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Nobel person with a noble gift

Premen Addy

HAVING kept Sir Vidia Naipaul and the world waiting for a decade and more, the Swedish Nobel committee decided in its wisdom that it was time to end the suspense. His Nobel Prize for literature was long overdue. Had he burned incense to the nostrums of p olitical correctness, the honour, probably, would have come his way much earlier.

Sir Vidia is perceived by his peers and the vast majority of his readers as a colussus in the world of English letters, its most distinctive voice in which there are no echoes of influence, unique in its intellectual range and creative endeavour, luminou s in its moral integrity. The story of his early life in Trinidad, where he was born into an Indian family of no great means, and his later encounters with adversity in London, following his period as a student at Oxford, is moving. More extraordinary wa s his determination to make writing his calling in the face of such daunting obstacles. The early promise of a young novelist ripened into true greatness, making his struggles the stuff of legend.

Even his critics, of whom there is no lack, concede that there is no finer craftsman of an English sentence. We can say of Sir Vidia Naipaul what Mathew Arnold said in praise of Dryden: that he wrote, a prose such as we would all gladly use if only we kn ow how.

Naipaul has opened new vistas in our understanding of post-colonial societies. His novels have ranged from comedies in the local setting of Trinidad, including his masterpiece A House for Mr Biswas, to the darker landscapes of Africa. His reportage and t ravel books involve social enquiry set on a historical canvas.

The Nobel Committee drew attention to Naipauls incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories. His explorations in the Southern states of America A turn in the South - was a work of acute insight informed by a warm humanity towards the people of the old Confederacy and the defeat that has marked them since the American civil way back in the 19th century. He has examined the tribulations of the non-Arab Muslim world and emphasised the need to liberate it from its barnacled cage of received wisdom which has shut out the light.

The contemporary Islamist neurosis and rage, the schizophrenic discords, the vaporous conspiracy theories of limited minds, according to which the destruction of the World Trade Centre was the handiwork of Jewish plotters bent on discrediting the Arab an d wider Muslim fraternity; these are the symptoms of an affliction prognosticated by Naipaul with rigour and uncompromising honesty. Among the Believers - An Islamic Journey and its sequel, Beyond Belief are works for our time; classics of travel and soc ial enquiry that are surely destined to resonate far into the future.

Naipaul has been denounced by members of the Left-liberal club of humbugs as anti-Islamic and racist. But abuse, like patriotism, is often the last refuge of scoundrels and charlatans. To extol the virtues of Voltaire as a champion of free thought and de nounce the cruelties and dogmas of the church he steadfastly fought is to guarantee membership of any masonic lodge of progressives, those who can detect the impending tides of historical movement, who can read the signs and organise the future before it s arrival. But similar talk or releasing the faithful from the baleful shadow of Islamic clericalism is apt to provoke charges of Islamophobia.

The radical chic cant is as debilitating as any rancid orthodoxy. It is integral to inquisitorial plebeian culture. Any body of thought, religious or secular, should have sufficient strength to withstand close critical scrutiny. In the absence of such in ner strength, terror and intimidation become the favoured instrument to extract obedience from an unwilling and brain-washed population. Maoism and radical Islam have more in common than either would prefer to admit.

Lady Nadira Naipaul, herself a Muslim from Pakistan, has expressed outrage at the falsehoods and calumny hurled against her husband by the harpies and cyclops Third World rectitude. She says dismissively: My people are not represented by the so-called Mu slim Council of British Muslims, who ironically have escaped to the West and can sit here waving the green flags, criticising the very government and laws that protect them. My people and that is 80 per cent of rural Pakistan are crushed by mullahs who m they loathe but are mute due to fear. She referred to the screams of women in Pakistani prisons, tortured by jailers whose political masters are routinely described as moderate by the great and good of the West.

And have the adversaries of V.S.Naipaul, she asked, ever stood with a group of crusading women in the High Court of Pakistan it is women only, men are too frightened to attend to face fierce mullahs crying for the death of a terrified 12-year-old Chris tian boy accused of blasphemy? The trial, she went on, was a sham. The boy received the death sentence but was acquitted on appeal.

