From Fatwa to Jihad

How the World Changed: The Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo

Kenan Malik

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857899132
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Radicalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Almost thirty years ago, the image of burning copies of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses held aloft by thousand-strong mobs of protesters became an internationally familiar symbol of anger and offence. In From Fatwa to Jihad, Kenan Malik reveals how the Rushdie affair transformed the debate worldwide on multiculturalism, tolerance and free speech, helped fuel the rise of radical Islam and pointed the way to the horrors of 9/11 and 7/7.

In this new edition, Malik examines the rise of home-grown jihadis, the threat of IS-inspired terrorism in Europe and how the West has failed to learn the lessons of the past.

Contents

INTRODUCTION:

How Salman Rushdie changed my life

1 Satanic delusions

2 From street-fighters to book-burners

3 The rage of Islam

4 Bargains, resentments and hatreds

5 God’s word and human freedom

6 Monsters and myths

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

How Salman Rushdie
changed my life

‘A poet’s work,’ he answers. ‘To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’ And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him.

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, p.97.

1

It was February 1989. I was in Bradford, a grey town in northern England. Nestled in the hills of West Yorkshire, it was a place dominated by its woollen mills, huge Victorian structures that seemed to reach up into the clouds, though by the late eighties few were still producing any wool. Surrounding the now derelict mills were row upon row of dreary back-to-back houses that had become as decayed as the textile industry itself. The mood of the town was not improved by a climate grey like its brickwork.

It was a town of which few people outside of Britain would have heard. Until, that is, a thousand Muslim protestors had, the previous month, paraded with a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, before ceremoniously burning the book. The novel was tied to a stake before being set alight in front of the police station. It was an act calculated to shock and offend. It did more than that. The burning book became an icon of the rage of Islam. Sent around the world by a multitude of photographers and TV cameras, the image proclaimed, ‘I am a portent of a new kind of conflict and of a new kind of world.’

Ten months after that January demonstration an even more arresting image captured the world’s imagination: protestors on top of the Berlin Wall hacking away at their imprisonment. These two images – the burning book in Bradford, the crumbling wall in Berlin – came in the following years to be inextricably linked in many people’s minds. As the Cold War ended, so the clash of ideologies that had defined the world since the Second World War seemed to give way to what the American political scientist Samuel Huntington would later make famous as ‘the clash of civilizations’ (a phrase he had borrowed from the historian Bernard Lewis). The conflicts that had convulsed Europe over the past centuries, Huntington wrote, from the wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics to the Cold War, were all ‘conflicts within Western civilization’. The ‘battle lines of the future’ would be between civilizations. Huntington identified a number of civilizations, including Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Orthodox, Latin American and African. The primary struggle, however, would be, he believed, between the Christian West and the Islamic East. Such a struggle would be ‘far more fundamental’ than any war unleashed by ‘differences among political ideologies and political regimes’. The ‘people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy’.

Huntington did not write those words until 1993. But already, four years earlier, many had seen in the battle over The Satanic Verses just such a civilizational struggle. On one side of the fault line stood the West, with its liberal democratic traditions, a scientific worldview and a secular, rationalist culture drawn from the Enlightenment; on the other was Islam, rooted in a pre-medieval theology, with its seeming disrespect for democracy, disdain for scientific rationalism and deeply illiberal attitudes on everything from crime to women’s rights. ‘All over again,’ the novelist Martin Amis would later write, ‘the West confronts an irrationalist, agonistic, theocratic/ideocratic system which is essentially and unappeasably opposed to its existence.’ Amis wrote that while still in shock over 9/11. The germ of the sentiment was planted much earlier, in the Rushdie affair.

Shocked by the sight of British Muslims threatening a British author and publicly burning his book, many people started asking a question that in 1989 was startlingly new: are Islamic values compatible with those of a modern, Western, liberal democracy? The Bible, the novelist, feminist and secularist Fay Weldon wrote in her pamphlet Sacred Cows, provides ‘food for thought’ out of which ‘You can build a decent society’. The Qur’an offers ‘food for no thought. It is not a poem on which a society can be safely or sensibly based. It forbids change, interpretation, self-knowledge, even art, for fear of treading on Allah’s creative toes.’ Or as the daytime TV chat-show host and one-time Labour MP Robert Kilroy-Silk put it, ‘If Britain’s resident ayatollahs cannot accept British values and laws then there is no reason at all why the British should feel any need, still less compulsion, to accommodate theirs.’

