complex sociohistorical dynamics, but rather as
a catastrophe
miraculously befalling the country.
Symptoms of what Naipaul (1998) perceives to be postrevolutionary havoc
and mayhem are pervasive in Naipaul's descriptions of interior spaces. Almost in
every corner of the hotel where he is staying, he observes both people and objects
that
he can associate with the Revolution or interpret politically
:
14
RALs, 8(1), Spring 2017
The hotel porters were all in open
-
necked shirts; this was one of
the
badges of the revolution. The collars had sagged into irregular
folds
below the jacket lapels, and looked at this dead time like a
kind of
grubby low ruff. Many of the porters were unshaved; this
was Islamic.
Some were shiny
-
faced and dirty. This was a form of
social defiance:
the two styles of revolution, the political and the
religious, running
together. And when later I came down again, to
look for a hotel safe
box, the porters were sitting unabashed and
sullen and unhelpful on
the upholstered chairs in the central part of
the lobby, like a little
conclave of the oppressed in whose name
hotels like the Hyatt had
been taken over. (p.
135)
Drawing inferences based on physical features, impressions, and personal
preferences is characteristic of Naipaul's (1998) style of narration. Throughout his
narratives, Naipaul can be seen forming judgments and making generalizations
about people and then associating them with their alleged ideological or political
affiliations. The man who brings up his lunch at the hotel, for instance, is "surely
from start to finish," and looks at him "with absolute hatred, and never said a word.
St
ill
some revolutionary rage, I thought" (p. 135). Such is also Naipaul's description
of Mr.
Parvez, an Indian who works for the English-language paper
Iran News,
as
someone
whose Shia passion had apparently drawn him to Iran from Bhopal and
India. Much
to his surprise, however, Naipaul discovers later that not only is he not
a Shia Muslim,
he is, in fact, quite averse to them, too.
On a different occasion, Naipaul (1998) informs that Mr. Parvez and a host
of
other people were under the impres
sion that after the revolution "things would
pick up
again, and the liberated country would soon once more be the boom country
it had been
at the time of the Shah" (p. 143). This, however, is contradicted at least
as far as
political freedom and the freedom of speech are concerned
by the same
Mr. Parvez:
And Mr. Parvez was used to censorship. In the Shah's time . . .
there used to be an intelligence man from Savak, the Shah's secret
police, in the office of the
Tehran Journal
The
Savak man
would
come at three in the morning with a English-speaking team
and they
would go through everything, even the advertisements. In
its reports
of anti-government demonstrations or marches the
Tehran
Journal
wasn't allowed to use the words 'student' or
`yout
h.'
Hooligans' was the word that had to be used. In
1975
this
day
-
to
-day censorship was stopped. But the government still
controlled; the top people in the newspaper were told what to do.
There was no formal censorship now, Mr. Parvez said; there was
Orientalism
Beyond Belief.
Critiquing the Problematics . . .
15
only self-censorship. Journalists now knew how far they could go.
In
the Shah's time, they didn't. Nowadays they could go
surprisingly far. (p. 151)
The passage not only contradicts Naipaul's
(1998) glamorization of the
Shah's reign, but also his assertion elsewhere that "the result of the revolution is
nothing Nothing has changed; the deficiencies remain" (Rowe
-
Evans & Naipaul, p.
29).
If anything, the passage attests to the fact that despite undeniable shortcomings,
the
post
-Revolutionary Iran is far more democratic and tolerant than the Shah's
reign
was.
Intertwined with discussions of the Revolution are descriptions of
Ayatollah Khomeini, the first leader of the Islamic Revolution, persistently
portrayed in a negative light. What is noteworthy about such references to Ayatollah
Khomeini is the absence of any reference to his public speeches, books, or any other
v
erifiable statements. We hear from Ali a property tycoon who confesses that he has
"learned to live a double life" (p.
168)
that the reason for the "out-
of
-
control
government," "anarchy," and "terror" was "Khomeini himself' (p.
173). What he
offers
as proof of his statement, however, are highly dubious personal encounters: "Sitting
together on the ground in Khomeini's house", he reminisces, he witnessed how when
some clerics had come to ask for money for their students and religious organizations
in their own towns, Ayatollah Khomeini had ordered them to "go to
your own towns.
Find the first man who is rich or the first man who has a factory or
a huge farm. And
force him to pay you"
(p.
173). Ali's stories, or arguably
Naipaul's rendition of
them, can hardly be trusted fraught as they are with over-
exaggerations. He claims,
for instance, that after the revolution, "if you were cleanly
dressed
, they
didn't
like it
.
They would attack you"
(p.