Barbarism in Pakistan reigned supreme. When the intellectual life of a country dies and there is no hope, we have dishonest clerics and turncoats like (Zulfikar) Bhutto, who played the Islamic card and sent us on the road to hell.

Men and women are at their best when they are free from victimhood. They can build their lives on individual choice as Sir Vidia Naipaul has so magnificently done. Britain, his home, and India, home of his ancestors, are best placed to lead the applause for the remarkable man who is our sardonic blessing.

To face the truth as it is and not how we would like it to be is to define a situation without which any attempt at a solution is doomed from the start. Politically correct obfuscations and empty liberal pieties would ensure that we keep chasing our tail s into eternity. A Naipaulian view perhaps but dramatically sustained by the events of September 11. The popular BBC television Panorama programme Koran and Country exposed the visceral hatred of Britain and British liberal values that permeate the Mus lim (mostly Pakistani) enclaves in northern England and the midlands. Every person, young and old, was solidly behind Osama bin Laden. Religion and religious solidarity took precedence over loyalty to the secular authority of the country. These are migra nt communities who chose to settle in Britain for the opportunities it offered. Most have benefited from the services of the welfare state. Of appreciation, however, there is little sign.

Sue Carroll, a columnist for the tabloid Mirror, berated the liberal press for the frenzied calls for Lady Thatcher to be bound, gagged and removed from public view after her declaration that British Muslim leaders were slow to condemn the attack on New York. If I didnt think she had a point before I watched Panorama, I hate to say it but I do now...my tolerance barometer took a bashing on Sunday night when I watched the Imam at Birminghams Central Mosque, Shaykh Riyadhulhuq, an articulate and educated man, denounce Tony Blair as a leader who has failed miserably, despite the tea parties at Downing Street, to convince Muslims of this country that hes not against Islam...such naked intolerance one man declared the Taliban the ideal government made my stomach turn. If the dream is of a regime so intolerant of other religions that Christian churches and synagogues are forbidden and the right to practise any other faith is outlawed, these people are in the wrong place here ...So thank you, Panorama, for showing us so clearly the people who hate this country and detest living here.

The American journalist and historian, William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and witness to the depredations of Hitlers Nazi regime, spent a year, prior to that experience, with Mahatma Gandhi at his ashram about which he penned a graphic and moving memoir. He described that stay as the greatest stroke of fortune that befell me.

He went on to write: I count the days with Gandhi the most fruitful of my life. No other experience was as inspiring and as meaningful and as inspiring.

But this exalted view is not shared by the Pakistani journalist and cricket commentator Omar Kureshi, who denounced Gandhiji as a hypocrite and a fake who was largely responsible for the communal violence that disfigured the Subcontinent in 1946-47. It w as Jinnah apparently who was the peacemaker. It was this peacemakers call for a Direct Action Day in mid-August 1946 that led to a bloodbath in Calcutta, but turning history on its head has become the latest surrealist art form.

A Bangladeshi professor of history at Dhaka University, no less, one Syed Anwar Hussain, has written a book for children extolling the virtues of Adolf Hitler. A columnist of the Al- Akhbar newspaper in Egypt is another of the Fuehrers enthusiasts. Thank s to Hitler, of blessed memory, who on behalf of the Palestinians took revenge in advance against the most vile criminals on the face of the earth. The columnist Ahmed Ragab continued: Although we do have a complaint against him, for his revenge was not enough.

Al hayat al Jadida, a newspaper funded by the Palestinian Authority wrote apropos of the September 11 events in New and Washington: The suicide bombers of today are the noble successors of their predecessors. These suicide bombers are the salt of the ear th, the engines of history...they are the most honourable among us.

The neurosis detected by Naipaul requires healing by a physician who must come from beyond the ranks of us mortals.

(The author, a visiting tutor in Modern Asian History at Kellog College, Oxford, is a political columnist of the London- based India Weekly.)