Nadira Naipaul defends her Husband
Habshi
wrote:
Like mangy cats the Islamic groups have decended on
Naipaul. His wife, admittedly a Muslim makes a few astute
observations on Islam.
“As a Muslim woman and, above all, a mother, I have stood close
to
heresy by simply being a helpless witness to these demonic
punishments.”
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DISGUSTED NADIRA TO NAIPAUL’S DEFENCE
FROM AMIT ROY, Telegraph, Oct 14
London, Oct. 13:
V.S. Naipaul’s wife, the former Pakistani journalist Nadira
Alvi, leapt today to the defence of her Nobel Prize-winning husband
and dismissed claims that the 69-year-old author was
“anti-Muslim”.
In an exclusive interview from her home in Wiltshire, Lady Naipaul
rounded on critics who had accused her husband of being against Islam
as a religion.
Visibly upset by some of the comments made in newspapers and on
television after Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature on
Thursday, Lady Naipaul said she was “speaking out from the
heart”.
The Times wrote: “An intensely personal view of history, steeped
in anti-Islamic sentiment, has defined Naipaul’s every utterance
on his ancestral homeland of India.”
More accurately, Naipaul has written of the consequences of
“conversion” to Islam, how it is practised by some people
and, more specifically, of the contemporary evils of terrorism in
Pakistan. None of this has gone down well with Muslim commentators in
Britain, some of whom may not even be familiar with his writings.
Lady Naipaul’s comments were not vetted by her husband. Other
friends, she said, had warned her of the risks of taking on Muslim
extremists.
She said: “We have not emerged from this nightmare. My
husband’s books, Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, are a
testimony to our suffering. They can show us a way out of this
darkness but we lack the intellectual honesty to look at the mirror
and accept it as an experiment gone horribly wrong. Only then can we
free our people from the monster that feeds off their ignorance every
day.”
For 10 years until she met her husband in 1995, Nadira Alvi wrote a
weekly column, which appeared in The Nation, an English language daily
published from Lahore. When Naipaul’s first wife, Pat, an
Englishwoman whom he had met in Oxford, died, Sir Vidia Naipaul
married Nadira Alvi whom he had encountered in Pakistan while
researching a book.
Lady Naipaul said that her husband did not need her defence “but
I am disgusted and even bewildered at the recent media hype on his
stand against Islam shown on a major British television channel and in
print, quoting, as always, academics and writers who sit cosily in the
UK or the USA”.
Kenya-born Lady Naipaul emphasised: “I am a Muslim. I was born
into a Muslim family who trace their ancestry back to their Semitic or
Arab inheritance although they have lived in the subcontinent for the
last 200 years.
“I am also a Muslim woman who has written for 10 years against
the oppression of her people, particularly women, by clerics and the
feudal (lords) of our sporadic one-legged democracies.”
She added: “I only wish to ask all my husband’s detractors
of what they really know of Islam in its present form and how it is
put into practice in tyrannies like Pakistan. I have to ask them if
they have ever stood with a group of crusading women in the High Court
in Pakistan — it is women only, men being too frightened to
attend — to face fierce mullahs crying for the death of a
terrified 12-year-old boy accused of blasphemy.
“Have they ever visited Pakistani jails? Have they stood, seen
and heard the shrieks of women being beaten by supple kikkar (acacia)
rods for a confession by the police?”
She recalled that her columns were never refuted or challenged.
“As a Muslim woman and, above all, a mother, I have stood close
to heresy by simply being a helpless witness to these demonic
punishments.”
She argued: “I am not a heretic. Like Mr Tony Blair I would and
can challenge leaders like Qazi Hussain, of the Jamat-e-Islami, with
quotes from the Quran and the life of the Prophet, and receive answers
that reeked of mindless intolerance and a deep wish to punish an
already afflicted and downtrodden population.”
Lady Naipaul was bitterly critical of some Muslim spokesman in London.
“My people are not represented by the so-called Council of
British Muslims, who ironically have escaped to the West and can sit
here waving the green flag, criticising the very government and laws
that protect them. My people — and that is 80 per cent rural
Pakistan — are crushed by mullahs who they really loathe. But
people are mute due to fear.”