173
) and that the
revolutionary guards broke into
people's houses to see if they "watched TV" or to
search for "women's dresses" and
"men's neckties"
(p.
173). That the Islamic
Revolution, like any other revolution in the
world, brought about certain restrictions
and a measure of radicalism is indubitable.
Nevertheless, the idea of attacking
cleanly
-
dressed people and other similar statements
are patently absurd.
Ali's
lawyer s analysis
of the political doctrine of Ayatollah Khomeini is
no
less extraordinary. According to him, Ayatollah Khomeini knew that "the
majority were not educated. They wanted to get money and things. They didn't want
revolution. They wanted money, and Khomeini knew that . . . so he made disorder in
the
country and let them loot. He did what they wanted" (p. 174). Not only does the
statement demonize Ayatollah Khomeini as a Machiavellian demagogue, it reduces
the
Iranian nation to an irrational and intellectually impoverished herd, and the
doctrine of the Revolution to plebian materialism. As far as Ayatollah Khomeini's
views on the people are concerned, as Marandi and Pirnajmuddin have argued, the
16
RALs, 8(1), Spring 2017
twenty
-
one
-volume collection,
Saheefeye Noor,
which contains all of Ayatollah
Khomeini's writings and his public speeches, includes numerous references to how he
held people in high esteem and deemed their social and political participation to
be of
paramount significance (2009).
5. Inscribing the Imp
osed War
Conspicuously absent in Naipaul's (1998) narration of the war is the fact
that, lured by the United States into attacking Iran
(Paul,
2002), Iraq waged the
longest war of the twentieth century against Iran. This, indeed, stands in stark
contrast to Naipaul's positioning of himself as an impartial observer seeking out the
truth. His attitude towards the war is, characteristically, one of denigration and
derision. He is also equally dismissive of the fact that the war was waged and
continue
d with full backing of the West, which, among other things, provided
Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons an incontrovertible fact that has been
voiced by many prominent American political pundits such as Chomsky (1998),
Paul (2002), and Kinzer
(Goodman &
Kinzer, 2008).
In
Beyond Belief,
Naipaul (1998) persistently represents the war as a lost
cause. In this, he is under the influence of his guide and interpreter, Mehrdad, who
tells
him that "it was a war that was lost" (p.
142). Much of the information that
Mehrdad
furnishes Naipaul with is dubious and founded on twisted logic. This is
especially
true of the war. In the martyrs' cemetery, we hear from Mehrdad that "no
one from the
families [of the martyrs] comes
[here] anymo
re" (p.
142)
a claim which a simple visit
to the mentioned cemetery on weekends would refute.
No less absurd is the manner in which Naipaul
(1998) introduces
Mehrdad's sister:
Mehrdad's sister was in her early thirties. She was educated and
not
ba
d looking, but there was no husband for her: there was a
shortage of men because of the war. She had a job in a publishing
house. In that she was lucky; many young women didn't have that
opportunity of leaving the house; it wasn't easy in revolutionary
Ira
n for unmarried women to have a social life or even to move
about. (p.
136)
The passage is only one, among the many, instances which serve to reveal
the
extent to which Naipaul's (1998) inferences are predicated upon gossip, dubious
information, and problematic reasoning rather than any solid evidence. More
significantly, however, the excerpt is especially noteworthy for the manner in which
it
yokes Orientalist notions of Muslim women to the social and political status quo
of
Iran. To
begin with, Naipaul's statement that it was unlikely for Iranian women to leave
the house or have a social life reinforces the tropes of incarceration often
Orientalism
Beyond Belief.
Critiquing the Problematics . . .
17
associated with Muslim women and conjures up Orientalist images of the harem.
Furthermore, Naipaul's assertion is contradicted by the many instances where he
refers to the active social and political participation of young Iranian women from
different backgrounds. The passage also reveals Naipaul's ignorance of the many
Iranian women who played quite a crucial role, both at and behind the war fronts
during the Iraqi invasion (Koolaee, 2014).
Equally extraordinary is the claim about the dearth
of men in the aftermath of
the war. A simple look at the databases of the country's population indicates that
in
1997, when Naipaul visited Iran for the second time, Iran had a population of well
over
sixty million people, whereas in 1980, when the war eru
pted, the figure was
less than
forty million. Therefore, one wonders if men were literally that difficult to
find after the
war
which implies significantly fewer marriages should have taken
place
how can
one account for the ever-increasing rate of population growth of the
country in that
period?
