The Rushdie Fatwa and After: A Lesson to the Circumspect

183 Pages·2014·0.883 MB·English

by  Brian Winston (auth.)

The Rushdie Fatwa and After
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Fatwa
The Rushdie and
After
A Lesson to the Circumspect
Brian Winston
University of Lincoln, UK
© Brian Winston 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-38859-9
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First published 2014 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-48208-5 ISBN 978-1-137-38860-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137388605
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For Gail
An vero illi qui religionis praetextu alios vexant, lacerant,
spoliant, jugulant, id amico et benigno animo agant,
ipsorum testor conscientiam.
Now, I appeal to the consciences of those that
persecute, torment, destroy, and kill other men upon
pretence of religion, whether they do it out of
friendship and kindness towards them or no.
John Locke: Epistola de tolerantia /
A Letter Concerning Toleration
(1689) (W. Popple, trans.)
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: A Lesson to the Circumspect 1
Warning 1
Understanding 3
Toleration 7
Sensitivity 16
Offensiveness 18
1 A Story to Pass the Waking Hours of the Night:
The Original Offence 22
The editorial adviser’s tale 22
A tale of four theorists 35
The Indian politician’s tale 48
A tale of an activist 49
Tales of the activist’s colleagues 51
2 A More Remarkable Story: Throwing Down the Gauntlet 59
A tale of two mobs 59
The tale of the Imam and the Shah of Shahs 61
The Supreme Leader’s tale 69
The tale of the hostage 78
The bien-pensant’s tale 82
3 Give Me More of These Examples: Contagion 92
The Secretary of State for Communities and
Local Government’s tale 92
Tales of the affronted, the insulted and the offended 97
The cartoonist’s tale 111
The tale of the fourth Dutch provocateur 119
A tale of lunatics and satirists 124
Afterword: Perceive the Dawn of Day:
Lessons to the Circumspect 138
Notes 141
Bibliography 151
Index 162
vii
Preface and Acknowledgements
It is a quarter of a century since the fatwa was proclaimed by the Imam
Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, against
a novel, The Satanic Verses, calling for the death of its British/Indian
author, Ahmed Salman Rushdie. This book offers an attempted synoptic
account of how that event came to occur and what its ramifications are.
It arises from work undertaken for a book planned as a response to the
template for violent action created by the fatwa. This was published as
A Right to Offend in 2012.
A Right to Offend assumed that a central issue of the Rushdie affair is
the question of free expression, for which it endeavoured to restate the
case. But a defence needs a prosecution; a response cannot stand alone.
What challenges it also must be addressed. However, in the event, doing
this so complicated the topic that the original plan to balance the chal-
lenge of the fatwa against the case for free expression in A Right to Offend
became unwieldy. The right was being demanded by those The Satanic
Verses had offended as well as by bigots offended by these protestors
who, in turn, insisted on a freedom to express hatred against them (to
which aspect can be attached the term ‘Islamophobia’).1 Moreover, the
right was being undercut externally by the fatwa while internally it was
weakened by the political Right’s long-term hostility to the concept of
rights in general. More surprising, however, was that in the fatwa’s after-
math Western Left bien-pensants also expressed doubts about the right
of free expression. Neither Rightist, Islamic nor Islamicist (and certainly
not Islamophobic), they agreed, peaceably of course, with those protest-
ing against Rushdie that censorship was necessary, at least on occasion.
They did so not only in the name of maintaining social harmony but
also on the empathetic basis that they ‘understood’ the ‘pain’ of those
offended by his novel.
Whatever one’s opinion of this stance, one thing became clearer
as the years advanced: peace was not obtained by such a surrender
of principle; nor did almost any of these empathetic voices actually
much ‘understand’, in a meaningful way, the causes of the ‘pain’ how-
ever much they sought to offer it balm. On the contrary, their worthy
impulse carried with it whiffs of infantilisation and condescension
towards the protestors. The liberality was laudable but it was grounded
in an ignorance not so different from that of the bigots.
viii
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
The prosecution or challenge to the right of free expression post-fatwa
therefore contained a number of strands. Externally, there was the fatwa
with all its implications for multicultural societies. Internally, in such
societies, there was a willingness to abridge free speech either from the
political Right or, more unexpectedly, from the Left. But, finally, and
this was my further trigger, there was anyway a growing willingness to
be seen in Western media to abuse the right in the name of sensation
and profit. Call this, in shorthand, the ‘Hackgate Scandal’ of the British
press. During this same quarter of a century since the fatwa, its shame-
lessness in abusing its privileges, in the face of continued circulation
decline, had become ever more egregious. This too, de facto, called into
question the viability of the right of free expression.
Eventually, my account of these various prosecutorial strands needed
to be redacted into an introductory section of A Right to Offend. Lost
was the more detailed examination of the context for the fatwa that I
had prepared and, in its twenty-fifth anniversary year, that is what is
here presented – not so much a further addition to the multidisciplinary
scholarship on The Satanic Verses but more a contribution to the general
debate on rights in multicultural societies.
As ever, or perhaps more so on this occasion, I am in great debt to
those whose work I have mined and to those who have advised me
during the preparation of this book. I am again grateful to Julian Petley
as well as Gabriel Chanan, Barnie Choudhury, David Hanan, Daniel
Allington and Matthew Winston as well as a number of other inform-
ants who have helped such understanding as I hope I have acquired
enormously. Any deficiencies are no fault of theirs. Felicity Plester of
Palgrave came to my rescue with her support of this project as did, more
than once, the ever-helpful staff of the University of Lincoln library. But
most of all I am grateful to Frances Mannsaker for again also coming to
my aid. Any textual errors are mine and mine alone.
Brian Winston
Lincoln, UK
December 2013