The Books: “Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey” (V.S. Naipaul)

History/Travel bookshelf:

Next book on the shelf is Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey by V.S. Naipaul. VS Naipaul went on a 7-month journey in the early 80s through 4 “countries of the converts” non-Arab countries, converts to Islam. He has no sympathy for religious fervor whatsoever, and he makes no bones about it. He distrusts fundamentalism of every kind. He and Christopher Hitchens are brothers in this respect. He is right in his assessment that converts are usually more fanatical than those born into a faith. I’ve known a few recent born-agains in my day, and I can say that he speaks the truth. A lot of people can’t stand Naipaul because of this hostility towards religion, but in my opinion – this personal bias makes him a clear-eyed critic of certain aspects of faith-based societies. Same with Krakauer who wrote that blisteringly hostile book about Mormons – Krakauer came right out and stated his bias in the beginning, so you, as a reader, know what you’re dealing with. I don’t share Naipaul’s distrust for people who have faith – not at all – but I do share his abhorrence of fundamentalists, of any stripe, and I make no bones about it either. Naipaul has no patience with those who do not use their MINDS.

There’s a sequel to the book which I’ll excerpt tomorrow – he returns to the same 4 countries a decade later – and looks up all the same people he met the first trip. The two books together are fascinating and rather prophetic looks at Islamic countries, and the radicalization of the Muslim faith. Especially his chapters on Indonesia, which I’ll excerpt here.

The excerpt gives you a real feel for the book. It’s all about PEOPLE. Naipaul tells the history of certain events, certain areas, etc., through one person’s personal history. Very very interesting. The following excerpt is a bit long, but it’s worth it. It’s about an Indonesian man named Suryadi.

From Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey by V.S. Naipaul.

It is dizzying to read of recent Indonesian history. And to look at it in the life of one man is to wonder how, with so little to hold on to in the way of law or country, anyone could withstand so many assaults on his personality.

Suryadi was in his mid fifties. He was small, dark-brown, frail-looking. He was born in East Java and he described himself as one of the “statistical Muslims” of Indonesia. He had received no religious training; such religion as he had was what was in the air around him. He wasn’t sure whether he believed in the afterlife; and he didn’t know that that belief was fundamental to the Muslim faith.

He belonged to the nobility, but in Java that meant only that he was not of the peasantry. The Dutch ruiled Java through the old feudal courts of the country. But Java was only an agricultural colony, and the skills required of the nobility in the Dutch time were hnot high. Suryadi’s grandfather, as a noble, had had a modest white-collar job; Suryadi’s father was a bookkeeper in a bank.

It was possible for Suryadi, as a noble, to go to a Dutch school. The fees were low; and Suryadi, in facat, didn’t have to pay. The education was good. Just how good it was was shown by the excellent English Suryadi spoke. And recently, wishing to take up German again and enrolling in the German cultural centre in Jakarta, the Goethe Institute, Suryadi found that, with his Dutch-taught German of forty years before, he was put in the middle class, and he was later able without trouble to get a certificate in an examination marked in Germany.

Early in 1942 the Japanese occupied Java. The message from Radio Tokyo was that the Japanese would give Indonesia its independence, and there were many people willing to welcome the Japanese as liberators. Suryadi was in the final year of his school. The Dutch teachers were replaced by Indonesians, and the headmaster or supervisor was Japanese. For six months classes continued as they would have done under the Dutch. Then — and it is amazing how things go on, even during an upheaval — Suryadi went to the university. The lecturers and professors there were now Japanese. But the Japanese simply couldn’t manage foreign languages. They recognized this themselves, and after a time they appointed Indonesians, who worked under Japanese supervisors.

The Indonesians used the classes to preach nationalism. Already much of the good will towards the Japanese had gone. It was clear to Suryadi that the whole economy was being subverted to assist the Japanese war effort. Thousands of Indonesians were sent to work on the Burma Railway (and there is still a community of Indonesians in Thailand, from the enforced migration of that time). Radios were sealed; the radios that had once brought the good news from Radio Tokyo could no longer be listened to,

Two incidents occurred at this time which made Suryadi declare his opposition to the Japanese. The university authorities decreed that all students were to shave their heads. It was the discipline of the Zen monastery. And Suryadi felt it as he was meant to feel it: an assault on his personality. And then one day on the parade ground — students were given military training — a student was slapped by a Japanese officer. All the Indonesians felt humiliated, and Suryadi and his friends held a protest demonstration in the university. Thirty of them, teachers as well as students, were arrested by the Japanese secret police and taken to jail.

In the jail they heard people being tortured for anti-Japanese offences and even for listening to the radio. But Suryadi’s group were treated like political prisoners; and they continued to be disciplined in the way of the Zen monastery. They were beaten with bamboo staves, but it was only a ritual humiliation. The bamboo staves were split at the end; they didn’t hurt, they only made a loud cracking noise. After a month of this Suryadi and his friends were released. But they were expelled from the university. So Suryadi never completed his education.

