BEYOND BELIEF - Abacus

This book is 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 stories. 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 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. 'Skeptical, enquiring, sharply obervant and unfailingly stylish in his formulations... remarkable... Naipaul's writing is suffused with a Conradian wistfulness about the tropics'