Malaysia

The section encompassing Naipaul‟s journey is entitled as ‘Conversations in
Malaysia’ with a subtitle The Primitive Faith. It starts with the excerpts from Joseph
Conrad‟s work on Malaysia An Outcast Of the Islandsin which a Malay is described as
someone primitive, deprived and with a poor temperament. The second extract is from
Portraits from Memoryby Bertrand Russell which describes Malays as being emotionally
poor and historical orphans. They have little to pass on to their generations as compared to
those nations whose history is the achievement of slow and steady struggle i.e the Europeans.
First Conversations with Shafi: The Journey Out Of Paradise
Malaysia has been approached by many religions Buddhism and Hinduism through
merchants and priests. It was in fourteenth or fifteenth century that Islam reached Malaysia
through an Indian traveller. Islam spread as an idea here. It came as a purification of the
mixed religion and the most passionate missionaries came. Naipaul believes that the greater
the distance from Arabia, the more ferocity in the Muslim faith. Malaysia is a land of Malay
sultans, warriors, tribal men and Chinese peasants. The Europeans reached this region from
the coast.
Malaysiais rich in natural resources. Malaysia‟s economy is based on colonial
foundations and the hard work of the Chinese slaves that were imported to work there.
Chinese have advanced in economy and technology but they are kept out of the political
stream. The government remains in the hands of royal or old Malay families. Malaysia is a
humid country with cloudy weather most of the time. The old colonial town of Kuala Lumpur
is surviving with the buildings from British era. The newly-built sky scrapers cover. The
region is densely covered by forests with occasional habitations. The Malays dress like Arabs
with turbans and gowns and women wear veils.

The money generated from the naturalresources goes down to the villages creating an
educated class. The young people, now adorned with modern civilization feel that they
cannot go back to their village. With limited skills, they feel every way is blocked. Their
villages are no more the same and they cannot fit in the fast lives of the cities so they feel
alienated. Islam serves them to get even with the world, to justify their social rage and racial
hate. Islam teaches them to pull down materialism and work for an Islamic state. For
Naipaul, Islam is a passion without a constructive programme.
The guide who accompanied Naipaul was Shafi. He had come to Kaula Lumpur from
m his village in the north as part of his scouts group and then never returned. He was now
part of an Islamic movement ABIM run by Muslim youth. Shafi still had that disturbance of
migration. He missed his village in every way. He believed that the embellishments of the
city life had made him forgot his religious duties and commitments. It was if he was losing
himself.
Shafi said that the city life was freer without any restrictions like that of village.
People roamed about like stray goats. However, freedom must be within a certain framework.
One should know where should know where he wants to go and what he wants to do. His
primary aim in coming to the capital was education but now it contradicted with the freedom
here. All the people coming from the village were used to live under religious bounds. Here
the values contradicted.
Shafi was brought up in bare minimum resources. Life was simpler and meaningful.
The city life was a waste in every aspect. People are running after the facilities the modern
world has brought. The trade takes away the produce of the village people and brings in
return the products of modern world like televisions, refrigerators etc. Shafi wanted to go
back to the village and live in a well-knit community. It is devoid of wastefulness.It was free

of physical, mental and social pollution.The relations between men and women were not
allowed outside wedlock and blood relations.
Shafi worked full-time for ABIM which was founded by Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar got
his education from a British-founded school. Due to his interest in religion he began studing
it more keenly and started giving speeches about Islam. He had met Ayatollah Khomeini and
believed that Islam was the sole remedy for Malaysia‟s social, cultural, political and moral
problems. He believed in the Islamic economic system and travelled extensively to propagate
Islamic beliefs.
It was the Festival of sacrifice that Shafi came. He was well-dressed. After two days
of spending time with Naipaul, his hesitation had dissolvedand now he was more eager to
answer questions. Naipaul wanted to know about Shafi himself so they went and sat in the
coffee shop. He asked him what he thought about pools and the white women. Shafi replied
that they were simply foreigners for him. They had more clear and natural pools in their
villages. When he was young they used to hunt birds with a catapult.
Recitation of Koran was one of the other activities of Shafi‟s childhood. Religious
education was mandatory for everyone, big and small. The verses were to be obeyed although
one did not understand them. The Mullah instructed on cleanliness and how to pray. First
time the books were given free. Any child who missed the religious lessons was punished
without the parents‟ intervention. They were taught how to maintain human relations and
value them.The people of the village were very much enterprising. They knit their own
clothes and grew their own plantations. They owned lands and houses. The village people had
contempt for Chinese people, their culture and literature. Astray pigs and dogs from the
neighbouring Chinese village were stoned.

