Author: David Selbourne
Publication: Times
Date: September 11, 2005
URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1774037,00.html
A fateful kowtowing to Muslim sensibilities
began with the Rushdie affair
The scale and speed of the Islamic advance
have exacted a high price from Muslims themselves in the past decades. Their
handicaps have mounted as a consequence of being seen as an actual or potential
danger. After the 9/11 attacks, Muslims almost everywhere in the western world,
Britain included, reported increasing hostility and discrimination. However,
their negative "image", about which Muslims are rightly anxious,
has largely been of their own creation.
Not even well-intentioned liberals or human
rights lobbyists have been able to protect Muslims from the effects of Islamist
violence and threats. This was shown clearly in the Salman Rushdie case. After
the Anglo-Indian novelist published The Satanic Verses, in which it was implied
that the Koran was inspired by Satan, the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini issued
a fatwa in February 1989 calling for zealous Muslims to execute the writer
for his blasphemy, forcing him into hiding. It was a sentence designed to
strike fear into others, as larger and other more terrifying events were to
do in the following years.
"It is Islamic law. He must die,"
asserted Sayed Abdul Quddus, the Bradford Muslim leader, at the time. There
was no shortage of volunteers. "Ninety-nine per cent of Muslims would
be prepared to kill him," declared Mohammed Ismail Janjua, president
of the Dudley mosque. There was also open incitement by Muslims in Britain
to murder the "blasphemous dog".
How to kill him occupied some; where to kill
him, others. "I would welcome the opportunity to kill him myself if he
was in an Islamic country," declared Mohammed Sidique, president of the
Muslim Youth Movement of Great Britain. "Let us take him to Medina,"
said a 16-year-old Bradford schoolgirl, Safia Sheikh, "and let us stone
him to death." Others, despite the bravado, were morally less certain
about whether Rushdie should die at all. "Death, perhaps, is a bit too
easy for him," said Iqbal - later Sir Iqbal - Sacranie of the UK Action
Committee on Islamic Affairs. "His mind must be tormented for the rest
of his life unless he asks forgiveness to almighty Allah."
On closer examination, the divisions and uncertainties
among Muslims about what to do with Rushdie were profound. Some Muslims held
that Khomeini had not only been right in theological principle but right in
decreeing the sanction of death. Other Muslims held that he was right in principle,
but wrong to call for Rushdie to be killed. Yet others havered indecisively
over both the principle and the practicality of the thing.
In Britain, Muslims were buffeted by internal
conflicts between loyalty to faith and the need to observe domestic law, just
as many Muslims were later to be divided in their responses to the London
bombings. Some expressed an inflamed hostility to Rushdie; others feared the
consequences for Muslims should he be killed. But few Muslims defended Rushdie's
freedom of speech, while those who approved of the novel itself were fewest
of all. Considerations of right and wrong also took second place among Muslims
to a wrestling with their duties in the non-Muslim world.
A fudged position was common. Zaki Badawi,
chairman of the Imams and Mosques Council, thus described incitement to violence
not as a wrong in itself but as "contrary to our faith". The Merseyside
Muslim Society, urging self-restraint, declared that the death sentence could
be carried out only in an Islamic state - a case of Muslim transferring moral
responsibility to Muslim.
But by December 1990 Rushdie had declared
that he was ready "to accept the basic tenets of Islam". In London,
in the presence of six Muslim scholars, he affirmed his belief in "the
oneness of God and the prophecy of the Prophet Muhammad". It had not
been his intention to offend people. A paperback edition of the novel would
not now be published.
Most Muslims rejected his "conversion"
despite the Koranic provision for a sinner's repentance, and seven months
later Rushdie himself repented of his repentance, explaining that at the time
of his conversion he had been "in a state of some confusion and torment".
But some non-Muslims had no such hesitation
about their positions, coming to the aid of militant Islam at its worst in
a way that is now still more common. In March 1989 the former US president
Jimmy Carter used Islam's own vocabulary in saying that The Satanic Verses
was not only "an arrow pointed at Muslims" but at religion in general.
Billy Graham, the American evangelist, also declared against Rushdie's novel.
The historian Lord Dacre said he "would not shed a tear" if British
Muslims were to "waylay Rushdie in a dark street". Similarly, in
September 1990 the former cabinet minister Lord Tebbit described Rushdie's
"public life" as "a record of despicable acts of betrayal of
his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality". He had used
the right of free speech to "insult, demean and degrade" and was,
in short, "a villain".
The education secretary at the time, Kenneth
Baker, was more moderate. "Those who wish to make their homes in Britain,"
he declared, "cannot deny to others the very freedoms which drew them
to this country in the first place." It was the same kind of position
as was to be adopted by Tony Blair after the London bombings. Yet the Conservative
government of the day betrayed Rushdie by condemning his book - an action
demanded by Iran as the price of restoring diplomatic relations - but failed
to get the fatwa rescinded; one of the many victories that militant Islam
has secured against a divided West.
More unedifying was the playing upon Muslim
feelings and interests by some Labour MPs who had large minorities of Muslim
constituents. In the Leicester East constituency, Keith Vaz, a Catholic of
Indian origin, led 3,000 Muslim demonstrators in an anti-Rushdie protest in
March 1989. Vaz not only declared that "today we celebrate one of the
great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain", but attacked his
own party, on his Muslim constituents' behalf, as "a godless party".
Roy Hattersley, deputy leader of the Labour
party, with 35,000 Muslim voters to concentrate his mind in his Birmingham
constituency, announced his "vehement opposition" to the banning
of books, but at the same time called for the paperback edition of Rushdie's
novel not to be published, and was accused of "trying to have it both
ways".
Such opportunism and muddle were not surprising,
since politicians in many western liberal democracies were having to watch
their backs as their Muslim electorates grew. But the confused combination
of "respect" for, fear of, contempt for and truckling to the Muslim
community was not governed by electoral considerations alone.
The deputy chairman of the Commission for
Racial Equality declared that Britain could not afford to have "a large,
proud and law-abiding minority withdrawing in a mood of deep sulk". As
for the Crown Prosecution Service, it refused to authorise the bringing by
the police of any charges of incitement to murder Rushdie. And when European
Community members backed away from an initial intent to present a common front
of disapproval towards the Iranian regime, it was swiftly exploited.
The envoys, declared Ayatollah Khomeini, were
"humiliated, disgraced, and regretful of what they had done".
This was the skill of a powerful force in
motion. Skilful, too, has been the use made by the Muslim and Arab worlds
of their knowledge that western liberal societies are increasingly afraid
of the progress of Islamic self-confidence and strength, and ever more deeply
divided over how to respond to it. Indeed, even by 1990, critics of the approach
to the Rushdie affair had concluded that "no one may say anything about
Islam which in any way displeases Muslims, irrespective of its foundation
in truth".
Since then, increasing hostility to Islam
in the non-Muslim world has increased the need of diaspora Muslims to transfer
blame to others for the dilemmas they face. In 1989 and 1990 many Muslims
in Britain made Rushdie the scapegoat for their troubles. In 2005, as the
Islamic advance accelerates and anti-Americanism grows, Muslims throughout
the world, now greatly strengthened by western liberal support, continue to
blame everyone but themselves for Islamism's violences and the angers that
they arouse.
The Losing Battle with Islam by David Selbourne
will be published in the United States next month
