The Intifada for The Imagination
I, like so many others, were horrified by the recent assassination attempt on Salman Rushdie’s life in New York. Just when Salman could finally breathe easily again and NOT have to look over his shoulder, he is brutally stabbed, seemingly in an attempt to vindicate the odious Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, suborning his murder for money, for the ‘crime’ of writing a novel that deployed holy writ for literary purposes.
Rightly so, popular opinion and the commentariat is in full support of Rushdie and the principle of free speech and artistic liberty. In all honesty, I’m not sure what more I can add to this discussion that wouldn’t be a repetition of what has already been said - and said much better! The stakes are so obvious and clear. When faced against theocratic nihilism, there is no side to be on other than in defence of Rushdie and free expression.
But I will try to get at this from another angle, and hopefully I won’t be just repeating well worn, but very correct, arguments stemming from the Enlightenment and the heritage of liberalism about the necessity of free expression, even if at times like these we have to redeploy them.
The ‘Satanic Verses affair’, became about about something clearly more than Rushdie and his individual rights. It was a paradigm shifting event. All the battlefronts in the culture wars over Islam in Western societies - the nature of Islam, mass immigration, ‘the failure multiculturalism’, integration, Islamophobia, the hijab/niqab wars, the boundaries of free speech in a pluralist society etc - all have their origins in the Satanic Verses affair.
In Britain at least, the backlash against Rushdie was an early instance of what we now call - though it’s use has become hackneyed - ‘identity politics’. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, for a generation of Britons of a Muslim background, whose ‘origins’ lay in the Indian subcontinent, their radicalism to oppose the racism of British society and Western imperialism was expressed in secular leftist politics, not Islamism. In fact, many of them rarely identified primarily as ‘Muslim’, but as ‘Asian’ alongside with those of Hindu and Sikh backgrounds, or even black (My piece on the moment of ‘Political Blackness’ might be of interest). To the extent Islam meant anything to them, it was a thread among other threads that composed who they were. The racism that they faced wasn’t based on religion, but on skin colour and their South Asian cultural origin. The National Front couldn’t care less to distinguish between Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus when they went on their ‘Paki-bashing’ rampages, and the concept of ‘Islamophobia’ wasn’t used as it is today.
Many of them, moreover, rebelled against the conservative orthodoxy and traditional cultural norms of their parents and ‘elders’. The ‘masjid’ was regarded as a fetter on social progress, not an avenue of political mobilisation. What the Rushdie affair revealed was a genuine and profound sociological transmutation, wherein religious identity would become more central in politics, and the idea of distinctive politicised, quasi ethnic, ‘Muslim identity’ and ‘Muslim Community’ began to take shape.
As a 2012 retrospective on the issue in the The New Yorker, notes, how the Rushdie affair was a golden opportunity for wannabe Muslim movers and shakers to assert their mandate as communal ‘spokesmen’:
As for the British Muslim “leaders,” whom, exactly, did they lead? They were leaders without followers, mountebanks trying to make careers out of her brother’s misfortune. For a generation, the politics of ethnic minorities in Britain had been secular and socialist. This was the mosques’ way of getting religion into the driver’s seat. British Asians had never splintered into Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh factions before. Somebody needed to answer these people who were driving a sectarian wedge through the community, she said, to name them as the hypocrites and opportunists that they were.
The anti-Rushdie campaign certainly became a magnet for born-again ‘Muslims’ to voice their disenchantment with mainstream society, mainstream values, the ‘white left’, through the narrow prism of Muslim identitarianism. This process was intensified by various factors: the competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran to win the leadership of Muslims globally by supporting various political Islamist movements; the development state-sponsored ‘multicultural’ policy that in Britain sought to neatly package people into groups with identifiable leaders with whom the business of community relations could be transacted; the ‘death of the Left’ as the radical opposition to mainstream politics and society, and the increasing supremacy of particularist visions of society over universalist ones.
For a new generation of Muslim Britons after 1989, Islam became the basis of their radicalism. Being Muslim increasingly wasn’t simply taking a theological position, or embarking on a spiritual odyssey, but a counter cultural identity politics in itself. Thus, Salman Rushdie, in using holy writ for literary purposes, was said to be adding to the misery of a disenfranchised subaltern population with nothing to live for but their deen.
