Insensitive to Islam
Sir: Ray Honeyford takes me to task for portraying Islam as an entiely sinned- against religion (Letters, 23 June). This is scarcely fair to my article. It is certainly not fair to the particular chapter of my book, A Brief History of Blasphemy, from which the article was extracted.
But, as Mr Honeyford himself implies by coming to the defence of Salman Rushdie, there are very significant parallels between the Rushdie affair and the controversy in which he was involved when he was a middle school headmaster in Bradford in 1980.
When I wrote in my article that 'we have developed an intellectual culture which is insensitive to the power of insult', I was not, of course, thinking of the Honeyford affair. But those words are, nevertheless, strikingly appropriate to it. For the particu- lar mistake which Ray Honeyford made was to write about an entire national culture — Pakistan's — in terms which Bradford Muslims found deeply insulting — and to do so behind their back in the pages of the Salisbury Review. During the row which followed, Mr Honeyford be- came the victim of a campaign of hatred in which, like Salman Rushdie, he was por- trayed as a devil and a racist. Because of the vicious excesses of that campaign I have a good deal of sympathy for Ray Honeyford, just as I have sympathy for Salman Rushdie. But I still believe that it is reasonable to ask of any novelist — or of any headmaster — who writes about racial- ly sensitive subjects, that they should show ordinary human sensitivity. I am very much afraid that Ray Honeyford did not do this. This view, it must be said, is shared by Malise Ruthven, to whose 'thoughtful study' Mr Honeyford refers in his letter. He has perhaps forgotten that Malise Ruthven comes to the conclusion 'that Honeyford was the wrong man for the job: he was tactless and insensitive in a post where tact and sensitivity were essential' (A Satanic Affair, page 78).
I am sorry that I have to remind Mr Honeyford of these rather painful words. But his letter seems to indicate that he has not yet taken them to heart.
Richard Webster
The Orwell Bookshop, 64 High Street, Southwold, Suffolk
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