You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (3 page)

‘I’ve been offered a deal,’ he shouts, but his followers will have none of it. Like so many leaders, Rushdie’s Muhammad is trapped by the fanaticism of disciples who deny him space for compromise. They had believed that every word he said came from God via Gabriel. If they changed their story to suit political pressures, they would become a laughing stock. Why should anyone trust them if they diluted their absolute faith and accepted that God’s commands were open to interpretation and negotiation? Why should they trust themselves?

‘How long have we been reciting the creed you brought us?’ asks one. ‘There is no god but God. What are we if we abandon it now? This weakens us, renders us absurd. We cease to be dangerous. Nobody will ever take us seriously again.’ In any case, a second disciple tells Muhammad, ‘Lat, Mamnat, Uzza – they’re all females! For pity’s sake! Are we to have goddesses now? Those old cranes, herons and hags?’

Muhammad realises that if he compromises, he will lose his followers and with them his power base. The Meccans will have no reason to deal with him. He falls into a crisis of self-doubt, a scene Rushdie carries off with great pathos, although neither his religious detractors nor many of his secular admirers could admit it.

As the book went on, Rushdie provided his enemies with more ammunition by continuing in the feminist vein. Can a man who has so many wives under his control be the leader of a new faith, he asks. Or as Aisha, Muhammad’s youngest wife, says in the novel, ‘Your God certainly jumps to it when you need him to fix things up for you.’ When Rushdie’s Muhammad confronts free-thinking women, ‘bang, out comes the rule book, the angel starts pouring out rules about what women mustn’t do, he starts forcing them back into the docile attitudes the Prophet prefers, docile or maternal, walking three steps behind or sitting at home being wise and waxing their chins’.

To illustrate how you cannot have blasphemy until there is a religion to blaspheme against, Rushdie had the men of Mecca go to a brothel where the courtesans were named after the Prophet’s wives. He tested the belief that the Koran was the sacred word of God by having a sceptic rewrite the Prophet’s divine revelations. As I said, to those with the mentalities of heretic-hunters and witch-burners,
The Satanic Verses
was a blasphemous book, and no one could deny it. The single point that his supporters should have needed to make in his defence was that Salman Rushdie was born in democratic India and moved to democratic Britain. He was a free man in a free country, and could write what he damn well wanted.

Events were to prove that his supporters needed additional arguments.

The first was to emphasise that the best novelists do not produce agitprop.

The Satanic Verses
is not just ‘about’ religion and the rights of women. It is a circus of magical realism, with sub-plots, dream sequences, fantasies, pastiches, sudden interruptions by the author, a bewildering number of characters, and a confusion of references to myths and to the news stories of the day. If you insist on nailing down its political message – and trust me, you will whack your thumb with the hammer many times before you do – you will discover that the novel is ‘about’ migrants from India to the West who, like Rushdie, are contending with their changing identities and their dissolving religious and cultural certainties.

The protagonists – Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood movie star who plays Hindu gods in religious epics, and whose fans worship him as a god, and Saladin Chamcha, an actor who has left India and makes a living doing voiceovers for London advertising agencies – confront the pressures on the psyche migration brings. Somewhat prophetically given what was to happen next, the Anglicised Saladin tells his Indian mistress, who is trying to find what remains of India inside him:

If people wanted reasons to find offence – and as we will see, there are people who are offended if you
don’t
give them reasons to find offence – then the British police and immigration services might have issued death threats, because Rushdie showed them as racists and sadists. When the controversy broke and he needed police protection, supporters of law and order complained about the lack of ‘respect’ for the British state Rushdie had displayed in his writings. The cops, however, took his satire on the chin and went on to guard him from assassins. If you wanted to be fussy, you could also notice passages which showed that Asian shopkeepers in London were not always comradely soldiers joined with their Afro-Caribbean brothers in the struggle against white prejudice, as the anti-racist orthodoxy of the 1980s said they must be. Rushdie’s Asian Londoners are contemptuous of the black youths they assume must be criminals. Britain’s black community once again lived with the offence.

