death for writing the ‘blasphemous’ novel The Satanic Verses was perhaps the
curtain raiser for the religious extremism, intolerance, and violence that
would mark the dying decades of twentieth century and the birth of the next.
The ugly, hydra-headed religious fanaticism of every variety continues to
threaten the cherished values of enlightenment.
Rushdie’s recently published memoir, Joseph Anton, takes youthrough the travails of the author during those fatwa years, when Islamist
assassins were on the prowl to execute him in order to claim the bounty announced by
the Shia cleric and, of course, to reserve a place in heaven where rivers of wine flows non-stop and
nubile girls roam around.
the fatwa years in order not to be identified by the fanatics. The memoir
however is not merely a narrative of the ordeals that Rushdie had gone through
during those years. The book provides a Rushdie enthusiast or a bibliophile a
wealth of interesting materials on what led to the writing of Rushdie’s literary
creations, including The Satanic Verses.
unequivocal advocacy of secularism, modernity, and rationality as opposed to
religious bigotry and intolerance.
unlike many other religions, ‘it was an event inside history’, and hence “it was
obviously influenced by the events and pressures and ideas of the time of its
creation; that to historicise the story, to try to understand how a great ideas
was shaped by those forces, was the only possible approach to the subject”.
“Revelation was to be understood as an interior, subjective
event, not an objective reality, and a revealed text was to be scrutinized like
any other text, using all the tools of the critics, literary, historical,
psychological, linguistic and sociological.
In short, the text was to be regarded as a human artifact and thus, like
all such artifacts, prey to human fallibility and imperfection”. (Page 24)
person, though not of an Islamist, who recites Quran as the word of god and
hence considers it blasphemous to read it rationally.
writes:
“Mecca
was prosperous….At the gates to the city stood temples to three goddesses,
al-Lat, al-manat and al-Uzza. Winged goddesses, like exalted birds. Or angels. Each
time the trading caravans from which the city gained its wealth left the city
gates, or came back through them, they paused at one of the temples and made an
offering. Or, to use modern language: paid a tax. The wealthiest families in Mecca controlled the
temples and muchof their wealth came from these ‘offerings’. The winged
goddesses were at the heart of the economy of the new city, of the urban
civilisation that was coming into being.“In the building known as the Cube, or Ka’aba, in the centre
of town there were idols of hundreds of gods. One of these statues, by no means
the most popular, represented a deity called al-Lah, meaning the god, just as
al-Lat was the goddess. Al-Lah was unusual in that he didn’t specialize, he
wasn’t a rain god or a wealth god or a war god or a love god, he was just,
vaguely, an everything god. It may be
that this failure to specialize explained his relative unpopularity. People making offering to gods usually did so
for specific reasons, the health of a child, the future of a business
enterprise, a drought, a quarrel, a romance.
There preferred gods who were experts in their field to this non-specific
all-rounder of a deity. However, al-Lah was about to become more popular than
any pagan deity had ever been.
“The man who would pluck al-Lah from near-obscurity and
become his Prophet, transforming him into the equal, or at least equivalent, of
the Old Testament God I Am and the New Testament’s Three-in-One, was Muhammad Ibn
Abdullah of the Banu Hashim family….
“Here was a fascinating paradox: that an essentially
conservative theology, looking backwards with affection towards a vanishing
culture, became a revolutionary idea, because the people whom it attracted most
strongly were those who had been marginialised by urbanization – the
disaffected poor, the street mob. This, perhaps, was why Islam, the new idea,
felt so threatening to the Meccan elite…” (Page 41-43)
Anyone pondering over the status of women in Islamic
societies today may wonder how it came to be so. Here, again, Rushdie take us
to the early years of Islam:
“… … most of the major collections of Hadith, or traditions,
about the life of he Prophet told the story of an incident that afterwards
became known as the incident of the satanic verses. The Prophet came down from
the mountain one day and recited the sura (number 53) call an-Najm, the Star.
It contained these words: ‘have you heard of al-Lat and al-Uzza, and al-Manat,
the third, the other one? They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is
greatly to be desired.’ At a later point – was it days later? Or weeks, or
months? – he returned to the mountain and came down, abashed, to state that he
had been deceived on his previous visit; the Devil had appeared to him in the
guise of the archangel, and the verses he had been given were therefore not
divine, but satanic, and should be expunged from the Quran at once. The angel
had, on this occasion, brought new verses from God, which were to replace the
satanic verses in the great book: ‘have you heard of al-lat and al-Uzza, and
al-Manat, the third, the other one? They are but names that your forefathers
invented, and there is no truth in them.
