You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen
Mormon sects, most of their examples came from Islam and Hinduism. That is not a sign of prejudice on their part. Any writer tackling religious oppression has to accept that liberalism tempered the misogyny of mainstream Christianity and Judaism in the rich world after centuries of struggle, but left the poor world largely untouched. Christianity and Judaism are not ‘better’ than Islam and Hinduism. Free-thinkers have just made a better job of containing their prejudices and cruelties.
Rushdie’s Muhammad does not always pretend that religious ordinances come from heaven. As he considers the Meccans’ demand that their goddesses should be allowed to argue with his male god, he is no longer a prophet seeking to understand divine commands, but a politician weighing the options. The pagans of Mecca will accept his new religion in return for him allowing them to keep their old goddesses. That’s the bargain. That’s the offer on the table. God’s will has nothing to do with it. Nor do the tricks of Satan. If Paris is worth a mass, is Mecca worth a goddess, or two, or three?
‘I’ve been offered a deal,’ he shouts, but his followers will have none of it. Like so many leaders, Rushdie’s Muhammad is trapped by the fanaticism of disciples who deny him space for compromise. They had believed that every word he said came from God via Gabriel. If they changed their story to suit political pressures, they would become a laughing stock. Why should anyone trust them if they diluted their absolute faith and accepted that God’s commands were open to interpretation and negotiation? Why should they trust themselves?
‘How long have we been reciting the creed you brought us?’ asks one. ‘There is no god but God. What are we if we abandon it now? This weakens us, renders us absurd. We cease to be dangerous. Nobody will ever take us seriously again.’ In any case, a second disciple tells Muhammad, ‘Lat, Mamnat, Uzza – they’re all females! For pity’s sake! Are we to have goddesses now? Those old cranes, herons and hags?’
Muhammad realises that if he compromises, he will lose his followers and with them his power base. The Meccans will have no reason to deal with him. He falls into a crisis of self-doubt, a scene Rushdie carries off with great pathos, although neither his religious detractors nor many of his secular admirers could admit it.
As the book went on, Rushdie provided his enemies with more ammunition by continuing in the feminist vein. Can a man who has so many wives under his control be the leader of a new faith, he asks. Or as Aisha, Muhammad’s youngest wife, says in the novel, ‘Your God certainly jumps to it when you need him to fix things up for you.’ When Rushdie’s Muhammad confronts free-thinking women, ‘bang, out comes the rule book, the angel starts pouring out rules about what women mustn’t do, he starts forcing them back into the docile attitudes the Prophet prefers, docile or maternal, walking three steps behind or sitting at home being wise and waxing their chins’.
To illustrate how you cannot have blasphemy until there is a religion to blaspheme against, Rushdie had the men of Mecca go to a brothel where the courtesans were named after the Prophet’s wives. He tested the belief that the Koran was the sacred word of God by having a sceptic rewrite the Prophet’s divine revelations. As I said, to those with the mentalities of heretic-hunters and witch-burners, The Satanic Verses was a blasphemous book, and no one could deny it. The single point that his supporters should have needed to make in his defence was that Salman Rushdie was born in democratic India and moved to democratic Britain. He was a free man in a free country, and could write what he damn well wanted.
Events were to prove that his supporters needed additional arguments.
The first was to emphasise that the best novelists do not produce agitprop.
The Satanic Verses is not just ‘about’ religion and the rights of women. It is a circus of magical realism, with sub-plots, dream sequences, fantasies, pastiches, sudden interruptions by the author, a bewildering number of characters, and a confusion of references to myths and to the news stories of the day. If you insist on nailing down its political message – and trust me, you will whack your thumb with the hammer many times before you do – you will discover that the novel is ‘about’ migrants from India to the West who, like Rushdie, are contending with their changing identities and their dissolving religious and cultural certainties.
The protagonists – Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood movie star who plays Hindu gods in religious epics, and whose fans worship him as a god, and Saladin Chamcha, an actor who has left India and makes a living doing voiceovers for London advertising agencies – confront the pressures on the psyche migration brings. Somewhat prophetically given what was to happen next, the Anglicised Saladin tells his Indian mistress, who is trying to find what remains of India inside him:
‘Well this is what is inside … An Indian translated into English-medium. When I attempt Hindustani these days, people look polite. This is me.’ Caught in the aspic of his adopted language he had begun to hear in India’s Babel an ominous warning: don’t come back again. When you have stepped through the looking glass you step back at your peril. The mirror may cut you to shreds.
If people wanted reasons to find offence – and as we will see, there are people who are offended if you don’t give them reasons to find offence – then the British police and immigration services might have issued death threats, because Rushdie showed them as racists and sadists. When the controversy broke and he needed police protection, supporters of law and order complained about the lack of ‘respect’ for the British state Rushdie had displayed in his writings. The cops, however, took his satire on the chin and went on to guard him from assassins. If you wanted to be fussy, you could also notice passages which showed that Asian shopkeepers in London were not always comradely soldiers joined with their Afro-Caribbean brothers in the struggle against white prejudice, as the anti-racist orthodoxy of the 1980s said they must be. Rushdie’s Asian Londoners are contemptuous of the black youths they assume must be criminals. Britain’s black community once again lived with the offence.
But, and here is the second large point, to go through The Satanic Verses with the squinting eye of a censor searching for thought crimes, or even to seek to see it in the round, as I have tried to do, is to blind yourself to the real reason why the fatwa against Salman Rushdie became the Dreyfus Affair of our age. That reason is as brutal now as it was then.
Globalising Censorship (1)
Terror is why The Satanic Verses is still the novel that all modern arguments about the silencing of sceptical and liberal voices must deal with first. The terror unleashed by its opponents and the response of the inheritors of the liberal tradition to their enemies’ demands for censorship and self-censorship. No terror, and The Satanic Verses would be one of several great works by a great novelist, rather than shorthand for a battle whose outcome defined what writers can and can’t say.
Rushdie did not understand what he was fighting. ‘The thing that is most disturbing is they are talking about a book which does not exist,’ he said as the protests grew. ‘The book which is worth killing people for and burning flags is not the book I wrote. The people who demonstrated in Pakistan and who were killed haven’t actually read the book that I wrote because it isn’t on sale there.’ He had not grasped that reactionary mobs and those who seek to exploit them have a know-nothing pride in their ignorance. It was sufficient that clerical authorities said that the book was blasphemous, and could quote a passage or two to prove their case. The vast majority of religious fanatics who murdered or threatened to murder publishers, translators, booksellers and innocent bystanders did not want to read the book in the round, or to read it at all. Most would not have understood it if they had tried.
Their violence rolled around the world. The brutality of the reaction was beyond anything that Rushdie or his publishers anticipated or could have anticipated. Penguin released The Satanic Verses in 1988. Without pausing to consider its contents, President Rajiv Gandhi put it on India’s proscribed list. The opposition MP who demanded that Gandhi ban the book had not read it either, but decided, ‘I do not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is.’ Gandhi was frightened of communal riots and of losing the Muslim vote, and perhaps remembered how Rushdie had excoriated his mother, Indira, in Midnight’s Children.
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