But, and here is the second large point, to go through
The Satanic Verses
with the squinting eye of a censor searching for thought crimes, or even to seek to see it in the round, as I have tried to do, is to blind yourself to the real reason why the fatwa against Salman Rushdie became the Dreyfus Affair of our age. That reason is as brutal now as it was then.

Globalising Censorship (1)

Terror is why
The Satanic Verses
is still the novel that all modern arguments about the silencing of sceptical and liberal voices must deal with first. The terror unleashed by its opponents and the response of the inheritors of the liberal tradition to their enemies’ demands for censorship and self-censorship. No terror, and
The Satanic Verses
would be one of several great works by a great novelist, rather than shorthand for a battle whose outcome defined what writers can and can’t say.

Rushdie did not understand what he was fighting. ‘The thing that is most disturbing is they are talking about a book which does not exist,’ he said as the protests grew. ‘The book which is worth killing people for and burning flags is not the book I wrote. The people who demonstrated in Pakistan and who were killed haven’t actually read the book that I wrote because it isn’t on sale there.’ He had not grasped that reactionary mobs and those who seek to exploit them have a know-nothing pride in their ignorance. It was sufficient that clerical authorities said that the book was blasphemous, and could quote a passage or two to prove their case. The vast majority of religious fanatics who murdered or threatened to murder publishers, translators, booksellers and innocent bystanders did not want to read the book in the round, or to read it at all. Most would not have understood it if they had tried.

Their violence rolled around the world. The brutality of the reaction was beyond anything that Rushdie or his publishers anticipated or could have anticipated. Penguin released
The Satanic Verses
in 1988. Without pausing to consider its contents, President Rajiv Gandhi put it on India’s proscribed list. The opposition MP who demanded that Gandhi ban the book had not read it either, but decided, ‘I do not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is.’ Gandhi was frightened of communal riots and of losing the Muslim vote, and perhaps remembered how Rushdie had excoriated his mother, Indira, in
Midnight’s Children
.

In India and Pakistan and later in Britain, Jamaat-e-Islami organised the protests. Its enmity was a compliment to Rushdie, for Jamaat’s supporters were enemies any liberal should be proud to have. Jamaat’s founder, Maulana Abu’l Ala Maududi, began agitating in British-occupied India in 1941, and had a good claim to be the first of the Islamists. He combined his version of a ‘purified’ Islam with European totalitarianism. From the communists he took the notion of the vanguard party, which would tell the masses what they wanted, regardless of whether the masses wanted it or not, and vague notions of a just future where all would be equal. From the Nazis, Jamaat, and its partners in the Arab Muslim Brotherhood, took the Jewish conspiracy theory. They explained that Muslims were weak because they were victims of the plots of sinister Jews, or ‘Zionists’, as they came to call them, who were everywhere seeking to undermine their faith and morals. Muslims would free themselves by building a caliphate, where the supreme ruler of a global empire would not be a Nazi führer or communist general secretary but a theocrat ruling with total power in accordance with Koran and Sharia.

After the British withdrew from India in 1947, leaving millions to die in the slaughters of partition, Jamaat supported the new Muslim state of Pakistan, which was split between its Bengali east wing and the Punjabi-dominated west. When the Bengalis of East Pakistan revolted against a system that made them second-class citizens, the Pakistani army’s retaliation stunned a twentieth century that thought it had become inured to genocide. Jamaat aided the army’s campaigns of mass murder and mass rape because it believed in the caliphate, and hence could not tolerate the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, because it broke Islamic unity. At the time this book went to press, Bangladeshi prosecutors were beginning war crime proceedings against Jamaat leaders they claimed were members of the paramilitary squads Pakistan recruited to help with killing.

Rushdie had already noticed that the Pakistani military dictatorship of the 1980s needed the Jamaatists to provide a religious cover for tyranny. ‘This is how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked,’ he said, as he gave Jamaat reasons to hate him as well.

