Among the Believers

V. S. Naipaul

4 ideas

1. The communist interpreter and the hanging judge

   In revolutionary Iran Naipaul travelled with Behzad, a young communist interpreter who rejected religion yet backed the Islamic revolution, expecting it to bring the social justice he wanted. With him Naipaul met Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, the revolutionary judge who had ordered many executions, and found him cheerful, restless and joking about his work. The episode shows secular radicals lending their energy to a religious upheaval they assumed they could later steer, alongside a new power that treated killing as a casual matter.

2. Rejecting the West while depending on it

   The revivalists Naipaul met condemned the West as corrupt, yet relied on its technology, medicine, universities and state machinery, none of which their doctrine could produce. Naipaul calls this a parasitic stance: they want the goods of an outside civilization while rejecting the intellectual habits that created them. The gap feeds rage rather than creation, because the rejection itself guarantees continued dependence.

3. Faith offered as a substitute for politics

   Revivalism promised that restoring the pure faith of the Prophet's time would by itself produce a just state. Because it had no worked-out program for law, economics or institutions beyond that promise, it could topple a regime but could not govern. Naipaul argues that each failure then pushes believers toward stricter purity rather than toward political thought.

4. Converts turned away from their own past

   Naipaul reads the revival among non-Arab peoples as partly a convert's condition: the faith places sacred history in Arabia, so a people's pre-Islamic past can come to count for little. In Pakistan he found schoolbooks that began history with Arabia, the Prophet and the early caliphs, leaving the Hindu and Buddhist centuries of the land out. Through this lens, some of the religious fervour he met can be read as a reach for an identity rooted elsewhere.

Save and mark ideas in the app