More from V.S.Naipaul's "Among the Believers"

The author continues his journey of Islamic countries between 1979-1981. In the extracts below he is in Pakistan.

Pakistan: The Salt Hills of a Dream. Page 115: Ahmed said, "The world is mixed up now. People are confused. There is no longer any symmetry in many people's lives." I put to him Khalid Ishaq's point about the emotional rejection of the West. How much of that rejection was self-deception? Could a civilization so encompassing, a civilization on which people here depended for so much, be truly rejected? Ahmed was divided. He said he himself didn't like being abroad. He was always "under tension". It was because of 'the time factor'.

When he was abroad, in a big city, he was ruled by the need to be on time. It weighed on him; it tormented him; he ceased to feel master of himself. The said, "But when people here talk about the emotional rejection of the West, they usually mean one thing, Women." Page 157: The Pakistan Times man could not hide his rage about the mullahs. They were politically ambitious; they had 'shrewdly entrapped' the government by framing laws that couldn't work and then blaming the government for not operating these laws; they had divided Islam into conflicting sects and made Islam a mockery. The answer was to by-pass the mullahs, do away with the sects, and go back to the holy book. Do that, and "we find the light all around. But once we wriggle out of the Koran, there is nothing but darkness and confusion in store for us." But was it as easy as that?

To raise just one point: how old was Aisha when she married the fifty-year-old Prophet? Was she six or nine or nineteen? Did she, as in one tender story, take her dolls and toys to the Prophet's tent? The Koran doesn't help; Aisha's age has to be worked out from other sources. The question was gone into at length one Friday sabbath in the Pakistan Times; and the question is of more than historical interest, because Aisha's age at marriage - and there are nine different opinions - can fix the legal marriage-age for girls. In Islam, and especially the Islam of the fundamentalists, precedent is all. The principles of the Prophet - as divined from the Koran and the approved traditions - are for all time.