Rating: 
Summary: Nice writing style
Review: I find this book easy to follow and a pleasure to read. Naipaul's journeys are very revealing, even though this book was written more than 20 years ago. The author shows what ticks in the Muslim mind. That to many Muslims Islam is everything, and such western ideas such as progress, equality (between believers and Kafirs-nonbelievers), and democracy must take a back seat to the Koran and its teachings. And no, Islam does not equal progress nor equality. Hence it explains why they are so few secular and democratic Muslim countries. It also explains the treatment of minorties in Islamic countries. In many ways Muslims are backwards, they lack many of the western ideas and concepts that help make a civilization more enlightened. Their sciences are still bound to religion, while in the Western world science grew its own roots apart from religion. Muslims are willing to rage against "evil" western ideas, but they cannot offer up any suitable ideas of their own. Naipaul does a great job in showing all of this.
Rating:
Summary: Really, really good
Review: I personally don't like overly good or overly bad reviews - but I can't help it with this book. Written in 1979-1982, every word that is written in this book is still holds true today. Well-written, flows smoothly, highly recommend!
Rating:
Summary: Even Better than its Sequel
Review: I read Beyond Belief and enjoyed it so much that I purchased and read his earlier book on the same topic, Among the Believers. This is probably the best book on Islam -- and especially on Islam in non-Arab countries -- that I have ever read. It is a depressing and moving book and even more relevant today than it was when written.
Rating:
Summary: Perceptive, Honest, Disturbing
Review: I was pleasantly surprised with the sincerity and honesty with which Naipaul engages his subjects, especially towards the end of the book and his journey, when his conclusions have started to form and he is looking for reaffirmation of his earlier impressions. He knows that the pattern that is emerging is critical of the people he is talking to, yet he listens to each person earnestly, trying to understand how they see themselves and the world around them. Sometimes he is merely an interviewer, yet to the main characters through whom the story evolves, he is like a friend, telling them when he disagrees with them and making them think through their own feelings.I do not see any hate or malice in this book, either towards 'the believers' or Islam. He is definitely sympathetic towards the believers he talks to, which should not and does not prevent him from criticizing their human frailties just as he celebrates their strengths. His critique of Islam too, follows from his analysis and should be refuted similarly. Coming back to read these reviews after reading the book, I find that some of the emotions expressed in the severest reviews fit the pattern described by the author. Ironic! There is a natural flow in the narrative in moving from Iran through Pakistan and Malaysia to Indonesia. Was that a deliberate choice ?
Rating:
Summary: A very accurate description of Islam in Malaysia
Review: I'm very impressed by Naipaul encounter in Malaysia. Reading the book brings me back my childhood memories of life as a non-muslim in Malaysia. This book has exposes the reality that Islam couldn't cope or unsuitable with the modern way of life.
Rating: 
Summary: Culturally occasionally interesting, but too traveloguish
Review: I've traveled throughout most of the world and am very familiar with the cultures Naipal describes. My hesitation on ramping this book up to a 3 or 4 starts is its slow pace and travelogue style. While he delves into various cultures, the book waxes in too much minutiae and too little plot. Writer's self-indulgence, instead of the reader's is the byword for this attempt at a good story.
Rating:
Summary: Culturally occasionally interesting, but too traveloguish
Review: I've traveled throughout most of the world and am very familiar with the cultures Naipal describes. My hesitation on ramping this book up to a 3 or 4 starts is its slow pace and travelogue style. While he delves into various cultures, the book waxes in too much minutiae and too little plot. Writer's self-indulgence, instead of the reader's is the byword for this attempt at a good story.
Rating:
Summary: Cold,hard,frightening truth
Review: In his travels throughout the Islamic world,Naipaul documented prevailing attitudes and a worldview that has finally hit home with the West. The point cannot be missed by anyone who reads this book that Islamic fundamentalism is essentially the longing for time to reverse itself so that the glory days of the old world may return again. This is symptomatic of many of the hellish regimes and political movements of the 20th century.In nazi Germany it took the form of reviving Norse gods,symbols and using pagan rituals to invoke power and fortune for the Aryan conquerors. As the constant flux of 20th century life began to set in,a large chunk of the world affected by such mass upheavel and endless change reverted to nationalistic fervor,religious fundamentalism and hopes for utopia based, oddly enough,on modern science and technology-the very means by which the modern chaos enveloped the world. Islamic fundamentalism is little more than a childish,confused,frightened,angry response to a world that doesn't any longer make sense to those who hold a medieval worldview.It has nothing positive,intelligent,useful or constructive in its ideology.It is bankrupt and doomed to bring more of the same misery,envy,hatred,poverty and warfare. This is a book everyone ought read to remind the West and any civilized people in the world what it is we are up against.
