"Here are the words from Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, one of the most renowned living authors in the English language and Ibn Warraq, writer of Hitchens-recommended tour-de-force “Why I Am Not a Muslim”. These two men have argued what I believe on this subject far more poetically and informatively than I am capable.
I have to stress that I was traveling in the non-Arab Muslim world. Islam began as an Arab religion; it spread as an Arab empire. In Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia—the countries of my itinerary—I was traveling, therefore among people who had been converted to what was an alien faith. I was traveling among people who had had to make a double adjustment—an adjustment to the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and an earlier adjustment to the Arab faith. You might almost say that I was among people who had been doubly colonized, doubly removed from themselves.
Because I was soon to discover that no colonization had been so thorough as the colonization that had come with the Arab faith. Colonized or defeated peoples can begin to distrust themselves. In the Muslim countries I am talking about, this distrust had all the force of religion. It was an article of the Arab faith that everything before the faith was wrong, misguided, heretical; there was no room in the heart or mind of these believers for their pre-Mohammedan past. So ideas of history here were quite different from ideas of history elsewhere; there was no wish here to go back as far as possible into the past, and to learn as much as possible about the past.Persia had a great past; it had been the rival in classical times of Greece and Rome. But you wouldn’t have believed it in Iran in 1979; for the Iranians, the glory and the truth had begun with the coming of Islam. Pakistan was a very new Muslim state. But the land was very old. In Pakistan were the ruins of the very old cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Fabulous ruins, the discovery of which earlier this century had given a new idea of the history of the subcontinent. Not only pre-Islamic ruins; but possibly also pre-Hindu.
— Our Universal Civilization, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
It is sad and ironic that in Algeria, for instance, all teaching in the French language was discontinued because the French language was considered a symbol of French colonialism, an illegitimate imperial presence. It is sad since it cuts a whole generation off from the rich cultural heritage of another civilization, but also ironic since Arabic is itself an imposed language. Arab imperialism not only imposed a new language on a people whose mother tongue was Berber, not Arabic, but even convinced the same people that they were ethnically Arabs—which they were not—and brainwashed them into accepting a religion that was alien to their own religious traditions. Bowing toward Arabia five times a day must surely be the ultimate symbol of this cultural imperialism.
Muslims despise co-religionists who accept what they see as alien Western values, and yet fail to see that they themselves could justifiably be seen as "traitors" to the culture of their ancestors. In India, for example, present-day Muslims are the descendants of Hindu converts, in Iran, of Zoroastrians, in Syria, of Christians. A vast number of Muslims throughout the world have been persuaded to accept a religion that originated thousands of miles away, to read a book in a language that they do not understand, which they learn to read and write before they know their mother tongue or the national language. These Muslims learn more of the history of a people remote from them geographically and ethnically than the past of their own countries before the advent of Islam.— Why I Am Not a Muslim, by Ibn Warraq"
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