You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (6 page)

Those who have never believed in universal human rights described the persecution of Rushdie as the first manifestation in the West of a ‘clash of civilisations’. We had ‘our values’ – human rights, freedom of speech – the Islamic world had theirs – fanatical blasphemy laws, the oppression of women – and never the twain would meet.

Rushdie’s persecution and the reactions to it showed that from the beginning the clash-of-civilisations hypothesis was condescending and bovine. It flattered the West by ascribing to its leaders a virtue they did not possess. Hardly anyone in a position of authority was prepared to speak up for ‘our’ values. Religious leaders were as keen as upper-class intellectuals were on shutting up Rushdie. Immanuel Jakobovits, the then Chief Rabbi of Britain, said Penguin should not have published. Robert Runcie, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, proposed that the government extend England’s blasphemy law to cover Islam. In these and similar statements from religious conservatives, you could see Christian and Jewish leaders sensing an opportunity. Maybe they could use the violence of Jamaat and the Khomeinists to create an ecumenical taboo that might protect all religions from criticism, even though those religions were incompatible, and their adherents had spent the best part of two millennia killing each other. If writers became frightened of taking on Islam, the reasoning ran, maybe they would keep away from Christianity and Judaism too.

The
Economist
looked at the trade unionism of the faithful and said, ‘Rabbis, priests and mullahs are, it seems, uniting to restrain free speech, lest any member of their collective flock should have his feelings hurt … The Rushdie affair is showing not just that some Muslims do not understand the merits of free speech. It shows that many Western clerics do not either.’

Nor did many politicians in Margaret Thatcher’s government and George Bush senior’s administration understand either. ‘The British government, the British people have no affection for this book,’ said Britain’s then Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe. ‘It compares Britain with Hitler’s Germany.’ Rushdie did not compare Britain with Nazi Germany, as it happens, and hundreds of thousands of British readers bought and enjoyed his novels. If these were forgettable mistakes from an ignorant man, Howe’s next words proved fateful. ‘We do not like that any more than people of the Muslim faith like the attacks on their faith.’

Western governments followed the same script. After anti-Rushdie riots in Islamabad, the US State Department said, ‘The Embassy wishes to emphasise that the US government in no way associates itself with any activity that is in any sense offensive to Islam or any other religion.’ Margaret Thatcher, adopting the royal ‘we’ as was her wont in her last days in power, said, ‘We have known in our own religion people doing things which are deeply offensive to some of us. We feel it very much. And that is what is happening to Islam.’ Thatcher’s acolyte Norman Tebbit called Rushdie an ‘outstanding villain’, and asked, ‘How many societies having been so treated by a foreigner accepted in their midst, could go so far to protect him from the consequences of his egotistical and self-opinionated attack on the religion into which he was born?’

From their different perspectives, Susan Sontag, one of Rushdie’s most loyal defenders, Daniel Pipes, an American conservative, and, later, Kenan Malik, a British historian of the struggles for free speech, all noticed the dangers of London and Washington’s stance. They were telling Muslim democrats, free-thinkers, feminists and liberals that human rights were Western rights, and not for brown-skinned people from a clashing ‘civilisation’. You can call this cultural relativism, but ‘racism’ is a blunter and better word.

Consider the position of the West in 1989. It had looked upon Iran as a threat from the moment the ayatollahs took power in 1979. It had given air cover to Saddam Hussein’s genocidal regime during the Iran–Iraq war because it thought that any enemy of Iran was better than none. Western politicians lectured their own Muslim citizens on the need to adapt to the Western way of life, but then assumed that all Muslims wanted to burn books and murder authors. Freedom of speech was a Western value, not a universal right. Muslims could not be expected to handle it.

The best in the Muslim world did not want Westerners to patronise them or protect them from dangerous books. They wanted the freedom to challenge theocracy and tradition. The bravest was the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who put his life on the line by condemning Khomeini as a terrorist. One hundred Arab intellectuals joined him when they came out in solidarity with Rushdie. One hundred and twenty-seven Iranians signed a declaration condemning the ‘terrorist and liberty-cide methods’ of the Islamic Republic.

