The entire saga — from the Iranian fatwa to the New York stabbing — showcases the threat Islamism poses to the free world and the liberal proclivity to go soft jihadi terrorism. It also states that there’s no margin of error in Islam
Sir Salman Rushdie began his 2012 memoirs, Joseph Anton, with a description of the day he first heard a fatwa being issued against him by the Ayatollah of Iran in 1989. He received a call from a woman BBC reporter, who told him that “his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin”. She had called him at home on his private line. “How does it feel,” she enquired, “to know that you have just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini?” It was a sunny Tuesday in London, but Rushdie never felt the world so dark before. “It doesn’t feel good,” he replied. But his thoughts were grimmer: “I’m a dead man.”
Rushdie, however, lived to see a new life unfolding before him — a life that seemed “gagged and imprisoned”, but far more glamorous and much less literary. Like his 30-second cameo in Ren?e Zellweger’s Bridget Jones’s Diary in 2001, where he scored over fellow novelist Jeffrey Archer to have a line of his own in the film, he became a celebrity who could also write novels. Soon his work became predictable and formulaic. He would just let Bombay mix with New York, Ibn Rushd with ISIS-type Islamists, and Arabian Nights-like fairy tales with modern politico-religious fault lines — and a novel would be ready to hit the shelves. Post-fatwa, his books, with some exceptions of course, would be overloaded with philosophical imageries and philological jargons, while characters seemed contrived and exaggerated, being way too uprooted from realities.
Yet, Rushdie is important, to the extent of being indispensable — for understanding some of the ills plaguing the contemporary world. So, when he was repeatedly stabbed by one Hadi Matar in New York on Friday, from which, thankfully, he may come out alive but with one eye less and the badly damaged liver, the incident once again brought home the message that Islamism remained a clear and present danger to the liberal world order. The incident also exposed the dominant liberal penchant of incessantly swearing by libertarian values and yet turning oblivious to the obvious Islamist threats. In fact, a recent op-ed in the Hindustan Times, ‘The scorching truth of Rushdie’s ordeal’, by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a self-proclaimed knight in shining liberal armour, is a classic example of what ails a liberal today: While examining the Salman Rushdie stabbing, he not just hides the bloodied Islamist hands (the writer didn’t mention even once why the novelist was attacked, who the attacker was, and why Rushdie was forced to stay under the covers despite seeking several apologies), but also invokes Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu — to come up with the following verdict: “The attack on Rushdie comes from the same source?”
Really!
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, however, is just the tip of the malaise afflicting the liberal order. There has been a tendency to gloss over the crimes committed in the name of Islam, out of ideological conviction — there’s a long history of coordination and cooperation between mullahs and comrades the world over — or the opportunistic stand aimed at keeping oneself out of harm’s way. The problem gets compounded in India where there’s a tendency to disparage one’s indigenous roots under the sway of the heady communist-colonialist cocktail.
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‘Rajiv Gandhi banned my book because of Muslim votes’, Rushdie had said in a 1998 letter
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This liberal doublespeak was also evident during the late 1980s when The Satanic Verses was banned in India, even before the Islamist Pakistan and the theocratic Iran. Interestingly, as Rushdie himself writes in Joseph Anton: “The ban came, improbably enough, from the Finance Ministry, under Section II of the Customs Act, which prevented the book from being imported. Weirdly, the Finance Ministry stated that the ban ‘did not detract from the literary and artistic merit’ of his work.” Paradoxically, some of the prominent liberal faces of the era — Khushwant Singh, Girilal Jain, MJ Akbar, Vir Sanghvi and Dileep Padgaonkar — supported the ban. In fact, the likes of Khushwant Singh, Inder Kumar Gujral and PN Haksar remained on the editorial board of Shahabuddin’s monthly Muslim India, even after active role he played in getting The Satanic Verses banned in India even before actually reading it. Shahabuddin justified his act by saying that he did not “have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is”.
The Rushdie phenomenon is also significant for another reason: The fatwa saw a dramatic rise in the tendency among non-Muslims to pursue self-imposed censorship vis-?-vis Islam. Daniel Pipes, in his book The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, The Ayatollah and the West, calls this “the Rushdie rules”, wherein “editors, authors, newsreaders, publishers and academic teachers abide by a new set of rules (new to modern Westerners, at least) which limit the freedom to discuss Islam with the same methods, terminology and frank inquisitiveness which are considered normal in discussing Christianity or Hinduism”. Pipes adds, “The Rushdie affair has convinced many that speaking frankly about Islam would be physically dangerous or at least costly in other ways, e.g. by provoking stigmatisating labels like ‘prejudiced’, ‘xenophobic’, ‘neo-Crusader’ or ‘anti-Muslim fanatic’, along with the social consequences.” The liberals did what they have been best at doing in such circumstances: Giving an ideological cover to their abject surrender, thus saving their skin as well as retaining the moral high ground!
Finally, the Rushdie saga, especially his stabbing on Friday, is a stark reminder that there’s no forgiveness in Islam; there is no evading punishment for a mistake, committed deliberately and otherwise. So, Rushdie might have reconverted himself into Islam to curry favour with Islamists. He might have claimed, contrary to what he had pompously said before, that The Satanic Verses “isn’t actually about Islam, but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay”. He could have written another book attacking Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray and mocking Hinduism — as he did in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). But all this failed to get him any reprieve.
There’s an interesting subplot here and a cautionary reminder for those who habitually equate Islam with Hinduism. When Rushdie tried doing to Hinduism in The Moor’s Last Sigh what he did with Islam in The Satanic Verses — one suspect it was a deliberate ploy to win over liberals and also assuage Islamist fury — many woolly-headed liberals suspected Hindus would be out on the streets baying for the novelist’s blood. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, there’s a character resembling Bal Thackeray; they thought he too would get into the Ayatollah mode to issue some sort of fatwa. When nothing of the sort happened, the liberals reached out to Thackeray, reminding him how he had been lampooned in the novel and if he would do anything about this. Thackeray said that he would ask his secretary to read the book!
Koenraad Elst, in his preface to The Rushdie Affair, makes an interesting observation. In one incident which showed Hindu fury at its most intense, the Belgian scholar writes, “the Shiv Sena did confiscate from the Mumbai news agents all copies of the India Today issue in which Khushwant Singh had called the 17th-century freedom fighter Shivaji a ‘bastard’, and announced it would not let Khushwant Singh’s books be sold”. Elst then explains how here again, the symmetry thesis proved wrong: “When Rushdie apologised and even reconverted to Islam, the Ayatollahs refused to show mercy, but when Khushwant Singh apologised to the fans of his ‘bastard’, the affair was promptly closed.” Interestingly, Khuswant Singh, who didn’t think twice in calling Shivaji a ‘bastard’, had claimed to have cautioned Rushdie from publishing The Satanic Verses, an ‘advice’ Sir Salman didn’t seem to remember, according to Joseph Anton.
The entire saga — from the Iranian fatwa to the New York stabbing — showcases the threat Islamism poses to the free world and the liberal proclivity to go soft jihadi terrorism and instead defend it by inventing horrors of radicalism in other religions, especially Hinduism. But more importantly, as the Friday stabbing states, there’s no margin of error in Islam. Once a mistake has been committed, deliberately or otherwise, there’s no running away from it and the impending punishment. One can only delay the inevitable. Survival becomes a life-long endeavour. And in the constant fear for life, one opts for slow death. Rushdie, since 1989, has been a victim of both halal and jhatka executions.
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