salman rushdie, the satanic verses and his knighthood

[faceless]

I knew you'd not be able to take the hint.

bye.

[Colston]

Returning to the original subject... Satanic Verses is one of my three favourite books, Lord of the Rings and Gore Vidal's Creation being the other two. Salman Rushdie is my favourite contemporary author and IMVHO well worth the knighthood. His books will be around for a very long time. Plus he is Spurs... ;-)

It is very difficult when people hold things as 'Holy' to mediate conflict when others poke fun and lampoon. Remember the reaction to Life of Brian?

My take on things is 'live and let live' but I do not think we have to take into account those who are so attached to something that they are hypersensitive to the opinions of others.

Salman's voice as a moderate muslim with an interest in East West contradictions... and an amazing ability to detail the Indian subcontinent... is compelling.

There is a description of a woman, Ayesha, leading a group of people to the seas on the way to Mecca in SV who is naked but covered by butterflies who swarm around her protecting her modesty... it is the most erotic piece of writing...

Salman... I love his prose... I love him.

[Mandy]

Extremist atheism which champions almost anything which undermines religions leads to situations such as this :

Also



As George asked on Friday night : When did Britain become so authoritarian ?

My feeling is it was when phony Blair was in charge. The Rushdie knighthood is in the same vein : Anything but religion.

[nekokate]

Well, those articles are depressing and stupid. Any organisation or council or employer that bans religious jewellery or clothing is patently idiotic.

I hope no one associates my atheism with anything as authoritarian and divisive and downright pathetic as this. Freedom for all, I say. Especially to worship

[Mandy]

No fears Kate .. we realise you are nice & not an extremist.

One day the extremists might do a "witch hunt" for religious believing people. They may start by looking for "Muslims", but other religions are sure to follow (unless the capitulate to the MIC)

[luke]

its scary really we now live in a country where those two things can happen, i mean a ring and a necklace?! whats the problem?! you can get arrested for teeshirts, arrested for taking photos of the 'wrong' buildings, you can't protest within a km of parliament now ( except brian and they've taken most of his stuff away )

[faceless]

The satanic curses
June 24 2007 at 12:12PM
www.iol.co.za

When did the poisonous habit of blaming the victims of crime for their suffering spread to Britain? From the kidnapped hostages in Iran to the murdered prostitutes in Ipswich to the parents of Madeleine McCann, we have begun to kick people when they are in agony - and with a superior sneer on our faces. The reaction to the knighthood of novelist Salman Rushdie is a case study of the new spitefulness. Here's the story.

In 1989, Rushdie wrote a superb novel, The Satanic Verses, in the course of which an insane person in a dream says some questioning, querying things about a man who died more than a thousand years ago. In response, a theocratic dictator said he should be butchered to death. Millions agreed beheading is a legitimate form of literary criticism, and tried to hunt him down. For more than a decade Rushdie had to live in hiding, shunted from one safe-house to another, missing his son's childhood, unable even to walk down the street.

One day, he switched on the television to see a BBC studio audience voting on whether he should be killed. (They thought, on balance, he should.) Now, after enduring decades of this, he is being given a knighthood. I'm no fan of the honours system. Seeing a hereditary monarch reward people by calling them a "Member of the British Empire" in 2007 makes me sad for my country. But if anyone deserves a reward, it's Rushdie - arguably our greatest living novelist, and a symbol of the glories of free speech.

The Satanic Verses will only become a more important novel as the battle to open up Islam intensifies. The book takes its title from a part of the Quran, where the Prophet Muhammad gave permission for his followers to continue worshipping pagan gods. When several Muslims protested, saying this contradicted everything he had said before, the Prophet claimed Satan must have disguised himself as the Archangel Gabriel and dictated the passage. Rushdie's central character wonders if more parts of the Quran might have been wrongly dictated.

Rushdie was trying to nudge his fellow Muslims away from a literalist reading of their "Holy Book" and towards a more reflective, independent form of thought. This is what really enraged the ayatollahs: They wanted to retain their monopoly on interpreting the Quran.