Naipaul (1998) reiterates the same claims on another occasion when he
describes the time he went to a park with his guide:
Mehrdad took me late one afternoon to a pleasure park not far
from the Hyatt. Young men and
women went to the park to look at
one
another; the guards also walked there, to catch them out. The
girls, in
small groups, were in black gowns and chadors. They
were easy to
see; black now, in this park, the quite startling color
of female
sexuality, making signals from afar. Mehrdad, thinking
no doubt of
his sister immured at home, said that the girls, some of
them already
women, were older than they should have been,
because men were
scarce after the war. (p. 137)
Once again, Naipaul s
(1998
) monolithic
judgment
undermines the
credibility of his statements. To claim that young men and women went to parks
merely "to look at one another" sounds extreme and is more an insult to the
intelligence of an entire population. Moreover, through attributing the "quite
startling color of female sexuality"
(p. 5) to the girls' black chadors or gowns
which, if anything, implies the girls' observance of Islamic hijab
he is implying
the
existence of a pent-up sexuality among the girls. Nevertheless, one could argue
that
such value judgments actually reveal more about the observer than the
observed.
It was mentioned earlier that Naipaul's (1998) narrative provides a platform
only for those voices that are compatible with his views on Iran and Islam. This is
nowhere better articulated than in the description of a war veteran of whom Naipaul
18
RALs, 8(1), Spring 2017
remains deeply suspicious for reasons that
characteristically remain unbeknownst to
the
reader:
The veteran, if indeed he was that, was a small, neat man with a
neat
black beard and bright, unreliable eyes. He thought he had been
sent to us to lie, and he lied and lied about everything. He
was an
architect; he was a doctor; he had held dying martyrs in his
arms.
There was no concrete detail in anything he said and I
doubted
whether he had even been at the front. (p. 163)
It is hard to overlook the dramatic irony in Naipaul's (1998) description,
which fails to provide any "concrete details"
(p.
158) regarding the discussion
between him and his interlocutor. The veteran, instead, is represented as an
inveterate liar because one can conclude his replies did not corroborate Naipaul's
assumptions about the war. That is why Naipaul does not dissimulate his preference
for
Arash
the first war veteran he interviews
and deems the highly exaggerated
pieces
of information he offers as reliable. Arash, who has run away from the war
fronts
three
times, states, for instance, that he remembers an occasion when the
"chanting"
(p. 158) had gone on for 6 hr a claim that simply defies reason. Naipaul
then,
oversimplifying things and giving a dangerously misleading twist to the ritual
as a
hypnotic and
trance
-inducing ceremony concludes that "the chanting filled the
men
with thoughts of death and martyrdom and going to paradise and having
freedom"
(p. 158). Arash also claims that in Tehran "nobody cared about the war," a
claim
countered by the increasing
number of people who volunteered to go to the
war. The
effect of Arash's views on the war is immediate: Naipaul takes a liking to
Arash for his
"openness" and sees him even as a "good man, whose goodness could
have been used in
other ways" (p.
163). No su
ch compliments are lavished on the
second veteran. Rather,
Naipaul tells us, "we decided he was a trouble
-
maker and
got rid of him" (p. 163).
6. Conclusion
Even though
Beyond Belief
purports to be a work of nonfiction, produced
as a
result of first-hand observation and objective analysis, as Gilsenan (1998) has
observed, Naipaul's "sheer ignorance, or ignoring, of all the different varieties of
thought, symbol and practice in which often eclectic forms of Islam have been
enmeshed
in Asia leaves only strident assertions in place of an argument" (p.
12).
That
Naipaul's
(1998) underlying thesis of conversion, as was demonstrated, is
seriously
flawed, renders the validity and authority of his observations and
inferences even
more problematic. It is, therefore, small wonder that Said (1998) has dubbed
Beyond
Belief
"an intellectual catastrophe of the first order" and has deemed Naipaul's diatribe
against Muslim societies a result of his "obsession with Islam"
Orientalism
Beyond Belief.
Critiquing the Problematics . . .
19
which "caused him somehow to stop thinking, to become instead a kind of mental
suicide compelled to repeat the same formula over and over" (p. 42).
Finally, that
Beyond Belief
was so enthusiastically welcomed in the West
speaks volumes about the pervasive Islamophobia and Iranophobia in the context of
which such works of "twisted vision" (O'Shea-Meddour, 2004, p. 70) can pass for
authentic accounts of Muslim Others. It is, therefore, incumbent upon informed
cultural, social, political, and literary critics and intellectuals, especially of Muslim
and
native backgrounds, not only to lay bare the inherent contradictions,
fabrications, and falsifications of such Orientalist discourses, but also to strategically
utilize their familiarity with the religion and their respective cultures to offer an
alternative discourse that speaks to the complexities and diversities of
misrepresented cultures, and through which the suppressed voices of the
discursively silenced societies could eventually be heard.
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