Zeno Swijtink
09-13-2008, 07:36 AM
The Rushdie effect (https://www.ft.com/cms/s/1057c5c2-8060-11dd-99a9-000077b07658,dwp_uuid=a558e3a8-584b-11da-90dd-0000779e2340,print=yes.html)
By John Lloyd
Published: September 13 2008 00:22 | Last updated: September 13 2008 03:24
Twenty years ago this month, on September 26 1988, Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, a work in the magical-realist tradition, was launched at a party for the literary elite. The book’s two main protagonists survive a fall from a wrecked aircraft and turn into an angel (Gibreel, or Gabriel) and the devil (Shaitan, or Satan). The book also contains a series of transgressions against Muslim sensibilities: the title itself referred to a much-disputed passage in the Koran in which Mohammed was apparently tricked by Satan.
Not long after this launch party, the book’s publishers, Viking Penguin (owned by the FT’s parent company, Pearson), and Margaret Thatcher’s government received angry calls from Muslims for the book’s withdrawal. India forbade its publication, and bans followed in Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa and Sri Lanka. By early 1989 this reaction had spread to other countries with sizeable Muslim populations: Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore and even Venezuela.
Then, in February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa, or ruling on Islamic law, calling for Rushdie’s murder. Though the author swiftly made a statement regretting the distress caused by the publication, Khomeini’s office wrote: “Even if Salman Rushdie repents ... it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and wealth, to send him to hell.” At this point Rushdie largely disappeared from public life and into safe houses, behind police protection.
In April 1989 two big London bookshops, Dillons and Collets, were bombed. The following month there were further explosions in London, York and High Wycombe, while unexploded bombs were discovered in other bookshops. Hitoshi Igarashi, the book’s Japanese translator, was stabbed to death in July 1991; Ettore Capriolo, who translated it into Italian, was stabbed (but survived) in August of the same year; William Nygaard, the book’s Norwegian publisher, just escaped assassination in October 1993. In July of that year, a gang had set fire to a hotel in Sivas, Turkey, where the late Aziz Nesin, the book’s Turkish translator, was meeting other intellectuals: 37 died (though not Nesin).
. . .
At the time I was little concerned with the issue. I was absorbed in and, for much of my time, living in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where communism’s collapse seemed to foreshadow a world of liberal democratic states.
Few, if any, western thinkers guessed that the fury of Muslim groups in Europe, and of Muslim states outside it, was a harbinger of the return of another, older history, in which the imperatives of faith and the settlement of insults against personal and religious honour were in the ascendant. The intellectual and literary class in Britain and elsewhere rallied to Rushdie. But the Satanic Verses controversy seemed just a sideshow, if a vicious one, driven by an individual, Khomeini, who was derisively referred to in the tabloids as the “mad mullah”.
I knew no Muslims well, and little about their communities: in this, I was typical not just of British citizens but of journalists. Outside local journalism in already ethnically diverse cities like Leicester, Bradford and Birmingham, the activities of British minority groups were hardly covered: their intellectual currents not at all.
Now, 20 years on, coverage is constant: much of it disturbing. This week saw three British Muslim men found guilty of attempted mass murder: Woolwich Crown Court was shown a video in which one of these, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, warned of “body parts ... decorating the streets” if Muslims were not left alone. On one view, the two decades since The Satanic Verses have seen a decline into a clash of civilisations on many fronts, actual and rhetorical. Yet in talks with some of the leaders of British Islam, I heard a different view: that the Rushdie affair was a cauterising and, ultimately, curative episode.
Usama Hasan, a bearded east London imam in his 30s, was a 16-year-old student at the private City of London School when he heard of The Satanic Verses. Hasan reacted with his first political act. He took the only copy of the book out of the school library, and kept it. “I had learned from a Jewish friend that Jews often took out anti-Semitic books from libraries and kept them to stop others reading them.”
In his late teens and 20s, Hasan became a member of Jinas, a radical group strongly influenced by the conservative Wahhabi Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia. Today, reflecting on the Satanic Verses affair, a large element in his radicalisation, he says: “It was about identity, much of it. My generation especially was caught between a godless British culture which emphasises materialism, and a conservative religious one.”