Intellectual pursuits were not of much concern for the villagers. All school education
was in Malay; however, religious education was mandatory. This made them lag behind in
technical and secular modern learning. They were baffled by the latest technological
developments. But Shafi was satisfied in being a backward but morally stronger man. He
thought that the village would be there as it is so they needed some basic amenities like
schools, bus services etc. By the end of the conversation Shafi was tired and depressed by the
hotel environment of wastefulness, strangers and indifference to the rules.
Shafi‟s grief and passion in multi-racial Malaysia was immediate. His wish to re-
establish rules was also a wish recreate security of his childhood, the Malay village life he
had lost. He felt like a man expelled from paradise.
Brave Girls
Suffering from insomnia, Naipaul had been waking up in the middle of night. The
nearest coffee-shop would be deserted having uninviting smell of cleaning chemicals.
Ordering coffee from room service at around five in the morning too proved to be an ordeal.
The coffee was made from sour milk so was the boy who brought it. A crowd had gathered in
the racecourse nearby, where there were no horses. Gambling on horse racing was prohibited
as par Malaysian Islamic law; these people were in fact gathered about a radio, transmitting a
race somewhere else. Around the racecourse were trees Naipaul could remember from his
childhood: banana trees, frangipani, another tree with a yellow flower and the great Central
American saman or rain tree.
The exhaustion of sleeplessness from previous night had turned to anxieties and
irritation: the bad milk had denied him coffee, unanswered cables. He went to complain about
them to the girl at the desk where he chanced to read the other cables from guests who had
previously stayed at the hotel. These comments described the scandalous lack of regard

towards hygiene in so many words as “urinating and purging” on hotel floors and cutlery.
The disgusting nature of this revelation made Naipaul nauseous, which substantially reduced
his excitement for the day. He met Shafi and Nasar, a friend of Shafi‟s, at Equatorial Hotel.
Nasar was a small and slight man of thirty-four, who like Shafi was a part the
movement ABIM. They discussed how the white people just blended in the background,
unnoticed and Shafi never thought of them. The white and the native Malays moved in
separate worlds. Neither of them touched the egg sandwich Naipual had ordered for them,
cautious of eating non-Muslim food. Exiting the hotel, Naipaul observed the figure of the two
friends, Nasar, small and frail, limping down the language ramp with Shafi, tall and
protective, guiding him. He thought of Behzad and the girl in Iran, how revolutionaries like
them were invisible.
Next day Shafi arrived to accompany Naipaul to ABIM and promised to find him
some „brave girls‟ who would talk to Naipaul. While stuck in a traffic jam, Naipaul asked
Shafi if he still felt the city strange, considering that Shafi was from a village in far northeast.
Shafi said no, but he did felt like a stranger in his own village now, with things, places and
people drastically changed. They arrived at the ABIM building, which had the school
building adjacent to it. Naipaul met a middle-aged Australian man with a skullcap and
glasses, sitting by himself there to learn about Islam. He observed the young Malay men
around, who would light up at being told the purpose of Naipaul‟s visit. As Shafi had work to
do, he left him with Nasar.
Naipaul describes how supposedly Nasar‟s ancestors, once Arabic-educated and
leaders in their own way had in modern Malaysia had become “a lower-middle class family”
undergoing transformation in colonial and postcolonial era. Nasar himself had had a part of
his education from England, a diploma in International relations. He opined how big powers

weren‟t really interested in peace; instead they were interested in their own spheres of
influence, selling arms. He wasn‟t impressed by the British ideals of Individualism, which
denied the consequences. He understood that if modernization in Malaysia is not checked it
too will disintegrate along the same lines as the Western society, lacking consolidated social
structure. Technology should not affect the social fabric, which included prohibition of
alcohol and free-mixing of sexes, which was why they had separate school for girls and boys.
The Western philosophy of women‟s liberation was problematic as it caused unemployment
for men.
Shafi and Nasar left for the Friday prayers, after introducing Naipaul to the brave
girls. The girls were of different racial types. One was brown-skinned and slender, the other
was plump, pale and round faced. They both wore long dresses and had covered heads. The
brown-girl had a slack looking black head-cover while the other was neater with pink head-
cover. They both were students at the ABIM school and were a bit nervous about the
interview. The first question Naipaul asked was about their headdress, called tu-dong in
Malay. They replied that the headdress was to cover the hair which shouldn‟t show. And it
must be covered so because men are sexually attracted to the beautiful hair. When asked why
it was bad, they replied that it was a sin for the woman to have men attracted to her. Girls
could only show her face, and hands. The question if feet should be covered too was decided
by a verdict which came from someone sitting outside.
The main philosophy behind covering their beauty was to preserve their beauty and
gentleness. Though they could not express why it was beneficial to remain veiled they
understood the purpose of it. They acknowledged their lack of knowledge, declaring they had
to learn Arabic to understand Koran. They criticized how the government schools focused
only on academic and scientific studies neglecting religious studies; girls had no time to pray.
These girls should be entreated gently to pray. For though it was not bad to pursue a career

