Originally published in the “The American Scholar” in 2003.
A little over twenty-one years ago, when I was teaching in the MIT Writing Program, I organized readings in Cambridge, Massachusetts by V.S. Naipaul, whose book about the Islamic Revolution, Among the Believers, had just been published. One of the events I scheduled for him was an afternoon seminar at Harvard with about 30 faculty and graduate students who specialized in Near Eastern studies. I was myself writing about the Middle East conflict at the time, mainly from the Israeli side, and I had assumed Naipaul would find the encounter a relief from promoting his book. I thought that, for their part, Harvard’s specialists would appreciate the chance to explore the book’s carefully wrought interviews, and feel treated to hear at first hand his sardonic accounts of travel through Khomeini’s Iran (also Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia), which was for an intellectual of rank, and exacting tastes, harrowing.
The meeting did not go well. It ended abruptly after about 40 minutes when Naipaul stood erect, told his audience how disappointed he was with what he had heard from them, announced “I leave you,” and with a flick of the hand signaled me to escort him out of the building. I’ve reflected on this meeting over the years, and on certain judgments Naipaul and I exchanged in private afterwards; it never occurred to me to write about either, and I won’t reveal (actually, I can hardly remember) most of what was private. But in light of recent events, including the author’s long-overdo Nobel prize, I’ve concluded that what happened in that seminar room deserves a more meticulous examination. There are the passions and vanities of writers and readers. More important, there are ways other than through flimsy cockpit doors or unguarded discothèques that urbane people can make themselves vulnerable to destroyers. I think this meeting throws light on the latter subject..
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The collision was not unforeseeable, though in my admiration for Naipaul, I had failed to foresee it. Many of the people who had turned up for the seminar considered Among The Believers an album of images distorted by a vaguely “Western” lens; they had understood Naipaul to be famous for feelings of cultural superiority and came eager to confront him. And there was a precision to their hostility. Professor Edward Said’s Orientalism had been published just two years before, and his big themes had already taken hold in many universities. Said had made the important point—which at a distance of many years now seems self- evident—that people from the West who studied the East (especially, the Middle East) ought not to expect Muslims and Arabs (“people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny”) to be in an inexorable transition to something certifiably “Western” or willing subjects of quaint, canonic paintings or poems. But what made Orientalism original, and contentious, was the way Said had casually extrapolated from criticism of certain areas of Western study to criticism of methods of Western study—of, say, the academic historian’s “procedure”—and fused it with his point about the need to refrain from imposing a foreign schema. He wrote: “One would find this kind of procedure less objectionable as political propaganda—which is what it is, of course—were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that Orientalists. . . writing about Muslims are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their Westernness.”
So even before Naipaul had sat down, his interpretation of Islamic revolution, indeed, the very habits of mind he applied to interpretation, were alleged to be not only not a guarantee of “objectivity,” but an occasion for heightened suspicion (and the added fact that he was of Indian descent, raised in Trinidad, made his interpretive predispositions more obscure, hence, more mischievous). I recall that the very first question put to him challenged even his account of Tehran traffic—and things went downhill from there. Naipaul insisted that his challenger support his claim by reading from Among the Believers. The young man, surprisingly, complied. He read: “They drove like people to whom the motorcar was new. They drove as they walked; and a stream of Teheran traffic, jumpy with individual stops and swerves, with no clear lanes, was like a jostling pavement crowd. This manner of driving didn’t go with any special Teheran luck. The door or fender of every other car was bashed in, or bashed in and mended.”
Now, Naipaul was not one to suffer offense, but when the reading of the excerpt was over he looked more dazed than annoyed. Did most not drive like that, Naipaul asked, were these not the facts? The word “facts” seemed a kind of trip-wire; Naipaul had stepped into the epistemological ambush. But how were the facts being framed and teased out, others shot back at him? Was it possible for him to visit such lands without projecting and expecting to see versions of Western values? Was he claiming to have observed Islamic traditions impartially, and was this not itself a vain Western idea? The tense exchanges went on for about half an hour more, the room growing muggy and electric, claims of fact flying past accusations of bias in shaping facts, Naipaul growing defiant and silent. Why not report, Naipaul asked with flagging energy, how drivers drove? He seemed determined to press home the point that he had observed these details directly, while some of his critics had not.
