Rushdie caught in tide of censorship NO BOOK in recent times has caused such literary and political uproar as Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. It has been banned in most of the Islamic world as well as "secular" India and South Africa. In France and Italy, publishers have "delayed" its appearance; but in the countries where it is available, despite (or because of) the campaign for it to be banned or boycotted, its sales are soaring.
Now the European Community has withdrawn its diplomats from Iran because of the call from spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini and other Iranian leaders for Muslims to slay Salman Rushdie. AHMAD SHUJA put it, "we are all Salman Rushdies". The affair of The Satanic Verses must be not only the occasion for a campaign in defence of freedom of expression in the West, but also and above all for a campaign for democratic freedoms in those countries that do not enjoy them — to the extent where their governments even want to limit them abroad.
The Rushdies who live in these countries must also be able to express themselves freely, because so long as a large section of humanity remains in chains no freedom can be irreversibly won. The defence of Salman Rushdie is not one of "Western values" against "Eastern culture"; it is one
OR THE LAST couple of months, almost every weekend in one town or another in Britain there have been organized demonstrations against the supposedly "blasphemous" Satanic Verses. In Bolton and Bradford [towns with large Muslim populations in north of England] the book was publicly burned, "to attract public attention", , according to one of the organizers. This served to horrify millions of people in Britain and non-Islamic countries, recalling the book-burning of Nazi were shot dead by police in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, when a huge demonstration led by mullahs tried to attack the American Centre in protest against the planned publication of The Satanic Verses in the USA. Not one of the demonstrators had seen, never mind read, the book: indeed ordinary Muslims are not allowed to read any book that has been declared blasphemous — only religious scholars have this privilege.
However, the Islamic world is divided on its response. Hashem El Essay, chair of the Islamic Society for the Promotion of of the right of all to free expression, includol the right of all to iree expression, including those in the East. *
Germany.
Germany.
On February 12, five demonstrators
Madden claims news media, and
Religious Tolerance (the organization that
Religious Tolerance (the organization that started and has led the campaign against he has been misrepresented by the both he and Seal have said that they oppose the banning of the book. However, they have failed to make clear public statements of this principled position - presumably for electoral reasons. The local council's Labour group, some of whose Asian members have called for a ban, has decided not to take any position!
Such caution has left the field open to others. Members of the Monday Club [an extreme right-wing Tory organization] have been running around posing as defenders of "free speech". Needless to say, this is not because they support the vigorous anti-racism that runs through Rushdie's book. Their claim that they are trying to "relax racial tensions" is belied by their leaflets and letters to the press. These include such traditional ingredients as an end to immigration from "the hinterland of the Indian sub-continent"
What is needed in Bradford, as elsewhere, is a labour movement response that concedes nothing to clerical reaction and censorship, but which also takes up the Muslim campaign in the wider context of a racist society. * Paul Hubert
Leaving the field to the right wing ONE of the most strikind images coniured up by the ONE of the most striking images conjured up by the campaign against Rushdie's book is that of Muslim leaders in Bradford burning a copy of the book outside the City Hall. Two leaders of the Bradford Council of Mosques apparently supported the call for Rushdie's death. Subsequently, they claimed to have been misquoted. The Council excused itself, saying "We are not politicians". The officials concerned were only speaking in religious terms; they say they only support legal, peaceful action.
Such confusion has been typical of the whole affair, not helped by local and national newspapers that seem to have deliberately avoided clarifying the issues. Some leading figures in the Labour Party have identified themselves with the Muslim campaign, if not with every detail or tactic. The local EuroMP, Barry Seal, who is leader of the Labour Group in Strasbourg, spoke at the rally where the book was burnt. MP Max Madden signed a motion in parliament supporting the extension of the blasphemy laws and, more recently, has called for a Muslim "right of reply" 4 to be inserted I in the book. International Viewpoint #160 • April 3, 1989
The Satanic Verses in Britain), insists that he is not in favour of burning or banning the book, and considers such actions as un-Islamic. He is also reported to be totally against the death sentence being passed against Rushdie. Scholars from the Al Azhar mosque in Egypt, viewed as the world's leading centre of Islamic teaching for the majority Sunni Muslims, have disputed Khomeini's right to order a death sentence, saying the edict contravenes Islamic law. Why Muslims find the book insulting
The reason for the whole furore is that Muslims believe the book to be an insult to their very religion. Rushdie's novel is named after two verses that the prophet Mohammed removed from the Koran after the capture of Mecca by his followers, believing that the verses had been inspired by Satan masquerading as the Angel Gabriel.
The implication is that Mohammed may have done this to deceive the people of Mecca. Worse, it implies that Mohammed, not God, may be the author of the Koran. For the followers of other religions and non-believers all this may not make much sense; but for Muslims it is an intolerable insult, because for them the Koran, syllable for syllable, word for word, is the word of God.
The loudest objection against Rushdie's novel is to pages 363-4, which describe the prophet's revelations as "sprouting rules about every damn thing from how deeply a believer should sleep to which sexual positions had received divine sanction, so that they learned that sodomy and the missionary position were approved, whereas the forbidden postures included all those in which the woman was on top".
In another sequence, prostitutes in a brothel are given the names of the prophet's nine wives. There is in all a 12-point list of extracts from the novel that the mullahs find objectionable.