The Rushdie affair was not a ‘clash of civilisations’ but a struggle for civilisation. On 27 May 1989, rival demonstrations in central London made the choice on offer clear to anyone willing to look. Thousands of anti-Rushdie protesters came to the capital. Malise Ruthven, author of one of the first accounts of the controversy, was shocked by the violence of their slogans. ‘Rushdie is a devil’. ‘Rushdie is a son of Satan’. ‘Kill the bastard’. ‘Jihad on Agnostics’. ‘Devil Rushdie Wanted Dead or Alive’. One poster showed Rushdie, with devil’s horns, hanging from a gallows. Another had his head on the body of a pig surrounded by the Star of David.

Shameless Labour MPs, who were prepared to court the ethnic vote by forgetting what liberal principles they had once possessed, addressed them. Ranged against them in Parliament Square were two counter-demonstrations. Skinheads from the neo-fascist National Front were hanging around on the fringes, looking for a fight. Meanwhile, in the lawn in the centre of the square, a small band of Asian women who ran hostels for battered wives and safe houses for the victims of misogyny staged a protest of their own.

‘Here to doubt/Here to stay/Muslim leaders won’t have their way,’ they chanted. The police had to protect them from the Asian religious demonstrators, who hated them for not being submissive, and from the British neo-fascist demonstrators, who hated them for not being white. The women never forgot the experience of seeing apparent enemies unite against them.

‘Approximately fifty women were marooned between a march of young Asian men calling for a ban on
The Satanic Verses
and National Front supporters. Instead of tackling the National Front, the Asian men verbally and physically attacked Women Against Fundamentalism, which then had to rely on the police for protection whereas previously WAF members would have been marching alongside their Asian “brothers” against police and state racism!’

They were not all atheists, the women said. They just wanted to be modern British citizens, and to dispute the power of their fathers and brothers to force them into arranged marriages.

Gita Sahgal and her sisters at Women Against Fundamentalism did not have the smallest doubt that Rushdie’s struggle was their struggle, and that Rushdie’s enemies were their enemies. ‘At the heart of the fundamentalist agenda is control of women’s minds and bodies, such as the imposition of restrictions on the right to abortion, on free and equal education and on the right of women to organise autonomously,’ said the group’s statement on Rushdie. ‘We reject the idea the fundamentalists can speak for us. We will continue to doubt and dissent and will carry on the fight for our right to determine our own destinies, not limited by religion, culture or nationality … We are taking this opportunity to reaffirm our solidarity with Salman Rushdie.’

How hard was it to be on their side? Who in conscience would not choose to stand with them and against Jamaat-e-Islami, craven Indian politicians, apartheid South Africa, Islamist Iran, Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, the Tory intelligentsia, the Tory government, shabby Labour MPs playing Chicago politics, book-burners, life-deniers, witch-finders and murderers?

I can place public figures of my generation by where they stood on Rushdie. His friends believed in imaginative freedom and the right of the individual to argue with the world. Even if they did not agree with him, they knew that those who were trying to silence him would silence millions if they could. His enemies did then and have since put the collective before the individual. The conservatives among them talked about realpolitik and keeping the natives happy. The leftists talked of the rights of ‘the other’ and cultural imperialism. Both would throw out freedom of thought, freedom of speech and the rights of women, if sectarian power or realpolitik demanded it.

Hundreds of thousands of people thought that the choice between defending Rushdie or joining his critics was no choice at all. They ensured that the censors could not stop
The Satanic Verses
, although the censors inflicted a terrible price. An unknown assailant murdered Hitoshi Igarashi,
The Satanic Verses
’ Japanese translator, by stabbing him in the face. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was knifed in his apartment in Milan, but lived. William Nygaard, Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher, was shot three times and left for dead at his home in an Oslo suburb. Nygaard was not a man who frightened easily. He recovered, and published the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, who had described the massacres of Hindus in the 1971 genocide, and received the obligatory death threats. In Turkey, the satirist Aziz Nesin started a translation. On 2 July 1993 he attended an Alevi cultural festival in the central Anatolian city of Sivas. Alevis are a tolerant and egalitarian Shia sect, and suffer the consequences. A mob gathered around the hotel where the Alevis were staying, calling for Sharia law and death to infidels. Nesin and many guests escaped. The killers murdered thirty-seven others.