Even those who had originally welcomed Muslims into this country were having second thoughts. As one of Britain’s most liberal Home Secretaries, Roy Jenkins had, in 1966, announced an end to this country’s policy of assimilation and launched instead a new era of ‘cultural diversity, coupled with equal opportunity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance’ – one of the first expressions of what came to be known as ‘multiculturalism’. Nearly a quarter of a century later, the now ennobled Lord Jenkins mused in the wake of the burning book that ‘in retrospect we might have been more cautious about allowing the creation in the 1950s of substantial Muslim communities here’.

I had watched the burning of The Satanic Verses with more than a passing interest. Like Salman Rushdie, I was born in India, in Secunderabad, not far from Rushdie’s own birthplace of Mumbai (or Bombay, as it was then), but brought up in Britain. Like Rushdie, I was of a generation that did not think of itself as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Hindu’ or ‘Sikh’, or even as ‘Asian’, but rather as ‘black’. ‘Black’ was for us not an ethnic label but a political badge (although we never defined who exactly could wear that badge). Unlike our parents’ generation, who had largely put up with discrimination, we were fierce in our opposition to racism. But we were equally hostile to the traditions that often marked immigrant communities, especially religious ones. Today, when people use the word ‘radical’ in an Islamic context, they usually have in mind a religious fundamentalist. Twenty years ago ‘radical’ meant the very opposite: someone who was militantly secular, self-consciously Western and avowedly left-wing. Someone like me.

I had grown up in communities in which Islam, while deeply embedded, was never all-consuming – indeed, communities that had never thought of themselves as ‘Muslim’, and for which religion expressed a relationship with God, not a sacrosanct public identity. ‘Officially, as it were,’ observes Jamal Khan, the narrator of Hanif Kureishi’s novel Something to Tell You, ‘we were called immigrants, I think. Later for political reasons we were “blacks” . . . In Britain we were still called Asians, though we’re no more Asian than the English are European. It was a long time before we became known as Muslims, a new imprimatur, and then for political reasons.’ So what, I wanted to know, as I watched the pictures of that demonstration, had changed? Why, I wondered, were people now proclaiming themselves to be Muslims and taking to the streets to burn books – especially the books of a writer celebrated for giving voice to the migrant experience? And was the dividing line really between a medieval theology and a modern Western society?

My day job then was as a research psychologist. But I also wrote the occasional article for the Voice, Britain’s leading black newspaper. When the editor asked me to write something about the Rushdie affair, I jumped at the chance. I already knew Bradford, and many of the players in the Rushdie drama, having organized anti-racist protests in the town, including a march against racist attacks in 1986. And so I arrived that February to talk to Sher Azam, president of the Bradford Council of Mosques, the man who had helped torch the book. I came also to try to answer my own questions. It was a journey that would transform my own views about myself, my politics and my faith – and continues to do so. Little did I know that those questions would return to haunt me again and again over the next twenty years, or that the issues raised by the Rushdie affair – the nature of Islam, its relationship to the West, the meaning of multiculturalism, the limits of tolerance in a liberal society – would become some of the defining problems of the age, linking the burning book in Bradford to the burning towers in Manhattan on 9/11 and the burning bus in London on 7/7.

2

When The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988, it had been expected to set the world alight, though not quite in the way that it did. Salman Rushdie was then perhaps the most celebrated British novelist of his generation. Not that he saw himself as British. He was, he said, someone inhabiting a world ‘in between’ three cultures: those of India, Pakistan and England. Midnight’s Children, his sprawling, panoramic, humorous mock-epic of post-independence India, was a literary sensation when it came out in 1981. It interlaced reality, myth, dream and fantasy, turned history into fable, and yet directly addressed highly charged contemporary political issues. The swagger of its historical sweep, the panache of its confident, modernist prose, the knowingness of its infectious humour, ...