A distant view of Mecca

V S Naipaul

Little Brown, 437pp, #20

SOME topics seem to obsess authors, and in Naipaul's case the magnet is the religions of Asia, on which this is his fifth volume. He is particularly fascinated by the phenomenon of Islam as this seems to him predominantly an Arab religion, so that the question immediately arises: how has it taken root in societies so disparate as those of Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran, and Malayasia? His main answer is that in Asia, Islam is always a symptom of reaction: the believer must perforce look towards Mecca and thus distance himself from his aboriginal culture. The elements: animism, Hinduism, Buddhism, even Marxism.

Naipaul underlines the complexity of the four countries he visits. Iran's relationship to the Arab world is nuanced: on the one hand it shares its detestation of Israel, but on the other fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq - not much sign of an Islamic synoptic vision there. In Pakistan Islam is part of the ideological structure that buttresses the nation against its old enemy, Hindu India. In Indonesia the issue of Islam is subsumed in the traditional rivalry between Java and Sumatra. And in Malaysia Islam is seen as a bulwark against the much-feared Chinese community; as Naipaul put it in his 1981 book, Among the Believers: ''It was said in Malaysia that if the Chinese as a community became Muslims, the Malays would become Buddhists.''

Ostensibly a travel book, this volume contains almost no colouristic detail or impressions of landscape and is largely restricted to the edited versions of interviewees Naipaul taped with subjects in the four countries. The most successful section deals with Iran under the fundamentalist mullahs - a land where there is strict segregation of the sexes, women go veiled, police helicopters search for satellite dishes and other signs of Western corruption, and the testament of the ayatollah Khomeini is a compulsory special subject at university, no matter what discipline you are studying. But even in this section some of the deficiencies of the book are apparent. In a word, Naipaul is not a very skilled interviewer. The star should have been the interview he secures with Khomeini's hanging judge, Ayatolla Khalkhalli but, on his own admission, Naipaul fails to get much out of a rather stupid

old man in failing health.

The interviews in the other three countries are marred by two very different faults. Either the stories they tell are inconsequential, inviting a ''so what?'' response or, when they are genuinely gripping, Naipaul takes it into his head to intervene, to show himself wittier and wiser than his interviewees. This fault is particularly apparent in the long talk with the idealistic, western-educated revolutionary young Pakistani student Shahban who in the 1970s tried to sell Marxist-Leninism to the tribesmen of Baluchistan. Instead of admitting the courage, however misguided, of one of the few of the ''class of '68'' prepared to put their money (or in this case their lives) where their mouths were, Naipaul opts for facile snipes at Shahban's expense. Naipaul, it seems, does not believe in giving people enough rope to hang themselves with; if he dislikes them, he wants to be judge, jury, and executioner,

too.

The least satisfactory part of the book is the journey in Indonesia. When one remembers the ferocity of Naipaul's animadversions of Eva Peron in his book on Argentina, it seems extraordinary, to say the least, that President Suharto is let off so lightly. Here, after all, is a man who came to power after a bloodbath that destroyed millions, who has conducted a shameful campaign of near genocidal repression in East Timor since 1975, and currently distinguishes himself by defying the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on Indonesia's shambolic economy purely to enrich himself and his extended family.

Eva Peron was corrupt, it is true, but she did a lot for her ''shirtless ones''. Suharto has never done anything for anyone but himself, his family and his cronies. Yet in Naipaul's world it is Evita who merits the philippic, not Suharto.

The suspicion arises, from the lack of any critical words for General Zia in Pakistan or to the egregious Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, that Naipaul has no quarrel with pro-Western despots but finds autocracy objectionable only when, as in the case of Khomeini and the mullahs, the despots in question are not ''our sons of bitches'', to use LBJ's phrase.

Naipaul has a huge reputation and has been knighted for his services to literature but his latest offering, as much on account of the mostly bland and unilluminating interviews he conducts as of his political ''detachment'', must be counted a severe disappointment.