You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen
the temerity to gaze on a sleeping Noah when he was naked and drunk, and laugh at him. God therefore damned his line in perpetuity.) The opponents of oppression did not say that they must ‘respect Afrikaans culture’, however. They did not say that it was Afrikaanophobic to be judgemental about religion, or explain that it was imperialist to criticise the beliefs of ‘the other’. If a religion was oppressive or a culture repugnant, one had a duty to offend it.
The liberal resurgence, which brought down so many tyrannies, was also an attack on the beliefs and values of the old democracies. The 1960s generation brought an end to the deference shown to democratic leaders and established institutions. Many found its irreverence shocking, but no matter. The job of artists, intellectuals and journalists became to satirise and expose; to be the transgressive and edgy critics of authority. They did not confine themselves to politics. Cultural constraints, backed by religious authority, collapsed under the pressure of the second wave of feminism, the sexual revolution and the movements for racial and homosexual emancipation. The revolution in private life was greater than the revolution in politics. Old fences that had seemed fixed by God or custom for eternity fell as surely as the Berlin Wall.
Struggling to encapsulate in a paragraph how the cultural revolution of the second half of the twentieth century had torn up family structures and prejudices, the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm settled on an account from a baffled film critic of the plot of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1987 Law of Desire.
In the film Carmen Maura plays a man who’s had a transsexual operation and, due to an unhappy love affair with his/her father, has given up on men to have a lesbian, I guess, relationship with a woman, who is played by a famous Madrid transvestite.
It was easy to mock. But laughter ought to have been stifled by the knowledge that within living memory transsexuals, transvestites, gays and lesbians had not been subjects that writers and directors could cover sympathetically, or on occasion at all. Their release from traditional morality reflected the release of wider society from sexual prejudice.
That release offended religious and social conservatives who thought a woman’s place was in the home, sexual licence a sin and homosexuality a crime against nature. Although the fashion for relativism was growing in Western universities in the 1980s, leftish academics did not say we had no right to offend the cultures of racists, misogynists and homophobes, and demand that we ‘respect’ their ‘equally valid’ contributions to a diverse society. Even they knew that reform is impossible without challenging established cultures. Challenge involves offence. Stop offending, and the world stands still.
Salman Rushdie was a man of his time, who would never have understood the notion that you should think twice before offending the powerful. Midnight’s Children, the 1981 novel that made him famous, was an account of how the ideals of independent India, which Nehru announced as the chimes of midnight struck on 14–15 August 1947, degenerated into the tyranny of Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency. Its successor, Shame, dissected the brutalities of military and religious tyranny in Pakistan. By the time he began The Satanic Verses Rushdie was the literary conscience of the subcontinent. He deplored the cruelties of post-colonialism, while never forgetting the cruelties of the colonists. It was not a surprise that after looking at post-partition India and Pakistan, he turned his attention to Islam. He had been born into a secular Muslim family in Bombay. He had studied the Koran at Cambridge University, as a literary text written by men rather than God’s creation. The Islamic Revolution in Iran, which brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979, had pushed religious conservatism to the centre of politics. Rushdie would no more treat religious authority uncritically than he would treat secular authority uncritically. If he had, he would have committed a real offence against the intellectual standards of his day.
A God of Bullies
Rushdie’s title declared his intention. According to a contested religious tradition, the satanic verses were the lines the devil tricked Muhammad into believing were the words of God as he struggled to convert the pagan people of Mecca to Islam. Satan suggested that Muhammad tell the Meccans he would compromise his harsh new religion and allow Mecca’s pagan goddesses Al-Lat, Al-’Uzzá and Man to intercede with God on their behalf. The biographers of the Prophet claimed that the angel Gabriel chastised Muhammad for allowing Satan to deceive him. Mortified, the Prophet took back the satanic words and returned to uncompromising monotheism.
To modern and not so modern eyes, the episode raises pertinent questions about how believers can consider a sacred text to be the inerrant word of a god or gods when the devil or anyone else can insert their thoughts into it. The cases of the Koran, Old Testament and New Testament gave them excellent grounds for scepticism, because the texts were not prepared until decades after the supposed revelations. Rushdie endorsed scepticism by showing how well the Koran suited the prejudices of early medieval Arabia, and threw in the oppression of women for good measure.
Al-Lat, Al-’Uzzá and Man?t were goddesses, and Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, was determined to wipe out the goddess cults of the ancient world and replace them with the rule of a stern and unbending patriarch. It is worth mentioning Christianity and Judaism at this point, because although everyone who raises the subject of sexism and religion in the post-Rushdie world concentrates on Islam’s attitude to women, liberalism’s task of knocking misogyny out of the other mainstream religions is not over. As late as 2010, a modest proposal to allow women to become bishops with the same powers as their male counterparts pushed the Church of England close to schism. In any other area of public life, the suggestion that male employees could refuse to serve a woman boss would be greeted with derision. To a large faction within the supposedly modern and moderate Church of England, sexism remained God’s will, and equality of opportunity an offence against the divine order. At about the same time as Anglicans were displaying their prejudices, gangs of Orthodox Jews were forming themselves into ‘chastity squads’. They beat divorced women in Jerusalem for breaking religious law by walking out in the company of married men, and asked the courts to uphold men’s ‘right’ to force Orthodox women to sit at the back of buses – an unconscious homage to the segregation of blacks and whites in the old American South.
Rushdie was touching therefore on a theme that was close to being universal. While there always have been and always will be men who wish to dominate women, the peculiar iniquity of religion is to turn misogyny into a part of the divine order: to make sexism a virtue and equality a sin.
The authors of a recent study of religious oppression dispensed with the circumlocutions of modern commentators, and put the case for an unembarrassed critique of religion plainly. They considered how Sharia adultery laws state that a raped woman must face the next-to-impossible task of providing four male witnesses to substantiate her allegation or be convicted of adultery; how when rapists leave Pakistani women pregnant courts take the bulge in their bellies as evidence against them; how in Nigeria, Sharia courts not only punish raped women for adultery but order an extra punishment of a whipping for making false accusations against ‘innocent’ men; how in the United States, the fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints gives teenagers to old men in arranged marriages and tells them they must submit to their wishes; and how the theocratic Saudi Arabian state stops women walking unaccompanied in the street, driving a car and speaking to men outside the family. Then – after drawing a deep breath – they asked, ‘Does God hate women?’
Well, what can one say? Religious authorities and conservative clerics worship a wretchedly cruel unjust vindictive executioner of a God. They worship a God of ten-year-old boys, a God of playground bullies, a God of rapists, of gangs, of pimps. They worship – despite rhetoric about justice and compassion – a God who sides with the strong against the weak, a God who cheers for privilege and punishes egalitarianism. They worship a God who is a male and who gangs up with other males against women. They worship a thug. They worship a God who thinks little girls should be married to grown men. They worship a God who looks on in approval when a grown man rapes a child because he is ‘married’ to her. They worship a God who thinks a woman should receive eighty lashes with a whip because her hair wasn’t completely covered. They worship a God who is pleased when three brothers hack their sisters to death with axes because one of them married without their father’s permission.
Although