and have a job, but one cannot always be materialist as the world was not eternal, one had to
think of the afterlife too. One had to mindful of the death that can come at any time. It was
desirable to go to heaven where one would get to see the Prophet; nothing on earth is
comparable to that.
When asked about reading, they replied that they had read Barbara Cartland, Perry
Mason and James Hadley Chase, which were short light romances, promoted in
commonwealth countries meeting the imaginative needs of the people new to modern way of
life. A fact acknowledged by one of the girls but it was all fantasy they said. When asked if
the life was better either in town or in the village, they two differed in their opinions. One
said it was more peaceful in village but the other felt that town was centre of all activity
hence more exciting; it was also a hubbub of religious movement taking place. When asked
about the strangers they had to encounter in the town the girl in black scarf indicated that
non-Malay i.e. Chinese were the cause of trouble as they are were immigrant brought by
British rule. They monopolized the economy. Naipaul observed how even after so many these
Chinese were still considered immigrant whereas the girl in black scarf whose ancestors were
from Indonesia was accepted socially being a Muslim. To be Malay was to be Muslim.
Araby
V.SNaipual talks about the Islamic commune in Kuala Lampur. They rejected modern
ways of living and also rejecting modern goods. They formed a little piece of land and lived
like old Arabs. They did not welcome visitors. When he visits to that community nothing
happened for many days. After that Khairul telephoned him. He one of te commune, his
English accent was clipped and sharp just like Japanese. Khairul asks from him that for what
purpose he is interested in that community? He answered him that spiritual purpose but he
actually want to know about the economic ideas of some Islamic groups in Malaysia.

One evening Khairul with his three men visit to his place in their turban and long
green gowns. Those men include khairul, haji, journalist and one man who look like Chinese.
Khairul is the translator of all of them because he knows English. Haji told them that his
father‟s family was head-hunters before converted in Islam, after that his father became
religious teacher .When he died he left only one dollar. Haji says that his father taught me
everything like Koran, Arabic, Napoleon and Hitler. His father told that we cannot compare
Napoleon with Khalid, because Napoleon withdraws his forces in order to meet his love. On
the other hand Khalid sacrificed his life for Islam. Haji also tells him that there are still
Hindus wedding ceremonies in villages. There is no sense of Islam in village life
Khairul states that tobacco is not encourageable in Islam but not forbidden. Haji told
him that they are using tobacco because it is manufactured by Jewish. They say that they
must not consume their products because they are the enemies of God. Haji also says that „if
you know the Koran you know everything; economics, politics,family laws –and all the
principles embedded in the Koran‟. Haji tells him that Jews are genius race. Another thing he
tells him that before the time of Moses, there was a Jewish tribe in Arabian lands. Among
them there is a prophet he ordered them to pray to God on Saturday. But they ignored the
commands of the prophet. God swore to convert the tribe to monkeys. This story is mention
in Torah in Koran. Haji says that as a Muslim we believe in the God and the Old Testament.
Narrator argues about the past of haji father‟s family that they were head-hunters. Haji
answered that that was the wrong way of life due to which Islam come into being. He gives
the example of Caliph Omar who buries his daughter alive but after embracing Islam he
become different person. Haji also claims that all the believers of Islam have a grace on their
faces and spirituality and beauty in their lives. Khairulalso tell him about the dress code of
women and men in Islam. In Islam men have to cover them from the navel to the knee. For
women cover everything except the face the hands.