They had got off lightly because the Indonesian nationalism leaders were still cooperating with the Japanese. Sukarno never believed that Japan was going to lose the war, Suryadi said. Sukarno didn’t even believe that the atom bomb had been dropped on Japan. It was only after the Japanese surrender that Sukarno and the nationalists proclaimed the independence of Indonesia. And four years of fighting against the Dutch followed.

What events to have lived through, in one’s first twenty-six years! But Suryadi was without rancour. The events had been too big; there was no one to blame. He had no ill-feeling towards either Dutch or Japanese. He did business now with both; and he respected both as people who honoured a bargain. The Japanese had the reputation in Southeast Asia of being hard bargainers (there had been anti-Japanese riots in Jakarta because of the Japanese domination of the Indonesian market); but Suryadi had found the Japanese more generous, if anything, than the Dutch.

Suryadi was without rancour, and it could be said that he had won through. But there was an Indonesian sadness in him, and it was the sadness of a man who felt he had been left alone, and was now — after the Dutch time, the Japanese time, the four years of the war against the Dutch, the twenty years of Sukarno — without a cause. More than once the world had seemed about to open out for him as an Indonesian, but then had closed up again.

He had lain low during the later Sukarno years. Army rule after that had appeared to revive the country. But now something else was happening. A kind of Javanese culture was being asserted. Suryadi was Javanese; the Javanese dance and the Javanese epics and puppet plays were part of his being. But he felt that Javanese culture was being misused; it was encouraging a revival of feudal attitudes, with the army taking the place of the old courts. Suryadi had the Javanese eye for feudal courtesies. He saw that nowadays the soldier’s salute to an officer was more than an army salute; it also contained a feudal bow. It was a twisted kind of retrogression. It wasn’t what Suryadi had wanted for his country.

And he had lost his daughter. She had become a convert to the new Muslim cause — the Malaysian disease, some people called it here. At school and then at the university she had been a lively girl. She had done Javanese dancing; she was a diver; she liked to go camping. But then, at the university, she had met a new Muslim, a born-again Muslim, and she had begun to change. She went out with her hair covered; she wore drab long gowns; and her mind began correspondingly to dull.

Suryadi and his wife had done the unforgivable one day. They had gone among the girl’s papers, and they had come upon a pledge she had signed. She had pledged to be ruled in everything by a particular Muslim teacher; he was to be her guide to paradise. She, who would have been a statistical Muslim like Suryadi and his wife, was now being instructed in the pure faith.

Suryadi didn’t take it well. He thought now he should have been calmer in the beginning; by making his dismay too apparent he had probably pushed the girl further away from him. He said to her one day, “Suppose someone asks you to go out camping now, will you say, ‘I can’t go, because I have no assurance there will be water for my ablutions before my prayers’?” He had spoken with irritation and irony. But later she came back to him and said, “I have checked. In the Koran there is nothing that says it is obligatory if you are travelling.” And Suryadi understood that she had become impervious to irony; that she had become removed from the allusive family way of talking. The intellectual loss was what grieved him the most. He said, “But don’t you have a mind any longer? Do you have to go to that book every time? Can’t you think for yourself now?” She said, “The Koran is the source of all wisdom and virtue in the world.”

She had married the born-again Muslim who had led her to the faith. She had a degree; he was still only a student at the university; but, like a good Muslim wife, she subordinated herself to him. That was the new sadness that Suryadi was learning to live with: a once-lively daughter who had gone strange.

Still, recently he had found a little cause for hope. He was driving her back one day to her in-laws’ house, where she lived with her husband. He said, “I have bought that little house for you. Why don’t you go and live there? Why does your husband want to keep on living with his parents? It isn’t right. Why doesn’t he make up his mind to act on his own?” She had said then, “He’s got an inferiority complex, Father.”

And this little sign, the first for some time, that his daughter still had a mind, was still capable of judging, was a great comfort to Suryadi. She had seen what was clear to Suryadi: that the boy was a poor student, didn’t have the background, couldn’t cope with university life. He was still some way from taking his degree and wasn’t giving enough time to his work. During the month of Ramadan, the fasting month, he had given up his work altogether, fasting all day and going to the mosque in the evening to pray. This was easier than being with the difficult books; and his religious correctness was admired by his Islamic group at the university.

Suryadi’s daughter had seen this on her own. That was some weeks ago. And it was now what Suryadi was waiting for: that in time she might see a little more.

At the end, just before we separated, Suryadi said, “But I’ve been lucky. I haven’t been like so many others in Indonesia, switching to another wavelength under pressure.”

“Another wavelength?”

“You know how people are like here. But perhaps you don’t. They turn mystical. Logical, rational people. They start burning incense or sitting up at night in graveyards if they want to achieve something. If they feel they are frustrated, not advancing in their work or career.”

“Do you call that mystical?”

“I don’t know what else you call it.”