The trouble is that it’s a highly selective truth, a novelist’s truth masquerading as objective reality. Take Iran: no hint in these pages that in the new Islam there is a good deal more than Khomeinism, or that the mullocracy’s hold on the people is actually very fragile. Naipaul never mentions the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, whose leader Rajavi is committed to a ‘multi-party democratic system of government’; but the Mujahideen are certainly ‘believers’. And what of (or have we forgotten him already?) the Shah of Iran? Naipaul quotes just two criticisms of him: Ayatollah Shariatmadari says, ‘The Shah was bad. He had forbidden polygamy and had thereby damaged women.’ And the Bombay businessman who attacks the Shah (‘He drained the country of billions … The people of Iran felt they had lost their country’) is immediately discredited by the revelation that ‘he was leaving Iran, after his twenty good years under the bad Shah, and going back to Bombay.’ Are these really the only Muslims Naipaul could find to speak against the Shah? Did SAVAK get rid of all the rest?
Sins of omission … Naipaul is so anxious to prove the existence of an Islamic stranglehold on these countries that, in the Pakistan section, there is no discussion of the army at all. And yet the view that Pakistanis have never been a mullah-dominated people, that a military dictator is currently using Islamization as a means of shoring up his unpopular regime, surely deserves a little air time. In my experience of Pakistan, it is not difficult to find people who will talk openly in these terms. Naipaul actually finds one, a jeep-driver in Kaghan who tells him: ‘These maulanas are using Islam as a tool … They want to destroy Pakistan.’ This same jeep-driver has previously mentioned that it is now harder to get passports than it was under Mr Bhutto; and Naipaul, refusing to discuss the driver’s attack on the theocracy, contents himself with a cheap gibe about the passports: ‘Isn’t it strange that the only freedom he wants is the freedom to leave the country?’ … attacking the poor fellow for wanting something, a passport, that Naipaul himself takes for granted. The very thing, in fact, that has made Naipaul’s journey possible.
Terrible things are being done today in the name of Islam; but simplification of the issues, when it involves omitting everything that can’t easily be blistered by Naipaul’s famous Olympian disgust, is no help. At one point, Naipaul tells his friend Shafi: ‘I think that because you travelled to America with a fixed idea, you might have missed some things.’ The criticism holds good for Naipaul’s own journey in the opposite direction, and makes Among the Believers, for all its brilliance of observation and depiction, a rather superficial book.
1981
‘IN GOD WE TRUST’
We stand at a moment in history in which, as we look around the planet, it appears that God—or, rather, formal religion—has begun once again to insist on occupying a central role in public life. There could scarcely be a more appropriate time to explore the subject of the relationships between politics and religions.
I am neither a trained theologian nor a professional in politics, so I can make no claim to any expertise. However, I have found myself, in my fiction, unable to avoid political issues; the distance between individuals and affairs of State is now so small that it no longer seems possible to write novels that ignore the public sphere. Sometimes one envies Jane Austen her fine disregard for the Napoleonic Wars. Today, with the television bringing visions of the world into every home, it seems somehow false to try and shut out the noise of gunfire, screams, weeping, to stop our ears against the inexorable ticking of the doomsday clock. As for religion, my work, much of which has been concerned with India and Pakistan, has made it essential for me to confront the issue of religious faith. Even the form of my writing was affected. If one is to attempt honestly to describe reality as it is experienced by religious people, for whom God is no symbol but an everyday fact, then the conventions of what is called realism are quite inadequate. The rationalism of that form comes to seem like a judgement upon, an invalidation of, the religious faith of the characters being described. A form must be created which allows the miraculous and the mundane to co-exist at the same level—as the same order of event. I found this to be essential even though I am not, myself, a religious man.
