I haven’t yet laid my hands on a copy of Salman Rushdie’s
new book, but it is an anticipated pleasure.
“Joseph Anton: A Memoir” tells his own story of being forced underground
with armed surveillance after Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him over The
Satanic Verses. Acton was the name Rushdie used while incognito during the time
when he was most in danger. The fatwa
remains current, as the only man who can lift it – Khomeini – inconveniently died
a few months after the pronouncement. However Rushdie is beginning to rebuild
his life in the open 24 years after the publication of that fateful book.
The best explanation for the fatwa and how it directly
inspired the likes of London’s 7/7 are to be found in Kenan Malik’s “From Fatwa
to Jihad”. English writer Malik tells
how in February 1989 he witnessed a profound event: the first burning of The
Satanic Verses in public. A thousand
Muslims gathered in Bradford, Yorkshire with copies of Rushdie’s book and
burned it in front of a police station.
It wasn’t quite Kristallnacht but it was calculated to shock and to
offend.
Like Rushdie, Malik was born of an Indian Muslim family. He
grew up in Britain in an Islamic culture which was deeply embedded but not “all
consuming”. He became a radical leftist in the 1980s, and did
not think of himself as Muslim but black.
Malik quotes secular writer Fay Weldon who said the Qu’ran offered no
food for thought. “It forbids change, interpretation, self-knowledge, even art
for fear of treading on Allah’s creative toes,” Weldon said.
Malik didn’t mind treading on Allah’s toes. He was
self-consciously secular and militant. Black for Malik was a political badge
which stood for refusing to put up with the discrimination dished out to the
previous generation. The whites called
them Asians but they were no more Asian than the Brits were Europeans. Malik said it was much later they became
“Muslims” and that for political reasons. Rushdie came from a similar background to
Malik and his early writings had done more than most to humanise the experience
of immigrant Muslims.
Rushdie was used to having his books banned if not burned.
His first novel Midnight’s Children was banned in India and Indira Ghandi
successfully sued for libel in a British court.
In the second novel Shame, Rushdie’s description of Benazir Bhutto as
the Virgin Ironpants caused outrage in Pakistan and another ban. Rushdie laughed it off as he won prize after
prize for his great writing. The third book took his mockery to the next level.
It would be no less than a fable about the origins of Islam.
Written over 12 years
before 9/11, The Satanic Verses opens with an exploding airline. The magical events that happen to the two
survivors of the explosion are used to discuss how God’s revelation to the
prophet Mahound brings a new religion called Submission (the English
translation of “Islam”) to a city in the sand called Jahilia (“Ignorance” –
where Arabs lived prior to Islam). A
second tale in the book is a caricature of Ayatollah Khomeini and the third is
based the true story of an Indian pied piper who leads all her Indian village
on the Haj and then into the sea to drown.
In one book, Rushdie was attacking Islam’s history, one of
its major political leader and one of its five pillars of behaviour. He might
have expected some resistance, yet the immediate reaction wasn’t huge.
Rushdie’s book was so obtuse and so difficult to follow in its non-narrative
form it was almost impossible to understand in a single reading and almost
threatened to go under the radar.
Then Sher Azam stepped in. Azam was the president of
Bradford’s Council of Mosques. Azam
wasn’t the first Muslim critic of the book. That honour belongs to philosopher Shabbir
Akhtar who called it an inferior piece of literature. But Azam was one of the
earliest to realise how Rushdie could be a rallying cry for Muslim
identity. Azam had not read the book but
read reviews of it. He knew religious
scholars had declared it blasphemous and he took on the task of writing to
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Azam compared it to the Spycatcher affair and
asked for it to be banned. He got no reply.
Azam told Malik Christians don’t mind about what people say
about their God because they no longer believe in “Him”. But look what it means, he told Malik. “It
means a country where the values have gone. People drink, take drugs, have sex
like dogs.” Azam said those problems would disappear if people believed in God.
Azam tapped into a new consciousness
among young radicals. These people were moving away from the radical secularism
preferred by Malik to a radical religiosity that could be firmly rooted across
the Muslim world.
The Muslims who burned the book in Bradford felt an immense
power in their action. Applauded as it was across the umma, they felt tuned in
to a philosophy much bigger than themselves. It gave them a giddy sense of
power they had never had before in their lives. A few days later on February
13, Khomeini called on “all zealous Muslims” to execute anyone involved in the
publication of the book, and Iran offered $3m for Rushdie’s death ( or a
knock-down $1m if the assassin was non-Muslim).
It didn’t matter that Khomeini issued the fatwa primarily as
a marker in his battle with the Saudis for supremacy in the Muslim world. His intervention
had made it an event of global consequence. That day Rushdie attended a
memorial service for writer Bruce Chatwin who had just died. Paul Theroux came
up to him and said “we’ll be back here next week for you.” Rushdie said it wasn’t
the funniest joke he’d ever heard. By
the following morning, Scotland Yard had given him grade one protection and
spirited him away to a safe house.
Joseph Acton was born.
But so was jihadism in Britain, according to Malik. He
argues Britain and many other Governments formed pacts with religious movements
because they thought they would be easier to control than the left. This was a miscalculation
and it was made worse in the UK by Government policies that outsourced “Muslim
issues” to Muslim organisations. In the wake of the London Bombings of 2005, Muslim
leaders lashed Prime Minister Tony Blair for ignoring the warning signs that
led to 7/7. Blair hit back criticising
moderate Muslims for not doing enough. “Governments cannot go and root out the
extremism in these communities,” he said.
That was your job, it implied but no one asked Blair why he felt so
helpless rooting them out.
Under the guise of multiculturalism, Britain divested all
its decisions on Muslim issues to the Muslim Council of Mosques. Radicalism
fermented in these organisations. Six of the 7/7 plotters were trainee doctors.
The Satanic Verses furore was a catalyst
for a more confident Islamic identity which educated young professionals could
endorse. But it was not an identity recognised by most Muslims. Islamism was not an expression of ancient
faith but a modernist reaction against the loss of belonging in complex societies
comforted by a literal belief in the Qu’ran. Rushdie, one of the most nuanced
of Muslim culture writers, had no chance against the power of this certainty.
