Free Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) by V.S. Naipaul Page B

gathering, until then demure, became assertive. This part of the ceremony belonged to them. There was a release of pent-up, happy chatter. Cameras flashed, and the food boxes, from a firm of caterers, which had been stacked up all the while on a chest against one wall, were taken around now by girls and offered to everyone.

    Imaduddin had appeared to suggest Mr. Mohammed Adam Khalid’s new names to him one by one, as though each name had required a separate inspiration. But this turned out to be only Imaduddin’s preacher’s or television style. He said when I asked him about it that Mr. Khalid’s names had been chosen by Mr. Khalid’s bride-to-be. So the tremulous, eager girl in yellow and red had known all along what was going to happen to the big man from Oklahoma sitting beside her on the bench.
    I learned this, about the names, in Imaduddin’s house on Sunday morning. His mental training trip to the United States and Canada had been delayed, and I was able to go and see him again. There was no trouble with taxis this time. He sent the Mercedes and Mohammed Ali to the hotel. Hewasn’t absolutely sure that Mohammed Ali—as a chauffeur still a little green and shy—would know how or where to pick people up from the hotel. But Mohammed Ali was only five minutes late. The Mercedes smelled of air fresheners, like a New York taxi; and the gaudily jacketed cassettes might have been of Arab music.
    Recognizable and reassuring this time: the small, colorfully uniformed marching groups, arms swinging from side to side; the furniture shops and wheel shops almost encroaching on the highway; the Heroes Cemetery; the lane, the little house, the big garage with the sliding door, the dark room, the little Eiffel Tower and other mementos, the small sunlit garden at the back bounded by a rockery against the wall of the neighboring house with the red-tile roof; the serving girls. One of them, in a red bodice, offered me fruit and fruit juice. Imaduddin wasn’t in the room, was perhaps with the masseur again. But Mrs. Imaduddin came in to welcome me, padding about on the plain reed mats on the tiled floor, and then she went out again. She came in again a short while later to ask whether I liked the fruit and to say that her husband was “preparing.” He came out, in his sarong again, from the front room, moving briskly, looking down, not saying much, saving his talk for when he was dressed.
    He talked of the conversion of Mr. Khalid in a down-to-earth missionary way. He appeared to have no other idea of the wonder of the occasion, no idea of the extraordinary movements of peoples which that conversion could be said to contain. Imaduddin had spent years in the United States. He would have known that there were many states in the American union. He could have found out that Oklahoma was a comparatively new state, and that it had been created by the overwhelming movement westwards over Indian territory late in the nineteenth century. This would have been at the time of similar expansionist movements in Argentina, Africa, Asia: at the time, in fact, when the Dutch, in their grinding-down way, were waging a long war in Aceh in Sumatra; and when, perhaps, Imaduddin’s muezzin grandfather was calling the faithful to prayer in neighboring Landkat.
    The conversion in the Menteng mosque of a young man from Oklahoma was full of historical linkages and ironies. But to see them required another vision of the world. Imaduddin’s missionary worldview was simpler. Everyone was born a Muslim, without sin, he had said at the conversion ceremony. What followed from this—though Imaduddin didn’t say it—was that everyone in the world outside Islam was in a state of error, and perhaps not quite real until he found his Muslim self.
    Imaduddin’s father, the mufti’s favorite, had had his higher education in Mecca and then at al-Azhar in Cairo, always in a little bubble of Islamic learning, spiritually always insulated from the cataclysms of