You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen
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.
The Rushdie Affair became the Dreyfus Affair of our age because it revealed how, when faced the threat of violence, ordinary political categories collapse. Whatever your opinions, if you supported Rushdie, you supported the freedom to write, read and publish what you liked, even when (I would say especially when) books were being burned and death threats issued not in some far away and forgettable dictatorship but in your own land. You supported the rule of law, for Rushdie had committed no crime, and you placed the right of the individual to express him or herself above the rights of the collective. The enemies of Dreyfus said that they must keep an innocent man in prison to protect the collective honour of the French army and French state. The enemies of Rushdie said that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s incitement to murder was understandable or excusable because it protected the collective honour of Muslims. No one who professed a belief in freedom of conscience and thought could hesitate for a moment before taking Rushdie’s side.
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