Khairulalso explains him that all matters fall in the five categories between allowance
and disallowance i.e haram and halaal, which would make things easy to understand. Naipaul
asked him if coughing was haram or halaal, as if to test him. After leaving them, he moves in
the commune and describes the people who were dressed like Arabs and waiting for the
prayer call. He hires a taxi back to his hotel.
The Spoilt Playground
During his visit in Malaysia Naipaul went to Shafi‟s village Kota Bharu which
according to Shafi was “once unpolluted, the people were pious, dignified and not
materialistic” unlike the present situation. When he enters Kota Bharu he designates savage
imagery to the place. He describes the village as a rubber estate, a place covered with jungle
and with a fusion of nonstop downpour. The village has “little low shops, little low houses,
tiled roofs, and corrugated iron”. There he meets Rehman who is a government employee and
three head teachers. Among the three men there is a lecturer who is a professor of philosophy,
a registrar and an Arabic teacher. During their conversation the lecturer shares his experience
with Arabs at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo which becomes quite intriguing for Naipaul
for his further study on Arab people. The lecturer says that the Arabs were undisciplined and
unreliable. While soon after making this statement he himself becomes an object of study for
Naipaul as he wants to hear more about The Al-Azhar.
Another man who is a registrar shares his three days experience that he spent in
England. He builds a negative picture of people living in England. According to him they
have absence of manners in their lives, no ethics and morality and no sense of decorum. He
gives example of three things which he finds immoral in England and compares it with
people in Malaysia. Registrar says that people in England travel underground; there is a
speaker in Hyde Park which announces that 60 percent of men are homosexual and men and

women don‟t feel ashamed while embracing in public. For Rehman people in Malaysia don‟t
mix their private life with their domestic life. There private life in secret and sacred for them.
They feel that people living in West are lost in their own world. During their conversation
they are joined by an Arabic teacher who claims that people are turning to Koran as they are
tired of novels because novels are also written by lost people who themselves have no sense
of direction in their lives and thus provides no immediate cure to their problems.
Naipaul assumes through their discussions that these people are happy and satisfied
with their lives as they used the word “content” again and again during their conversation.
Naipaul says that here at this part of Malaysia people are optimists, they have a strong believe
in their religion and they know that God will provide for their sustenance no matter how large
their families are or how poor their condition is. Naipaul says that “Islam for these men is
part of their contentment” unlike Shafi‟s Islam which was “revolutionary, serving no cause”.
The next stop during Naipaul‟s visit in Malaysia was Penang on the West coast.
Unlike Kota Bharu the West coast was more developed with the British plantations and
factories working under energetic Chinese. Penang being more advance in nature also had an
international airport. Here Naipaul meets Abdullah, a man of thirty four and Muhammad.
They both are unlike Kota Bharu‟s people not at all content with their present situation.
Abdullah talks about the city‟s dissolute condition and says that there are „international
companies but low wages, the casualness of Malays, their inability to compete and the need
for Islam” is what Malaysia is nowadays facing.
Emphasizing more on the colonial past Naipaul asserts that the people living in
Malaysia with Chinese feel like strangers in their own land. There is a constant rift between
Chinese and Malay people which is quite visible in their faces. Naipaul when ask
Muhammad about his colonial past, Muhammad, says that there has always been a Christian

and alien atmosphere. Living under colonial dominance Islam was never been taught to us.
Having a Muslim background their present was quite unIslamic and their identity fragmented.
They were confused between the two schools of thoughts, things which were taught in
Christian school and things which they believed throughout generations. Their ideas about
life, death, society and nature were a mixture of Christian and secular beliefs. For instance
their idea of conquering nature was based on Western concept of ecology and environment.
During this process they used to find an easy solution in Islam and their faith in God which
for Naipaul is an abstract belief. These people are living their lives with no sense of
reformation, they are dependent on other people‟s ideas and thoughts and it is hard for them
to get themselves out from these ideas.
Naipaul has shown that the Malay people have no account of their history they are
aimless people living in a limbo with no sense existence and direction. Their faith has made
them an abstract man living in a vague idea of utopian world. To be civilized for them is a
matter of correct religious beliefs. The only difference between old and new Malay was the
difference between Chinese and Malay people. Chinese people were more humble towards
modern life realities. They were more powerful and energetic unlike Malays. Naipaul
believes that religion is diverting Malay people from their true purpose of life, it is the reason
they are still retrograde. And for this reason they despise Chinese and call them commercial
lovers while they are aesthetic devotees.

