of courage. This was crucial not only to their own survival, I said, but to the survival of their city. My friend angrily replied that no analogy could be drawn to his unique circumstances.
“September 11th is something new,” he said. “Nothing can be compared to it.”
Our conversation ended soon after.
Which in time prompted me to reflect more systematically on terror—and on the power of art, literature, and ceremony to counter it, to bolster the spirit in the presence of fear. The argument that I developed, which started with identifying the body’s responses to fear (to flee, to lash out, to become paralyzed, to focus on the source of danger, to seek solutions, to rise to the occasion—reactions that for better or worse define individuals as well as societies), went something like this: poetry works by correspondence, linking one thing to another, past, present, and future, in order to enlarge the reader’s sensibility; fiction cultivates empathy, inspiring us to imaginatively inhabit other lives, other ways of being; and sacred ceremonies, which in many traditions are exercises in analogy, serve to mitigate various forms of terror, from individual existential anxieties to societal threats, such as what Americans experienced on 9/11, when a new paradigm took shape—a cultural framework whose parameters were still becoming clear the day that I sipped scotch by the pool in KL, catching occasional whiffs of smoke from the fires. The diplomat said that fear informed the American body politic, making it easier for my countrymen to think the worst of Muslims. For terror is the chief impediment of empathy and analogy, without which it is difficult to make sense of what seems foreign or strange; when terror blunts the mind’s ability to find analogies, to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, it becomes easier to fall for justifications of appalling deeds, like torture—“enhanced interrogation,” in Bush administration parlance, a distortion of the language integral to preparing Americans to accept hitherto unimaginable excesses, like torture.
In the American response to 9/11 some Malaysians found sanction for their darker impulses. Thus a cartoon on the front page of the PAS party newspaper likened the scandal at Abu Ghraib to the treatment of Islamic militants locked up in the Kamunting Detention Center: “Ini bukan Iraq tetapi ISA”—“This is not Iraq but the ISA” (Malaysia’s internal security service). Inside the paper was another cartoon: from behind the bars of a prison cell a shrouded figure cries, Arrgh! Adoi! Two men walk by. Prisoners of the USA? one asks. No, says the other, ISA! Indeed Human Rights Watch was about to issue a report connecting Malaysian prison abuses to the war on terror. In August 2001, when Malaysia arrested several members of PAS, the White House condemned the government for its violations of human rights. After 9/11, though, Malaysia and other US allies were given a free hand to deal with Islamic militants as they wished. That some of the 9/11 hijackers had met in KL in January 2000 to discuss plans for the attack reinforced the argument that to secure information about terrorist plots quickly, the gloves had to come off. The ISA had videotaped the al-Qaeda summit, but without audio no one recognized the seriousness of the threat. More forceful action might have prevented 9/11, though the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib called into question the wisdom of the argument that there should be no limits in the war on terror.
The eighteenth-century writer Edmund Burke summed up the British failure to understand the American Revolution with words that still rang true for the diplomat: “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” To which one might add this insight from the contemporary poet Geoffrey Hill: “Terror is opportune as is relief from terror.” In my clearest moments I understood that it was but a step from terror to courage, but how difficult it is to take that step when terror grips the soul. Literature and faith, art and ceremony—they only go so far.
“Another round?” said the diplomat.
“Definitely,” I said.
“Religious or cultural purity is a fundamentalist fantasy,” V. S. Naipaul argues in Beyond Belief : Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, his follow-up account of travels in Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia first detailed in Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism alarmed the writer, and if I admired the precision of his descriptions of the people he met and the places he visited, his storytelling, and his elegant synthesis of information, I was also struck by his assertion that “the zeal of converts outside the Arab world is more fervent.” It was the sort of sweeping generalization that inspires suspicion, even as I admired his attempt to explain the ferment in the region: “Islam is in its origins an Arab religion,” he writes. “Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert.” That is the problem, according to Naipaul. He describes himself as “a manager of narrative,” and the most problematic narrative for him is conversion, no doubt because his own biography, well known to his readers, is such a story: how a precocious schoolboy from Trinidad goes to Oxford on a scholarship and, by dint of hard work, transforms himself into a major English prose stylist, earning for his labors riches, a knighthood, the Nobel Prize in Literature. But religious transformation is another story—an act of erasure for which he has little sympathy:
Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.
Of course the same holds for Christianity, which from its origin made conversion central to its theology, as Paul learned on the road to Damascus: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold all things have become new.” Conversion stories, like stories of healings and miracles, provide the foundations of Christian belief. Moreover, Christianity’s holy places are located mainly in Arab and Jewish lands, only a handful of people read the languages in which the foundational texts were written, and in many societies that converted to Christianity the disturbances occasioned by the change of belief remain unresolved. Witness the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom, or the bloody aftermath of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. What tribe cannot be brought to a boil? The Hundred Years’ War, which some thought might be a model for the “long war” sparked by 9/11, proved that the converted peoples of Europe could be just as savage as anyone in the defense of faith. Naipaul’s thesis, then, was as suspect as any essentialist argument which blurs individual differences. But what is more individual than matters of religion? The individual is the locus of literature, as the Nobel laureate brilliantly showed in his novels.
The problem for a writer with a thesis is that anecdotes, facts, and insights may be arranged to support a story line at odds with a nuanced rendering of the material: one mark of an enduring literary work. The history of Islam, like that of Christianity, another conquering state religion, is too complicated to support a simplistic narrative, at least not in literature, which functions by complexity, gradations of tone and hue. Islam spread to Southeast Asia via trade, not conquest, and though it has the same universal aspirations as Christianity it also has a tradition of tolerance for other faiths, other ways of negotiating one’s time here below—a necessity for the preservation of Malaysia’s cultural mosaic. Near my hotel in KL, for example, was an Anglican church, where I attended mass one Sunday morning. The congregation was Chinese, the language of the service English, the guitar-playing minister a familiar spirit from my childhood. The history of religion in Malaysia is a history of shared space—a fact that Naipaul glosses over in his bid to speak in grander terms about the failings of the converted and of the faith itself.
He is on firmer ground in his portraits of individuals. “For Anwar Ibrahim,” he writes of the politician in Among the Believers, “Islam was the energizer and purifier that was