Hasan went to Cambridge University and Imperial College London and then on to a consultancy, working with big corporations. During the 1990s, he remained in Jinas but “began to think differently. I was learning how the world worked; most of the fundamentalists have no idea. And I had Jewish friends and inspiring Christian teachers who encouraged me and respected my religion.”
For Hasan, the events of September 11 2001 in New York and July 7 2005 in London were the final confirmation that fundamentalist-fed violence was a dead end. “And so I changed: as have many others. I realised that we have a shared morality with Judaism and Christianity; we don’t believe Jesus is the son of God – the only difference. The Koran is not a sectarian text – in fact, it’s anti-sectarian, it honours the Jewish and Christian communities. I have had to speak out on this: there’s still a lot of fundamentalism around, a lot of stuff coming out of Iran.”
Talking with Hasan, I realised that in spite of his matter-of-fact way of discussing his transition from radical to moderate, his present stance is not an easy one. Some things, as he says, are simply part of the mental furniture of many Muslims. He attracted enmity, for example, for arguing on BBC TV’s Hard Talk last year that women need not wear the hijab. He has Jewish friends, but on a wall next to the office in his mosque there is a map showing the extent of Palestinian dispossession by Israel.
Some days later, I spoke to the man seen by many as Europe’s leading Muslim intellectual, Tariq Ramadan (https://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?lang=en). Swiss-born, he is a fellow of St Antony’s College Oxford, and one around whose teachings and actions controversy has swirled, especially in France, where a series of books have disputed his progressive and liberal credentials. Others have strongly defended him as a teacher and exemplar of moderation.
Ramadan, a slim, handsome man who will be 46 this month, said he had spoken against the Rushdie fatwa at the time. He says that “those who see The Satanic Verses as a starting point for proof that reconciliation between Islam and the west is impossible are wrong. European Muslims now do not react as they did 20 years ago. The younger generation especially understands the cultural context, the stress on freedom of speech.”
At first sight, Hasan’s and Ramadan’s view would seem to be over-hopeful. After a lull, the past few years have seen a number of protests from Muslims over publication of material held to be insulting – and some of these have been murderous.
In November 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, working from a script by the Somalian-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali (https://ayaanhirsiali.org/), made and distributed a film called Submission, which showed a woman’s naked body with verses from the Koran playing across it. Van Gogh was murdered in November 2004 by Mohammed Bouyeri, who cut off his head and left a note threatening Hirsi Ali with death. Like Rushdie, Hirsi Ali moved behind a screen of bodyguards.
Hirsi Ali now lives in the US and has made a point of meeting and being filmed with Rushdie: in an exchange in 2005, she publicly apologised for her own protests against The Satanic Verses, when she was a teenager in Nairobi, Kenya. “Near where I lived, there were some guys who said, ‘We should burn this book!’ And I joined in. I am sorry. I was demonstrating from ignorance. I have grown up. I have lost my fear of hell.”
Earlier this month, I asked her what she had meant by that. She said: “In Nairobi at that time, the book galvanised the Muslim society. It was done in the madrasas [religious schools]. It turned the community towards radicalism; it fused us into a political society and what had been our main concerns – getting an education, food, housing – were subsumed in this. It took over the community.
“But later, I lost my fears of being expelled from the community; and then lost my fear of hell if I went against the teaching. My reflection on this is that you have to stop believing what the propaganda says – that we are all part of a powerful ummah [community of believers]. Then you can take responsibility for yourself; and then you can change.”
. . .
Twenty years on, Muslim society in the UK is taking part self-critically in society’s wider debates, something that was absent during the Rushdie affair. A prominent figure is Ed Husain, author of the The Islamist (https://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/edhusain), a vivid account of his descent into fundamentalism – again, sparked by The Satanic Verses – and his climb out.