Analysis
Naipaul‟s writings also include „accurate ethnographic observations‟. His style gives
the text an anthropological touch through a certain objectivity and indifference. He describes
landscape, topography and people. Due to his detached perspective, he depicts humans as
„objects‟. Since these details are the result of „colonial gaze‟, this style gives Naipaul a
certain „narrative authority‟. He portrays the weather, buildings, dresses and locations with
profound detail. For example, in the opening chapter, Naipaul mentions, „Malaysia steams. In
the rainy season in the morning the clouds build up‟. (228). He states that Malaysia „produces
many precious things: tin, rubber, palm oil, oil‟. Similarly in the second chapter, the trees
around the racecourse are described in detail. (244)
While in Kuala Lumpur, he describes the old colonial town with „old tile-roofed
private dwellings, originally British; the rows of narrow two-storey Chinese shop-houses, the
shops downstairs, the pavement pillared, the pillars supporting the projecting upper storey‟.
(228)He also mentions the attire of Malay people who „dressed as Arabs, with turbans and
gowns‟. The girls wear veil, socks and gloves. (229). The head dress in Malay is called a „tu-
dong’. When he meets the two girls in the second chapter, he describes their appearance in
much detail from their dresses to skin colour. This detached description of human beings
makes them treated as an object.
The vulcanization of travel writing and fiction attains its height in Among the
Believers. He uses many fictional elements which blur the thin line between a travel writing
and fiction. Naipaul incorporates the elements like theme, imagery, tone, characterisations
and use of dialogue. He integrates the themes of confusion, stagnation and decay.
This work is not objective because it carries certain themes throughout. There
are themes of futility and decay. Naipaul‟s eye only captures grotesque and ugly details. He

sees the Malaysian land or every Muslim land in general, with the corroded and dusty lens.
The lodgings, streets, weather and people are all described in dark and stark vocabulary. The
conversations with the people carry a theme of confusion. The overall physical, emotional
and psychological picture of the Malays is that of despair, misery and lacking originality. All
these themes are maintained through the apt use of imagery, tone, dialogues and character
descriptions. All of them are addressed in the following passages.
Be it landscapes, people or locations, the visual representations as given by Naipaul
are grotesque and dark. In the third chapter, he has used harsh, hot and dry imagery for
example: „The heat which is in the town was hard to bear. The trees, cattle which would have
now suffered in the sun.‟(254) He uses disgusting imagery for these people e.g. the way haji
cleans his nose with his finger. The imagery of decay is also visible where he describes that
in rainy season, the creepers race up the steel guy ropes of telegraph poles; the overwhelm
dying coconut branches even before the branches fall of‟. (228)
Naipaul‟s tone takes on various shades. Mostly it remains pessimistic throughout with
occasional glimpses of irony and satire. Shafi, his guide in Malaysia was a defiant of the
modern world. Naipaul, however, mentions sarcastically that „Shafi…had been made by the
world that had released his intelligence; that was the world that had released his intelligence‟‟
(234). He also remarks that ironically, „ritual cleanliness had nothing to do with the
cleanliness for its own sake… There were rules for villages; there were no rules for towns.‟
(244).
In chapter two, the girls told him that it felt good to read English romances because it
contained big houses and big cars. The author comments satirically if „these Islamic
ducklings…already secret city swans‟ against the Islamic teachings to reject materialism
(252). While asking from them about categories of halal and haram, he mocks the Islamic

principles by asking Khairul to describe coughing in these categories of permissibility and
impermissibility. (276).
Another feature of fiction seen in Naipaul‟s travel writings is the characterisation of the
people he meets on his journeys. He describes them as fictional characters with ample detail;
from the tips of their hair to the soles of their feet. Whether it‟s Shafi, his guide, the two
school girls or the ABIM founder Anwar Ibrahim, all are defined in all their facets. For
example, while describing the two school girls he writes that „one was brown-skinned and
slender; one was pale, plump, and round-faced. They both wore long dresses and had covered
heads. The brown girl had a head-cover in thin black cotton that had crinkled up and looked
slack; there was about her a general adolescent untidiness which was fetching. The round-
faced girl was neater. A white kerchief was drawn tightly on her head, and over that she had a
pink head-cover that was pinned below her chin.‟
The use of dialogues in Naipaul‟s narrative adds to the dramatic form of the
travelogue. The interviews he takes from various people as transformed into dialogues as
being carried out between the characters of a fictional work. For example, the conversation
between Rehman, the lecturer and the registrar is written in dialogue with Naipaul posing
questions and people answering them. Similarly, throughout the section, all conversations are
presented in this manner.
An analysis of Among the Believers shows that Naipaul has amalgamated the genres
of travel and fiction to create an entirely new one called „travelon‟ or „novelogue‟. The use of
various travel strategies through the tools of fiction produce a narrative that the readers find
pleasing to read. The instances from history or journalistic sources give him an authorial
authenticity.His time to time commentary and critical views add to the validity of the
narrative. For him, the world is an arena with innumerable stories to be picked up and

reproduced.In short, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey is not only a travelogue but a
complete aesthetic text in itself.

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