My relationship with formal religious belief has been somewhat chequered. I was brought up in an Indian Muslim household, but while both my parents were believers neither was insistent or doctrinaire. Two or three times a year, at the big Eid festivals, I would wake up to find new clothes at the foot of my bed, dress and go with my father to the great prayer-maidan outside the Friday Mosque in Bombay, and rise and fall with the multitude, mumbling my way through the uncomprehended Arabic much as Catholic children do—or used to do—with Latin. The rest of the year religion took a back seat. I had a Christian ayah (nanny), for whom at Christmas we would put up a tree and sing carols about baby Jesus without feeling in the least ill-at-ease. My friends were Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, and none of this struck me as being particularly important.
God, Satan, Paradise and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. I recall it vividly. I was at school in England by then. The moment of awakening happened, in fact, during a Latin lesson, and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. I remember feeling that my survival confirmed the correctness of my new position. I did slightly regret the loss of Paradise, though. The Islamic heaven, at least as I had come to conceive it, had seemed very appealing to my adolescent self. I expected to be provided, for my personal pleasure, with four beautiful female spirits, or houris, untouched by man or djinn. The joys of the perfumed garden; it seemed a shame to have to give them up.
From that day to this, I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person, and have been drawn towards the great traditions of secular radicalism—in politics, socialism; in the arts, modernism and its offspring—that have been the driving forces behind much of the history of the twentieth century. But perhaps I write, in part, to fill up that emptied God-chamber with other dreams. Because it is, after all, a room for dreaming in.
The dream is part of our very essence. Given the gift of self-consciousness, we can dream versions of ourselves, new selves for old. Waking as well as sleeping, our response to the world is essentially imaginative: that is, picture-making. We live in our pictures, our ideas. I mean this literally. We first construct pictures of the world and then we step inside the frames. We come to equate the picture with the world, so that, in certain circumstances, we will even go to war because we find someone else’s picture less pleasing than our own. It is tempting to say that this behaviour conforms very well to the Hindu idea of maya, the veil of illusion that hangs before our limited human eyes and prevents us from seeing things as they truly are—so that we mistake the veil, maya, for reality. Dreaming is our gift; it may also be our tragic flaw.
Whichever it be, it is unquestionably our nature, and, perhaps, our explanation. And politics and religion, both in theory and in practice, are, I would suggest, manifestations of our dreaming selves. In political thought we seek to express our dreams of improvement, of betterment, of progress—our dreams, some may feel, of dreams. We seek to give life to these grand visions, and we assume that we can do so; that our dreams are attainable, that the world can be made what we wish if we wish it enough, that we are capable of making history. Thus most political discourse, because it places the human spirit in a position of power over events, can be seen as a dream of adequacy. An optimistic dream. The great universal religions, by contrast, ask us to accept our inferiority to a non-corporeal, omnipresent, omnipotent supreme being, who is both our creator and judge. The word ‘Islam’ means submission, and not only Islam but Christianity and Judaism, too, classically require of believers an act of submission to the will of God. That is, religion demands that God’s will, not our small vanity, must prevail over history. To make it plain, we could say that relig
ion places human beings beneath history. In this world we are not masters, but servants; so perhaps we can see religion, in this contrast, as a dream of our inadequacy, as a vision of our lessness.
Of course this is too simple, and so, contrariwise, as Tweedledee would say, let me counter-propose that the practice and experience of politics is very largely shaped by the hard reality of limitations—boundaries in space, time, resource, will and possibility. One cannot seriously propose the ‘art of the possible’ as a wholly optimistic enterprise; whereas religious systems offer, in place of the earthbound limitations and imperfections of political life, the transcendent joys of faith—eternity, immortality, everlasting bliss. So in this formulation our potential seems far smaller when seen through the lens of practical politics than when observed through the glass of transcendent faith. Now it is religion that seems like the good dream, and politics the nightmare.
