DIARY
CHARLES MOORE Salmon Rushdie's defence of himself, published in the latest Independent on Sunday, was dignified and clear. It made me feel ashamed that because I so disliked the petulance of his political utterances over the years I had tended. to make light of his present difficulties. I agree with one of his critics, Tariq Modood, who says: We should not succumb to the libertarianism which sees the artist as a Nietzschean Ober- mensch, towering above conventional moral- ity with perfect liberty to publish imaginative explorations regardless of social consequ- ences.
There must be some things, sometimes, in any society, which are too destructive to be said, and it is arrogant of artists to claim to be above the society in which they live. But Mr Rushdie is offensive to nothing upon which British society depends for its survival, and any hubris of which he may be guilty is as nothing beside the intoler- ance of those who try to ban him and the cowardice of the politicians who abet them. The most striking feature of Mr Rushdie's apologia was how very British it was. Mr Rushdie makes a good deal of knowing two cultures, of being deracinated and so on, yet it seemed to me that all the assumptions behind his writing were West- ern ones — assumptions about freedom of thought, about the nature of imaginative writing, about the status of divine truth. Even his 'anti-racism', which he empha- sises, is a thoroughly Western idea. It does not come from the sub-continent which give birth to caste. Mr Rushdie's Western- ness is a strong reason why he should be supported. His difficulty is ours, not some obscure problem within a different culture.
In all the Rushdie debates, there is a search for the 'moderate' Muslim who will speak out against the persecutors. Such brave people can often be found, but their words give a misleading impression. There are moderate Muslims in the sense in which there are moderate individuals in any religion — forgiving, kindly, unwilling to think ill of others, naturally peaceful. There does not, however, seem to be any moderate position which is distinctively Muslim. Islamic experts assure me that there is no tradition of scriptural inter- pretation comparable to that which Christ- ianity has developed over the past thousand years. That is to say, there is nothing to move the scripture onto a more metaphorical or other-worldly plane or to imply that the meaning of the scripture is not wholly or only literal. Islam, like orthodox Judaism, is a religion of the law, not, like Christianity, of the divine fulfil- ment of the law, and the whole duty of the Muslim is to obey that law in clear, practical ways. There simply is no other
interpretation available. Muslim tolerance therefore arises only out of traditional practice: the properly constituted author- ities should be the only ones to punish, and so on. When this tolerance is rejected by revolutionaries like Khomeini, it is shown to be intellectually defenceless. Given the intolerance, it is a puzzle to me why there have not been earlier protests about other books which are offensive to Islam. Perhaps the only explanation is that the people likely to take offence do not read many books. I challenge a publisher to reprint a one-time best-seller, The true nature of imposture fully displayed in the life of Mahomet by Humphrey Prideaux, published in 1697. In this, Prideaux claims that the Prophet trained pigeons to peck grains of corn out of his ears so that he would appear to be taking instruction from the Holy Spirit.
It might seem bathetic or worse to compare the persecutions of the novelist with the legal battle of Mr Peregrine Worsthorne, but one similarity did strike me. Mr Rushdie insists on the 'fictionality of fiction'. He is terribly frustrated by those who accuse him of passing off his fictions as literally true. They are fictions, works of art, he says, I believe they are true but not true in that way. Sitting in court 13, and listening to the libel case brought by Mr Andrew Neil, I felt that Mr Worsthorne was the victim of a compara- ble literal-mindedness. Despite being a journalist, Mr Neil did not seem to under- stand the journality (if that is the word) of journalism. Everything in a journalist's life is grist to his mill. `That will make a good Diary par,' we say to ourselves or our colleagues as we get cancer or get divorced or go bankrupt. One of the things that makes Mr Worsthorne a so much better journalist than Mr Neil is that there is almost nothing that he will not write about. (I was going to add that Mr Neil is also hampered by the fact that he cannot write in the first place, but in case this claim is brought before a libel court, let me make it plain that I am not saying that Mr Neil
literally cannot write, only that he is not very good at it.) In the case of the Pamella Bordes affair, therefore, Mr Worsthorne acted like a good journalist and used the occasion to provoke an argument. It was supposed to be an argument in the context of journalism, and only a pompous dullard, supported by his employer's money, would prefer to conduct it in the courts rather than the pages of the paper he edits.
At the beginning of next month, I am exchanging identities for four weeks, I am going to New York to edit the National Review and for that month The Spectator will be edited by the National Review's editor, Mr John O'Sullivan. I shall tell you how I got on when I return. Perhaps I should say 'if. A current story goes that an Englishman approached a policeman in New York and said, 'Excuse me, officer. Could you tell me how long it takes to walk across Central Park to x Street?' The reply was immediate. 'Don't know. No one's ever made it.'
Acold, thin, jarring year, especially for politicians', wrote our then political correspondent, Ferdinand Mount, in our first issue of 1982. It had been that sort of year for the business fortunes of The Spectator too. But just as that issue went to press things began to look up for the magazine. James Knox, then aged 29, joined as marketing director. At that time we were receiving annual advertising re- venues of £40,000. Eight years later, we take more than half a million pounds of advertisements a year, and the cjrculation is more than twice what it was then. And now James Knox, later promoted to be our publisher, and the chief author of this success, is leaving, partly to return to authorship. His only published work so far is a history of the Trinity Foot Beagles: his next will be the first full biography • of Robert Byron. One often says of people who have a terminal illness that they have borne it with unfailing cheerfulness. James has borne the tribulations of The Spectator (which often seemed to be terminal) just like that. His confidence has infected others: advertisers as well as readers have come to believe in The Spectator, and although we still badly need to swell the ranks of the faithful, we no longer fear the weekly appearance of the bailiffs (James Knox, is very good with bailiffs). It is a compliment to James's remarkable achievements that he has found Luis Dominguez as his successor. Mr Doming- uez is coming from the richer pastures (,I Harpers and Queen, where he is the publisher, because he, too, believes in this magazine.
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