OPINION: Rise, Sir Salman!

 

Writing in The Guardian on June 19, Muslim Council of Britain official Inayat Bunglawala recalls the heady days of 1989 when he, by his own admission, was a "book burner". He wrote ...

For many young Muslim students at the time the situation was fairly straightforward. The Thatcher government had banned Peter Wright's 'Spycatcher' and had gone to court to prevent its distribution. Surely, Rushdie's novel, which had caused such offence to hundreds of millions of believers, deserved a similar fate?

I remember being rather puzzled as to why Rushdie's defenders were so vigorous in arguing for the right to offend Muslims. Muslims were not writing books making fun of Christ and other revered religious figures. It seemed to be a deliberate attempt to mock deeply held beliefs.

Somehow, all this emotion seemed to have passed right over my head. It wasn't as if I lacked religiosity or a commitment to Muslim causes. 

By 1989, when Khomeini had issued his fatwa for Rushdie's death sentence, I had already read (and in some cases, almost memorised) the works of various Islamic (and Islamist) writers - Syed Maududi, Syed Qutb, Maryam Jameelah, Ali Shariati and many more.

Yet for some reason, I could never understand how Muslims could be offended by Rushdie's novel. To me, it was quite clear cut. If you don't like the novel, no one is forcing you to read it. If you want the novel to be a failure, the worst way to start is to give the author lots of attention.

I realise this approach won't make me very popular in some Muslim circles. Why?

Well, in some Muslim circles, people violently protest when a foreign country bestows a title on one of its citizens. In some Muslim circles, people protect the honour of their religious figures by doing exactly the opposite of what these figures taught them.

Notice how I'm saying 'some' Muslim circles. Thus far, violent threats and responses to Sir Salman have come from MPs and merchants in Pakistan and Iran. There have also been strong words from PAS in Malaysia. Some Arab countries have also murmured quiet disapproval. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, there's hardly a murmur.

Anger over knighthood

That hasn't stopped many Western newspapers from pretending Muslims are angrier than they really are. Even on the edges of Western civilisation, the editorial in The Press (a Fairfax newspaper published in Christchurch) on June 25 speaks of "(the) renewal of death threats against Rushdie, in the wake of his knighthood" as representing "British Prime Minister Tony Blair fighting the right sort of war against Islamic terrorism". It seems that the view from New Zealand is that "(the) reaction in the Muslim world has been led by extreme groups".

Perhaps back in 1989, many Muslims were baying for Rushdie's blood, with fatwa flying around like blades, ready to decapitate him. Perhaps then Rushdie personified the battle between Western modernity and medieval religion.

What protests do we see now? At the time of writing, Pakistani protests were generating crowds of up to 2,000 people. Given Pakistan's population, this is the equivalent of 20 protesters holding placards in Sydney's Town Hall Square. Pakistani merchants have also offered some 200,000 rupees for anyone who beheads Rushdie. That should be enough to buy the average Malaysian family a nice dinner at a fast-food outlet.

Then, of course, we have a Pakistani Council of Religious Scholars who, in a fit of unscholarly anger, decided to take revenge by awarding an honorary title to Osama bin Ladin. Hopefully they can find him!

Certainly many Britons are angered by the decision to grant Rushdie a knighthood. Some on the British Left are angry that he has accepted an elitist award; nationalists resent that a man who, after millions were spent securing him, abandoned Britain in a huff and puff to enjoy the high life in the United States. One MP claims he would find more literary merit in the Yellow Pages.

I can't say I've read the Yellow Pages cover to cover. I've also never read an entire Rushdie novel. Hence, I am in no position to comment on his literary worth. However, I have read a number of Rushdie's articles and reviews.

The first Rushdie review I read was in the mid-1980s. Rushdie reviewed Edward Said's autobiography 'After The Last Sky'. I was in high school at the time and my father used to subscribe to The Guardian weekly. Like many Aussie kids of my age, I accepted the conventional wisdom that the Palestinians were regarded as terrorists. Rushdie showed to me that there were in fact two sides to the story.

I also read a series of articles by Rushdie about communal killings in India. His coverage of the communal riots in Gujrat in 2002, in which over 3,000 innocent civilians (mainly Muslim and Christian) were massacred by Hindu militants, was haunting. Women and children were targeted, as they are in every communal riot. In the immediate aftermath, Rushdie wrote of Indians' 

... particular gift, always most dazzlingly in evidence at times of religious unrest, for dousing our children in kerosene and setting them alight, or cutting their throats, or smothering them, or just clubbing them to death with a good strong length of wood.