Husain is now co-founder and deputy director of the Quilliam Foundation (https://www.quilliamfoundation.org/) (named for a 19th-century English convert to Islam, who founded the first British mosque), which describes itself as “the world’s first counter-extremism think-tank”. Husain told me that during the Satanic Verses controversy in 1988 he had joined a march in Brick Lane, in the now majority-Muslim borough of Tower Hamlets.
“Many people found a voice then. It was the first time Muslims had engaged with British political society as a united group. Before that there were idiosyncratic outfits in Bradford and elsewhere, each with their own agenda, often inimical to each other. With Satanic Verses, they were radicalised – through a grievance. The real focus of this thing was victimhood.”
The leaders of the protest against the book included the late Dr Kalim Siddiqui, creator of the Muslim Parliament forum, and Iqbal Sacranie, a former head of the Muslim Council of Britain, which brings together a range of Muslim organisations under a single constitution.
Husain says that “Sacranie and these people came into their own then, mobilising the Muslim community into a political force – their agenda was a fundamentalist one”.
Now Sir Iqbal, Sacranie remains in the leadership of the MCB: he would not comment on the Satanic Verses controversy but another prominent member of the MCB did. Inayat Bunglawala, assistant general secretary and spokesman, said that “it caused great offence. It created a British Muslim identity, through the common offence. But now, looking back, it seems we were foolish trying to get the book banned. We were demanding that others be prevented from reading it, which I now think is preposterous. When you go down that road it is dangerous.”
According to Ed Husain: “A lesson has been learned since 1988. You need to expose Muslim civil society to the arguments – and this is now happening. You have to empower people in civil society, Muslims and non-Muslims, to take on the extremists. And we have to recognise we are in a Christian society, and we must adapt to it.”
I felt a slight start of surprise that Husain would describe British society as Christian: it is perhaps more obviously so to a Muslim. The churches, the prayers at school assemblies, the use of Westminster Abbey for ceremonials – these are so much a part of British life that they have sunk into near invisibility. Yet he is also right: Islam, in Europe, has to live in a civic way with societies formed by Christian faith. Even when their citizens drift from it, they do so in favour of a secular dispensation that insists that all religions have a right to exist.
John Lloyd is an FT contributing editor
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By John Lloyd
Published: September 13 2008 00:22 | Last updated: September 13 2008 03:24
Twenty years ago this month, on September 26 1988, Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, a work in the magical-realist tradition, was launched at a party for the literary elite. The book’s two main protagonists survive a fall from a wrecked aircraft and turn into an angel (Gibreel, or Gabriel) and the devil (Shaitan, or Satan). The book also contains a series of transgressions against Muslim sensibilities: the title itself referred to a much-disputed passage in the Koran in which Mohammed was apparently tricked by Satan.
Not long after this launch party, the book’s publishers, Viking Penguin (owned by the FT’s parent company, Pearson), and Margaret Thatcher’s government received angry calls from Muslims for the book’s withdrawal. India forbade its publication, and bans followed in Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa and Sri Lanka. By early 1989 this reaction had spread to other countries with sizeable Muslim populations: Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore and even Venezuela.
Then, in February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa, or ruling on Islamic law, calling for Rushdie’s murder. Though the author swiftly made a statement regretting the distress caused by the publication, Khomeini’s office wrote: “Even if Salman Rushdie repents ... it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and wealth, to send him to hell.” At this point Rushdie largely disappeared from public life and into safe houses, behind police protection.
In April 1989 two big London bookshops, Dillons and Collets, were bombed. The following month there were further explosions in London, York and High Wycombe, while unexploded bombs were discovered in other bookshops. Hitoshi Igarashi, the book’s Japanese translator, was stabbed to death in July 1991; Ettore Capriolo, who translated it into Italian, was stabbed (but survived) in August of the same year; William Nygaard, the book’s Norwegian publisher, just escaped assassination in October 1993. In July of that year, a gang had set fire to a hotel in Sivas, Turkey, where the late Aziz Nesin, the book’s Turkish translator, was meeting other intellectuals: 37 died (though not Nesin).
. . .
