Making the British Muslim

Representations of the Rushdie Affair and Figures of the War-On-Terror Decade

N. Falkenhayner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137374943
• eBook ISBN: 9781137374950
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

Tracing representations of the Rushdie affair from 1989 to 2009, this study establishes a genealogy of how British Muslims appeared on the public scene and how an imaginary and politics of this subject position developed.

Part I

The Rushdie Affair

1

Transnational Takeovers

In the case of the Rushdie affair, the token that started the circulation of meaning that would surround the event was a postmodern novel. The movement of the circle of representation was thus not from the real real of a factual life-world but from the multilayered text of Rushdie’s novel, which effected performances in reality. Before I continue with an outline of the temporal unfolding of the Rushdie affair, I will therefore try to map how Rushdie’s deeply critical, but also deeply allegorical, text was transformed into the token of a belief war.

When Salman Rushdie, who had achieved critical acclaim with Midnight’s Children (1981), and subsequent novels and travelogue writing about Pakistan and South America, published his long-awaited new novel, The Satanic Verses, in late 1988, it made a controversial impact not only in the field of literary criticism, where Rushdie was already a celebrity, but also in the field of cultural politics: one week after its publication, the novel was banned in India. The Muslim opposition MPs Syed Shahabuddin and Kurshid Alam Khan had convinced the government of Rajiv Gandhi that the book was a ‘direct attack on Islam’¹ – and a danger to civil peace. How did a postmodern novel, assigned to the genre of magic realism, perform an attack on Islam so vital that it might endanger civil peace? Srinivas Aravamudan’s review of the novel gives a good reading of the underlying problematic reception of satire, which ‘reduced the text to event’.² Rushdie’s critics were quick to single out those features of the dense web of the novel’s manoeuvres of displacement which were ‘attacking’ Islam, and, as the controversy shows, hit the target without fail: in dream sequences of the already fantastically transformed character Gibreel, the prophet of a newly found religion in the desert city of Jahilia – already a satirical pun, as this name designates in Islamic traditions the state of pagan ignorance of the one god – is given the derogatory name Mahound, a term from medieval European tradition that equates Mohammed with the devil. This choice of name, the narrative voice explains, will effect the political transformation of derogatory names invented by enemies to strengthen one’s own identity. Even though Rushdie repeatedly pointed to this authorial ploy – for example, in his essay In Good Faith³ – this strategy was not accepted by demonstrating Muslims. Another controversial shift of names and meanings occurs in scenes that narrate stories of a brothel called ‘Hijab, or the Curtain’, and in which prostitutes take on the names of the wives of the prophet. The shift of names from their sacred meanings into satirical displacement was the most often singled out trope of the novel that caused offence to Muslims. The destabilizing effect of the text’s reception was that of a synechdochal satire, in which the defamed names came to stand for the whole of Islam, as Aravamudan observes:

Even as the satirical victim can respond only in the name of the ‘whole’, with the complaint that satire has defamed a proper name, whether it be personal, corporate, political or religious, Rushdie’s phenomenological universe works according to the principle that the ‘whole’ it attacks is itself only an accretion of parts, and following the law of association, these parts can always be reconstituted and displaced by others. This law of substitution is itself what threatens the logic, propriety, and indeed property of the ‘proper’ name.⁴

This destabilizing of certainty and wholeness was also the characteristic of the episode concerning the so-called ‘Satanic Verses’ as an expelled part of Islamic tradition. It refers to a case of flawed revelation due to which Mohammed had to edit the sacred text, as the inclusion of three female goddesses in one verse turned out to be a trick of the devil. The historicity of this episode is in itself a matter of dispute. While some Islamic scholars accept it, others believe it to be an Orientalist fabrication (43). This open instability made it a point of entry for Rushdie’s own creative deconstruction. Rushdie’s rendering of the ‘Satanic Verses’ episode, which makes the inclusion of the goddesses a matter of power politics, posed questions about the relationship between imagination and revelation, as well as their respective legitimating role for worldly power. Exploring the relationship between revelation and imagination as two different but contiguous aspects of divination, however, is in itself a sincere task, and this exploration also underlies Rushdie’s satirical rewriting of the beginning of Islam. In an interview aired by Channel 4 on the evening of the day the fatwa against him was pronounced, Rushdie explained his postmodern take on historiographic metafiction, geared at the multiplication of what can be thought and what can be said about the past. This structural take on multiplication of the past via reimagination is not unlike the idea of eventalization outlined in the introduction. In a sense, Rushdie had, with The Satanic Verses, eventalized the beginning of Islam, in which ‘you find a conflict between the sacred text and the profane text’.⁵

The main point around which The Satanic Verses controversy was to revolve, however, was that the actual reading of the book, the polysemy of its text, was not the question; the pure existence of an insult was enough to rally against it, and the pure existence of a cry for censorship from Muslims was enough to rally for free speech. It was in this manner that the text was reduced to event. There was an underlying double designation of the text in two different idioms of meaning-making: the rules of reception of the literary genre of magic realism did not apply when the text was received in an idiom in which the sacred and profane were political categories.

