Author: V S Naipaul
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1999
Language: English
Pages: 437
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140279350
Description
Now available in paperback edition, this book is a classic account of author's travels and intelligent observations as to how do the converted peoples view their past.
In a follow up to 'Among the Believers', V S Naipaul travels through Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia and writes what has Islam done to the histories of these countries.
A startling and revelatory addition to the Naipaul cannon, this book confirms the author's reputation as a masterful observer, a 'finder-out' of stories, as well as a magnificent teller of them.
In Indonesia he finds a pastoral people who have lost their history through a confluence of Islam and technology. In Iran he discovers a religious tyranny as oppressive as the secular one of the Shah. But nowhere, as Naipaul illustrates, has history been more successfully mangled into a cultural desert than in Pakistan. The tragic realization of a casual poetic dream, a Muslim recreation fantasy, it inherited blood feuds, rotting palaces, antique cruelty - then President Zia installed religious terror with $ 100 million of Saudi money. How, asks the author, can you convert a personal faith into the apparatus of a state without settling for a personal tyranny? Everyone he talks to and everything he sees leads him to the conclusion that you can't.
Yet that hasn't stopped Islamic missionaries from swooping down on Malaysia to spread the word, where the Muslim Youth Movement is welcoming Malay converts still reeling from racial riots with the Chinese. But he also finds the same old conflicts, the same problems endemic amongst the converted. For here are people mentally, physically and geographically torn between two worlds. People struggling to live the impossible dream of a true faith born out of a spiritual vacancy.
COMMENTS:
A record of intelligent observation that promises to be an enduring literary achievement. - Richard Bernstein
A grand addition to that special literary form that Naipaul has mastered as perhaps no one else has. - Economic Times
Contents
Prologue
CHAPTER I
THE FLIGHT OF THE N - 250
PART I
The Man of the Moment
PART II
History
PART III
A Convert
PART IV
A Sacred Place
PART V
Kampung
PART VI
Below the Lava
PART VII
Oh Mama! Oh Papa!
PART VIII
Ghosts
CHAPTER II
IRAN
THE JUSTICE OF ALI
PART I
The Foundation of the Oppressed
PART II
Mr Jaffrey's Round Trip
PART III
The Great War
PART IV
Salt Land
PART V
The Jail
PART VI
The Martyr
PART VII
Qum : The Punisher
PART VIII
Cancer
PART IX
The Two Tribes
CHAPTER III
PAKISTAN
DROPPING OFF THE MAP
PART I
A Criminal Enterprise
PART II
The Polity
PART III
Rana in his Village
PART IV
Guerrilla
PART V
Penitent
PART VI
Loss
PART VII
From the North
PART VIII
Ali's Footprint
PART IX
War
CHAPTER IV
MALAYSIAN POSTSCRIPT
RAISING THE COCONUT SHELL
PART I
Old Clothes
PART II
New Model
PART III
The Bomoh's Son
PART IV
The Other World
Acknowledgements