The victims did not appear to have suffered in vain. Rushdie lived, and
The Satanic Verses
remained in print and sold around the world. Battered but unbeaten, liberalism triumphed.

Or appeared to triumph.

For here is something strange. Between the fatwa and the present, religious killers have murdered just one Western artist – the Dutch director Theo van Gogh, assassinated in 2004 for making a film with the Somali feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yet in the same period Western culture changed, and not for the better. The change can fit into a sentence. No young artist of Rushdie’s range and gifts would dare write a modern version of
The Satanic Verses
today, and if he or she did, no editor would dare publish it.

Free societies are not free because their citizens are fighting for their freedom. They are free because previous generations of citizens
have
fought for their freedom. When put under dictatorial pressure, they must start old fights anew. Once the struggle begins, you can never guarantee in advance that the citizens of the United States, Holland or Britain will be braver than the citizens of Iran, Zimbabwe or Burma. National and political differences are no protection against the universal emotion of fear. Not the immediate fear that causes the eyeballs to dilate and the fight-or-flight response to kick in, but the niggling fear at the back of the mind that warns of the pressing need to avoid a fight in the first place.

Hitoshi Igarashi was the only person associated with
The Satanic Verses
to pay for the Ayatollah’s blood lust with his life. Compared to the millions killed in wars and genocides in the years that followed the fatwa, the pain the enemies of the novel inflicted was small. But it was sufficient. The threats against Rushdie produced a fear that suffused Western culture and paralysed its best instincts. From then on, authoritarians seeking to restrict civil liberties or members of the political right led the opposition to militant Islamism. Liberals, who had the best arguments against theocracy, and who might have offered immigrants to Europe – particularly women immigrants to Europe – a better future, went absent without leave.

The society around them imitated the craven politicians, bishops and rabbis rather than the workers in the bookshops and the editors at Penguin. It displayed little or no willingness to defend the potential victims of terror. In one of his rare interviews, Peter Mayer, Penguin’s chief executive, praised the bravery of everyone in the book trade who had defended his right to publish, but then told a bleak story about how strangers treated his family. He had received many death threats. Someone went to the trouble to cut themselves and send him a letter scrawled in blood. An anonymous telephone caller told Mayer that ‘not only would they kill me but that they would take my daughter and smash her head against a concrete wall’. Far from rallying to defend an innocent girl and her innocent father, the parents of her classmates demanded that the school expel her. What would happen, they asked, if the Iranian assassins went to the school and got the wrong girl?

And Meyer thought, ‘You think my daughter is the
right
girl?’

The same cowardice greeted him when he applied for a co-op apartment in New York. ‘There were objections that the Iranians could send a hit squad and target the wrong apartment. As if I had done something wrong.’

Mayer spoke truer than he knew. After Rushdie, the fear of a knife in the ribs or a bomb at the office meant that liberals who stuck by liberalism were in the wrong. They knew the consequences now. If someone killed them, they were guilty of provoking their own murder. In the eyes of most politicians and most of the journalists, broadcasters, academics and intellectuals whose livelihoods depended on the freedom to debate and criticise, the targets of religious violence had no one to blame but themselves. The intensity of the rage against Rushdie allowed them to turn John Stuart Mill on his head. Mill argued that censorship could be justified only if a writer or speaker caused a direct harm – by urging on a mob to commit a crime, was his example. Rushdie did not incite violence. His opponents did. The harm was all on their side. However, governments and cultural bureaucracies came to believe that when religious mobs showed that they were prepared to murder Rushdie, they provided the justification for the censorship they sought.