Reconstruction

Before I will focus on British newspaper representations of the Muslim protest in Britain in Chapter 2, I wish to give a short and necessarily incomplete overview of the transnational chronology of the major events that made the Rushdie affair emerge. I will outline the stages of erupting escalation, from the publication of the book on 26 September 1988 until the pronunciation of the fatwa on 14 February 1989 and its immediate diplomatic aftermath.

Renarrations of the Rushdie affair often suffer from the sheer mass of media material, newspaper debates and reports from various locations, and the multiplicity of possible interpretations that these reports, debates and the events that they discuss represent. In the 2009 BBC documentary The Satanic Verses Controversy,⁶ the producers try to track the international development of the events by displaying a large world map, on which the viewer sees a beeping red line zigzagging back and forth between dots marking London, Islamabad and Tehran; Bombay, Bradford and Bonn; Washington and Paris. While this filmic representation gives the viewer an impression of the nervous international reactions during the affair, it also elicits a nervous confusion in the viewer as to what happened when and where in the drawn out saga of the Rushdie affair. In order to prevent confusion without downplaying the multiplicity of issues connected to the controversy, this overview is therefore limited to the three most dramatic changes in framing the meaning-making surrounding the affair: the banning of the book in India and the riots on the subcontinent, the Bradford book-burning and the pronouncement of the fatwa. For more detailed chronologies, the monographs cited in the introduction and those discussed in Part III might be consulted.

While my later, more exact discussions of the evolving dispute will concentrate on the way in which the British public represented the British Muslims and their protests, the following short reconstruction of locations of the developing dispute shows that the frames of judgement concerning what The Satanic Verses meant were different in every location, and changed with every new intervention into the dispute. After the intervention of Iran, more localized issues that the affair was embedded in were overwritten by an evolving symbolic war, in which Rushdie and his novel became tokens of a ‘clash of civilizations’ performed by the rhetoric of state leaders.

There had been much publicity about Rushdie’s new book before its publication, largely because of the generous advancement for its writing granted by Penguin/Viking publishers. Because of this tremendous investment, the publishers tried to market the book as aggressively as possible for a thick and complicated magic-realist novel. The Satanic Verses was probably one of the most prepublication hyped novels of the 1980s. This media attention that it received even prior to its publication adds to the fact of a media-made controversy. The public figure of Salman Rushdie was necessary for the possibility of an emerging media controversy in the first place. Rushdie was a celebrity not only in Britain and India, but also for the Indian diaspora in other countries and continents, as well as the international left intelligentsia. Around the time of his long-awaited new novel’s publication on 26 September 1988, the attention it received was largely through positive literary reviews, also in Indian newspapers.⁷ The Western reviews focused on Rushdie’s textual strategies and issues of class, race and gender. That Rushdie also attempted a postmodern inflection of ‘Islamic history’ (9) in the novel was pointed to by himself – Western reviewers didn’t give that aspect much attention. The first hint that this was not to stay that way was the ban of the novel in India as early as 5 October 1988.

INDIA: October 1988

The Islamic opposition MPs Syed Shahabuddin and Kurshid Alam Khan had convinced the government of Rajiv Gandhi that the book was ‘a direct attack on Islam’ (42).The Islamic politicians were able to lobby the ban not only via the charge of blasphemy: what prompted the ban of the novel were fears concerning civil peace in India. Riots by revolted Muslims were feared should the critical treatment of Islam in Rushdie’s book become public knowledge. Rushdie promptly answered the news of the ban with a scorching open letter to Rajiv Gandhi defending his rights to free expression and condemning Gandhi’s government: ‘Clearly, your Government is feeling a little ashamed of itself, and, Sir, it has much to be shamed of’(43). At this point in time, Rushdie was obviously still unaware of the furore his novel was about to release in transnational Muslim circles and communities. With great verve, he defended his right to free speech. The criticism of the banning of his book was transformed into an open criticism of what he saw as the failure of freedom in his country of origin – Rushdie had previously engaged himself in this dispute.

