Should Rushdie be killed?
Edward Mortimer
A SATANIC AFFAIR: SALMAN RUSHDIE AND THE RAGE OF ISLAM by Manse Ruthven Chatto & Windus, f14.95, pp. 184 LETTER TO CHRISTENDOM by Rana Kabbani Virago, £3.99, pp. 70 Ayatollah Khomeini made things very easy for British liberals, unless they hap- pened to be Muslim and very difficult for British Muslims, especially if they hap- pened to be liberals. As long as the argument was about the limits of freedom of expression it was difficult for liberals and easy for Muslims.
The latter knew that whatever and wherever the limits are, Rushdie had over- stepped them: nothing could be more offensive to God, or to the community of believers, than the kind of obscene parody of the origins of Islam contained in The Satanic Verses. The former do not really like any argument about such limits. Their instinct is to say that there should be none, but a moment's reflection suffices to show that this position is unsustainable.
As Malise Ruthven points out:
In a free society limits of freedom of speech must be limited by the possibility of harm inflicted to [sic] others: that is why there are libel laws and why it is illegal to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded cinema. The problem with verbal attacks, of course, is that the notion of harm is likely to be a subjective one.
Precisely. Most of us liberals would be very reluctant to include harm done to other people's feelings because it is so hard to quantify, and because implicitly it gives a right of total censorship to any group or individual who claims to feel strongly about anything. But we have for the most part conceded limits on public utterances which tend to legitimise violence or hatred against a given group. The Satanic Verses itself would not fall into that category: it is a novel in which the Muslim characters are on the whole sympathetically portrayed. But, as Richard Webster pointed out in The Spectator recently, much of the pro- Rushdie liberal campaign well might.
Khomeini's fatwa made the issue glor- iously and fatally simple for the liberal camp. Whatever the problems raised by Rushdie's book, no one in Britain thinks that killing him would be an appropriate solution to them. The liberal's obligation of solidarity with a writer so threatened is splendidly straightforward.
Many British Muslims agree that killing Rushdie is not the solution, and would in fact make matters worse. At the same time most of them believe Khomeini's inter- pretation of Islamic law is correct, and many are grateful to him for taking up an issue which more traditional Muslim rul- ers, notably in the Arab world, had been doing their best to ignore. It is very difficult for any Muslim publicly to de- nounce the fatwa without appearing to go over to the enemy camp.
All this emerges with painful clarity from Malise Ruthven's short but carefully re- searched and thought-out book, which comes probably as near as any one work could to doing justice to both sides of this very awkward argument. No Muslim him- self, but the author of a learned and sympathetic book on Islam (Islam in the World, Pelican, 1984), Ruthven is able to relate to British Muslims not only academi- cally (by explaining the different schools of subcontinental piety that they belong to) but also personally. Some of the best passages in the book are provided by his personal dialogues with individual Mus- lims, in Bradford and elsewhere. He makes no bones about his admiration for The Satanic Verses as a novel but, like Richard Webster, he finds Rushdie guilty of insen- sitivity and even 'secular fundamentalism', especially in his refusal to allow that even the Indian government, with all the con- flicting religious passions it has to handle, might have had valid reasons for banning his book.
Rana Kabbani's short Letter to Christen- dom has a much simpler object: simply to express her anguish, as a Muslim woman living in and enjoying Western culture, at finding these two identities thrown into sharp mutual antagonism. Her simple and moving account of her childhood in Damascus should be read by as many non-Muslims as possible, for it does more to explain the deep love of Islam felt by its adherents than any number of shrill apolo- gias. It is a pity that, in the last chapter, the author feels obliged to attempt her own criticism of The Satanic Verses. The novel she suggests
seems to concern itself only with satisfying Western literary values, which inevitably leads to a recanting of its author's political stance.
That is surely a profound misreading. It is hard to think of a novel more determinedly political and one might have hoped that Kabbani, sharing Rushdie's cultural hyb- ridity, would recognise this. For Rushdie, like any political novelist worth reading, uses his book to attack several targets at once. Dogmatic religion is certainly one, but among the others are English smugness and racism, and a whole gamut of poses struck by people in Rushdie's own halfway- house position to conceal their lack of self-confidence. Sadly, feelings about the book are now so polarised that even such a perceptive writer as Kabbani can no longer read it for what it is.
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