At the time I was little concerned with the issue. I was absorbed in and, for much of my time, living in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where communism’s collapse seemed to foreshadow a world of liberal democratic states.
Few, if any, western thinkers guessed that the fury of Muslim groups in Europe, and of Muslim states outside it, was a harbinger of the return of another, older history, in which the imperatives of faith and the settlement of insults against personal and religious honour were in the ascendant. The intellectual and literary class in Britain and elsewhere rallied to Rushdie. But the Satanic Verses controversy seemed just a sideshow, if a vicious one, driven by an individual, Khomeini, who was derisively referred to in the tabloids as the “mad mullah”.
I knew no Muslims well, and little about their communities: in this, I was typical not just of British citizens but of journalists. Outside local journalism in already ethnically diverse cities like Leicester, Bradford and Birmingham, the activities of British minority groups were hardly covered: their intellectual currents not at all.
Now, 20 years on, coverage is constant: much of it disturbing. This week saw three British Muslim men found guilty of attempted mass murder: Woolwich Crown Court was shown a video in which one of these, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, warned of “body parts ... decorating the streets” if Muslims were not left alone. On one view, the two decades since The Satanic Verses have seen a decline into a clash of civilisations on many fronts, actual and rhetorical. Yet in talks with some of the leaders of British Islam, I heard a different view: that the Rushdie affair was a cauterising and, ultimately, curative episode.
Usama Hasan, a bearded east London imam in his 30s, was a 16-year-old student at the private City of London School when he heard of The Satanic Verses. Hasan reacted with his first political act. He took the only copy of the book out of the school library, and kept it. “I had learned from a Jewish friend that Jews often took out anti-Semitic books from libraries and kept them to stop others reading them.”
In his late teens and 20s, Hasan became a member of Jinas, a radical group strongly influenced by the conservative Wahhabi Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia. Today, reflecting on the Satanic Verses affair, a large element in his radicalisation, he says: “It was about identity, much of it. My generation especially was caught between a godless British culture which emphasises materialism, and a conservative religious one.”
Hasan went to Cambridge University and Imperial College London and then on to a consultancy, working with big corporations. During the 1990s, he remained in Jinas but “began to think differently. I was learning how the world worked; most of the fundamentalists have no idea. And I had Jewish friends and inspiring Christian teachers who encouraged me and respected my religion.”
For Hasan, the events of September 11 2001 in New York and July 7 2005 in London were the final confirmation that fundamentalist-fed violence was a dead end. “And so I changed: as have many others. I realised that we have a shared morality with Judaism and Christianity; we don’t believe Jesus is the son of God – the only difference. The Koran is not a sectarian text – in fact, it’s anti-sectarian, it honours the Jewish and Christian communities. I have had to speak out on this: there’s still a lot of fundamentalism around, a lot of stuff coming out of Iran.”
Talking with Hasan, I realised that in spite of his matter-of-fact way of discussing his transition from radical to moderate, his present stance is not an easy one. Some things, as he says, are simply part of the mental furniture of many Muslims. He attracted enmity, for example, for arguing on BBC TV’s Hard Talk last year that women need not wear the hijab. He has Jewish friends, but on a wall next to the office in his mosque there is a map showing the extent of Palestinian dispossession by Israel.
Some days later, I spoke to the man seen by many as Europe’s leading Muslim intellectual, Tariq Ramadan (https://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?lang=en). Swiss-born, he is a fellow of St Antony’s College Oxford, and one around whose teachings and actions controversy has swirled, especially in France, where a series of books have disputed his progressive and liberal credentials. Others have strongly defended him as a teacher and exemplar of moderation.
Ramadan, a slim, handsome man who will be 46 this month, said he had spoken against the Rushdie fatwa at the time. He says that “those who see The Satanic Verses as a starting point for proof that reconciliation between Islam and the west is impossible are wrong. European Muslims now do not react as they did 20 years ago. The younger generation especially understands the cultural context, the stress on freedom of speech.”
