“The Non Muslim World Has Lost All Hope in Trying to Take the Muslims Away from the Path of Islam by Using Methods from Outside the House of Islam. Instead They are Trying to Deviate / Confuse the Muslims By Using the APOSTATES (Murtads) – Individuals Who Will BARTER Anything for a Few Hours of FAME – to Do Their DIRTY Work.” - AB
Salman Rushdie: Fighting Words on a Knighthood
Published: July 4, 2007
When Britain awarded a knighthood to Salman Rushdie last month, many across the Muslim world protested. They viewed the honor as a direct insult, an official endorsement of a writer whose novel "The Satanic Verses" they deemed a blasphemous attack on Islam. The Iranian government denounced it as "an obvious example of fighting against Islam by high-ranking British officials." The Pakistani Parliament passed a resolution condemning the knighthood, while the minister of religious affairs suggested it would justify future suicide bombings. In a letter to The Guardian, the leaders of 12 British Muslim groups decried the knighthood as "a deliberate provocation and insult to the 1.5 billion Muslims around the world."
The response prompted flashbacks to February 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa sentencing Rushdie and his publishers to death. These days, most intellectuals and editorialists are on Rushdie's side, as they were back then. But it's instructive to return to the fatwa period, when some important literary and political voices were critical of Rushdie.
Among them was Jimmy Carter. In a March 1989 Op-Ed article in The New York Times titled "Rushdie's Book Is an Insult," Carter argued that "The Satanic Verses" was guilty of "vilifying" Muhammad and "defaming" the Koran. "The author, a well-versed analyst of Moslem beliefs, must have anticipated a horrified reaction throughout the Islamic world," Carter wrote. While condemning the death sentence and affirming Rushdie's right to free speech, the former president argued that "we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah's irresponsibility. "
Another critic was the novelist and essayist John Berger, who wrote in The Guardian in February 1989: "I suspect that Salman Rushdie, if he is not caught in a chain of events of which he has completely lost control, might, by now, be ready to consider asking his world publishers to stop producing more or new editions of 'The Satanic Verses.' Not because of the threat of his own life, but because of the threat to the lives of those who are innocent of either writing or reading the book. This achieved — Islamic leaders and statesmen across the world might well be ready to condemn the practice of the Ayatollah issuing terrorist death warrants. Otherwise a unique 20th-century holy war, with its terrifying righteousness on both sides, may be on the point of breaking out sporadically but repeatedly - in airports, shopping streets, suburbs, city centers, wherever the unprotected live."
Roald Dahl was even sterner. In a letter to The Times of London, Dahl called Rushdie "a dangerous opportunist, " saying he "must have been totally aware of the deep and violent feelings his book would stir up among devout Muslims. In other words, he knew exactly what he was doing and cannot plead otherwise. This kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent book on to the top of the best-seller list, — but to my mind it is a cheap way of doing it." The author of dark children's books and stories for adults (who himself once had police protection after getting death threats) also advocated self-censorship. It "puts a severe strain on the very power principle that the writer has an absolute right to say what he likes," he wrote. "In a civilized world we all have a moral obligation to apply a modicum of censorship to our own work in order to reinforce this principle of free speech."
While calling the death sentence outrageous, John le Carré agreed. "I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity," the spy novelist told The New York Times in May 1989. "I am mystified that he hasn't said: 'It's all a mess. My book has been wildly misunderstood, but as long as human lives are being wasted on account of it, I propose to withdraw it.' I have to say that would be my position." Le Carré elaborated in "Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to Death" (1990), a biography by W.J. Weatherby. At a time when the leading American bookstore chains refused to carry the novel out of concern for their employees' safety, "again and again, it has been within his power to save the faces of his publishers and, with dignity, withdraw his book until a calmer time has come," le Carré said. "It seems to me he has nothing more to prove except his own insensitivity. " Le Carré also questioned defending the book on literary merit alone: "Are we to believe that those who write literature have a greater right to free speech than those who write pulp? Such elitism does not help Rushdie's cause, whatever that cause has now become."
Carré's reference to the "dignity" of the publishers versus the "insensitivity" of the author reflects another strain evident in the British response: disdain for an immigrant arriviste who is unapologetic about his ambitions and who criticizes the British government rather than, say, expressing gratitude, as if that were the essential role of the artist.
"The British government, the British people, do not have any affection for the book," Sir Geoffrey Howe, then the foreign secretary, said in a BBC interview. "The book is extremely critical, rude about us. It compares Britain with Hitler's Germany. We do not like that any more than the people of the Muslim faith like the attacks on their faith contained in the book. So we are not sponsoring the book. What we are sponsoring is the right of people to speak freely, to publish freely."
The poet Stephen Spender demonstrated in support of Rushdie when the Indian government banned "The Satanic Verses" four months before the fatwa. But writing in The Spectator in 1992, he blamed multicultural Britain for Rushdie's situation.
"It is mass immigration that has got him into the trouble in which he now finds himself," Spender wrote. "One cannot take it for granted that a global population hotchpotch of the kind which Rushdie envisages would be a world safe not just for him, but for democracy. Democracy is threatened in many countries now by immigration, partly because immigration provokes the most reactionary forces in the countries now receiving immigrants, — partly because the immigrants themselves are by no means always upholders of democracy."
Writing in The New Republic in 1990, the essayist and journalist Paul Berman perhaps summed up the situation back then best: "A picture of Rushdie wielding a sword in the struggle between East and West is the key to almost every aspect of this astounding affair. But which way does the sword point, East or West?" The honor given to Sir Salman from the heart of the British establishment seems to have provided one answer.
Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.
First They Came for the EXTREMIST, FUNDAMENTALIST & MODERATE Muslims. And I DIDN’T Speak Out Because I Wasn't An Extremist, Fundamentalist or a Moderate Muslim. Then FINALLY They Came for Me the NON-PRACTICING Muslim And NO Muslims Were Left to Speak Out for ME.
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