Book description
This is a book about one of the more important and unsettling issues of
our time. But it is not a book of opinion. It is, in the Naipaul way, a
very rich and human book, full of people and their stories: stories of
family, both broken and whole; of religion and nation; and of the
constant struggle to create a world of virtue and prosperity in equal
measure.
Islam is an Arab religion, and it makes imperial Arabizing demands on
its converts. In this way it is more than a private faith; and it can
become a neurosis. What has this Arab Islam done to the histories of the
non-Arab Islamic states: Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia? How do
the converted peoples view their past - and their future? In a follow-up
to Among the Believers
, his classic account of his travels through these countries, V. S.
Naipaul returns, after a gap of seventeen years, to find out how and
what the converted preach.
‘Sceptical, enquiring, sharply observant and unfailingly stylish’ Guardian
‘Peerless . . . the human encounters are described minutely, superbly,
picking up inconsistencies in people’s tales, catching the uncertainties
and the nuances . . . there is a candour to his writing, a constant
precision at its heart’ Sunday Times
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a
scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he
began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has
published more than twenty books of fiction and non-fiction, including
Half a Life
, A House for Mr Biswas
, A Bend in the River
and most recently The Masque of Africa
, and a collection of letters, Between a Father and Son
. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