I could not myself resist jumping in after a time, hoping to provide him an opening. I noted that social observers cannot be without prejudice, a point I thought (but did not say) was too obvious for Naipaul to bother with since, paradoxically, almost anyone from the “West” would see it. I proposed that we leave the question of objectivity aside. I might have added that nobody should want to go back to any “positivist” claims. But Among the Believers recounted how, in various ways, the Revolution in Iran had repressed dissenting views. I asked: Was it wrong for the book to dwell on this, was the principle of tolerance itself just a Western conceit?
A couple of Naipaul’s questioners threw me a pitying look. The word “tolerance” caused a noticeable wince, as if I had only proven their point by ignoring Naipaul’s apparent intolerance and by yanking in a term from Western political philosophy. Anyway, it rolled away like water off a duck’s back. Nor did we ever get to my question which, given the tempers that were flaring, could hardly be treated as a serious one. It was at this moment, or just a little after, that Naipaul decided to escape the meeting.
But had Naipaul, in a hundred similar ways, not proven their point in Among the Believers? Could he escape the “mere fact of his Westernness”? And if not, could any of us in the West presume to understand how the people in the Middle East think or feel—or why they act? Could we demand certain political standards from them? If such questions could ever have been dismissed as academic, they certainly could not be after September 11, 2001. Similarly, what should we make of President Bush’s stipulation on June 24, 2002 that Palestinians build “a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty,” adopt “a constitution which separates the powers of government,” and institute “a truly independent judiciary”? Was this simply a domineering American trying to foist his own political culture on yet another piece of the Islamic world—a world which should rather be expected to pursue a political path of its own?
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Let’s go back to Among the Believers, and following Naipaul’s urging during the seminar, look carefully at his own words. I’ll focus only on the Iran chapter here, though virtually any page of the book would serve our purpose. We have heard about the traffic; consider this description of a car radio:
… But technology surrounded us in Teheran, and some of it had been so Islamized or put to such good Islamic use that its foreign origin seemed of no account.
The hotel taxi driver could be helped through the hotel traffic jams by the Koranic readings on his car radio; and when he got back to the hotel, there would be Mullahs on television. Certain modern goods and tools—cars, radios, televisions—were necessary; their possession was a part of a proper Islamic pride. But these things were considered neutral; they were not associated with any particular faith or civilization; they were thought of as the stock of some great universal bazaar.
Naipaul meets Ayatollah Shirazi, a great teacher, in the holy city of Qom:
… The students began to fall forward before him—a flurry of black coats and turbans. He, allowing his hand to be kissed, appeared to give them his benediction. And then we all sat down. He said nothing; he seemed only to smile… And always—whether I tried to get him to talk about the scientific needs of Muslim countries, or about his ideas for Iran after the revolution—we slid down his theology to the confusion of his certainties.
Naipaul and his guide, Behzad, visit a Tehran university:
We crossed the road… and for an hour or more, on the pavement reserved for men (as we thought), in the contracting, thinning shade of a plane tree, we watched the crowd coming up from Revolution Avenue, the women, black veiled and black gowned on one side, the men on the other… Once amazingly, on our pavement there passed a plump young woman in tight jeans and high heels bound on some quite different business. She walked as fast as she could on her heels, looking at no one.
Naipaul meets a famous judge, Ayatollah Khalkhalli:
Khomeini received and preached and blessed; Khalkhalli hanged…Khalkhalli had recently been giving interviews, emphasizing his activities as a judge, and a story in Tehran was that he had fallen out of favor and he was trying through these interviews to keep his reputation alive. He told the Tehran Times that he had ‘probably’ sentenced four hundred people to death in Tehran. ‘On some nights, he said, bodies of thirty or more people would be sent out in trucks from the prison.’
And finally, this about the uses of the mosque:
The speeches never stopped. The minister of labor and social welfare made one and got his picture in the papers: the mosque, he said, was not only a place of worship but also ‘a base for launching anti-colonialist movements in a display of unity, thought and action.’ Unity: it was the theme of a big Friday sabbath feature in the Tehran Times, ‘Why has Islam the potential for revolution?’
Unity, union, the backs bowed in prayers that were like drills, the faith of one the faith of all, the faith of all flowing into the faith of one and becoming divine, personality and helplessness abolished: union, surrender, facelessness, heaven.
