Author: Adam Shatz
Publication: The New York Times
Date: October 28, 2001
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/magazine/28QUESTIONS.html
Q.: Although your prose has been
universally praised, you remain an object of considerable controversy.
You have been charged with insensitivity and pandering to Western prejudices
in your writings about Islam.
A.: Well, that is the trouble with
writing about Muslim people. There are people of the universities who want
to run you out of town, and they're paid to, and so they pay no attention
to what you actually say.
Q.: You have described the Taliban
as vermin.
A.: No, that's my wife! She's a
Pakistani journalist who for many years wrote a column. She writes from
that kind of perspective.
Q.: Are you surprised by Osama bin
Laden's support in Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Iran -- countries
you wrote about in your travel books on Islam?
A.: No, because these are the converted
peoples of Islam. To put it brutally, these are the people who are not
Arabs. Part of the neurosis of the convert is that he always has to prove
himself. He has to be more royalist than the king, as the French say.
Q.: Is this what you mean when you
write about Islam's imperial drive to extend its reach and root out the
unbeliever?
A.: Yes. It is not the unbeliever
as the other person so much as the remnant of the unbeliever in one's customs
and in one's ways of thinking. It's this wish to destroy the past, the
ancient soul, the unregenerate soul. This is the great neurosis of the
converted.
Q.: What then makes Islam's appeal
so potent?
A.: I'll tell you something from
the eighth century. The first province of India to be conquered was the
province of Sindh, which is today part of Pakistan. The king of Sindh resisted
quite well. Then one day it was reported to him how the invaders said their
prayers in unity as one man, and the king became frightened. He understood
that this was a new force in the world, and it is what in fact Muslims
are very proud of: the union of people. That idea of brotherhood is very
powerful.
Q.: What about nonfundamentalist
Islam?
A.: I think it is a contradiction.
It can always be called up to drown and overwhelm every movement. The idea
in Islam, the most important thing, is paradise. No one can be a moderate
in wishing to go to paradise.
The idea of a moderate state is
something cooked up by politicians looking to get a few loans here and
there.
Q.: What do you think were the causes
of Sept. 11?
A.: It had no cause. Religious
hate, religious motivation, was the primary thing. I don't think it was
because of American foreign policy. There is a passage in one of the Conrad
short stories of the East Indies where the savage finds himself with his
hands bare in the world, and he lets out a howl of anger. I think that,
in its essence, is what is happening. The world is getting more and more
out of reach of simple people who have only religion. And the more they
depend on religion, which of course solves nothing, the more the world
gets out of reach. The oil money in the 70's gave the illusion that power
had come to the Islamic world.
It was as though up there was a
divine supermarket, and at last it had become open to people in the Muslim
world. They didn't understand that the goods that gave them power in the
end were made by another civilization. That was intolerable to accept,
and it remains intolerable.
Q.: Do you think the events of Sept.
11 influenced the committee's decision to give you the Nobel Prize?
A.: I don't know. I thought beginning
in 1973 that I was being considered. And then I felt that great campaigns
had been waged against me, quite successfully.
Q.: By whom?
A.: People who were pillorying
me as a racist and anti the third world.
Q.: Do you find the controversy
around your work exhausting?
A.: No, it doesn't bother me at
all. It's important for writers to generate this kind of hostility. If
a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
Q.: You have admitted that you are
no historian of Islam. Which scholars of Islam do you rely on?
A.: No, no, no! I travel, and I
meet people, and they tell me about their lives. I don't need to read the
scholars. If I travel in India or Africa, the best way to go is with a
very blank mind and let the facts emerge.
A scholar would look at these people
and draw conclusions. I don't do that. The reader looks at these people
and makes a pattern, and the pattern depends on the reader.
