You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen
to agonise about their staff, most of whom did not realise that they were signing up to fight for freedom of speech when they signed on for mundane jobs. Despite what critics said against them, they had to and did worry about British Muslims, trying to integrate into a new culture. And when the heat was at its fiercest, they had to worry about protecting their own lives and the lives of their families.
They did not spend too much time thinking about Milton or Galileo, Mayer recalled, ‘but I did think of books we and others had published that some Catholics probably did not like; other books that offended some Jews or evangelical Christians, or minorities who felt their beliefs, values or ethnicity had been treated negatively. And what of books that offend majorities, a subject I heard no one raise? Cease to publish those books, too, when someone raised a hand against them?’ Workers in bookshops, who were neither well paid nor well protected, said that they must continue to stock it. Even bookshops Islamists bombed kept it under the counter when they reopened. The customer only had to ask.
The mediocrity of Rushdie’s critics in the West strengthened the resolve of liberals. Most of his enemies came from the political right. American neo-cons, who a few years later would shout until they were hoarse about the threat of Islamism, were delighted that the dictatorial regimes and movements of the poor world were targeting a left-wing novelist. Whatever their politics, comfortable English intellectuals were equally incapable of seeing extremist blackmail for what it was. John le Carré, whose George Smiley seemed to understand that political freedom had to be defended, saw no similar case for a defence of religious freedom. There was ‘no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity’, he said, apparently unaware that the law of the land he lived in specifically protected its citizens from assassination. It was not that he supported the fatwa, of course. But his anger was directed at the writer, not the men who wanted the writer dead. ‘When it came to the further exploitation of Rushdie’s work in paperback form, I was more concerned about the girl at Penguin books who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was about Rushdie’s royalties. Anyone who had wished to read the book by then had ample access to it.’
In one of his rare public interventions during his underground life, an icy Rushdie wrote from his secret address to say that le Carré was taking ‘the philistine, reductionist, militant Islamist line that The Satanic Verses was no more than an insult’, and that anyone ‘who displeases philistine, reductionist, militant Islamist folk loses his right to live in safety. He says that he is more interested in safeguarding publishing staff than in my royalties. But it is precisely these people, my novel’s publishers in some thirty countries, together with the staff of bookshops, who have most passionately supported and defended my right to publish. It is ignoble of le Carré to use them as an argument for censorship when they have so courageously stood up for freedom.’
The Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who wasted his time and talent in snobbish feuds, revelled in Rushdie’s suffering. ‘I wonder how Salman Rushdie is faring these days,’ he mused, ‘under the benevolent protection of British law and British police, about whom he has been so rude. Not too comfortably, I hope … I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit and literature would not suffer.’ Roald Dahl said that Rushdie knew what he was doing, an assertion which was not true but allowed him to turn the blame from the potential murderers to their intended victim. ‘This kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent book on to the top of the bestseller list,’ he continued, ‘but to my mind it is a cheap way of doing it.’
The English establishment has a dictionary of insults for men and women who take on the futile task of making it feel guilty – ‘chippy’, ‘bolshie’, ‘uppity’, ‘ungrateful’ … It directed them all at Rushdie.
I do not think I am reading too much into Dahl’s accusation of cheapness or Trevor-Roper’s hope that Islamists would beat manners into an author in a dark alley when I say that members of the traditional intelligentsia could not support Rushdie because in his success they could sense their decline. The Indian and South American magical realists of the 1980s foretold a time when great literature would not come from the world they knew. Rushdie was the master of the English language, their language. He came to literary London and took their prizes at the Booker awards. Reviewers in their serious newspapers praised him for his ability to draw from different cultures and ideas. The immigrant from a Muslim family, the most famous Indian in England, seemed interested in everyone except them. He did not describe the agonies of the English upper-middle class or the life and loves of Oxbridge dons, but the slums of London and the politics of the subcontinent, while never forgetting to remind the well-bred among his readers of the shame of British imperialism and the persistence of white racism.
Conservatives claimed that the slippery foreigner ‘knew what he was doing’. Rushdie deliberately insulted Islam because he wanted to make money from the controversy, and then forced the taxpayer to meet the cost of his police protection. They made him into a figure from Tory fantasy: the highbrow scrounger, the champagne socialist, who collected his royalties while milking the public purse. When a snide Prince Charles joined the hostile chorus, Ian McEwan said that His Royal Highness’s security cost far more, even though the prince ‘had never written anything worth reading’. Understandably, Rushdie was more outraged than amused. It took him four years to write The Satanic Verses. Did his opponents not find it strange that a serious writer would spend a tenth of his life creating something as crude as an insult? But of course, his enemies could not accept that he was a serious writer, he said. In order to attack him and his work, it was necessary to paint him ‘as a bad person, an apostate traitor, an unscrupulous seeker of fame and wealth, an opportunist whose work was without merit, who “attacked Islam” for his own personal gain. This was what was meant by the much-repeated phrase “He did it on purpose”.’
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