Backs bowed in prayers that were like drills. For any Muslim scholar, or for anybody with sympathy for Islamic societies or traditions—or even just some lingering affection for friends and experiences in these countries—such descriptions might well have felt like an onslaught. Consider what lies between the lines of these excerpts:
The cadres of the Iranian Revolution—and the distinction between cadres and ordinary Iranians was fine—rejected the disciplines of civil society (why else ignore traffic signs?) which enable social contract; they revered received truths and those who gained power by exploiting belief in them; they were disquieted by deviation from or any historical legacy inconsistent with the current dogma; they treasured imported appliances but could not see their underlying technology as the product of scientific doubt and open inquiry; they persecuted dissenters, especially those who believed that life could be understood as a personal project; they declined the risks of sexual display and especially female sexual power; they enjoyed instead male sovereignty, which could easily tip into brutality; they saw poverty as a justification for desperate measures, and vengeance against the rich as a subtle political act; they wanted the comforts of unity above all, which echoed the comfort of family love; and, they were prepared to be killed (or kill) to sustain the obedience that kept tribes safely together.
Were there Iranians who did not conform to such descriptions? Of course. Did Naipaul see them? Presumably. Why were they not his subject? The answer is not that Naipaul was habitually mean-spirited about “wogs”—as Said would later charge[1]—though Naipaul’s distaste for what he found was indisputable, and Among the Believers did indeed notice mostly what his Iranian interlocutors were not saying or failed to do; Naipaul actually seemed rather fond of the Iranians he interviewed, or at least charmed by their vices. No, Naipaul’s negative reactions are best understood by playing a little mind game. Turn the negative observations of his Iranian interlocutors into a roster of positive principles, and you are suddenly in a different world, a world of ethics which cannot be inhabited dogmatically (as Said himself agreed at the end of his life), universal principles like these: sovereignty should derive from the consent of the governed, because a person sees only a personal piece of (what John Stuart Mill humbly called) “the truth”; stirred up majorities may well become tyrannies; innovation presupposes personal freedom; and so on. These principles might well be called “Western,” but that is only a matter of convenience. They are individualist, autonomist, incipiently liberal, arguably democratic, and recall what the Greeks began to struggle through in that ancient moment when the “West” got its start.
Indeed, a moment’s reflection should reveal that Islamic society was actually not Naipaul’s subject at all, though it served as a foil for his subject. He went East to explore the West. “Believers,” Naipaul implied (but did not quite acknowledge), was meant to be taken ironically, and more in a psychological than a theological vein. Believers corresponded to what, say, William James wryly meant (in Varieties of Religious Experience) by the “healthy-minded,” people who were at peace in a strict faith, but only because they were inclined to a certain gullibility; people who felt themselves custodians of a purified order because they had no stomach for darker mysteries.
And there is, indeed, a paradoxical insight about knowing here: To believe that perception is more or less relative is to believe that the need for tolerance is more or less absolute. Naipaul’s believers were not Muslims per se, but human beings who, in this case, happened to be Muslims, people with foibles familiar in any society, and against which people with democratic imagination always have to struggle. We may find toleration in other forms; the Islamic code, we often hear, specifically preaches toleration of Jews. But this is irrelevant. The issue is not whether some sacred text preaches toleration, but whether Muslims have the courage to see that only the right to interpret texts is sacred—courage to live without a “confusion of certainties” and within the bounds of our own (tragically limited) reason.
This all becomes clearer when Naipaul gets to Pakistan and recalls (with continuing disdain) its vision of a state based on revealed Islamic law—as articulated, for example, by the poet, Sir Mohammed Iqbal (1876-1938), in this speech to the All Indian Muslim League: “Iqbal’s argument goes like this,” Naipaul writes; “Islam is not only an ethical idea; it is also a ‘certain kind of polity.’ Religion for a Muslim is not a matter of private conscience or private practice… To accept Islam is accept certain ‘legal’ concepts. These concepts— revelatory, but not to be belittled for that reason—have ‘civic significance.’” Naipaul quotes Iqbal directly:
The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.
Or consider this passage:
Church and state are kept separate [in Christianity], treated as separate provinces. Our case is different. Holy law and traditions are not man- made, but are God’s own law. We can have no partial acceptance, for this destroys the sanctity of the Holy Law, [which] more than touches upon state and public life… The very sections of our laws dealing with man’s relations to his conscience and his Maker also offer general and specific guidance on the conduct of the state and social life, and also relations with other countries—how to wage war with them and how to live at peace with them… Neither… have we ever had laws of an exclusively “secular” nature.