The jihadism of the past decade has shown how urgent Rushdie's attempt to nudge Islam away from literalist fanaticism really was. Yet across the political spectrum, people have reacted by blaming Rushdie for being the victim of wannabe-murderers. "He cost us 10-million (about R143,1-million)!" sneers the right-wing press in unison. You might as well say the Soham victims, Holly and Jessica, "cost us" millions because we had to investigate the crime against them.

Ah, the critics say, but he brought it on himself. He wrote things he knew were "provocative". British MP George Galloway, completing his journey to the theocratic far right, has sneered that his novel is "indeed positively satanic", and said "he turned 1,8-billion people in the world against him when he talked about their prophet in a way that can only be described as blasphemous". This is exactly analogous to saying a woman wearing a short skirt is responsible for being dragged into an alley and raped. It is also flecked with a form of soft racism, since Galloway assumes all Muslims are excitable children who can only react to querying of the Quran with attempted butchery.

But the new spitefulness continues with a barrage of attacks on this victim of crime. On the right, the columnist Peter McKay thought these renewed death threats - including a call for suicide bombing by a Pakistani government minister - offered a prime opportunity to beat up the victim, calling him "arrogant" and even asking: "But how much danger was he in?. The death sentence was more symbolic than real."

Perhaps McKay would like to tell that to the family of Hitoshi Igarashi, Rushdie's Japanese translator, who was stabbed to death in 1991. I'm sure it feels very "symbolic" to them. On the left, Lord Ahmed, Britain's first Muslim peer, actually accused Rushdie of having "blood on his hands" - a bizarre inversion of reality. Backing him up, Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal jeered that Rushdie thinks "humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally Western ideas".

In fact, Rushdie thinks precisely the opposite, writing, "I have never seen this controversy as a struggle between Western freedoms and Eastern unfreedom. In my lifelong experience of the East I have found people to be every bit as passionate for freedom as any Czech, German or Pole."

To all these people, we should ask - why are you more angry with a man who wrote a novel than with the people who tried to hack him to pieces for it? But the Rushdie case is only one example of beating up victims. Jon Gaunt used his radio programme to jeer at the McCanns as they searched for their kidnapped daughter.

Richard Littlejohn said the terrified Iranian hostage, Faye Turney, should "join Celebrity Fat Club". He even attacked the women who were killed in Ipswich as "disgusting drug-addled street whores". This abuse is an import from the American right, which has become unhinged with hatred for the weak. Ann Coulter said in her bestseller, Godless, that she has "never seen women enjoying their husbands' deaths as much as the 9/11 victims".

Top-rated radio host Glenn Beck recently explained, "It took me about a year to start hating the 9/11 victims' families. When I see a 9/11 victim's family on television, I'm like, 'Shut up!' I'm so sick of them - they're always complaining." He added, "I didn't think I could hate victims faster than the 9/11 victims - until Hurricane Katrina". He called the people trapped in New Orleans "scumbags" and said "they're ruining it for everybody".

But my favourite example comes from far-right columnist Mark Steyn, who attacked the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre. No, that's not a misprint. He said they were "decadent" for not fighting back, and snapped, "They're not 'children'. The (victims) were grown women and - if you'll forgive the expression - men."

Is this what we want to become - people who start jeering the moment bullets are loaded into a gun? The reaction to the renewed savagery against Rushdie shows, alas, we are already there. -Tribune Foreign Service

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I've never seen Galloway and Coulter quoted in the same article as being from the same type of bias.... I thought it was an interesting article all the same though.

[nekokate]

There are some good points in that article. And some bad ones.

I am disgusted that a fatwa could be placed on someone merely for writing a novel, but I'm also disgusted that journalists are trying to pretend that it was every Muslim in the whole fucking world that made that call, instead of one Ayatollah who happened to be ruling over a very unfree part of the world, whether the masses liked it or not.