V. S. Naipaul Quotes
Why do people willingly choose lives that restrict their intellectual freedom? What becomes of modern societies founded on Islam, whose strictest adherents long for a return to the time of Muhammad?
V. S. Naipaul, British Nobel Laureate in Literature, Quoted in New York Times Book Review, August 7, 2005
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There are few Islamic leaders who were so forthright about freedom of thought vis a vis religion.
Islamic modernists like Serageldin are many among the educated Muslims but their views are often drowned out by the violence and extremist statements of the fundamentalists. Ironically, the necessary intellectual freedom existed in the Islamic world one thousand years ago and Islamic science and other learning was as advanced as any and superior to most including the Christians.
In almost every election in those Islamic counties that have elections, the fundamentalist political parties almost always lose by large margins.
There are large areas of life and society in which all Arabs—especially in Saudi Arabia are expected to behave, believe, and think in certain ways. The modern Islamic religion governs behavior of all kinds and is very prescriptive. Everyone is expected to take it literally and behave accordingly. Individualism and even creativity except in prescribed areas is even regarded as sinful. Islam was not always such, and ironically when Christianity was in its Dark Ages and was even worse for the individual than Arab Islam today, the Muslims celebrated intellectual creativity and exploration of all ideas including those of the West. However, in the 12th century there was a “closing”—a narrowing of allowable Islamic thinking, and since then, Islamic people have had great difficulty with change or modernity. Not all Muslim nations are equally rigid but the Arabs are at the extreme among Islamic counties.
This statement was made 20 years before the Arab Spring of 2011.
This statement is so absurd, that one marvels that an agency of the United States Government could publish such a statement. It was all the more embarrassing in that the FBI had as one of its objectives developing relationships with Muslim communities across the country. The FBI did withdraw the publication, but there were dozens of FBI officials who read this and approved its publication. They were either themselves Islamaphobic and/or extremely ignorant. One of the worst things about such a statement, is that it does not warn about one real problem that some extremist Muslims want modern Islamic states to adopt a literal view of the Koran which reflects 7th century values, knowledge, and culture. Those fundamentalists have kept modernism from changing and developing several Islamic countries. Most Muslims nations have very little that resembles 7th century Arabia and a nation like Turkey is more modern than many of the nations of Europe.
The term “slave soldiers” oversimplifies the relationships which existed in Islamic societies. For example the Sultans of the Ottoman Turks established networks of non-Muslim minorities, Christians, Jews and others who while slaves could wield tremendous power. Grand Viziers were even slaves. The slavery concept meant that the Sultan had the power of arbitrary life and death over the soldier which is what he wanted for his key units. Islamic law prohibited Muslims from holding other Muslims as slaves.
Gabriel exaggerates in the sense that while the quotation is correct for many Muslims, it is by no means true of all. Iran for example is an Islamic theocracy, but Turkey is a 99 percent Muslim nation which is totally secular and in some ways is much more restrictive of Islamic teaching and practice than most secular democracies. The fundamentalist Muslim view of the state and religion is essentially the same as the ultra orthodox Jews and Christians. It is true that a greater proportion of Muslims believe in the merging of civil and religious law than Jews and Christians, but by no means all. The non Arab Muslims are much less likely to see the unity of state and religion.
They are so different that most people in the West think of what Khamenei describes as “religious democracy” as not even close to democracy—almost the antithesis of democracy, and Islamic fundamentalists perceive Western democracy as sinful and evil.
A large part of the spread of Islam was military conquest and conversion by the sword. However, the Arabs and other people of the desert were great traders and the trade routes went right through the newly Islamic areas. As the camels went, so did the new Muslims and many converted because Islam was a more modern and humane religion than what they had, and in some cases the motivation was to be more acceptable to Arab customers.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul TC, commonly known as V. S. Naipaul, and familiarly, Vidia Naipaul, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years.
