V. S. Naipaul's Travel Anecdotes and Daniel Pipes' Historiography: A New Historicist Reading

Abstract

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018) describes experiences of his travels from August 1979 to February 1980 to four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia – in Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981). After sixteen years, in 1995, he revisited his impressions in Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998). Since then, critics have debated the (in)authenticity of Naipaul’s narratives in these travelogues. This article attempts a new historicist analysis of Naipaul’stravelogues within the historiographical framework of Daniel Pipes’ In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (1983). It argues that Naipaul’s anecdotes and Pipes’ historiography are complementary in terms of their production in, and impact on, Western culture. Such anecdotal historiography, this article argues, is a reflection of the authors’ psychological and ideological position within the politico-cultural discourse involving the West and Islam in the post-Iranian Revolution period.