Victimary Rhetoric and the Politics of Decolonization in V. S. Naipaul’s ‘Mimic Men’ (1967)
Novelists often make subtler political scientists than do the political scientists themselves, perhaps because a competent novelist nourishes himself on his observation of human actuality whereas the political scientist is typically the subscriber to some party-orthodoxy or the proponent of someone’s special-interest agenda. The names of Joseph Conrad and Fyodor Dostoyevsky come to mind, as men of keen political perception. Competent novelists are anthropologists, interested supremely in reporting human facts as they see them and in making their way to essential structures of communal existence and the cultural tradition. The tenured political-science professors strive mightily to avoid those cases where facts contradict doctrine, while the genuine novelists relish both the paradox of human nature and the tragicomic accent of the historical chronicle.
Swat and the Prospects of Islamic Conquest
The normalization of life in the Swat Valley, where the inhabitants are returning to their homes after fleeing the military confrontation between the Taliban and the Pakistani Army, is a happy development. The Taliban have lost their hold on the Swat Valley, where they had managed to carve out an ultra-Islamic republic inside and with the approval of the Islamic republic of Pakistan. Does this prove militant Islam is now on the decline?
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