Memoir recounts 13 years of a fatwa for writing a novel about Islam.
In a marketing stroke of genius, Sir Salman Rushdie’s lengthy memoir of living under a fatwa for the past 13 years is out today in the bookshops.
There was no talk of it being hidden under wraps or the drama that went with the release of Harry Potter books.
But that doesn’t mean Rushdie has escaped punishment from writing a novel, The Satanic Verses, that dares to criticise Islam.
The global wave of violent protests over the past two weeks indicates nothing has changed in the three decades since the revolutionary form of Islam took political power in Iran.
In Rushdie’s case, Muslims in Bradford, a city just 200 miles from his London residence, declared his book blasphemous and set it alight – presumably having not bothered to read it.
It was Ayotollah Khomeini who declared the fatwa against Rushdie, effectively putting him under a death sentence should any Muslim wish to carry it out.
They haven’t (so far) but, as far as Rushdie is concerned, if he wasn’t “sent to hell” but he has been living in one.
This week, publicising his 630-page book, Joseph Anton (Jonathan Cape), Rushdie gave a long interview to the BBC after earlier saying The Satanic Verses (1988) could not be published today because of a climate of "fear and nervousness."
He said the banning of his book in many countries (including India) and the subsequent threats on his life had created a "long-term chilling effect."
Born in Kashmir, the subject of dispute between Pakistan and India, Rushdie says "loathing is a bit too affectionate" to describe how he feels about Pakistan, which announced a holiday today so protests against America could continue.
In his latest interview, he says "the most frightening change" he sees in Pakistan was that the mass of the people seem to have given up the "very moderate" religious beliefs they used to hold.
"It is clear that India has not behaved at all well in Kashmir; that the Indian military forces seem like, feel like and behave like an occupying army; that there are too many accusations of violence, rape, and murder for it all to be made up; and the Pakistani side has constantly exacerbated the situation by the use of jihadist groups, and by the funding of groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad and so on.”
The Rushdie legacy lives on
No one has described the Rushdie legacy better than Daniel Pipes, who says it has
become the hum-drum response of Islamists to perceived insults. By telling the West what can and cannot be said about Islam, Khomeini sought to impose Islamic law (the Shari'a) on it.
Pipes’ analysis goes on to describe other outcomes:
• Individuals hold governments hostage: Anti-Islamists from pastor Terry to French publication Charlie Hebdo can snub appeals from top politicians and defence chiefs not to criticise Muslims.
• Governments clamp down on free speech: The White House asks Google to take down the You Tube film Innocence of Muslims.
• The separation of civilisations: Rather than a clash, the Islamic response to critcism in the West indicates how far those worlds are now separated in their approach to virtually every aspect of social, cultural and economic norms.
Pipes concludes that the future of Western civilisation may be at stake as Islamist aspirations grow with improved communications and weakened Middle Eastern governments.
He asks: Will we maintain our historic civilisation against their challenge, or will we accept Muslim dominion and a second-class dhimmi status?
In sum, Islamists want to impose Shari'a, Westerners are divided, and the battle of wills is just getting started.
In other areas of the debate, Israeli commentator Shaul Rosenfeld speaks for many when he notes a double standard, due to the lack of knowledge in the West of how Islamic societies treat other religions in their own home lands, pointing out a society
that turns violent whenever its holy figures are disparaged, revels in the horrific portrayals of Jews and Judaism in Arab media, particularly during the holy month of Ramadan.
Just as Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam in 2004 after criticising Islamic society in his movie Submission, and just as the publication of prophet Mohammed caricatures in Denmark (2004) sparked violent riots that claimed the lives of more than 1000 people worldwide – it is only natural that an amateurish film such as Innocence of Muslims – produced by a Coptic Christian – serves as a good enough excuse for the Muslims to murder, torch embassies and riot in 2012.
The lessons of 1979
In the New York Review of Books, Christian Caryl recalls the lessons of 1979, when the original of militant Islam first surfaced: Iranian student revolutionaries storming the US Embassy in Teheran and the siege of the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia.
Caryl describes who the “Salafists” – a term that loosely terms all Muslims who want to return to an unsullied, or anti-modernist form of Islam – now hold sway in places as far afield as Kashmir, the North Caucasus, Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq.
Caryl does not draw parallels with their western equivalents, who oppose capitalism, globalisation and modernism with equal street fury and resort to violence.
But the comparison fits as
one of the biggest drivers is the appeal of simple answers in a time of rapid and radical change.
The call of “back to the roots” offers a clarity and straightforwardness that stands in stark contrast to the policies of corrupt and incompetent authoritarian governments as well as cautious and compromising moderate democrats.
The role of violence and the “culture of honour” in Islam a has been studied by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature.
He cites these societies as ones with a well-documented “discourse of humiliation” that justifies the use of indiscriminate violence against any members of another civilisation they hold responsible.
Pinker's point is that closed-mind totalitarian systems are incompatible with rational, open ones.
It is commendable that many Muslims living in the west have condemned the use of violence. But they don’t accept that religion can be satirised or criticised in an open society that way that, say, happens with Christianity and Mormonism.
Islam does not easily accept pluralism of religious views – let alone secularism. It is not just the Rushdies or satirists who have become hostage.
