Naipaul travelled these countries.

What he found in his opinion is an immense confusion, which

"potentially will not have found an end in a thousand years". And this is due to the Islamic society,
which has pulled over the peculiarities of every people and tribe. This fascinates him again and again,
though he himself as an Indian comes from a culture where the wheel of rebirth always stops at a
similar confusion of the society, just to go on to whirl around unaffected.
Islam has answered at least what the people are in their next rebirth, one thought, but the author
makes clear, that in Islam as well nothing seems to be clear and the uncertainty is creating neurosis.
Questioning what they are or not the people develop inevitably fantasy conceptions, thus Islam has
an element of neurosis and nihilism in the converted countries. And this is also what he felt very
distinctly in the contact with his travelling acquaintance. These people are maladjusted and what is
worse: Such kind of countries could very easily be brought to boil!
The author himself regards his book as a continuation of the former one. Meanwhile his ideas about
Islam are a bit clearer. The stories he is writing should characterize the countries and the people. He
is convinced that other people could generate different stories. But the picture that would have been
painted would have been the same. The multi-layeredness of the stories is illuminating enough.
Naipaul is imagining himself as an observer of a process. There is a transformation from ancient
convictions of belief, nature religion and cultures in which the centre is a ruler or local deity to
revealing religions of the kind of Islam with their comprising philosophical and social matter. But also
with compulsions and demands.
Somebody who knows the first book will recognize the repetitions. This is not any deficiency, rather it
is a fact that not so much has changed in those countries. Still they say in Pakistan: "Nobody really
tried Islam!" to excuse the failed project "the first Islamic state in history" or better, not to have to
persuade oneself of the failure. Or, also famous: "There is freedom in Islam!" namely then when
oneself has subdued to Islam.
And again to the author happens, what other travellers in Islamic countries again and again report.
The word Jihad is in the Quran never understood figuratively. To imagine it as just an allegoric
expression is a blasphemy. Compare this to official statements!
On one side the author deplores the proceeding destruction of tradition, but he felt worse about the
lack of critic, he so often encounters. Origination and history virtually changed to some kind of
neurosis. Too much is ignored or excluded, the delusion becomes rampant. The delusion is not
limited on books, it encroaches the whole life of the people!

the author is hard and he is not very optimistic that this for what he has plain words in the case of
Pakistan is not also correct for the other non-arabic muslim states: "still captured in bondage, still
deeply uncultivated and occupied to spoil the history right into the school books and to demolish the
community, for which it was meant to serve, nothing else in the mind than to create here and now a
cultural desert".

the author emphasizes Islam be the most adamant form of imperialism, cause it leaves no margin for
tradition, heritage and history and claims an own total identification. This is exemplified in Bali, where
south-eastern Asian women, mostly gay and good-humoured, mainly Hindus, still have their
traditional superb head of long hair, while their muslim neighbours look with their headscarf
unpleasant and unhappy. They are a dreary sight comparatively. But this is only the subjective view of
the prejudiced western observer who does not look like a muslim.

the rise of fundamentalism has shattered the hopes of people for freedom, certainty, belongingness,
and self-assurance. Islamic fundamentalists are essentially utopians with a totalitarian attitude: "The
cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only to one people - the Arabs, the original people of
the Prophet - a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages and earth reverences. These sacred Arab places
have to be the sacred places of all the converted people. Converted peoples have to strip themselves
of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such a thing can be
arrived at), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism."
One of the interesting ideas in this book is that great conversions take place when the pace of change
overwhelms nations or cultures that "have no means of understanding or retrieving their past"
because they lack the education, the language, and above all the freedom to reflect on it. Given the
importance of understanding one's own past in order to gain an identity, Naipaul sees Islamic
fundamentalism as a dead-end road: it denies the converted peoples an open-minded education, a
free language, and independent thoughts.
Naipaul tries to re-create the past and preserve the present. He writes grass-roots history in his
interviews, and it is amazing how many details he weaves into his narrative. His obsession with facts
and details is only a logical consequence of his belief in the importance of grasping reality (past and
present),

Regulations, Naipaul finds again and again, are everywhere, "deforming people's lives." They have
taken the place of spontaneity.

Beyond Belief is about the need for roots -- connections with ancestors, traditions, and land. However,
Naipaul sometimes seems to forget that people also have a need for truth -- for universals that
transcends the particular.

As an American interested in genealogy, I always ask people from all over the world about their
ancestry, family and culture. The people from the Indian subcontinent used to puzzled me the most.
While most of the Indians I met seem to refer to themselves as a product of Aryan and Dravidian
cultures (depending upon where they are from), the Pakistanis seem to be keen on establishing their
Arab ancestry. Some claimed that they were from the Holy prophet's clan and some seem to believe
that they were descended from his daughter. One lady I know says she traced her family back to
Jordon though her grandfather had migrated to Karachi from Bihar in India. As far as I can tell, the
Pakistanis and the Indians (especially North Indians) must have an identical ancestry. Naipaul does a
great job in explaining the paradox. It also explains the behavior or the Muslims from the Indian
subcontinent.

I always thought Pakistanis were proud of glories of Mughal history. Surprise, surprise, not quite.
Naipaul says they have almost rejected that history and are busy 'manufacturing' their roots in the
sands of Arabia.I hope this is not true. This books gives me a sense of hopelesssness because if
India and Pakistan don't agree on their common past, they will not work towards common future.