But there is no doubt that the campaign against the book is to some extent politically inspired. In India, the elections are due within one year, and Rajiv Gandhi knows the importance of 100 million Muslim votes. In Pakistan, the demonstrations that brought deaths and hundreds of injuries were led by opponents of the new regime of Benazir Bhutto. "Was it a genuine protest?" she asked, "or was it rather a protest by those people who lost the election, or those people [who benefited from martial law], to try to destabilize the process of democracy? The dying order always likes to give a few kicks before it goes to rest"
A political motive is also a factor in the
Iranian stance, not only in Khomeini's bid to take the leadership of the world's 1 billion Muslims, but also in the need for his regime to find a new external enemy on
INTERNATIONAL
C
A
P iy+1 cNN
V
. :
O-M
,t,tiN
Lis.
which to focus domestic discontent in the aftermath of the disastrous war with Iraq.
At the same time there should be no doubt that Muslim feelings are genuinely hurt. Islam has not undergone any reformation or experienced any "Age of Enlightenment". Doubts about the origin and teachings of the Koran are forbidden. The prophet Mohammed, however disguised with fictional names (as in The Satanic Verses), his family, and his original companions are seen as beyond reproach.
Rushdie is not the only victim of censorship
The problem is not restricted to Rushdie's book. The works of one of Egypt's greatest Nobel Prize-winning novelists, Nequib Mahfouz, are banned in his own country - and Egypt is relatively liberal. Jordanian writer Fadia a Faqir, also banned in Egypt, complained recently in the Times Literary Supplement against the "rising tide of censorship and intimidation in almost all of the Islamic world". On the other side, a Saudi Arabian group has declared a jihad (holy war) against "modernism" itself.
Some moderate Muslims who have no time for mullahs or fundamentalists still feel that Rushdie's novel has produced the opposite of the effect the author desired, and has served instead to strengthen the hand of the fundamentalists among ordinary Muslims. The whole affair has triggered a wider debate: who defines what is Islamic and what is un-Islamic?
The terms can quickly change. Not long ago, when Pakistan dictator Zia ul-Haq carried out barbaric punishments against hundreds of his countrymen and women — for no greater crime than voicing political opinions or protesting against Zia's new Islamic code — the mullahs applauded him or kept quiet. Where were the protests of the likes of Hashem El Essawy against Zia's barbarism, or against the beatings and torture carried out by fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami louts against their opponents?
Only after some artists and writers had the courage to make a film exposing the treatment of women in Zia's Islamic Republic were there belated screams by "sophisticated, enlightened Muslims" in this country claiming that the (now safely dead) Zia had "only exploited the name of Islam". By then the climate had changed, and any association with Zia's dreadful regime had become a liability. Yesterday's Islam became "un-Islamic" overnight!
Zia's anti-woman Islamic
Code
Under Zia's Islamic Code it was declared that the evidence of two women, even in a rape case, would be equal to that of one man. The religious leaders who formulated this code were quite indifferent to the insult and misery it must have caused millions of Muslim women throughout the world.
Muslim leaders, including the Islamic Society for "Religious Tolerance", who now shed tears for the hurt caused by Rushdie's book would do well to dwell on 5 the feelings of the Bahais in Iran and the
INTERNATIONAL • EL SALVADOR
Ahmadis in Pakistan, who are constant targets of abuse and vilification from the mullahs. The Ahmadis worship the same God as other Muslims, regard the Koran as their holy book, say prayers like other Muslims — but were, under pressure from religious leaders, declared non-Muslim by the regime of Zulfigar Ali Bhutto.
Advocates of "religious tolerance" might be taken more seriously if they campaigned for better treatment of these victims of the mullahs, and for equal rights for women, and showed some concern for the plight of non-Muslims (like Pakistani Sindhis, who were forced by fear and intimidation to leave Pakistan, and long to return home).
Socialists must defend
Salman Rushdie
Unfortunately, the anti-Rushdie Muslims have now been joined in Britain by the "I am against censorship, but... " brigade, and the lobby for the extension of the blasphemy laws [which apply only to blasphemy against the Christian religion]. This dangerous and ill-advised group of people are unwittingly playing into the hands of the reactionary elements, many of whom would happily step up such censorship but equally happily drive out Britain's Muslims — along with any other Black people, and any representatives of "alien culture".
An equally dangerous response comes from Labour member of parliament Max Madden, who has joined Hashem El Essawy and others in demanding that a short statement from Muslim critics be "inserted in the book or displayed in bookshops or libraries" , explaining to those who choose to buy or borrow the book why some Muslims find it offensive. This they term "a modest right to reply".
Why do they stop at The Satanic Verses? What about Darwin's The Origin of the Species (still banned from schools in parts of the USA)? What about the Communist Manifesto, or the holy books of all the main religions — each of which contains passages that followers of other religions find offensive? If this ludicrous suggestion were taken to its conclusion, almost every book would include at least one "short statement" and bookshops would need to erect new walls on which to pin up objections to books on sale!
Socialists must defend Salman Rushdie; but by no means all his would-be defenders are socialist or progressive. [Press baron] Robert Maxwell, for example, in a signed editorial in the Sunday Mirror on February 19 urged the British government, among other things, to tell the Iranians that "all Iranians, except proven enemies of Ayatollah Khomeini, will be sent home".
With "friends" like Robert Maxwell, Salman doesn't need enemies. *
• This article is reprinted from the British monthly Socialist Outlook, • March 13, 1989. International Viewpoint #160 • April 3, 1989