The attack on
The Satanic Verses
appalled liberals. The fight to defend it exhausted them. Knowing what they now knew, few wanted to put themselves through what Rushdie and Penguin had been through. Unlike the Western campaigns against apartheid, Franco, the Greek colonels and the Soviet Empire, a campaign for free speech would involve them running a slight risk of becoming the target of violence themselves. They soon found high-minded reasons to avoid it, and redefined their failure to take on militant religion as a virtuous act. Their preferred tactic was to extend arguments against racism to cover criticism of religion. Or rather, they extended them to cover arguments about minority religions in Western countries. It remained open season on Christianity for liberal writers and comedians, even though Islamist pogroms in Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt and Iraq and communist oppression in China made Christianity the most persecuted of the major religions.

Writers taking on religious themes, journalists writing about Islamist extremism, or police officers, teachers and social workers investigating the abuse of women, knew that they now ran the risk of their opponents accusing them of a kind of racial prejudice. The charge of ‘Islamophobia’ would not always stick, but its targets understood that their employers would take it seriously and their contemporaries would regard them as tainted until they had cleared their names. The accusation was not always fatuous. As the millennium arrived, racists and nativist conservatives, who hated Muslims because they were immigrants or came from immigrant families, could develop the most unlikely interest in human rights. If liberalism gave them a new means of attack, they were prepared to feign an interest in it. The only principled response to their hypocrisy was to oppose racism and radical Islam in equal measure and for the same reasons. The best conservatives and liberals managed that, but most settled into the ruts described by a liberal Muslim think tank in 2011. ‘Sections of the political left have not done enough to challenge Islamism, yet, encouragingly, they have challenged anti-Muslim extremism,’ it said. ‘Similarly, sections of the political right have been reluctant to challenge far-right extremism yet are willing to challenge Islamism.’

The fear the Ayatollah generated among liberals thus operated on several levels. Critics of religious obscurantism, most notably liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims, feared violent reprisals. Beyond the worries about direct threats lay the fear that religious groups, bureaucrats, left-wing politicians and newspapers would accuse critics of insensitivity or racism, and that racist groups or websites would confirm the accusation by repeating their critiques. The fear of the vilification and ostracism that would follow was often the most effective deterrent against speaking out. ‘Society can and does execute its own mandates,’ said John Stuart Mill. ‘It practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.’ He might have been writing of modern Europe.

The nature of intellectual life made retreat the likely option. Whatever radical postures they strike, writers and journalists in Western countries are not the equivalents of soldiers or police officers. Nor are they members of a revolutionary underground. They do not begin an artistic or journalistic career expecting to risk their lives. They do not work in well-protected police stations or military bases alongside colleagues who have access to firearms. They work in university campuses or offices, or, in the case of many authors, at home surrounded by their families. Rushdie’s marriage broke down under the strain of the fatwa. Police moved the couple fifty-six times in the first few months, and his wife walked out. The desperate Rushdie tried everything to persuade his pursuers to let him live in peace. He apologised to Iran and converted to Islam. Nothing worked. His enemies just laughed at him and pressed on with the terror campaign. Should other writers spend years in hiding with no hope of escape? Did they want to see their relationships disintegrate, as Rushdie had done?

They could rely on the police for protection, but only up to a point. Ordinary criminals, including ordinary murderers, want to escape from the scenes of their crimes. Visible security measures deter them. The likelihood of arrest and prosecution makes them think twice. Suicide bombers, brainwashed to believe they are on their way to paradise to ravish an assortment of virgins, do not care about arrest and prosecution once they have detonated their bombs. They reason that the police cannot prosecute a corpse.

If they had discovered a general resolve to take on militant religion, then writers and editors might have found safety in numbers. Instead, they were united by their fear. An inversion of the usual processes of publishing began. In normal circumstances, publishers look for controversy the way boozers look for brawls. Nothing delights them more than an author or newspaper columnist who arouses anger. When Margaret Thatcher’s government tried and failed to suppress the memoirs of Peter Wright, a retired MI5 officer, his paranoid book became an international bestseller. The British authorities’ trial of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
for obscenity in 1960 turned the lawyers and expert witnesses on D.H. Lawrence’s side into liberal heroes, and the publishers into happy men and women. Forty years on, admiring newspaper features and television drama documentaries still recalled how E.M. Forster, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams had revealed to the jury the artistic merit behind Lawrence’s use of the words ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’. The prosecutor, the hapless Mervyn Griffith-Jones, earned his dismal place in the history books when he revealed how out of touch the fuddy-duddy establishment of the 1960s had become by asking the jury if this was the kind of book ‘you would wish your wife or servants to read’.