There is a silly argument that has developed since 1989 that says the backlash to 'The Satanic Verses' novel was informed by Islamophobia. A minority of Muslims didn't agitate against Rushdie, in some cases, on command of, and due to a narrative weaved by, Khomeini and other demagogues, try to murder Salman Rushdie, his translators and publishers because of racism. They did so because of a deep, extremely fanatical, bone headed strain of vicious intolerance for anything that is perceived to degrade their particular vision of Islam.
The scumbag who stabbed Rushdie didn't do so because he was a victim of endemic Islamophobia, who ‘senselessly’ lashed out. He is a staunch supporter of the Iranian regime, particularly the IRGC and Hezbollah. Of course, everyone, even killers, has their story, so other factors may have contributed to pushing him into the attack, but there's little doubt his motive was to fulfil what he thought was his religious and political duty (and perhaps get a good pay day out of it too!) to murder Salman Rushdie for writing a novel that apparently defames Muhammad. As is always the case, few of Rushdie’s have read a single word of his novel nor are open minded enough to do so.
When one looks at similar attacks on ‘blasphemers’ in Muslim majority countries, you see how utterly absurd this narrative is. Whether it was the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz who was stabbed in 1994, partially for his support for Rushdie and partially due to his wonderful Children of Gebelawi for the use of religious allegory; The killings of 202 Egyptians between 1992-93 for ‘heresy’ by Jihadists, among them Farag Foda, a satirist of Islamic fundamentalism, who was declared an ‘enemy of Islam’ by Al-Azhar; The hacking to death of Bangladeshi blogger, Avijit Roy, in 2015 by a Jihadist gang for producing blogs explicitly advocating atheism and secularism. These are only a few examples, but believe me, I could produce many more. No serious person can say these instances of violence were for any other reason other than vigilante attempts to enforce blasphemy laws and narrow the spectrum of acceptable opinion on religion within a society.
Unfortunately, this nonsense does nothing but validate the prejudice that Muslims are easily ‘provoked’ into atavistic violent passions by encountering ideas that contradict whatever their view of Islam is, and are incapable of developing a self-critical perspective of their own religious traditions.
As well, some of Rushdie’s defenders, the partisans of ‘Western Civilisation’, packaged their arguments with a similar idiom of identity, as well as demography, putting forward the thesis that the very presence of Muslim minorities in Western countries represented a threat to and ‘cultural incompatibility’ with ‘Western values’. In the 1990s, intellectuals such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis did much popularise the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis, which would gain a hearing among ‘muscular’ liberal tendency after 9/11. Enlightenment values - free speech, democracy, secularism, scientific inquiry etc - were treated more as unique products of Occidental kultur to which Muslims is in some inherent way are allergic to, than universal achievements of history, applicable to all of humanity struggling to emancipate itself. Ironic, as it mimics the Islamists own prejudices.
I’ll leave you with this quote from Syrian intellectual, Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm, who should be remembered as one of those who unconditionally stood shoulder to shoulder with Rushdie and free expression - even more so as he defended not only Rushdie against the hideous fatwa, but promoted the artistic merits of The Satanic Verses before Arab and Muslim audiences, when it wouldn’t have earned him a lot of popularity, showing how brave and principled he was. In his defence of Rushdie, Al-Azm lamented how the:
deep seated and silent assumption in the West remains that Muslims are simply not worthy of serious dissidents, do not deserve them and are ultimately incapable of producing them; for in the final analysis, it is the theocracy of the Ayatollahs that becomes them.
Once you clear away the clutter that tends to infest this argument and distil it to its core point then all becomes clear. The defence of Rushdie isn’t simply about the defending the man against assassination from theocratic thugs; it’s about the affirmation of a series of principles: the right to use holy writ for literary purposes. This isn’t about conceited, Western navel gazing over ‘our way of life’, but an intifada for the imagination against those who seek to enclose it with the threat and enforcement of violence because it might tread on their particular religious sensibilities. As Karl Marx once said, the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism. If you can’t criticise religion, the oldest argument humanity have ever had, then you can’t criticise anything.
Salman Rushdie may have had it foisted upon him, but he is a symbol for all those who seek to interrogate the founding myths of their own culture, who dare step outside the boundaries of religious taboos. Thankfully, he didn’t become a martyr for it.