You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen
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.
You only had to look around to understand why they accepted that there might be something in the clash-of-civilisations hypothesis after all. The 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington were planned in Hamburg. The 7/7 attacks on the London transport system were planned in Leeds and executed by men with broad Yorkshire accents. Most terrorist violence in Europe came from within. Meanwhile Britain exported terrorists to Pakistan, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Danish Muslims travelled the world to whip up trade boycotts against their own country.
Theirs were not typical cases. But those in charge of politics and culture were well aware that behind the terrorists were hundreds of thousands of people whose attitudes towards violence were at best ambivalent. In 2007 a survey of British Muslims found that, contrary to expectations, the sense of belonging to Britain was higher among the old, who were more likely to have been born abroad, than the young, who were more likely to have been born in Britain. A significant minority was turning to religious reaction. About one third of Muslims surveyed aged between sixteen and twenty-four wanted the introduction of Sharia law and supported the execution of apostates. Cheeringly, two thirds did not, but anxious cultural bureaucrats were more impressed by those who might do them harm than by those who would leave them alone, particularly when the forces of reaction appeared to have history on their side.
In his caustic Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, the American conservative writer Christopher Caldwell saw a continent that was declining in numbers and paralysed by political correctness. It had become too weak to face down the ‘adversary culture’ of militant Islam. He and others on the right held that post-Christian, post-imperial, post-Holocaust, post-modern, post-just-about-everything European countries lacked the patriotic pride and religious certainties of strong societies, and were wide open to attack from those who felt no comparable embarrassment about their beliefs. As I hope this book makes clear, I think that conservatives underestimate the power and appeal of liberalism. But the most striking feature of the twenty years after The Satanic Verses was that Western political and cultural grandees, who trumpeted their anti-Americanism, behaved as if American conservatives were right. They treated Muslims as a homogeneous bloc, and allowed the reactionaries to set the cultural agenda.
They might have looked to Salman Rushdie, to the feminists in Women Against Fundamentalism, to the Arab and Iranian dissidents