@122 peterike

I just finished reading “Among the Believers” by VS Naipaul. It was written 30 years ago and reading it now many of his observations seem prescient. One of his major points was the strange dichotomy in Muslim thinking, regardless of which country he was in, that counted on the continual existence of the same Western society and economy they seek to undermine and replace with a “pure” Islamic polity. Pakistan was a great exemplar of this – the entire economy was based (still is, so far as I know) on remittances from overseas, Pakistanis who’d sought work in the West and were simultaneously expected to spread the faith. The newspapers were full of ads for such workers, calling the process “manpower export”.

On page 101, he writes:

“The business was organized. Like accountants studying tax laws, the manpower experts of Pakistan studied the world’s immigration laws and competitively gambled with their emigrant battalions: visitor’s visas overstayable here (England), dependents shippable there (England), student’s visas convertible there (Canada and the United States), political asylum to be asked for there (Austria and West Berlin), still no visas needed here, just below the Arctic Circle (Finland). They went by the planeload.”

He goes on to describe the now-familiar process by which the immigrants would then appeal to the Western ideals they despised at home and make whatever use they could of civil liberties organizations with claims of racial discrimination, economic deprivation due to Western imperialism back home etc. Elsewhere he records conversations with clerics and civil officials who brag about the Pakistani role in bringing Islam to the West, citing Scandinavia and Britain as particularly successful areas.