The next countries to ban
The Satanic Verses
were Sudan, Bangladesh and apartheid South Africa. If you find the alliance of militant Islamists and white supremacists strange, then you have yet to learn that all the enemies of liberalism are the same. In its dying days, the regime tried to uphold the apartheid state by co-opting mixed-race and Asian South Africans into the system, the better to deny South Africa’s black majority the vote. Most coloured and Asian South Africans refused to cooperate. But Islamists saw the chance to use apartheid’s censorship laws against Rushdie. The left-wing
Weekly Mail
and the Congress of South African Writers had invited him to visit Johannesburg in 1988 to discuss the censorship of the opponents of white rule. Rushdie had to pull out because of death threats from Islamists. The white-skinned rulers learned they could now rely on brown-skinned religious extremists to intimidate a writer who was proposing to come to their country and denounce their regime.

Even before the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, Rushdie had many enemies, but they were not dangerous enemies. The Indian government regularly banned books it thought might provoke communal violence. Jamaatists in Pakistan and white supremacists in South Africa had always threatened authors. An Anglo-Indian writer based in London had little to fear from them. Intellectuals who had made it to the West were beyond the reach of oppressive forces. They had a place of sanctuary.

The fatwa changed all that. It redrew the boundaries of the free world, shrinking its borders and erasing zones of disputation from the map of the liberal mind. It ensured that London, New York, Paris, Copenhagen and Amsterdam could no longer be places of safety for writers tackling religious themes.

Journalists throw around the word ‘unprecedented’ so carelessly and ceaselessly that we miss the new when it stares us in the face. Khomeini’s incitement to murder was without precedent. Here was a head of state ordering the execution of the private citizens of foreign countries for writing and publishing a work of fiction. A grotesque regard for the forms of legality had accompanied previous outbreaks of state terrorism. Even Stalin forced his victims to confess at show trials so that when he murdered them, he did so with a kangaroo court’s approval. No such concern with keeping up appearances inhibited Khomeini. On 14 February 1989, he said that the faithful must kill Rushdie and his publishers and ‘execute them quickly, wherever they may find them, so that no one will dare insult Islam again. Whoever is killed in this path will be regarded as a martyr.’ Just in case zealous assassins doubted that they would receive eternal life in paradise along with the services of seventy-two virgins, an Iranian foundation offered the earthly reward of $3 million.

There was not even a show trial. Khomeini did not listen to the religious scholars who said that as Rushdie was not a citizen of an Islamic state, he could not punish him for blasphemy or apostasy. And he took even less notice of the more substantial objections from secularists that no one had the right to order the murder of a writer for subjecting religion to imaginative scrutiny.

Far from making himself the object of repulsion, the Ayatollah’s endorsement of state-sponsored murder won him many followers. After the death sentence, preachers whipped up mobs against Pakistani Christians in Islamabad. In Bombay, twelve died in battles with the police. A bomber murdered a security guard at the British Council offices in Karachi. In Dhaka, fifteen thousand people tried to break through police lines and ransack the British Council’s library. In the United States, Islamists threatened bookstores and firebombers hit the offices of the
Riverdale Press
, a weekly paper in the Bronx, after it published an unexceptional editorial saying that the public had the right to read whatever novels it pleased.

In Britain, demonstrators in Bradford burned copies of
The Satanic Verses
. I doubt they had heard Heinrich Heine’s line that ‘Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings’ – a condemnation from the German Enlightenment of the burning of the Koran by the Spanish Inquisition, ironically enough. Onlookers were entitled to wonder whether Heine was right, and Rushdie’s British enemies would burn the human being in question if they could get hold of him. As in America and Europe, British bookshops withdrew the novel in the face of threats – two independent bookshops on the Charing Cross Road were bombed, as were Penguin bookshops and a department store. Police surrounded Penguin’s head office with concrete barricades to stop suicide bombers crashing cars into the building. They X-rayed all packages for explosives and patrolled the perimeter with guard dogs. Meanwhile Special Branch officers moved their charge from safe house to safe house. Rushdie was at the beginning of a rolling programme of house arrest that was to deprive him of his liberty for years.