Syed Shahabuddin, the driving force behind the ban, responded to Rushdie’s letter with an equally scorching open letter in return, denouncing his book and the anglophile Indian bourgeoisie, which was, in his view, still complicit with the aims of Western imperialists. We can here also see how the core antagonistic phrases are embedded in local contextualizations, and, stretched to a larger context, call up other disputes and problems both contemporary and historical. At this very early stage of the dispute, Rushdie’s novel was employed metonymically to enforce postcolonial rhetorics and with that it drew attention to differing standpoints concerning India’s postcolonial existence. Shahabuddin’s letter to Rushdie (cf. 45–49) evoked the exploitation of India by the British and the disrespect for its traditions, including Islam, the lamentable divisions between Indian intellectuals and the mindset of the people. We here find multicultural and class frictions within independent India and the Indian diaspora as the main frame of the dispute. The basic antagonistic set-up of this first round of open-letter dispute shows how the temporality of the Rushdie affair stretches into the past recalling other events to which it seems to link, and into the future by proposing different patterns of behaviour: Shahabuddin called for no more Orientalistic ‘hate writing’ from the West, while Rushdie called for no more traditionalizing, anti-enlightenment behaviour in India. At that point in time and in that rhetorical location concerning India and Pakistan, The Satanic Verses and its condemnation or defence was a symbol for the ideological and cultural frictions on the subcontinent, in its political sphere as well as at the street level. The situation in Pakistan and India was an altogether different issue from the international diplomatic power play that was to develop later. Whereas later the moral dispute that could be used as a ‘clash of civilizations’ trope by Khomeini, who called the Western states that would support Rushdie ‘the world devourers’, the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses was a question of social unrest on the subcontinent. Shahabuddin had much support for denouncing Rushdie’s outrage at the ban exactly for fear of the social unrest that the book’s controversial nature might release. After Rushdie had told the government of Rajiv Gandhi to feel ashamed of itself for banning his book in October, the Indian media showed an awareness of the street-level sentiment, as this quote from an article in the The Times of India shows:

No, dear Rushdie, we do not wish to build a repressive India. On the contrary, we are doing our best to build a liberal India, where we can all breathe freely. But in order to build such an India, we have to preserve the India that exists. That may not be a pretty India, but it is the only India we have. (277)

The article hinted at the fact that it might not be ‘pretty’ to ban his book, but that it was better than to have riots on the street. The complicated high literary novel was seen as a real threat to civil peace, as the quote shows. Also, under Indian law which protects all of its religions against insult, the ban was a legal attempt to prevent larger outrage. But, as the book’s blasphemy continued to be discussed in transnational Islamic and literary circles, and controversial protest performances against it started to be enacted among Britain’s subcontinental communities, the hope that a ban might prevent social unrest dissolved. On several occasions in February 1989, riots occurred after Muslim demonstrations against Rushdie, first in Islamabad and then in Kashmir and Mumbai. These riots resulted in more than a hundred deaths and many more injured.

The Satanic Verses controversy had a death toll even before the pronunciation of Khomeini’s fatwa, and the deaths that occurred in India and Pakistan were later cited by emerging public British Muslims as a quasivalidation of the fatwa – his British opponents claimed that Rushdie was responsible for the death of the demonstrators in Pakistan who were shot by riot police.

BRITAIN: January 1989

The controversy in India was quickly becoming a part of public knowledge in the translocal Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Britain. On 28 October 1988, therefore, the newly founded UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs could begin its call-to-action pamphlet with the words:

We hope that by now you have certainly heard about the recently published blasphemous and filthily abusive novel, Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie. (58)

As Bikhu Parekh reported in his account of the Rushdie affair in 1990,⁸ the book was heavily discussed in the British ethnic press. Without the national public taking much notice, the indignation at the book was vented among British Muslims and prompted, for the first time, their national organization. Groups of enraged Muslims were forming committees that copied out the allegedly blasphemous passages from the novel and circulated them among mosque communities and in ethnic publications. But the Rushdie book had become a token of public circulation without contextualizing the passages or, indeed, its literary nature. Among the Muslim communities in Britain, the outrage about the book was not a literary controversy because its satirical passages were taken literally. It was not the intellectual meaning within the written pages that was of importance but the meaning that the controversial nature that the book was reported to have was able to take on: it had become metonymical with the grievances of Muslims in Britain who felt disrespected and insulted by Western culture and the power valences within British society in general. Throughout the winter of 1988 the British protesters consolidated themselves. Their centre was forming among the large subcontinental Muslim communities in Yorkshire. After a couple of attempts to stage protest performances which went unnoticed by the British national public, a protest in Bradford on 14 January 1989 finally succeeded in catapulting the outrage of Britain’s Muslims into the national public and the attention of the national political system. But the attention was not to lead to a resolution of the conflict. Rather, the symbolic image that the protesters in Bradford had created secured the wholesale condemnation of their action and the instant devaluation of their protest: they had publicly b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: The Rushdie Affair
• Part II: Figurations after the Event
• Part III: Eventalization Templates
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index