Step Across This Line (30 page)

In Turkey, thirty-six secularist writers, dancers, musicians, and artists gathered for a conference in the town of Sivas are burned to death in their hotel by a mob of Islamic fundamentalists which accuses them of being atheists and therefore, in the fanatics’ view, deserving of being burned alive.

The United States has recently become all too painfully familiar with the nature of the holy—or, rather, unholy—terrorists of Islam. The crater beneath the World Trade Center and the uncovering of a plot to set off more gigantic bombs and to assassinate leading political figures have shown Americans how brutal these extremists can be. These and other cases of international Islamic terrorism have shocked the world community; whereas the cases of domestic terrorism previously listed have captured relatively little of the world’s “share of mind.” I should like to suggest that this imbalance in our attention represents a kind of victory for fanaticism. If the worst, most reactionary, most medievalist strain in the Muslim world is treated as the authentic culture, so that the bombers and the mullahs get all the headlines while progressive, modernizing voices are treated as minor, marginal, “Westoxicated”—as small news—then the fundamentalists are being allowed to set the agenda.

The truth is that there is a great struggle in progress for the soul of the Muslim world, and as the fundamentalists grow in power and ruthlessness, those courageous men and women who are willing to engage them in a battle of ideas and of moral values are rapidly becoming as important for us to know about, to understand, and to support as once the dissident voices in the old Soviet Union used to be. The Soviet terror-state, too, denigrated its opponents as being overly Westernized and enemies of the people; it, too, took men from their wives in the middle of the night, as the poet Osip Mandelstam was taken from Nadezhda. We do not blame Mandelstam for his own destruction; we do not blame him for attacking Stalin, but rather, and rightly, we blame Stalin for his Stalin-ness. In the same spirit, let us not fall into the trap of blaming the Sharjah theater-folk for their rather macabre-sounding ants, or Turkish secularists for “provoking” the mob that murdered them.

Rather, we should understand that secularism is now the fanatics’ Enemy Number One, and its most important target. Why? Because secularism demands a total separation between Church and State; philosophers such as the Egyptian Fouad Zakariya argue that free Muslim societies can exist only if this principle is adhered to. And because secularism rejects the idea that any society of the late twentieth century can be thought of as “pure,” and argues that the attempt to purify the modern Muslim world of its inevitable hybridities will lead to equally inevitable tyrannies. And because secularism seeks to historicize our understanding of the Muslim verities: it sees Islam as an event within history, not outside it. And because secularism seeks to end the repressions against women that are instituted wherever the radical Islamists come into power. And, most of all, because secularists know that a modern nation-state cannot be built upon ideas that emerged in the Arabian desert over thirteen hundred years ago.

The weapons used against the dissidents of the Muslim world are everywhere the same. The accusations are always of “blasphemy,” “apostasy,” “heresy,” “un-Islamic activities.” These “crimes” are held to “insult Islamic sanctities.” The “people’s wrath,” thus aroused, becomes “impossible to resist.” The accused become persons whose “blood is unclean” and therefore deserves to be spilled.

The British writer Marina Warner once pointed out that the objects associated with witchcraft—a pointed hat, a broomstick, a cauldron, a cat—would have been found in most women’s possession during the great witch-hunts. If these were the proofs of witchcraft, then all women were potentially guilty; it was only necessary for accusing fingers to point at one and cry, “Witch!” Americans, remembering the example of the McCarthyite witch-hunts, will readily understand how potent and destructive the process can still be. And what is happening in the Muslim world today must be seen as a witch-hunt of exceptional proportions, a witch-hunt being carried out in many nations, and often with murderous results. So the next time you stumble across a story such as the ones I’ve repeated here, perhaps a story tucked away near the bottom of an inside page in this newspaper, remember that the persecution it describes is not an isolated act—that it is part of a deliberate, lethal program, whose purpose is to criminalize, denigrate, and even to assassinate the Muslim world’s best, most honorable voices: its voices of dissent. And remember that those dissidents need your support. More than anything, they need your attention.

[
From a letter to
The Independent,
July 1993
]

I find it impossible to avoid the conclusion that the world community’s shameful response to the continuing annihilation of the Bosnian Muslims is in some way connected to their being Muslims. It is worth mentioning, however, that outrage at this fact is by no means confined to the Muslim community—if only because, according to your correspondent Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the “underlying issue” is that “for years the majority of Muslims have felt misunderstood and demonised in the West. . . . Bosnia is seen as the culmination of their process of alienation.”

