DEAR V. S. NAIPAUL, ISLAM IS A PRACTICAL POLITICAL IDEOLOGY TO FORM THE STATE
Elder Naipaul, it is my prayer that God will allow an opportunity for you to read the published version of this essay about a chapter in one of your book. I have not written to you in person because you are a literary celebrity hence any contest against your idea or ideas must be an item of public discourse. And also the book on which I am basing my arguments is such a serious work that merit joining the list of your oeuvres. Before I set on what I want to correct you, but only at ideological level , I want to assure you that this is not a spurn of your efforts nor a riposte fuelled by a motivation to establish grains of ideological jejune in your literary career. Kudos to you for the service you have done to literature, categorically for the efforts you displayed in your book House for Mr. Biswas.
Today my concern is all about your book that you first published in 1981. The book is Among the Believers which also has a subtitle, An Islamic Journey. This is a wonderful book, burning with facts and intellectual audacity beyond match. However, Part two of the book has a second chapter under the title Karachi Phantasmagoria. In which You have dealt with international politics of the time as influenced by the contemporary ideologies; communism, capitalism, Islam and Christianity. You picked Iran and Pakistan as geographical back-ground for this chapter, to assess the intellectual feasibility of Islam as political ideology capable to form a state or not. Unfortunately, you were forced by the forces of the last century to make deliberate and false conclusion that Islam is devoid of any political praxis. You dismissed it as only emotional, fanciful and limited to the emotions of religious neurosis but not fit to be tested as an ideology to form the state the way Marxism formed the Soviet Union and capitalism formed America. You dismissed the then inception of the young Islamic state of Pakistan as a Karachi Phantasmagoria only waiting to be liberated from its social and political mire through obvious advent of communism. Elder, You were wrong, and you intellectually goofed.
I similarly subscribe to socialist ideology of politics and government just as you do. But my intellectual leeway permits me to have a conviction that any type and form of government can work as long as there is no external and internal conspiracy. Capitalism has worked not because it is ideologically perfect but because it has survived betrayal, socialism worked in Russia and still working in many other political civilizations not because of any inherent superiority in its ideology, I tell you it is onlylimited to the barbs of betrayal and conspiracy thrown against it.Be informed Elder Naipaul that Islam has been now battled tested by time and space; it has proved that it works politically. Evidently, more than ten countries in the Northern part of Africa have Islamic governments, just as Pakistan, Turkey and very many other countries in the Arabic emirates do. What I mean is that Islam as a political ideology has established and maintained more states than socialism. What has made Islam to achieve all these monumental political results is the inherent divine humility as vouchsafed by the Quranic teachings asa basis of the Islamic state or society or community. Contrastingly, socialism as a political ideology has been failing because of its inherent over-secularism as vouchsafed by the Marxist ideology of the state. A blend of this experience must give calcify into a political crucible that for one to reign he or she must accept God.
When Tony Blair argued that a clash between Islam and the West was a clash about civilization, he technically erred just as you did, perhaps due to your similar back-grounds of strong Anglicism in your intellectual upbringing. The clash between Political-Islam and Western Capitalism is the clash between two giant civilizations of world, a fact which has to be humbly accepted by respecting a political fact that the west has no moral duty to dictate how a government must look like in Iraq or in Botswana, it can be Monarchy or a Quranic theocracy as long as it is been accepted by the majority of the citizens. This is practical and modern perspectives of political nationalism as recently attested through the most informed collective and socialized democratic actions of Brexit and Donald Trump.
It is understood that the mid of last century was the era of political under-estimation of religion. This was the era in which a Marxist statement that religion is the opium of the poor was on fashion among revolutionary intellectuals. The capitalist world had equally given respect to science than religion; African intellectuals like Wole Soyinka had already mistaken invention as man’s worst invention only hiding behind the cloak of faith as its alibi to be justified in the worship of those in power. Okot P’ Bitek in his Artist the Ruler had already expressed his intellectual doubt and skepticism about the cadaver of Jesus saving the whole world and a socially inferior person like Muhammad who married a woman, infact a widow twice his age to be the center of worship in form of Islam. This was also the era of racial misunderstanding even among the literary luminaries like Jagjit Singh in his play Sweet Scum of Freedom accussed Africans politicians of being dictators and African women being prostitutes praying to have an Indian client for a fair pay, Sulaman Rushdie and his intellectual sarcasm about Prophet Muhammad and the seminal deficiency of the Quran, or Yan Martel and his derogatory position about spiritual worthiness of Muslim prayer in his book Life of Mr. Pi. That was that. All this intellectual dissonance among those influenced European social thought is not only limited to the last century it goes far back, even Samuel Taylor Coleridge came up with the ideology of social system which wanted social comfort for each and every human being, he called it pantisocracy, but in sharp contrast he dejected his wife and also his poetry expressed negative feelings about Kublai Khan.
As a socialist ideologue Elder Naipaul, I believe you or we must have evolve and revolutionize ourselves against a visceral ignorance that only one type of ideology is fit to form the state. World politics must be understood in terms of political contingency model.Ths is an approach where different societies work well with different forms of governement.The way net-work governance of tribal Chiefdoms have been working in Somalia, Council of presidents in Norway and Sweden, Bicameralism in America and Britain, Life presidency in Rwanda under Paul Kagame or socialism in Cuba and socialist-capitalism in China. Such practical experiences are redolent of Karl Marx who authoritatively pointed out that colonialism was a blessing to Africa and Indians, the same Karl Marx who died fighting for the freedom of the oppressed. He At sentimental level he was wrong, but technically he can be justified as he was only observing the social fact of political contingency.
Alexander Opicho
(From, Lodwar, Kenya)