I have to say that V.S. Naipaul, the new Nobel laureate, has some very arresting things to say about September 11 in the New York Times Magazine. Since they resonate with my own views – but from someone with an infinitely vaster knowledge of the subject, I’m particularly struck. Here’s a selection of the interview:
“Q: What makes Islam’s appeal so potent?
A: I’ll tell you something from the eighth century. The first province of India to be conquered was the province of Sindh, which is today part of Pakistan. The king of Sindh resisted quite well. Then one day it was reported to him how the invaders said their prayers in unity as one man, and the king became frightened. He understood that this was a new force in the world, and it is what in fact Muslims are very proud of: the union of people. That idea of brotherhood is very powerful.
Q: What about nonfundamentalist Islam?
A: I think it is a contradiction. It can always be called up to drown and overwhelm every movement. The idea in Islam, the most important thing, is paradise. No one can be a moderate in wishing to go to paradise. The idea of a moderate state is something cooked up by politicians looking to get a few loans here and there.
Q: What do you think were the causes of Sept. 11?
A: It had no cause. Religious hate, religious motivation, was the primary thing. I don’t think it was because of American foreign policy. There is a passage in one of the Conrad short stories of the East Indies where the savage finds himself with his hands bare in the world, and he lets out a howl of anger. I think that, in its essence, is what is happening. The world is getting more and more out of reach of simple people who have only religion. And the more they depend on religion, which of course solves nothing, the more the world gets out of reach. The oil money in the 70’s gave the illusion that power had come to the Islamic world. It was as though up there was a divine supermarket, and at last it had become open to people in the Muslim world. They didn’t understand that the goods that gave them power in the end were made by another civilization. That was intolerable to accept, and it remains intolerable.”
MBEKI’S MADNESS: Much of the world has long criticized South African president Thabo Mbeki’s criminal lack of response to the AIDS epidemic in his country (although some would rather hammer the pharmaceutical companies who have made HIV a manageable disease). Many, including me, have also hoped that Mbeki would soon see the light. Recent speeches suggest otherwise. Last Wednesday in a speech to parliament, Mbeki called anti-retrovirals a plague in themselves: “I’ve said to the Minister of Health, have we looked at the radically revised guidelines from the US government issued at the beginning of this year, about treatment with anti-retroviral drugs, where they have said that these drugs are becoming as dangerous to health as the thing they are supposed to treat.” A few weeks before, he played the race card against those South African doctors who dissented from their government’s dangerously negligent policies. “And thus does it happen” Mbeki argued, “that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards, to demand that because we are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its passions to reason, we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease… Convinced that we are but natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.” This is just kooky – an attempt to dispel Western medicine as equivalent to bigotry. And it would be merely absurd if it weren’t leading to the early deaths of millions.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “In the West, we have become habituated to a certain picture, according to which puritan zeal had accompanied the early stages of emergence of a modern economy, but in which its culmination was eventually marked by a very widespread religious lukewarmness and secularization. . . .The virtue inculcated by puritanism leads to a prosperity which subverts that virtue itself, as John Wesley had noted with regret. In the world of Islam, we encounter quite a different situation. Though long endowed with a commercial bourgeoisie and significant urbanization, this civilization failed to engender industrialism; but once industrialism and its various accompaniments had been thrust upon it, and it had experienced not only the resulting disturbance but also some of its benefits, it turned, not at all to secularization, but rather to a vehement affirmation of the puritan version of its own tradition. Perhaps this virtue has not yet been rewarded by a really generalized affluence, but there is little to indicate that a widespread affluence would erode religious commitment. Even the unearned oil-fall wealth has not had this effect.” – Ernest Gellner, “Postmodernism, Reason and Religion” (1992).
The Dish 