Rating:
Summary: Cassandra, proven right
Review: In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 assault, America, egged on by its liberal intelligentsia, went through a typically oversensitive and
overgenerous phase of wondering what we had done to cause such hatred of us in the Middle East. However, the level of public anger that the
murders awoke greatly shortened this period of angst and left only a few inveterate self-haters asking these questions...Meanwhile, the rest of
America quickly moved on to the more accurate question of..."What Went Wrong?" with Islam to
reduce a once great religion to an ideology of little more than hatred of the West. Oddly enough, the search for answers to this question sent us
scurrying back twenty years, to a couple of books and essays by V. S. Naipaul that were roundly condemned at the time they were written,
particularly in the Muslim world, but which can now be recognized as brilliant and prophetic... Among the Believers recounts the author's seven month sojourn across Muslim Asia, from Iran to Pakistan to Malaysia to Indonesia and back
again to Iran. It should be remembered that he traveled in the immediate wake of the Iranian fundamentalist revolution that had overthrown the
Shah, with at least implicit approval from Western intellectual elites, and ushered in a supposed new dawn of reform. But instead of finding
cause for hope in the post-Colonial muscle flexing of Islamic regimes, Mr. Naipaul warned instead that the Islamic world was unreconciled to
modernity and perhaps irreconcilable. Here we find Naipaul's assessment of Islamic fundamentalism, one that is finally coming to be accepted,
though two decades too late for the folks murdered last September : In the fundamentalist scheme the world constantly decays and has constantly to be re-created. The only function of intellect is
to assist that re-creation. It reinterprets the texts; it re-establishes divine precedent...The doctrine has its attractions. To a student from
the University of Karachi, from perhaps a provincial or peasant background, the old faith comes more easily than any
new-fangled academic discipline. So fundamentalism takes root in the universities, and to deny education can become the
approved educated act. In the days of Muslim glory Islam opened itself to the learning of the world. Now fundamentalism
provides an intellectual thermostat, set low. It equalizes, comforts, shelters, and preserves. In this way the faith pervades everything, and it is possible to understand what the fundamentalists mean when they say that
Islam is a complete way of life. But what is said about Islam is true, and perhaps truer, of other religions--like Hinduism or
Buddhism or lesser tribal faiths--that at an early stage in their history were also complete cultures, self-contained and more
or less isolated, with institutions, manners, and beliefs making a whole. The Islamic fundamentalist wish is to work back to such a whole, for them a God-given whole, but with the tool of faith alone--
belief, religious practices and rituals. It is like a wish--with intellect suppressed or limited, the historical sense falsified--to work
back from the abstract to the concrete, and to set up the tribal walls again. It is to seek to re-create something like a tribal or
a city-state that--except in theological fantasy--never was. The Koran is not the statute book of a settled golden age; it is the
mystical or oracular record of an extended upheaval, widening out from the Prophet to his tribe in Arabia. Arabia was full
of movement; Islam, with all its Jewish and Christian elements, was always mixed, eclectic, developing. ... The West, or the universal civilization it leads, is emotionally rejected. It undermines; it threatens. But at the same time it
is needed, for its machines, goods, medicines, warplanes, the remittances from the emigrants, the hospitals that might have
a cure for calcium deficiency, the universities that will provide master's degrees in mass media. All the rejection of the West
is contained within the assumption that there will always exist out there a living, creative civilization, oddly neutral, open to all
to appeal to. Rejection, therefore, is not absolute rejection. It is also, for the community as a whole, a way of ceasing to strive
intellectually. It is to be parasitic; parasitism is one of the unacknowledged traits of fundamentalism. There in a nutshell...is as good a description as anyone is offering today, some two decades later, of why Islam has turned
so radical, so violent, so anti-Western : it has come to be a kind of retrograde utopianism which locates its Utopia not in some bright and idyllic
future but in the temporary medieval community created by the Prophet Mohammed fourteen hundred years ago. It is not the West per se that
Islam is at war with, but the progressive tendencies of the West which keep bearing the whole world ever further away from a past that Muslims
long to return to. At first glance the attacks of September 11th may appear to be a kind of mindless nihilism, but from the perspective that
Naipaul grants us, we can see that they were a thoughtful form of nihilism. It becomes obvious that at least fundamentalist Muslims believe
that for Islam to return to its former glory, the West must be destroyed. I've enjoyed several of V. S. Naipaul's novels, found others less effective, but this is the best book of his that I've read. He combines a
novelist's gift for characterization, with the observations and scene-sketching of the very best travel writers, then adds to the whole the kind of
insightful religio-political analysis that too few Middle East experts have offered us over the last quarter century of Islamic confrontation with
the West. It is altogether fitting that he was given his long overdue Nobel Prize in 2001, because this book does so much to explain the horrid
events of that year. GRADE : A
Rating: 
Summary: Religion can never fail, except of course, when it does.
Review: In this enjoyable travelogue, set in the backdrop of late 1970's Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, Naipaul confronts a way of life that he had never given a second thought to as an intellectual, coming from a secular Hindu family in Trinidad. Although this handicaps him in some ways (e.g. he uses the word "Sabbath" for the Friday Ju'mah), it is also a source of some novel thoughts about Islamic ideals (insofar as they can be articulated) versus actual Muslim practice, and Islamic "Revolutions." In his accounts of meetings with Muslims of various levels of religiosity Naipaul attempts to understand how Islam could possibly exert a pull given its manifest failures. Although he comes to no definite answers, he does provide insight about the un-falsifiable nature of Islamic ideology (Islam didn't fail, Muslims did...). Interesament
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