We are entering a tricky, contradictory zone, full of paradoxes and blind alleys. Nevertheless, let me suggest that if political thought places us in an ‘adult’ relation to the historical process, whereas religion obliges us to be the ‘children’ of a wiser God, then religion, conversely, is also capable of speaking to and arousing our sense of the marvellous, in a manner to which political language can only occasionally aspire. And then there is the matter of disappointment. Any good advertising man will tell you that a product or service must never be oversold, because to claim too much for it increases the likelihood of consumer disappointment, of what they call a ‘cognitive dissonance’ between what you say and how the product performs. Consumer disappointment greatly reduces the likelihood of brand loyalty. In this respect religions have the great advantage of not having their most important promise tested until after the consumer is dead; whereas the promises of politicians, of political parties and movements and theorists, go wrong while we, in growing disillusion, watch. Even those ideas which have been, for a time, the most uplifting and galvanizing, end by inducing cognitive dissonances and damaging brand loyalty. It is a disillusioned age. So it is not surprising that some of us turn back towards belief-systems which at least have never made the mistake of promising us an earthly paradise.
It is immediately necessary to make some distinctions between the West and the East, because in certain important respects the starting-points are so different. A few years ago, I came across a rather brave and also slightly ludicrous attempt at enumerating the total number of gods at present extant in India, from the most minor tree- or water-sprite to Brahma and Allah themselves. The figure arrived at was, astoundingly, 330 million, that is, roughly one god for every two and a quarter human beings. The overwhelming fact about life in India is that this vast multitude of deities co-exists in everyday life with the doubly vast multitude of people. You bump into gods in the streets. You jostle past them, you step over their sleeping forms. They take your seat in the bus. What I mean is that these gods are no abstractions. They are as real to the faithful as their families and friends. (And, since the divine population is, we can presume, reasonably stable, whereas the humans have rapidly increased in number, we can see by projecting backwards that it is only relatively recently that the human population in India overtook the supernatural one …) The point is that the idea of large numbers of persons going back towards religion is an essentially Western one. In the East, relatively few people ever left their faiths. So when we speak of a religious ‘revival’, a revival of ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘communalism’, we are not speaking of a religious event, as we would be if we were describing an event in a Western country. We are, in fact, speaking of a political event that is almost always nationalist in its true character.
Christianity, which arose as a fusion of Jewish monotheism and Roman universalism, was radical in matters of the spirit—offering everyone, and not just the Chosen People, the chance of salvation; but, under the influence of St Paul, it took great care to avoid political confrontations. The render unto Caesar formula is, obviously, significant here. Thus from the earliest times we see in Christianity a willingness to separate Church and State, and admission that such a separation is possible and maybe even desirable. In the world of Islam, no such separation has ever occurred at the level of theory. Of all the great sacred texts the Qur’an is most concerned with the law, and Islam has always remained an overtly social, organizing, political creed which, again theoretically, has something to say about every aspect of an individual life.
It is, in a way, ironic that Pauline Christianity turned away from politics towards mysticism, for, as historians such as Hyam Maccoby have recently reminded us, crucifixion was at the time of Christ a penalty reserved exclusively for persons found guilty of acts of political—not theological—subversion. Christ died as a political revolutionary, but was largely depoliticized and wrapped in mysteries by Paul; Muhammad has never been ‘withdrawn’ from the public arena in this fashion. Thus the assumptions about the inter-penetration of political and religious affairs are very different in the two spheres.
But—and it’s a big ‘but’, which brings me back to the point I alluded to about the connections of the present-day religious ‘revivals’ with nationalisms of various types—we cannot discuss religion in the modern world, even in such societies as India or the Ummah-Islam, as if it still operated in the world just as it did in the age before the rise of the nation-state. Then, as Benedict Anderson tells us in his book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Christendom and Islam were communities of this ‘imagined’ type, international groupings whose unity existed in the minds of the believers. And what enabled them to be imagined as unities was the existence of sacred languages through which the religions could be mediated to many different peoples speaking many different tongues. These languages, and the role of literate élites as the mediators of the languages to the largely illiterate masses (I am remembering my own mumbled parroting of Arabic prayers) provided the underpinning substructure of the great universal faiths. The decline in power of the sacred languages and their interpreters, and the parallel rise in the idea of the nation, changed the world’s relationship to religious belief in the most fundamental way.
