Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

This is a book about one of the more important and unsettling issues, of our time. But it is not a book of opinion. It is in the Naipaul way-a very rich and human book, full of people and stories

Islam is an Arab religion, and it makes imperial Arabizing demands on its converts. In this way it is more than a private faith; and it can become a neurosis. What has this Arab Islam done to the histories of Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia? How do the converted peoples view their past - and their future? In a follow-up to Among the Believers, his classic account of his travels through these countries, V. S. Naipaul returns after a gap of seventeen years to find out how and what the converted preach.

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, and meets people weary of the religious rules that govern every aspect of their lives. Pakistan, in a tragic realization of a Muslim re-creation fantasy, inherited blood feuds, rotting palaces, antique cruelty - and then President Zia installed religious terror with $100 million of Saudi money. In Malaysia, the Muslim Youth is alive and growing, and the people are mentally, physically and geographically torn between two worlds, struggling to live the impossible dream of a true faith born out of a spiritual vacancy.