Actually, this last passage is not from Iqbal, but from Rabbi Meir Berlin (or Bar- Ilan, after whom Israel’s Bar-Ilan University is named),[2] one of the founders of the “Religious” Zionist Mizrachi Party; their most zealous contemporary heirs are the influential Gush Emunim settlers who have pock-marked the West Bank with settlements. Is there any doubt what Naipaul would have written after a visit to one of those? Would it be materially different in substance and tone from what, say, Amos Oz wrote in his book In The Land Of Israel, where it was the Jewish “believers” who, in being extensively quoted, seemed disdained?
In other words, Naipaul’s case against Iranian Islamists was really against any persons who tell you what tradition says, nature needs, or God thinks. So why didn’t he make his case against, say, Mobutu’s Zaire, Peron’s Argentina, or fundamentalist American Christians at a Republican Convention? In fact, he did, and he would. In 1974 Naipaul had written about Mobutu: “The chief threatens; the people are cowed; the chief relents; the people praise his magnanimity”.[3] In 1984 he would attend the Republican Party convention: “A wonderful cosmic idea, God coming to the end of the world: barely imaginable. But even less imaginable was the idea that many of the people in the auditorium were to be saved in some way from the cosmic nothingness…”.[4] Nor was Naipaul an original here. Dickens had made something like this case against intolerance against French mobs, Orwell made it against Burmese peasants, Koestler made it against Soviet Marxism—and, in 1949, against the Orthodox Jewish Rabbinate of Jerusalem who, not surprisingly, still venerated Meir Berlin.
Granted, the greatness of such writers was in their ability to produce (what Isaiah Berlin was fond of quoting from Kant) “no straight thing” from the “crooked timber of humanity.” The bearers of Western values are not described without fault or hubris. Orwell was certainly no apologist for the British imperial agents against which the Burmese peasants grumbled; and Koestler added his own twist, acknowledging that the Cold War was only a confrontation between a “Big Lie” and a “half-truth.” But their trailing insight was at least straightforward. To write what can be meaningfully called history—to “write” at all—we need the terms of a civil society, and chief among these, the principle of tolerance, which implies how we make history by striving for truth in ways inherently limited by our humanness. To achieve a civil society we all have to shed some of the most seductive (but not immediately suffocating) pleasures: “union, surrender, facelessness, heaven.”
Naipaul (still defiant) took up this matter autobiographically several years later in a lecture at the Manhattan Institute in New York, which he entitled “Our Universal Civilization”: “To get your name on the spine of the created physical object, you need a vast apparatus outside yourself. You need publishers, editors, designers, printers, binders; booksellers, critics, newspapers, and magazines and television where the critics can say what they think of the book; and, of course, buyers and readers…”
But I have never been able to take my career for granted. I know that there are still large tracts of the world where the cultural or economic conditions I described a while ago do not obtain, and someone like myself would not have been able to become a writer. I couldn’t have become a writer in the Mohammedan world; in China; in Japan—the Japanese make room for the literary culture only of the countries they see themselves competing against. I couldn’t have become the kind of writer I am in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union or black Africa. I don’t think I could have taken my gifts even to India.[5]
So the inescapable question, it turns out, is the one we never got to at Harvard, but which is now haunting us at every turn. It was not whether Naipaul shaped facts with values, or whether those values were vaguely Western, but whether there are foundations of the democratic tradition—which have come to be called Western—which are reasonably thought universal and are, for this very reason, so easily “taken for granted.” Is tolerance just a Western conceit, like a Wordsworth metaphor, or is it something we ought to expect from all human beings? And if we have the right to expect it, dare we use what power we have to demand it?
Naipaul answered the first question with gratitude: “It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system.”
There is a danger, to be sure, in answering the first question in this passionate way, or answering the first without answering the second, which could not be more troubling to people of my own generation. Ours is—Vietnam taught us nothing if not this—a civilization of half-truths struggling to become three- quarter truths; and civil society may produce idols of its own: fancy claims for market rationality, or polling data, or mass production, or shortened hemlines. Talk of a “clash of civilizations” is disheartening in this context, not only because it can lead to reverse Jihads, but because it assumes a West that is, as Naipaul fears, “reduced to a fixed system”; reduced, that it, to just another finished “cultural entity” which—in Professor Huntington’s words—is differentiated from other cultural entities “by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion.” This, alas, is exactly what the Iranian Mullahs would like you to believe. It accords with their sense of political legitimacy growing from their custodianship of an historical (linguistic, cultural, traditional, religious, etc.) community and makes their tyranny seem no worse than common people getting used to the force of their tradition. It makes American democracy seem merely traditional.