Before Rushdie, publishers praised themselves for their business acumen in buying a book that offended the authorities. After Rushdie, the smart business move was for a publishing house to turn down books that might offend religious zealots. Publishers knew that their business rivals would not pick up the discarded title; they would be equally frightened, and no more inclined to run risks. A cost-benefit analysis lay behind their calculations. Authors can be touchy creatures: vain, grasping and needy. But say what you must about us, no author has ever murdered an editor for
not
printing a book, or bombed the home of a television commissioning editor for
not
broadcasting a drama.

Censorship is at its most effective when its victims pretend it does not exist. If intellectuals had stated that they were too scared to cover subjects of public concern, then at least they would have possessed the courage to admit that they were afraid. Western societies would then have been honest with themselves, and perhaps that honesty would have given birth to a new resolution. But the psychological costs of a frank confession were too high to contemplate. Honesty would have exposed contemporary culture as a culture of pretence.

The grand pose of intellectuals and artists in liberal democracies in the years after the fatwa was that they were the moral equivalents of the victims of repressive regimes. Loud-mouthed newspaper columnists struck heroic postures and claimed to be dissenting voices bravely ‘speaking truth to power’. Their editors never had to worry that ‘power’ would respond by raiding their offices. Publicly funded BBC comedians and state-subsidised playwrights claimed to be the edgy breakers of taboos as they denounced the wars of the Bush/Blair era. Although they never said it, they knew that Bush and Blair would not retaliate by cutting grants or putting artists on trial for sedition – nor did governments fighting wars on two fronts think of imposing military censorship on civilians. Few admitted that what made liberal democracies liberal was that ‘power’ would not throw you in prison, whether you spoke the truth to it or not, and that taboos had been broken for so long that the most ‘edgy’ thing an artist could do was conform to them. If the transgressive had come clean, they would have had to accept that they lampooned the bigotry of Christianity and the wickedness of Western governments because they knew that Christians were not so bigoted and Western leaders were not so wicked that they would retaliate by trying to kill them, while the Islamists they ignored just might. Their fear caused them to adopt out of nervousness an ideology that Islamists adopted out of conviction. A partisan of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat or al Qaeda would not tolerate criticism of Muhammad, but had no difficulty in attacking the greed of Western corporations and the double standards of Western governments. As for denunciations of Christianity and Judaism from Western commentators, Islamists welcomed them, because they echoed their own denunciations of Zionists and Crusaders.

Journalists hoped no one would notice that we were living with a similar double standard. Newspapers ran accounts of Western soldiers torturing or mistreating prisoners in Iraq or Afghanistan. They could well have put troops’ lives in danger as the Internet and satellite television sent images of abuse round the world. If anyone raised the matter with us, we replied that freedom of the press and the need to expose torture trumped all other considerations. It would have been a conclusive argument, had we not refused to publish articles and cartoons that might have put
our
lives in danger. As it was when Grayson Perry, a British artist who produced what Catholics would consider to be blasphemous images of the Virgin Mary, said what everyone knew to be true, his candour was so rare
The Times
treated it as news. ‘The reason I have not gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel the real fear that someone will slit my throat,’ he told the audience at a debate on art and politics.

Few others could bring themselves to say the same in public, or admit the truth to themselves in private. In the chilling phrase of Kenan Malik, they ‘internalised the fatwa’, and lived with a fear that dare not speak its name. They ignored the Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs, Africans and Turks who just wanted to get on with building a new life in the West, they forgot about the refugees who had fled to Europe to escape militant Islam, and took militant Islam to be the authentic voice of European Muslims.