This kind of them-and-us rhetoric of victimization, no matter how legitimate it may seem, creates as many cultural problems as it addresses.

It creates intellectual confusions, as when British Muslims rightly excoriate Europe for failing to defend its very own citizens but denigrate these same Muslims for being “Muslims in name only.” Bosnia’s Muslims are indeed secularized and humanistic, representing an attractive blend of Muslim and European values. By sneering at this hybrid culture, British Muslims undermine their own case.

It creates moral confusions, too: when German racists burn Muslims in their houses, the blame is very properly laid on the perpetrators; but when Islamic fanatics burn dozens to death in a hotel in Turkey, some Muslim commentators at once try to blame the targets of the mob, accusing them of such inflammatory offenses as atheism.

Worst of all, it creates the risk that the community will fall under the spell of leaders who will ultimately damage them more than their present (real or perceived) enemies. Germany’s sense of national humiliation after World War I was exploited by Hitler during his rise to power; the Iranian people’s wholly justified hatred of the regime of the shah led them toward the great historical mistake of supporting Khomeini; in India today, the cry of “Hinduism under threat” is rallying people to the banner of Hindu fundamentalism; and now, here in Britain, Alibhai-Brown tells us that “moderation seems an obscenity.” Will the fatuous Dr. Siddiqui be followed by more formidable extremist figures?

British Muslims may not wish to hear this from the author of
The Satanic Verses,
but the real enemies of Islam are not British novelists or Turkish satirists. They are not the secularists murdered by fundamentalists in Algeria recently. Nor do they include the distinguished Cairo professor of literature and his scholarly wife who are presently being hounded by Egyptian fanatics for being apostates. Neither are they the intellectuals who lost their jobs and were arrested by the authorities in Saudi Arabia because they founded a human-rights organization. However weak, however few the progressive voices may be, they represent the best hope in the Muslim world for a free and prosperous future. The enemies of Islam are those who wish the culture to be frozen in time, who are, in Ali Shariati’s phrase, in “revolt against history,” and whose tyranny and unreason are making modern Islam look like a culture of madness and blood. Alibhai-Brown’s interviewee Nasreen Rehman wisely says that “we must stop thinking in binary, oppositional terms.” May I propose that a starting place might be the recognition that, on the one hand, it is the Siddiquis and Hizbollahs and blind sheikhs and ayatollahs who are the real foes of Muslims around the world, the real “enemy within”; and that, on the other hand—as in the case of the campaign on behalf of Bosnia’s Muslims—there are many “friends without.”

[
From a letter to
The Nation, August 1993]

Alexander Cockburn accuses me of “spiteful abuse” of Turkish secularists (
The Nation,
July 26). This is a grave charge, and I hope you will permit me space to reply. I heard the news of the atrocity in Sivas, Turkey, on the evening of Friday, July 2. Within half an hour I put out a statement condemning the fundamentalist murderers, and elaborated on this in a live telephone interview with the main BBC radio news program of the evening. The next day, I appeared on BBC-TV, ITN, and Sky Television, and spoke on the telephone to journalists from several British newspapers. In every case the primary importance of denouncing the murderers formed the main thrust of my contribution.

In the week that followed, I wrote a further text (July 6), published as the leading letter in the London
Independent,
in which I tried to speak up for Bosnia’s Muslims and also defended those who died in Sivas against the charge that “such inflammatory offences as atheism” had provoked their murderers into murdering them. I gave interviews on this subject to several European newspapers. Finally, I published a text that some of your readers may have seen in
The New York Times
(July 11), discussing the need to pay attention to and support the dissidents of the Muslim world—including those in Turkey—who are at present under such vicious and lethal attack.

It is a pity Cockburn did not trouble to check the facts—he made no attempt to contact me or my agents or the Rushdie Defence Campaign based at Article 19 in London—before letting fly. After almost two weeks in which hardly a day has passed without my speaking up for secularist principles and against religious fanaticism, it is really quite extraordinary to be vilified in your pages for not having done so.

