HOIST BY HIS • OWN CANARD

Stephen. Spender argues that

Salman Rushdie is a victim of the immigration he supports

SALMAN RUSHDIE was sentenced to death a thousand days ago, by order of the Ayatollah Khomeni, a judgment which has been endorsed by his successors. Rushdie's Offence was, allegedly, blasphemy against Islam, the prophet and the Koran in his novel, The Satanic Verses.

It was surely unthinkable, until quite recently, that a religious or political leader In a foreign country should openly and Publicly pronounce sentence of death on a writer living in this country. It was also unthinkable that there should be co-reli- gionists of the Ayatollah living in Great Britain who would publicly express their approval of the sentence so passed, and that they should make it so clear that some among them were willing to carry out the sentence, that the British authorities have been obliged to take Mr Rushdie into what iS, in effect, protective custody. These previously unthinkable things have become realities because, following on events such as the disintegration after 1945 of the British and other European Empires, we are living in one of the great Periods of migration, when immigrants from over-populated and impoverished Parts of the world — and from countries Where there is political persecution — flow over their boundaries into the less populat- ed, more prosperous and more democratic areas.

Some English (and French and Germans and, indeed, now Italians) deplore immi- gration and try to stop it. I must admit to having a certain sympathy for the way they feel, though not with their actions. It is sad for members of a nation to lose a sense of their own identity with all its traditions, culture, art, ideas and way of life inherited from the past and identified with land- scape and towns. Nevertheless, I think that Immigration, like the shrinkage of the World through modern communications, is inevitable.

In an interesting essay entitled 'In Good Faith' (published in the Independent on Sunday 4 February 1990) Mr Rushdie defends The Satanic Verses on the grounds that:

it is written from the very experience of Uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis . . . that is the migrant condition, and from which, I think, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity.'

He sees( his task as a novelist as that which Shelley, in the modern world of scientific invention, saw as his task as a poet, 'to imagine that which we know'.

And what he knows in The Satanic Vers- es is his celebration of: hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the trans- formation that comes of new and unexpect- ed combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs . . . Mélange, hotch- potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world . . . It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it.'

What Mr Rushdie seems here to over- look is that it is mass immigration which has got him into the trouble in which he now finds himself: unpleasant as it is to have to admit this, it is the presence of large numbers of Muslim immigrants in English cities with, among them, a small minority of fanatics, which makes it neces- sary for the native British police to protect him from their attentions.

One cannot take it for granted that a global population hotch-potch of the kind which Mr Rushdie envisages would be a world safe, not just for him, but for democracy. Democracy is threatened in several countries now by immigration, This is a stuck-op.

partly because immigration provokes the most reactionary forces in the countries now receiving immigrants (le Pen in France, neo-Nazis in Germany, neo-Fas- cists in Italy), partly because the immi- grants themselves are by no means always upholders of democracy.

There seems to be a rather widely shared assumption today that the breakdown of communism implies the triumph of capital- ism and the market economy which go hand in hand with the triumph of democra- cy. Myself, I think that while Big Business may benefit from the forces released in a period of intense competition and rivalry, democracy may not necessarily, and inevitably, prove the alternative to the tyrannies which have collapsed or been overthrown. Events in Yugoslavia show how provinces may break off from their centres without their necessarily becoming democracies in doing so, and how in some countries communists may remain in power, perhaps under another name.

As a result of internecine struggles in Russia, Yugoslavia and elsewhere there are likely soon to be millions of refugees; and wherever these are received as immigrants there will be reactionary forces opposed to receiving them, and there will be no guar- antee that the immigrants themselves are democratic.

Salman Rushdie's vision in The Satanic Verses of a world consisting almost entirely of immigrants intermingling to the benefit of all, is inspiring and generous. But for migration to take place on such a scale without its resulting in a breakdown of democracy, is difficult to imagine. And if there was a breakdown of democracy, the immigrants in every country would be threatened with the kind of liquidation with which we were made all too familiar in central Europe in the years between 1933 abd 1945.

Maintaining democracy is the essential pre-condition of immigration and, doing so, means putting it before immigration.

One lesson I draw from the Salman Rushdie affair is that immigrants should be required to obey the laws of the country or countries to which they migrate, especially where these are concerned with freedom. I wonder how far democracy is taught in English schools where there are large num- bers of immigrants. I find myself thinking almost nostalgically of American schools, where children are made every morning to salute the American Flag, and wishing that there was a flag of democracy, symbolising freedom of speech, which children going into English schools — wherever these chil- dren come from — were made to salute.

Meanwhile, of course, I support the free- dom of Salman Rushdie to express his visions, even when I do not agree with these. His case has come to symbolise the freedom of the writer, and to show bow endangered this may be, and indeed espe- cially, in the world of total migration which he appears to support.