Rushdie says the Arab Spring offers crucial lessons
Jun 26,2011
The revolutions sweeping the Arab world trash the myth that people living in the Islamic world have different needs, believes controversial Indian-origin author Salman Rushdie, who calls it an important lesson to be learnt from the Arab Spring.Rushdie said the spirit behind the Arab uprisings was not religious, but guided by the basic needs of freedom and choice. "It's an old-fashioned revolution: It's about jobs and freedom. What it shows is that people everywhere want the same thing. The idea that Islamic culture is different, that Islamic people want different things -- garbage.
The fact that there was hardly anything religious about the uprisings is a lesson to be learnt from the Arab Spring, he told The Times. "Everybody wants the same thing: to be free, to choose their own futures, to feel that there is a future. This is universal," he said. He was also critical of what he called "the cultural relativist mistake" of the UK, regarding tolerance of religious extremism. "The mistake is to think that this is their culture and you've got to let them have it; at the lunatic fringes you get people like George Galloway, and a tolerance for what ought to be intolerable. "But the problem is the mainstream acceptance of his relativist argument; and I think that's dangerous," he said.
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And here's GG's response...
