Confronted with her, I shed old fantasies. My body obeyed its new impulses, discovered in itself resources that answered my new need. - V. S. Naipaul

We have no means of understanding a fraction of the thought and science and philosophy and law that have gone to make that outside world. We simply accept it. We have grown up paying tribute to it, and that is all the most of us can do. We feel of the great world that it is simply there, something for the lucky ones to explore, and then only at the edges. It never occurs to us that we might make some contribution to it ourselves. And that is why we miss everything.

"We heard of ambushes on roads we knew, of villages attacked, of headmen and officials killed. It was at this time that Mahesh said something which I remembered. It wasn't the kind of thing I was expecting from him - so careful of his looks and clothes, so spoiled, so obsessed with his lovely wife. Mahesh said to me: "What do you do? You live here, and you ask that? You do what we all do. You carry on.

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 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.