Alas, America’s various efforts to preempt such tyrannies, I.F. Stone once observed, too often meant getting into peasant wars on the side of landlords. And the bombs that are dropped to break the hold of tyrants can hardly be expected to educate their victims to the virtues of personal freedom. This last point is particularly vexing in the context of the fight against Iraqi “insurgents” and Palestinian “terrorist infrastructure.” No one can doubt the totalitarian political imagination of a leader who would dispatch a suicide bomber. But if the fight against such people means killing, as it inevitably does, many civilians, it raises the question of how a democracy can ever spikes terror and demonstrate the grandeur of democracy at the same time. And should we not—how did we put it in the Sixties?—try to understand where such people “are coming from”?
The point is, however, only those who advance Naipaul’s “elastic idea” would make that demand on themselves. And it puts us in a delicate contradiction. For the demand is both an implicit plea for tolerance and a tribute to a definite (if provisional) body of argument, embodied in a democratic constitution—itself passed from generation to generation so that it looks like a mere “tradition”; a constitution replete with familiar institutional arrangements (“a vast apparatus outside yourself,” “booksellers, critics, newspapers, and magazines,” etc.) which almost certainly come into conflict with the practices and values—the holinesses—of peoples we would otherwise wish to tolerate. Nor is belief in such a constitution just the result of—what did political scientists like Samuel Huntington try to teach us in the Sixties?—a “socialization process,” no more than Mill’s conception of happiness was just the product of his work at the British East Indian Company. We come to democratic tolerance as a philosophical prerequisite for the right of argument making itself: a Western idea that, since Socrates, has grown immense fighting other Western ideas, and which no person or hemisphere can really claim as its own possession. The greatest danger is in refusing to appreciate tolerance and its institutional prerequisites as axiomatic to the achievement of a tolerable conversation, including a theological conversation. This is not cultural imperialism or even narrow-mindedness. Even a school child can tell the difference between the right to speak one’s mind and the right to advertise Coke.
Gandhi once wrote that although he struggled for self-determination against Britain, he never forgot that he learned the principle of self-determination from Britain. This is a deceptively profound admission, and it addresses a very old pattern. Read the Books of Maccabees—perhaps the first multi-generational chronicle of a struggle for self-determination—and you find indomitable Judean clans from around 165 BCE who sound a lot like what we are hearing from Central Asia today; clans presumably leading their people to triumph against the Hellenism foisted on them by Assyria—a foreign power which, among other things, dared to elevate the faculties of personal reason above the “Holy Law.” However, the writers of the Books of Maccabees could not leave things there. The books culminate in an exhortation to justify the Law according to the “sovereignty” of reason (“Now reason is the mind that with sound logic prefers the life of wisdom; wisdom, next, is the knowledge of divine and human matters and the causes of these; this, in turn, is education in the law, by which we learn divine matters reverently and human affairs to our advantage…”[iv, 1, 15-17]). It seems that the West (or Northeast in the case of Judeans) may be beaten, but it also teaches a language of personal responsibility indispensable to societies that make room for people who write history.
If the defense of tolerance is implied by this language, it is because tolerance enables any debate for which historical evidence is organized. You cannot say we must try to understand others on their own terms and deny that all people are called upon to do so. You cannot come to a seminar, use words like “tradition,” “values,” etc.—the very categories of historical analysis, of historical writing—and fail to condemn societies that fail to institutionalize basic liberties. On second thought, you can. But then you cannot expect Naipaul to stay.
NOTES
1 Al-Ahram Weekly, Issue: 389, August 6 – 12, 1998.
2 See the second edition of my The Tragedy of Zionism, New York: Helios Press, 2002, p. 96; I took the liberty of translating the word “Torah” to “Holy Law.”
3 “A New King for the Congo,” New York Review, June 26, 1975.
4 “Among the Republicans,” New York Review, October 25, 1984
5 New York Review, January 31, 1991.