Anderson warns us against the idea that the imagined communities of nations simply grew out of the decaying bodies of the imagined communities of faith and the dynastic realms that supported them. Rather, he argues, quoting Erich Auerbach and Walter Benjamin, the crucial change was in our apprehension of time. Time, in the imagined community of Christendom, was held to be near its end; and also contained the idea of simultaneity—God’s eye could see all moments, past, present and future, so that the here and now was only part of the eternal. Benjamin calls this ‘Messianic time’. Our modern concept of time, by contrast, is guided by ticking clocks. It moves forward. It is a ‘homogeneous, empty time’, in Benjamin’s phrase. And, says Anderson, ‘the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation.’
This is important stuff for a novelist, because what we are being told is that the idea of sequence, of narrative, of society as a story, is essential to the creation of nations. But writers insist, if they’re any good, in having it both ways—to be both linear and Godlike, to express both the truths of simultaneity and those of linearity. John Berger has said that Man is two events: there is the event of his biology and the event of his consciousness. The first is linear, temporal. The second is simultaneous, multiform, protean.
I am suggesting that in the world since the idea of the nation-state began to be thought, the biological event of man has become dominant; that our sense of the world is now clock-ridden, so that we cannot—except briefly, in the act of creation or contemplation—regain the sense of Messianic time. When religion enters the political arena today, then, it does so as an event in linear time; that is, as a part of the world of the nation-state, and not a rejection of it.
Consider the so-called ‘Islamic revival’ or ‘funda
mentalist Islamic revival’. The sloganizing of the term ‘Islam’ by the West in recent years has been extensively examined by Edward Said in his book Covering Islam. What ‘Islam’ now means in the West is an idea that is not merely medieval, barbarous, repressive and hostile to Western civilization, but also united, unified, homogeneous, and therefore dangerous: an Islamic Peril to put beside the Red and Yellow ones. Not much has changed since the Crusades, except that now we are not even permitted a single, leavening image of a ‘good Muslim’ of the Saladin variety. We are back in the demonizing process which transformed the Prophet Muhammad, all those years ago, into the frightful and fiendish ‘Mahound’.
Whereas—and, like Said, I must make clear that it is no part of my intention to excuse or apologize for the deeds of many ‘Islamic’ regimes—any examination of the facts will demonstrate the rifts, the lack of homogeneity and unity, characteristic of present-day Islam. The murky war between Iran and Iraq reveals, if it reveals nothing else, the primarily nationalistic character of the States involved. That both sides claimed the support of the Almighty is, of course, nothing new. In the English Civil War, both armies marched into battle singing hymns. Soldiers have always been encouraged to die by the idea that they have God on their side.
Khomeini’s revolution was intensely nationalistic in character. The unity it forged between many widely disparate elements of Iranian society, from the high bourgeoisie to the oil-workers, was built upon the desire to depose a despot, to liberate a nation. Why did Khomeini, an exiled and archaic cleric, become the focus of this national effort? The answer must be sought in the torture chambers of the Shah, where the paid killers of the SAVAK forces broke all political opponents of the Shah’s regime. But Pahlevi never dared to move as ruthlessly against the mosques, against the clergy, as he did against his secular enemies. As a result opposition gravitated to the theologians; there was a power vacuum, and Khomeini stepped into it with massive authority. That his revolution, when it triumphed, began at once to devour its makers does not invalidate the essentially nationalist impetus that lay behind it. And even today, after that auto-cannibalism, it must be admitted that the power of the glowering figure of Khomeini is not purely the product of his ‘holiness’, or of fear. He does, in a real sense, embody an idea of the Iranian nation. Perhaps he would have fallen by now if he did not.