At first sight, Hasan’s and Ramadan’s view would seem to be over-hopeful. After a lull, the past few years have seen a number of protests from Muslims over publication of material held to be insulting – and some of these have been murderous.
In November 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, working from a script by the Somalian-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali (https://ayaanhirsiali.org/), made and distributed a film called Submission, which showed a woman’s naked body with verses from the Koran playing across it. Van Gogh was murdered in November 2004 by Mohammed Bouyeri, who cut off his head and left a note threatening Hirsi Ali with death. Like Rushdie, Hirsi Ali moved behind a screen of bodyguards.
Hirsi Ali now lives in the US and has made a point of meeting and being filmed with Rushdie: in an exchange in 2005, she publicly apologised for her own protests against The Satanic Verses, when she was a teenager in Nairobi, Kenya. “Near where I lived, there were some guys who said, ‘We should burn this book!’ And I joined in. I am sorry. I was demonstrating from ignorance. I have grown up. I have lost my fear of hell.”
Earlier this month, I asked her what she had meant by that. She said: “In Nairobi at that time, the book galvanised the Muslim society. It was done in the madrasas [religious schools]. It turned the community towards radicalism; it fused us into a political society and what had been our main concerns – getting an education, food, housing – were subsumed in this. It took over the community.
“But later, I lost my fears of being expelled from the community; and then lost my fear of hell if I went against the teaching. My reflection on this is that you have to stop believing what the propaganda says – that we are all part of a powerful ummah [community of believers]. Then you can take responsibility for yourself; and then you can change.”
. . .
Twenty years on, Muslim society in the UK is taking part self-critically in society’s wider debates, something that was absent during the Rushdie affair. A prominent figure is Ed Husain, author of the The Islamist (https://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/edhusain), a vivid account of his descent into fundamentalism – again, sparked by The Satanic Verses – and his climb out.
Husain is now co-founder and deputy director of the Quilliam Foundation (https://www.quilliamfoundation.org/) (named for a 19th-century English convert to Islam, who founded the first British mosque), which describes itself as “the world’s first counter-extremism think-tank”. Husain told me that during the Satanic Verses controversy in 1988 he had joined a march in Brick Lane, in the now majority-Muslim borough of Tower Hamlets.
“Many people found a voice then. It was the first time Muslims had engaged with British political society as a united group. Before that there were idiosyncratic outfits in Bradford and elsewhere, each with their own agenda, often inimical to each other. With Satanic Verses, they were radicalised – through a grievance. The real focus of this thing was victimhood.”
The leaders of the protest against the book included the late Dr Kalim Siddiqui, creator of the Muslim Parliament forum, and Iqbal Sacranie, a former head of the Muslim Council of Britain, which brings together a range of Muslim organisations under a single constitution.
Husain says that “Sacranie and these people came into their own then, mobilising the Muslim community into a political force – their agenda was a fundamentalist one”.
Now Sir Iqbal, Sacranie remains in the leadership of the MCB: he would not comment on the Satanic Verses controversy but another prominent member of the MCB did. Inayat Bunglawala, assistant general secretary and spokesman, said that “it caused great offence. It created a British Muslim identity, through the common offence. But now, looking back, it seems we were foolish trying to get the book banned. We were demanding that others be prevented from reading it, which I now think is preposterous. When you go down that road it is dangerous.”
According to Ed Husain: “A lesson has been learned since 1988. You need to expose Muslim civil society to the arguments – and this is now happening. You have to empower people in civil society, Muslims and non-Muslims, to take on the extremists. And we have to recognise we are in a Christian society, and we must adapt to it.”
I felt a slight start of surprise that Husain would describe British society as Christian: it is perhaps more obviously so to a Muslim. The churches, the prayers at school assemblies, the use of Westminster Abbey for ceremonials – these are so much a part of British life that they have sunk into near invisibility. Yet he is also right: Islam, in Europe, has to live in a civic way with societies formed by Christian faith. Even when their citizens drift from it, they do so in favour of a secular dispensation that insists that all religions have a right to exist.
John Lloyd is an FT contributing editor
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008