An imam once told me that God can even manipulate the devil to bring misguided people back to the fold. I know of at least one friend who told me she would not have been Muslim had it not for her reading Rushdie's work on Muslim cultures.

How many Muslim Rushdie-haters remember him as the author of 'The Moor's Last Sigh'? This novel castigated Hindu religious chauvinism in India, and lampooned the head of Mumbai's Hindu fascist RSS party Bal Thackeray. The Indian government of the day effectively banned the book and Hindu militants threatened Rushdie with their own 'fatwa' .

I admit I was offended at first by the few extracts of 'The Satanic Verses' that I read in a pro-Iranian newspaper called the Hong Kong Muslim Herald . I never actually read the entire novel, so I cannot comment on the context within which these extracts were placed. In fact, I never even bothered to check if those extracts exist in the novel.

Fiction and reality

Again, I ask the question: How can fiction be blasphemous? And where does fiction end and reality begin? Or vice versa? I ask myself this question each time I scan the opinion pages of some of Murdoch newspapers. So much fiction in such a small space!

Some weeks back, The Australian published an article by a Canadian Muslim who would like to be Rushdie if only she could write better. Irshad Manji thrives on controversy and is desperate to get a fatwa to improve her book sales. Her major claim to fame is that she re-discovered the concept of ijtihad (roughly translated as independent juristic reasoning), a claim she shares with Osama and a host of other Muslim controversialists.

Irshad's article laments the recent response of some Pakistani lawmakers to the recent award to Rushdie of a Knight Bachelor for his services to literature. Why they were so angry beats me. Perhaps they were jealous Rushdie could still be regarded as a bachelor despite being married to a Bollywood actress.

What made Irshad particularly upset was that Pakistani MPs spent so much time worrying about Rushdie and so little time focusing on issues of poverty and women's rights. Quite wisely, she did not blame Islam but rather "hypocrisy under the banner of Islam". I doubt many Muslims would disagree with her, though that didn't stop cultural warrior sub-editors at The Australian from giving this article the headline 'Islam the problem'.

In fact, I'm not aware of anytime during the thousand-year-plus Muslim renaissance when Muslims had a problem with allegedly blasphemous books. In fact, Muslims almost turned blasphemy into an artform. On the eve of the Crusades, a Syrian Muslim scholar named Abul Hasan al-Ma'arri (his surname indicating he was from the town of Ma'arra in Syria) was told about these nasty uncivilised European crusader thugs who even resorted to cannibalism. And his response?

There are only two classes of people in this world - those with lots of religion but little intelligence and those with lots of intelligence but little religion!

Around the same time, in the Spanish Muslim city of Cordoba, one Sheik Musa bin Maymoun bin Abdullah al-Qurtubi was placing the finishing touches on his famous Arabic theological text called 'Dalalat al-Hari'in' (Guide to the Perplexed). The Sheik-cum-physician devoted part of the book to comparing the three Abrahamic faiths - Islam, Christianity and Judaism. He concluded that Judaism was superior to its younger spiritual twins.

You'd think that, writing this kind of hubris, he thought himself some kind of rabbi. Indeed, he was! Jews regard him as Moses Maimonides. Muslim rulers of his day honoured him. Among them was Saladdin, who appointed Maimonides as Chief Medical Officer of his army. Yep, the Muslims liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders with the help of an allegedly blasphemous rabbi!

Some hostile non-Muslims (or, in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ex-Muslims) quote verses from the Qur'an in an effort to show that I believe in beating wives or slaughtering infidels. They want you to believe that I am a threat to you. I despise their antics because I know they are quoting the Qur'an out of context in an effort to have you suspect me. They distort the meaning.

So there you have it. I don't want you to despise me and other Muslims. I want you to believe me when I tell you that the verses being quoted are being taken out of context. At the same time, some Muslims are quite prepared to quote a work of fiction by a novelist as an excuse to cause him harm. Makes sense?

Muslims needn't worry about the likes of Rushdie. The poor fellow is very much yesterday's man, even forced to play himself (and do so rather terribly) in 'Bridget Jones' Diary' just to remain visible. Despite his marriage to a lingerie model, he has been awarded the Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II.

Muslims need not punish Sir Salman any further. Unless, of course, if we want him to remain relevant.

(IRFAN YUSUF is a Sydney-based lawyer, writer and blogger whose articles and reviews have appeared in various newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Age, Canberra Times, Australian Financial Review and The New Zealand Herald . He recently interviewed Ayaan Hirsi Ali for NewMatilda.com. First published in malaysiakini on 3 July 2007)