You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen
organised the protests. Its enmity was a compliment to Rushdie, for Jamaat’s supporters were enemies any liberal should be proud to have. Jamaat’s founder, Maulana Abu’l Ala Maududi, began agitating in British-occupied India in 1941, and had a good claim to be the first of the Islamists. He combined his version of a ‘purified’ Islam with European totalitarianism. From the communists he took the notion of the vanguard party, which would tell the masses what they wanted, regardless of whether the masses wanted it or not, and vague notions of a just future where all would be equal. From the Nazis, Jamaat, and its partners in the Arab Muslim Brotherhood, took the Jewish conspiracy theory. They explained that Muslims were weak because they were victims of the plots of sinister Jews, or ‘Zionists’, as they came to call them, who were everywhere seeking to undermine their faith and morals. Muslims would free themselves by building a caliphate, where the supreme ruler of a global empire would not be a Nazi führer or communist general secretary but a theocrat ruling with total power in accordance with Koran and Sharia.
After the British withdrew from India in 1947, leaving millions to die in the slaughters of partition, Jamaat supported the new Muslim state of Pakistan, which was split between its Bengali east wing and the Punjabi-dominated west. When the Bengalis of East Pakistan revolted against a system that made them second-class citizens, the Pakistani army’s retaliation stunned a twentieth century that thought it had become inured to genocide. Jamaat aided the army’s campaigns of mass murder and mass rape because it believed in the caliphate, and hence could not tolerate the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, because it broke Islamic unity. At the time this book went to press, Bangladeshi prosecutors were beginning war crime proceedings against Jamaat leaders they claimed were members of the paramilitary squads Pakistan recruited to help with killing.
Rushdie had already noticed that the Pakistani military dictatorship of the 1980s needed the Jamaatists to provide a religious cover for tyranny. ‘This is how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked,’ he said, as he gave Jamaat reasons to hate him as well.
The next countries to ban The Satanic Verses were Sudan, Bangladesh and apartheid South Africa. If you find the alliance of militant Islamists and white supremacists strange, then you have yet to learn that all the enemies of liberalism are the same. In its dying days, the regime tried to uphold the apartheid state by co-opting mixed-race and Asian South Africans into the system, the better to deny South Africa’s black majority the vote. Most coloured and Asian South Africans refused to cooperate. But Islamists saw the chance to use apartheid’s censorship laws against Rushdie. The left-wing Weekly Mail and the Congress of South African Writers had invited him to visit Johannesburg in 1988 to discuss the censorship of the opponents of white rule. Rushdie had to pull out because of death threats from Islamists. The white-skinned rulers learned they could now rely on brown-skinned religious extremists to intimidate a writer who was proposing to come to their country and denounce their regime.
Even before the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, Rushdie had many enemies, but they were not dangerous enemies. The Indian government regularly banned books it thought might provoke communal violence. Jamaatists in Pakistan and white supremacists in South Africa had always threatened authors. An Anglo-Indian writer based in London had little to fear from them. Intellectuals who had made it to the West were beyond the reach of oppressive forces. They had a place of sanctuary.
The fatwa changed all that. It redrew the boundaries of the free world, shrinking its borders and erasing zones of disputation from the map of the liberal mind. It ensured that London, New York, Paris, Copenhagen and Amsterdam could no longer be places of safety for writers tackling religious themes.
Journalists throw around the word ‘unprecedented’ so carelessly and ceaselessly that we miss the new when it stares us in the face. Khomeini’s incitement to murder was without precedent. Here was a head of state ordering the execution of the private citizens of foreign countries for writing and publishing a work of fiction. A grotesque regard for the forms of legality had accompanied previous outbreaks of state terrorism. Even Stalin forced his victims to confess at show trials so that when he murdered them, he did so with a kangaroo court’s approval. No such concern with keeping up appearances inhibited Khomeini. On 14 February 1989, he said that the faithful must kill Rushdie and his publishers and ‘execute them quickly, wherever they may find them, so that no one will dare insult Islam again. Whoever is killed in this path will be regarded as a martyr.’ Just in case zealous assassins doubted that they would receive eternal life in paradise along with the services of seventy-two virgins, an Iranian foundation offered the earthly reward of $3 million.
There was not even a show trial. Khomeini did not listen to the religious scholars who said that as Rushdie was not a citizen of an Islamic state, he could not punish him for blasphemy or apostasy. And he took even less notice of the more substantial objections from secularists that no one had the right to order the murder of a writer for subjecting religion to imaginative scrutiny.
Far from making himself the object of repulsion, the Ayatollah’s endorsement of state-sponsored murder won him many followers. After the death sentence, preachers whipped up mobs against Pakistani Christians in Islamabad. In Bombay, twelve died in battles with the police. A bomber murdered a security guard at the British Council offices in Karachi. In Dhaka, fifteen thousand people tried to break through police lines and ransack the British Council’s library. In the United States, Islamists threatened bookstores and firebombers hit the offices of the Riverdale Press, a weekly paper in the Bronx, after it published an unexceptional editorial saying that the public had the right to read whatever novels it pleased.
In Britain, demonstrators in Bradford burned copies of The Satanic Verses. I doubt they had heard Heinrich Heine’s line that ‘Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings’ – a condemnation from the German Enlightenment of the burning of the Koran by the Spanish Inquisition, ironically enough. Onlookers were entitled to wonder whether Heine was right, and Rushdie’s British enemies would burn the human being in question if they could get hold of him. As in America and Europe, British bookshops withdrew the novel in the face of threats – two independent bookshops on the Charing Cross Road were bombed, as were Penguin bookshops and a department store. Police surrounded Penguin’s head office with concrete barricades to stop suicide bombers crashing cars into the building. They X-rayed all packages for explosives and patrolled the perimeter with guard dogs. Meanwhile Special Branch officers moved their charge from safe house to safe house. Rushdie was at the beginning of a rolling programme of house arrest that was to deprive him of his liberty for years.
He had nowhere to run. If he had left Britain, no other country could have promised him safety. The global scale of the malice directed against him made him a refugee without the hope of asylum. Iranian or Pakistani writers who saw the violence in the West realised that if clerics issued fatwas against them in Tehran or Lahore, they could no longer expect to flee to a safe haven. If the controversy was raucous, if the media amplified the death threats, there would be nowhere on the planet to hide.
To justify their death threats and make the shocking seem reasonable, Rushdie’s enemies aped the European fascists and communists of the twentieth century. Just as the Nazis said that the Germans were the victims of supernatural Jewish plots or the communists said that the proletariat was the target of the machinations of the treacherous bourgeoisie, so the Islamists told the faithful that they were being persecuted by a conspiracy of global reach and occult power. Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, declared that the West had been engaged in a cultural war from colonialism on to ‘undermine the people’s genuine Islamic morals’. Rushdie was at its forefront. He was the ideal undercover agent for Western intelligence, Rafsanjani announced – ‘a person who seemingly comes from India and who apparently is separate from the Western world and who has a misleading name’. Rushdie was a white colonialist, hiding beneath a brown skin; a traitor hiding behind a Muslim name. The British secret service had paid him to betray the faithful, the Iranian theocracy explained as it added corruption to the list of charges against him. It gave him bribes, disguised as book advances, as it organised the assault on Islam by the cunning if curious means of a magical realist novel.
As with Nazism, the conspiracy