Topical Take
Thursday, 21 June 2007
It's slightly depressing to read that Her Majesty's Government were entirely taken aback by the hostile Muslim reaction to their decision to knight Salman Rushdie. One assumed they had factored into their calculations at least a bit of pro forma Death-to-the-Great-Satan prancing in the livelier quartiers of Pakistan - or even, with classic Brit cynicism, figured that enraging hundreds of millions of Muslims over an imperial bauble was a cheap way to look courageous and tough and determined after the recent humiliations inflicted on the Royal Navy. But no: the whole burning-effigies-of-the-Queen routine took them completely by surprise. It really is impossible to exaggerate the depths of self-delusion within which the multiculti bien pensants exist. With characteristic clumsiness, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, managed to make things worse. As The Sydney Morning Herald reported:
"Obviously we are sorry if there are people who have taken very much to heart this honour, which is after all for a lifelong body of literary work," she said, after protests in the Muslim world over the award.
She stressed that Rushdie was just one of many Muslims who had been recognised by the British honours system - something she said "may not be realised by many of those who have been vocal in their opposition.
"People who are members of the Muslim faith are very much part of our whole, wider community ... they receive honours in this country in just the same way as any other citizen."
Er, yes, but Sir Salman does not, I believe, consider himself a Muslim. (Certainly, the last time I saw him, he was enjoying an alcoholic beverage.) So, locked into the usual identity-groupthink, Mrs Beckett has, in effect, repositioned Rushdie within the group that wants to kill him. Thanks a bundle. Few of us understood the full implications of the fatwa 18 years ago, but, if even ministers of the Crown can't get it in 2007, then we really have learned nothing. This is from Mark Steyn From Head To Toe:
I was reading a Salman Rushdie column the other day and, not for the first time, agreeing with 95 per cent of it. In fact, I agree with him so often these days I’ve almost stopped noticing it.
But not quite. Far away at the back of my mind, I still remember the Rushdie of the 1980s - reflexively leftist, anti-Thatcher, the works. The old line – a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged - goes tenfold for him. He’s not just a liberal mugged by reality; he’s a liberal whom reality has spent the last 13 years trying to kill. I still have difficulties with his novels, not least the one that got him into all the trouble, but in his columns and essays he has outgrown his illusions.
At the time – Valentine’s Day 1989 - most of us in Britain and the West didn’t appreciate the significance of the event. It marked the first time the Ayatollah Khomeini had claimed explicitly extraterritorial authority. Why he chose an obscure and for most of us unreadable English novel for his expeditionary foray is unclear, but the results must have heartened him tremendously.
Rushdie had not set out to offend Muslims. None of the London reviewers found anything controversial in the book. When British Muslims and their co-religionists around the world burnt copies of The Satanic Verses in the streets, BBC arts bores held innumerable discussions on the awful “symbolism” of this assault on “ideas.”
But it wasn’t symbolic at all. They burned the book because nothing else was at hand. If his wife and kid had swung by, they’d have gladly burned them instead. Overseas, they made do with translators and publishers. Rushdie’s precious lit. crit. crowd mostly opposed the fatwa on the grounds of artistic freedom rather than as a broader defence of Western pluralism. That was a mistake.
In the Fifties and Sixties, Nasserism attempted to import Soviet socialism to the Middle East. It never really took. A generation later, the Ayatollah came up with a better wheeze: Export Islamism to a culturally defeatist West. Everything that has become pathetically familiar to us since September 11th was present in the Rushdie affair.
First, the silence of the “moderate Muslims”: A few Islamic scholars pointed out that the Ayatollah had no authority to issue the fatwa; they quickly shut up when the consequences of not doing so became apparent.
Second, the squeamishness of the establishment: Rushdie was infuriated when the Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode. “I well understand the devout Muslims’ reaction, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for,” said His Grace.
Rushdie replied tersely, “There is only one person around here who is in any danger of dying.”
Roy Hattersley, the Labour Party’s deputy leader, attempted to split the difference by arguing that, while he of course supported freedom of speech, perhaps “in the interests of race relations” it would be better not to bring out a paperback edition. He was in favour of artistic freedom, but only in hard covers - and certainly, when it comes to soft spines, Lord Hattersley knows whereof he speaks.
Gerald Kaufman, a Jewish MP who has since gone on to disown Israel all but totally, attacked critics of British Muslims: “What I cannot accept is the implication that it is somehow anti-democratic and un-British for Mr Rushdie’s writings to be the object of criticism on religious, as distinct from literary, grounds.”
Kaufman said this a few days after large numbers of British Muslims had marched through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed. In the last few months, several readers have e-mailed me with their memories of those marches. One man in Bradford recalls asking a West Yorkshire police officer why the “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they’d been told to play it cool. The cries for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The police officer told him to “fuck off, or I’ll arrest you.”
And, most important of all, the Rushdie affair should have taught us that there’s nothing to negotiate. Mohammed Siddiqui wrote to The Independent from a Yorkshire mosque to endorse the fatwa by citing Sura 5 verses 33-34:
The punishment of those who wage war against God and His Apostle, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land, is execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the hereafter. Except for those who repent before they fall into your power. In that case know that God is oft-forgiving, most merciful.
Rushdie seems to have got the wrong end of the stick on this. He suddenly turned up on a Muslim radio station in West London one night and told his interviewer he’d converted to Islam. Marvellous religion, couldn’t be happier, praise be to Allah and all that.
The Ayatollah said terrific, now you won’t suffer such heavy punishment in the hereafter. But we’re still gonna kill you.
As bad as the fatwa was, the inability of the establishment coherently to defend western values was worse. Clifford Longley, the Religious Affairs Correspondent of The Times, was one of the few to understand what was at stake. The British government must surely know, he wrote, that some Muslim beliefs, “at least at face value, are not compatible with a plural society: Islam does not know how to exist as a minority culture. For it is not just a set of private individual principles and beliefs. Islam is a social creed above all, a radically different way of organizing society as a whole.”
Longley wanted anyone parading a “Death To Rushdie” placard to be “taken at his word and arrested for incitement to murder. The immediate consequences could be unpleasant, even including the risk of riot. But the painful shock of such a confrontation may regrettably be necessary before the British Muslim community is brought face to face with the reality that tolerance and compromise, even over fundamentals, are a fundamental requirement of life in Britain.” Instead, all those British Muslims who called openly for Rushdie’s death are still around, more powerful and with more followers.
Her Majesty’s Government lacked the will then, as most of the West does today. In effect, the Ayatollah was allowed to get away with annexing Islam for political purposes, not just at home but internationally. If “moderate Muslims” are a viable demographic at all, they face a choice: They can follow the murder-inciters of Bradford, the suicide-bombers of the West Bank and the depraved killers of northern Nigeria on their descent into barbarism. Or they can wake up and save their religion. Either way, the West will be little use.
from Mark Steyn From Head To Toe
Via Finestkind Clinic and fish market
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