You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen
stand would have involved confronting their fears. However fantastic those fears were, they were not irrational. They could glance at the evening news and see Islamists slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians in Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria and Afghanistan. They knew it could happen here, because in Rushdie’s case it had happened here.
With religious censorship, as with censorship in all its forms, you should not just think about the rejected books, newspaper articles, TV scripts and plays, but remember the far larger class of works that authors begin then decide to abandon. The words that were never written, the arguments that were never made during two decades when argument was needed. In 2010, the BBC asked the Egyptian-American feminist Mona Eltahawy why ever-larger numbers of European women were allowing men to tell them that they must hide behind veils. ‘I think it has become more prevalent because the space has been left completely uncontested to the Muslim right wing, which does not respect anyone’s rights whatsoever except for this one right to cover a woman’s face,’ she replied. ‘No one has pushed back against the Muslim right wing. Integration has largely failed across Europe, even in the UK.’
You can find many reasons why writers, journalists and politicians failed to push back against the Muslim right wing, or even to admit that a Muslim right wing existed. I accept that they were not always cowardly, and that an honourable wariness about the possibility of aiding the white right wing motivated many. But beneath the plausible arguments lay a base and basic fear.
It pushed the majority of Western liberals into adhering in whole or in part to the post-Rushdie rules of self-censorship:
1 They would defer to Islamists and engage in no criticism of the life and teachings of Muhammad.
2 They would treat the Koran as the inerrant word of God, as they would the sacred texts of any other religion which threatened violence, and not suggest that sacred texts are man-made.
3 They would carry on exercising their freedom to criticise, often justifiably, Western religions and governments, which were not threatening to kill them, while appeasing or ignoring those that might.
4 They would never admit to being hypocrites, or accept that their double standards favoured extremists.
5 They would minimise political differences within Muslim communities and refuse to risk their necks for Muslim or ex-Muslim liberals and feminists.
6 They would say that the dictatorial policies of religious regimes and movements were the fault of Western provocation.
7 They would argue that religious violence had nothing to do with religion.
If these rules were all there were, it would have been bad enough. But rules imply limits, and there were no limits. After Grayson Perry said he did not satirise Islam because he feared having his throat slit, he added a shrewd observation. ‘I’m interested in religion and I’ve made a lot of pieces about it,’ he said. ‘With other targets you’ve got a better idea of who they are, but Islamism is very amorphous. You don’t know what the threshold is. Even what seems an innocuous image might trigger off a really violent reaction, so I just play safe all the time.’
THREE
Manufacturing Offence
One nineteen p.m.
No one seems to be going in.
Instead a fat baldy’s coming out.
Like he’s looking for something in his pockets and
at one nineteen and fifty seconds
he goes back for those lousy gloves of his.
WISłAWA SZYMBORSKA, ‘THE TERRORIST, HE WATCHES’
No one doubted that Maqbool Fida Husain was India’s greatest modern artist. Western conceptual art became so formulaic, so lost in mannerism and self-reference, that he may have been the world’s greatest living artist, although writers risked ridicule when they made such ostentatious claims. I would defy any critic, however, to deny that Husain’s work embodied the struggles and glories of India.
For half the year, he lived in London. If you had passed him in Mayfair before he died in June 2011 at the venerable age of ninety-five, you would have found him hard to ignore. He strode out from his studio to Shepherd’s Market in bare feet or socks – he did not wear shoes, whatever the weather. Often he carried an oversized paintbrush, just to make sure that the curious could guess his trade. Yet most people in Britain who thought of themselves as cultured found it easy to ignore his work, because no one showed it to them. In part, the ignorance was the result of the parochialism of British culture. But that was not the only reason for Husain’s obscurity.
London’s Serpentine Gallery included a selection of his paintings in a wider exhibition of contemporary Indian art in 2008. Strange though it once would have been to say it, the gallery’s staff deserved praise for their courage as well as their good taste. In 2006, the Asia House cultural centre in Marylebone tried to give the British public the first major solo exhibition of Husain’s work. Threats from protesters closed it within days. Even though the Indian High Commissioner opened the show, they denounced Husain as an enemy of the Indian nation. Husain offended all Hindus, they said, with his pornographic and blasphemous art. The possibility of violence terrified the exhibition organisers, and they backed away from a confrontation with censorious extremism.
In India, Husain’s position was worse. Hindu militants attacked his home and galleries showing his work. For twelve years, the Indian legal system aided and abetted them. Without understanding how his enemies were exploiting him, the old man became a cog in a machine that manufactured offence. Sectarian politicians exploited him to keep their supporters in a useful state of religious fury, a splenetic condition that delivers many votes to unscrupulous operators at election time.
Born into a Muslim family in Maharashtra in 1915, Husain began his career as a self-taught artist under the Raj. His family moved to Bombay when he was in his teens, and he went door to door offering to sketch portraits. ‘What I discovered was that everyone, regardless of their looks, wanted to have their cheeks rosy. I could not do all these rosy cheeks, so I decided to paint Bollywood cinema hoardings instead.’
He painted posters for nearly twenty years, scaling scaffolding and sleeping on the pavement. ‘I loved it, that street life. All art in India is viewed as celebration. That is what I’ve tried to put into my work.’
Husain’s friends tell me that he travelled round India, and when he ran out of money he exhibited his drawings on railway station platforms and invited passing passengers to pay what they wanted for them.
When Nehru announced Indian independence in 1947, Husain joined the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. It had the cosmopolitan project to make a new art for a new country by combining Indian traditions with the Western avant-garde. Husain stayed true to the progressive promises of the 1940s all his life. German expressionism and the modern movement influenced him, and Western critics called him ‘the Indian Picasso’, but he never lost his ability to straddle high culture and popular culture, which is as good a definition of greatness in art as I can find. In his paintings, gorgeous Bollywood stars appear alongside gods and goddesses of the Hindu tradition. ‘For me, India means a celebration of life. You cannot find that same quality anywhere in the world,’ he told an interviewer in 2008. ‘I never wanted to be clever, esoteric, abstract. I wanted to make simple statements. I wanted my canvases to have a story. I wanted my art to talk to people.’
All India’s religious traditions moved him. His family were from the Sulaimani Bohra branch of Shia Islam, which had absorbed many Hindu beliefs. His mother died when he was young, and his father sent him away from home when he was a teenager. ‘I used to have terrible nightmares when I was about fourteen or fifteen. This stopped when I was nineteen. I had a guru called Mohammad Ishaq – I studied the holy texts with him for two years. I also read and discussed the Gita and Upanishads and Puranas. This made me completely calm.’
All