I was a student in England when the Salman Rushdie Affair broke out (one must be careful about one’s names because if you separate his last name they read RUSH DIE!). Let’s refresh our memories. Mr. Rush-to-Die, a celebrated British writer of Indian Muslim origin, had written a novel called The Satanic Verses. In it, he repeated one of many insinuations about the Prophet Muhammad, sexuality and women.

Apart from the literary types and their allied industry promoters, advertisers, publishers and the cultural media, not many people would have heard of the book and even less would have bought it, and fewer still would have read it. Somehow some Muslim clerics got to hear about this book through summaries of summaries and before you could say Salam Alaikum, Muslim clerics in Bradford (predominantly Asian) were up in arms, calling for aban on the book and declaring it a blasphemy against Islam.

Then Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (briefly in the 1980s the spiritual leader not just of Shiite Muslims, but notionally for all Muslims and admired by many anti-imperialists for cutting the US down to size), waded in by declaring Fatwah (basically capital punishment for an apostate Muslim). From a local affair in Bradford, the anti-Satanic Verses protests spread across the United Kingdom and became a global Bonfire of the Book in many Muslim countries. A spate of banning followed, including by many African states that feared that the book was a threat to public peace and safety.

The protests about Salman Rush-Die’s book had less to do with the offence than the context. This was England in the 1980s painfully adjusting to the conservative counter-revolution of Margaret Thatcher in which poor people in general but ethnic and racial minorities in particular felt marginalized and vulnerable. British Muslims- especially second or more generation Asians locked in their ethno-religious Laagers in places like Bradford, Leicester, parts of London, etc- felt more vulnerable than others. A community under attack from socio-economic and political changes finally found its religious faith also not considered sacred! The matter was made worse by the fact that the author who gave this public expression was supposed to be one of them, even if he claimed to have become a lapsed Muslim! Do we see any parallels with the current protests and bonfire of flags and attacks on Danish embassies across the Muslim countries because of a set of a dozen cartoons published in some Danish Newspaper 4 months ago?

Like Rushdie’s case, the matter began locally and then became global because of faster technology, but was also exacerbated by tensions about the role of the West in global matters, particularly in the Middle East which often wrongly translate into tensions with Islam and Muslims in general. Like British Muslims, their brethren and sisters in Denmark- despite pretensions to liberalism in countries like Denmark- feel left out, and in recent years have lived under right-wing attacks due to a right-ward shift in politics in the Nordic and Scandinavian countries. Xenophobia is onthe rise (formalising itself in parliament and government) as in many other European countries.

While the Rushdie case was regarded as a stab in the back, the cartoons are considered a frontal blow. Ordinarily you should not bother if your enemy attacks you since one would even suspect sugar candies from them. However the international environment has meant that the tiny Muslim population in a very tiny country called Denmark are not alone. Their frustrations can feed into all kinds of frustrations by Muslims and non-Muslims alike about the West.

The disagreement is presented as a simplistic one between freedom of expression and its enemies. Or even more directly, as yet another ‘clash of civilizations’ between the West and Islam with the former standing for democracy and the latter lack of it. But it is not about religion essentially, but about politics and power locally and internationally. Freedom is not absolute anywhere in the world- least of all in the West. Would the same newspapers that have gleefully published the cartoons in over 25 Western Countries (including the apartheid State of Israel) have published them if they had been about Jews? What would be the reaction of the same newspapers if the cartoons were about Jesus Christ insinuating that he was a paedophile, since so many priests in Europe and the US have in recent years been exposed as systematically abusive of children in their flocks? How many of these freedom lovers will take up the challenge thrown by an Iranian Newspaper which had commissioned a similarly offensive set of cartoons about Christianity and Judaism and dare publish them in their papers?

On the other hand, how many of those militant protesters burning down embassies and brandishing all kinds of violent posters and placards will be tolerated in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan or any other so called Muslim state if their protests are about the un-Islamic practices of their rulers whose rule is any thing but Islamic?

How many of those protesting have actually seen these cartoons? My guess is that like the Satanic verses which many liberals bought to show solidarity but never read beyond the ‘Satanic’ page many of those protesting the cartoons have not and will not even see them.
10th February 2006

Does that mean there are no issues at stake apart from cynical politics and transferable anger? No, there are serious issues and discussions that need to be heard but which can only be meaningful after the current pontification from the West and emotional victimhood from Muslims have settled down. Neither has a monopoly on good and evil. Freedom will be meaningless if it is completely unlimited, but living in a society also means that we have to share it with people whose ways, values may clash with ours.

Finding a peaceful formula for mutual coexistence within boundaries of tolerance in equal dignity is what democracy is about. The tragedy is that the West behaves as though it has patent monopoly on democracy to the extent that many non-Westerners or non-Westernised now instinctively reject democracy as a Western subterfuge because of the multiple standards the Western powers deploy, which gives different signals depending on what and whose interests are at stake.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Thursday Postcard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.