Orientalism Beyond Belief: Critiquing the Problematics of V. S. Naipaul’s Islamic Excursion

This study aims to offer a critical analysis of V. S. Naipaul’s second Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998), which chronicles the author’s excursions to the 4 non-Arab Muslim countries of Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. This critique is presented, firstly, through problematizing the author’s theorization on the theme of Muslim conversion— which, according to Naipaul, has bred nothing but neurosis and nihilism in Muslim societies—and then through analyzing representations of the post-Revolutionary Iran of the late 90s. We argue that Naipaul’s representations fall within an Orientalist frame of reference in which Iran and its people are portrayed through various tropes of Othering in a narrative fraught with disinformation, exaggerations, and reductive treatment of complex sociopolitical phenomena. Finally, Naipaul’s reasoning in formulating conversion coupled with his myopic approach undermine the authenticity of his representations, resulting in what Said (1998) has dubbed “an intellectual catastrophe of the first order” (p. 42).