Naipaul on Islam's `fantasy of lost glory'

Byzantine Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem Sophronius watched in horror as Caliph Omar rode into the holy city triumphantly on a white horse and knelt in prayer at the Temple Mount in February 638 CE. He thought he was watching the Abomination of Desolation that Prophet Daniel had predicted. Heartbroken, he died a few months later. Omar built a mosque on the Temple Mount along with Al-Aqsa Mosque to commemorate mihraj (night ascension of Muhammad who is believed to have ascended to heaven from that spot in Jerusalem).
That was the beginning of the Islamic conquest of the Levant that finally led to the decline of the eastern Roman Empire as Byzantium was known and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Christians of the Middle East today form a small minority: just 14 million living amid 180 million non-Christians, mostly Muslims. Coptic Christians in Egypt, Maronites in Lebanon, Syrian Orthodox Church and Christians in Palestine and Turkey are experiencing the finale of a plot of history that started unravelling in the early seventh century. But Christian world is not sentimental about it.
Historically real or perceived injustices have, however, never failed to haunt the world of Islam and ensuing sentimentalism allows Muslims to be always on a denial mode whenever injustices have been committed in the name of their religion. V.S. Naipaul's Beyond Belief (1998) exposes Islam's incursions among non-Arab peoples in the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, Iran and Malaysia. The book based on his travels in these lands and meeting with people there does not stop half way in its bid to lay bare the thorough victory of Islam over the converted people. Naipaul, in fact, turns the table against Islam and seeks to puncture its sentimentalism. Islam as a conquering power may be arrested in the West, but it is spreading in the east, says Naipaul.
Islam's fantasy of the lost glory, according to Naipaul, is best exemplified in the creation of Pakistan. The Muslims who had been in power in northern parts of the subcontinent were `wounded' by the decline and the final loss of Mughal power with the coming of the British.

"The British period…was a time of Hindu regeneration. The Hindus, especially of Bengal, welcomed the New Learning of Europe and the institutions the British brought. The Muslims, wounded by their loss power, and out of old religious scruples, stood aside. It was the beginning of the intellectual distance between the two communities. This distance has grown with independence; and it is this…that at the end of the twentieth century has made India and Pakistan quite distinct countries." (p 265)

It was poet Iqbal who fed the fantasy with much-needed intellectual and emotional endorsement. Quoting the poet's 1930 speech, Naipaul shows Iqbal's hostility to the idea of a polity built on the basis of nationalism. For Iqbal, the idea went against the Islamic principle of solidarity. The best part of Naipaul's book is his exposition of the collapse of the principle in Pakistan which Iqbal espoused as a model of the new Muslim polity. Bangladesh broke away from this polity, Baluchis started an insurgency that failed and mohajirs (Muslim migrants from Indian side who went to settle in the new polity) staged a revolt that was crushed. Iqbal, who thought that the Muslim identity could bulldoze regional and other identities, has been proved wrong.
# Fundamentalists, however, do not acknowledge this as a failure of the idea of Islamic polity. Their attitude was and still is:

"If Iqbal's Muslim state had had its calamities, it wasn't the fault of Islam; it was only the fault of the people who called themselves Muslim." (p. 312).

In the fundamentalist scheme of things, it is the Mullah or Ayatollah who keeps the converted people in non-Arabian lands `on their toes', says the author who is, provocatively, persuasive when he observes:

"[T]here probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs. The Gauls, after five hundred years of Roman rule, could recover their old gods and reverences; those beliefs hadn't died; they lay just below the Roman surface. But Islam seeks as an article of faith to erase the past; the believers in the end honour Arabia alone; they have nothing to return to." (p. 354).

In Islam, he says, converted people are deprived of their past and are required to treat Arab sacred places as their sacred places.
Beyond Belief is a sequel to his Among the Believers. While the latter is based on his travels through Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia, the former is an account of his return to these countries after a gap of seventeen years. The book helps readers delve deep into the roots of the Muslims' sense of glory, loss, alienation and pain that define their dream to recreate a pure society which is believed to have existed in the early days of Islam.
Sentimentalism of Muslims stands in sharp contrast with the pragmatic attitude of Christians. For majority of Christians today, the loss of the Levant, the region where their religion was born, is no longer a religious issue. It is history and history has its own nuances that are best understood from perspectives that were alien to Patriarch Sophronius who in his old age led the defence of Jerusalem as its magistrate against the Muslim conquerors till the time to surrender came, and, when it came, insisted that he would surrender the city of the Holy Sepulchre to the caliph of Islam and not to any general of the invading army.