The
Observer
piece itself—as Cockburn concedes—also laid the blame for the Sivas massacre firmly on the local religious fanatics, and expressed my outrage at what they had done. It is true, however, that I criticized the behavior of the journalist Aziz Nesin, in whose newspaper
Aydinlik
unauthorized extracts from
The Satanic Verses
had been published in May.

Cockburn quotes Nesin thus: “I had met Rushdie in London and discussed the possibility of publishing his book in Turkish.” This is untrue. In 1986—the only time I ever met Nesin—
The Satanic Verses
was not even finished. Nesin goes on: “The only thing he lately cares for is whether he receives his copyright fees or not.” Not so. I have no interest in receiving whatever monies may be due to me from
Aydinlik.
I am, however, vitally interested in how, and by whom, my work is published.

Nesin and
Aydinlik
published the pirated extracts from my novel in the most polemical manner possible, denigrated my work, attacked my integrity as a man and as an artist, and made a lot of money by doing so—Cockburn reveals that the paper’s circulation trebled during the period of publication. Certainly these were not people I would have chosen to be the first publishers of
The Satanic Verses
in a Muslim country. Yet Cockburn believes I was wrong to defend myself, even though British Muslim “spokesmen” and sections of the British media were attempting to make me the person responsible for the Sivas killings. It appears to be Cockburn’s view that all this—the theft of my work, the assaults on my character, the lies about my public positions, and the responsibility for having caused a “Rushdie riot”—is just fine, whereas my wish to set the record straight is evidence of an even deeper perfidy. In a letter from the Turkish writer Murat Belge, one of the friends whose advice I sought, he says: “It is quite legitimate to criticize Nesin for his rather childish behavior. However, the way all the politicians are now blaming him for everything is infuriating. . . . It is as if Nesin has killed these people, and the murderers who actually burned them alive are innocent citizens.” This is exactly my view, which I have expressed over and over again in the past fortnight. I am sad that it has not managed to get through to Alexander Cockburn.

[
From
The Guardian,
September 1993
]

I have just returned from Prague, where President Vaclav Havel reaffirmed his belief that the so-called Rushdie affair was a test case of democratic values, a test case, as he put it, for himself. The story has been widely reported—except in Britain, where, as far as I can see, it has not been mentioned by a single newspaper, nor has anyone thought it interesting until now to print the photograph of the meeting that was made freely available to the press. However, an unpleasant little story about Iran giving gold coins and tickets to Mecca to the winners of a Rushdie cartoon contest has been given space by several papers.

In late July, I was able to visit Portugal, and President Mario Soares went on national television with me to declare his passionate support for the fight against the fatwa, and committed himself to helping in every way he could. Once again, this was treated as a big story by many European countries; in Britain, however, nothing.

In my meetings with John Major, Douglas Hogg, and Foreign and Commonwealth Office diplomats, I have repeatedly been told that the British government considers such trips to be matters of the highest importance and utility. They remind Iran about the wide international consensus on this issue, and demonstrate, too, the international community’s growing impatience with Iran’s failure to withdraw its threats, and its determination to make Iran do so. In my view they also serve the important symbolic function of showing the fundamentalists that their intimidation isn’t working. The trips take enormous amounts of planning, and I couldn’t make them without the help and support of many individuals, organizations (notably the Rushdie Defence Campaign at Article 19), and security forces; so it is frustrating, to say the least, that they are so comprehensively ignored at home.

It is plain that Iran is feeling the heat. In a recent interview with
Time
magazine, President Rafsanjani said that in his view the Rushdie case was a Western conspiracy to put pressure on Iran, which takes some beating as a case of upside-down, Humpty-Dumpty thinking. But if one ignores the paranoia in the first half of his comment, the second half shows that he is feeling under pressure. This is excellent news. In recent months, Speaker Nateq-Nouri of the Iranian Majlis, the same man who less than a year ago was demanding my head on a plate, has said that it is not Iran’s policy to have me killed; and Rafsanjani, in his
Time
interview, confirmed this. Amusing as such wide-eyed, who-me-guv innocence can seem, it is at least evidence that the penny has begun to drop. It is possible that Iran is trying to find the language that will solve the problem, for the fatwa, as a senior Western diplomat with deep knowledge of the region told me, is essentially a matter of Iran’s internal politics: how are they to do what the world demands and still manage to play to the home audience as well?