This is a fantastic book about how the fundamentalist streak in Islam has wiped out the history of
many nations from their collective psyche. A bold statement that Islam, at least what we see today, is
Arab imperialism parading as a religion. Those fundamentalist muslims who disagree would do well to
note that he is speaks well of Malaysians who have avoided falling into the bottomless pit that has
swallowed Pakistan and Iran.

when he writes: the Muslim polygamy, as ridiculous it might appear to be for people from outside,
bestowed untold misery on many; this was inherited from generation to generation, because the
people stood under constraint to hand over the mistreatment - the jealousy, the tortures, the neglect
which they had to suffer.

He observes and occasionally between the lines tells you how he thinks, how he feels. He views
Islam as more of a conquering force taking away local religion and tradition, complicating things
instead of making them better. Perhaps his strongest thoughts come out on Pakistan, a land carved
out of India based on a poet's dream of having a land of their own for the Muslim's of India. You
realize what a grave impact this has had on the psyche of Indians and Pakistanis alike.
As a Western reader, this book was enlightening. I went into it looking for a deeper understanding of
the way Islam impacts an individual's thought processes, the way Islam might paint the Western
World, the way Islam might spur an individual to action based on their beliefs.

The ambition of the Islamic fundamentalists is not less than the take-over of this part of the world: `In
politics you must not expect honesty and morality. The question of winning is the end result. If you put
your ideas into the mind of your enemy, and he practices it, you are the winner.' Therefore, the motto
is `to control the school is to possess power.'
It's not a book of opinion. It's a book of stories." These are stories about people in four Islamic
countries (Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia) that simply say: to live a life BEYOND BELIEF in
the Third World means maintaining one's hopes and dreams against the daily grind of disillusionment
and poverty. This disheartening experience is central to Naipaul's writing. There is always the theme
of a "universal civilization" with center and periphery and the idea of the pursuit of happiness is at its
center. In both his fiction and travel writing he simply believes that this is an "immense human idea"
and it colors all he sees and writes about. Another theme closely linked to this is Naipaul's search for
how we fill the psychological and spiritual center. Take the example of the young Iranian student who
he describes as someone who "couldn't step outside himself to consider his life and motives." The
same spiritual quest can be seen in the lifestories of a Malaysian playwright and a Javanese poet.
The playwright's story also involves the man's father and his unfinished house. Again we are dealing
with Naipauls' interests. It is no coincidence that the persons Naipaul is drawn to are writers like
himself or men who worked out the center and periphery struggle of father and son. Nor is a house
insignificant in the context of what it means to possess a piece of ones own sacred ground.

What comes across is a rich tapestry of stories that illuminate the social tensions from conflicting
organisations of society. In rural pre-industrial villages, there is the warm support network of families
versus the rigid, often violent, caste hierarchy and ignorance of other societies. In literate industrial
states, there is the massive expansion in life opportunities and individual expression versus the
necessity of adopting a transcendent monolithic belief structure (in the shape of islam), which
obliterates village life. Finally, there is the inklings of an emerging liberal democratic sentiment that is
linked with a nascent prosperous middle class with the associated traumas of existential angst,
divorce and living in a world devoid of god-given meaning. Sometimes Naipaul panders to a naive
Roussean praise for rural life. Other times, he acknowledges the improvements brought about by
literate industrial authoritarian regimes.

Naipaul's essential thesis here is not complex, but it does have the ability to offend. Naipaul comes
from the largely Western school of separation of Church and State. In other words, he believes that a
healthy, complete human culture is always complemented by religion, but should NEVER be
dominated by it. He illustrates this point by examining the lives and psychologies of individuals in the
so-called "conquered" Islamic states, with a particular emphasis on suggesting that religious dogma
creates an incomplete and unhealthy human condition in its defenders and practitioners. In this way,
Naipaul's thesis is similar to that presented by Milosz in THE CAPTIVE MIND: Only when freed from
dogmatic captivity is the human mind capable of transcending our most basic appetites. If you are
comfortable with that idea you will probably like this book. If you are uncomfortable with that thought,
you're probably going to hate it.

I can see how certain Muslim or mideastern readers might hate this book. Much of this writing is
concerned with the need for freedom from fear and want (conspicuously absent for many in most of
these countries); the tyranny of religion; family abandonment justified by religion and polygamy;
obsession with following rules to the exclusion of common sense; abuse of the unprotected, and so
on. I had thought that the Koran forbid the killing of one Muslim by another, but that is rampant
throughout the book. In particular, on the section about Iran, Naipaul refers to the shortage of
husbands, because so many young men had been killed in the war with Iraq. Also one can sense
through the biographies that there are different motivations for following Islam. These include forceful
coercion, the necessity in order to conduct commerce, a source of hope, sense of community and
being part of group, the need to earn a living and so on.
While Naipaul covers the positive sides of Islam, which include comfort, a sense of hope, and a sense
of instant community and oneness with a huge group of others, the most interesting and memorable
material is also the most negative.
Naipaul's prologue is especially powerful, in which he describes the ". . .crossover from old beliefs,
earth religions . . to the revealed religions - Christianity and Islam . .. . like a cultural big bang, the
steady grinding down of the old world."
Most of Naipaul ties in very closely to David Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, in which he
discusses how tyranny (religious or political) can be debilitating to the progress of a nation.
The book is hugely relevant to 9-11-01 and the fact that it was written in 1995, makes it all the more
remarkable. I give this fascinating and highly informative writing the strongest recommendation
possible.

You get some wonderful unique insights in this book. The Design Institute with idiotic ideas
for peasant tools...the Ghandi politicians with immaculate white home spun costumes.

Naipaul thinks that India as it was formed by independence politicians was doomed to failure
without any cohesive sense of race and no intellectual vigour. This was caused by a over
romantic view of the ancient Indian village culture with its supposed democratic traditions and
the tendency of Indians to believe too much in religion and caste.