Shall God have daughters while you have sons? That would be an unjust
division.’ And in this way the Recitation was purified of the Devil’s work. … …
“The ‘true’ verses, angelic or divine, were clear: it was
the femaleness of the winged goddesses – the ‘exalted birds’ – that rendered
them inferior and fraudulent and proved they could not be the children of God,
as the angels were. Sometime the birth
of a great idea revealed things about it future; the way in which newness
enters the world prophesied how it would behave when it grew old. At the birth of this particular idea,
femaleness was seen as a disqualification from exaltation.” (Page 43-45)
During the days following Ayatolah Khomeni’s fatwa, a number
of writers came to the defence of Rushdie. The South African writer Paul
Trewhela was one among them. Rushdie says, Trewhela defended him describing
“the Islamist campaign as a ‘bursting forth of mass popular irrationalism’,
arguing that “it was ‘the novel’s secularizing tendency that was at issue…its
intention to ‘discuss Muhammad as if he were human’… and he argued for a
robust secularist response to the religious attack” (Page 125).
spread their culture of hate and violence. Here is Rushdie:
“Modern information technology was being used in the service
of retrograde ideas: the modern was being turned against itself by the
medieval, in the service of a world view that disliked modernity itself –
rational, reasonable, innovative, secular, skeptical, challenging, creative
modernity, the antithesis of mystical, static, intolerant, stultifying
faith. The rising tide of Islamic
radicalism was described by its own ideologues as a ‘revolt against history’.
History, the forward progress of peoples through time, was itself the enemy,
more than any mere infidels or blasphemers.” (Page 131)
with a character after Salman Rushdie himself, Rushdie writes in his memoir:
“Among the subjects the play did not explore were: religion
as political repression and as international terrorism; the need for blasphemy
(the writers of the French Enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a
weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on
thought); religion as the enemy of the intellect.” (Page 177).
Rushdie says these were the themes
he might have treated had he written the play!
Banquet, a play written by the poet Tony Harrison, treats blasphemy “being
at the very root of Western culture. The
trials of Socrates, Jesus Christ and Galileo had all been blasphemy trials and
yet the history of philosophy, Christianity, and science owed them a mighty
debt.”
“At the heart of the dispute over The Satanic Verses”,
writes Rushdie,
“…was a question of profound importance: who shall have the
control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell
the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what
manner those stories may be told? For everyone lived by and inside stories, the
so-called grand narratives. The nation was a story, and the family was another,
and religion was a third. As a creative
artist he knew that the only answer to the question was: Everyone and anyone
has, or should have that power. We
should all be free to take the grand narratives to task, to argue with them,
satirise them, and insist that they change or reflect the changing times. We should speak of them reverently,
irreverently, passionately, caustically, or however we chose. That was our
right as members of an open society.”
apologists (and post-modernists as well). This has been used to justify every
atrocities committed against the oppressed and especially against
religion-based atrocities against women – be it burning of women in the pyre of
their deceased husbands (sati), mutilation of girls, the practice of purdah,
child marriage, and what not.
wrote to the British Member of Parliament, Bernie Grant:
“Cultural relativism is the death of ethical thought,
supporting the right of tyrannical priest to tyrannise, of despotic parent to
mutilate their daughters, of bigoted individuals to hate homosexuals and Jews,
because it is a part of their ‘culture’ to do so. Bigotry, prejudice and violence or the threat
of violence are not human ‘values’. They
are proof of the absence of such values.
They are not the manifestations of a person’s ‘culture’. They are indications of a person’s lack of
culture. (Page 187)
“A new word had been created to help the blind remain blind: Islamophobia.
To criticize the militant stridency of this religion in its contemporary
incarnation was to be a bigot. A phobic person was extreme and irrational in
his views, and so the fault lay with such persons and not with the belief
system that boasted over one billion followers worldwide. One billion believers
could not be wrong, therefore the critics must be the ones foaming at the
mouth. When did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to
dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were
the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A
religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they
were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were
shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent….
“It was Islam that had changed, not people like himself, it
was Islam that had become phobic of a very wide range of ideas, behaviours and
things. In those years and in the years that followed, Islamic voices in this
or that part of the world – Algeria,
Pakistan, Afghanistan –
anathematized theatre, film and music, and musicians and performers were
mutilated and killed. Representational art was evil, and so the ancient
Buddhist statues at Bamiyan were destroyed by the Taliban.
“‘Islamophobia’ was an addition to the vocabulary of Humpty
Dumpty Newspeak. It took the language of analysis, reason and dispute, and
stood it on its head.
“He knew, as surely as he knew anything, that the fanatical
cancer spreading through Muslim communities would, in the end, explode into the
wider world beyond Islam. Ifthe intellectual battle was lost – if this new
Islam established its right to be ‘respected’ and to have its opponents
excoriated, placed beyond the pale and, why not, even killed – then political
defeat would follow” (Page 344-46)
Published by Jonathan Cape,
2012
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