Posts Tagged ‘Kenan Malik’
March 25th, 2013
Writer and broadcaster Kenan Malik and art historian and educator Nada Shabout on one of the art world’s most contentious debates
Mark Boardman/www.mark-boardman.com
Dear Nada,
I regard free speech as a fundamental good, the fullest extension of which is necessary for democratic life and for the development of other liberties. Others view speech as a luxury rather than as a necessity, or at least as merely one right among others, and not a particularly important one. Speech from this perspective needs to be restrained not as an exception but as the norm.
The answer to whether religious and cultural sensibilities should ever limit free expression depends upon which of these ways we think of free speech. For those, like me, who look upon free speech as a fundamental good, no degree of cultural or religious discomfort can be reason for censorship. There is no free speech without the ability to offendreligious and cultural sensibilities.
For those for whom free speech is more a luxury than a necessity, censorship is a vital tool in maintaining social peace and order. Perhaps the key argument made in defence of the idea of censorship to protect cultural and religious sensibilities is that speech must necessarily be less free in a plural society. In such a society, so the argument runs, we need to police public discourse about different cultures and beliefs both to minimise friction and to protect the dignity of individuals, particularly from minority communities. As the sociologist Tariq Modood has put it, “if people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism”.
I take the opposite view. It is precisely because we do live in a plural society that we need the fullest extension possible of free speech. In such societies it is both inevitable and important that people offend the sensibilities of others. Inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable. And they should be openly resolved, rather than suppressed in the name of “respect” or “tolerance”.
But more than this: the giving of offence is not just inevitable, but also important. Any kind of social change or social progress means offending some deeply-held sensibilities. Or to put it another way: “You can’t say that!” is all too often the response of those in power to having their power challenged. The notion that it is wrong to offend cultural or religious sensibilities suggests that certain beliefs are so important that they should be put beyond the possibility of being insulted or caricatured or even questioned. The importance of the principle of free speech is precisely that it provides a permanent challenge to the idea that some questions are beyond contention, and hence acts as a permanent challenge to authority. The right to “subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism” is the bedrock of an open, diverse society, and the basis of promoting justice and liberties in such societies. Once we give up such a right we constrain our ability to challenge those in power, and therefore to challenge injustice.
The question we should ask ourselves, therefore, is not “should religious and cultural sensibilities ever limit free expression?” It is, rather, “should we ever allow religious and cultural sensibilities to limit our ability to challenge power and authority?”
Best wishes,
Kenan
Mark Boardman/www.mark-boardman.com
Dear Kenan,
I too regard free speech as a fundamental good and as necessary. On the surface, thus, the simple and direct answer to the question of whether religious and cultural sensibilities should ever limit free expression should be an unequivocal NO! However, the reality is that the question itself is problematic. While free expression, and let’s think of art in this specific case, will always push the limits and “reveal the hidden”, consideration and sensitivity, including religious and cultural sensibility, should not be inherently in opposition. By positioning it as such, the answer can only be reactive. I thus disagree with your argument.
A quick note on “censorship”. Yes, we all hate the word and find it very offensive. It is a word loaded with oppression, but the reality is that censorship in some form exists in every facet of life, personal and public. It is not that one needs to restrict speech in a plural society but that this plurality needs to find a peaceful way of co-existing with respect and acceptance, as much as possible — not tolerance; I personally abhor the word tolerance and find that it generally masks hatred and disdain. No belief is above criticism and nothing should limit our ability to challenge power and authority.
I suppose one needs to decide first the point of this criticism/free expression. Does it have a specific message or reason, and how best to deliver it — or is it simply someone’s personal free expression in the absolute? And if it is someone’s right to free expression, then why is it privileged above someone else’s right — religious and cultural sensibility being someone’s right to expression as well?
For example, and I will use art again, there is a problem when art/the artist is privileged as “genius”, with rights above other citizens — except not really, since the artist is subject to other limitations that may not be religious or cultural, like those of the tradition of expression, funding, law and so on. This is not to say that a religion should dictate expression. We should remember, though, that the marvel of what we call Islamic art was achieved within full respect of Islamic religious sensibilities, but also pushed the limits and critiqued simplicity in interpreting these sensibilities.
Perhaps my view here is less idealistic and more practical, but I see many unnecessary attacks on all sides that do not accomplish anything other than insult and inflame. All I’m saying is that expression is always achieved through negotiations, including limitations.
All the best,
Nada
Dear Nada,
I’m afraid that I was no clearer at the end of your letter than I was at the beginning about your actual stance on free speech. You say you ‘regard free speech as a fundamental good’ and that the answer to “whether religious and cultural sensibilities should ever limit free expression should be an unequivocal NO!” You then, however, go on seemingly to qualify that unequivocal stance but without actually specifying what it is that you wish to qualify. Where should the line be drawn when it comes to the issue of what is and is not legitimate free speech? Who should draw that line? And on what basis? These are the critical questions that need answering. You write: “It is not that one needs to restrict speech in a plural society but that this plurality needs to find a peaceful way of co-existing with respect and acceptance”. It’s a wonderful sentiment, but what does it actually mean in practice? Should Salman Rushdie not have written The Satanic Verses so that he could find “a peaceful way of coexisting with respect and acceptance”? Was the Birmingham Rep right to drop Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti after protests from Sikhs? Should Jerry Springer: The Opera ever have been staged (or broadcast)?
You suggest that “one needs to decide first the point of this criticism/free expression. Does it have a specific message or reason, and how best to deliver it — or is it simply someone’s personal free expression in the absolute?” Again, I am unclear as to the point you’re making here. Are you suggesting here that speech is only legitimate if it has “a specific message or reason”? If so,who decides whether it does? During the controversy over The Satanic Verses, the philosopher Shabbir Akhtar distinguished between “sound historical criticism” and “scurrilously imaginative writing”, and insisted that Rushdie’s novel fell on the wrong side of the line. Do you agree with him? If not, why not? You ask: “If it is someone’s right to free expression, then why is it privileged above someone else’s right — religious and cultural sensibility being someone’s right to expression as well?” This seems to me a meaningless question. A “sensibility” is not a “right”, still less a “right to expression”. If your point is that all people, whatever their religious or cultural beliefs, should have the right to express those beliefs, then I agree with you. That is the core of my argument. What they do not have is the “right” to prevent anybody expressing their views because those views might offend their “sensibilities”.
A final point: to defend the right of X to speak as he or she wishes is not the same as defending the wisdom of X using speech in a particular fashion, still less the same as defending the content of his or her speech. Take, for instance, The Innocence of Muslims, the risibly crude and bigoted anti-Muslim video that provoked so much controversy and violence last year. I would defend the right of such a film to be made. But I would also question the wisdom of making it, and would strongly challenge the sentiments expressed in it. There is a distinction to be drawn, in other words, between the right to something and the wisdom of exercising that right in particular ways. It is a distinction that critics of free speech too often fail to understand.
Best,
Kenan
Dear Kenan,
Nicely said! I believe we are ultimately saying the same thing. It is that “distinction” that you outline in your last paragraph that I call a negotiation between all sides, cultures, etc. My answer is not clear because the issue is not simple! I am saying that it is not a black and white binary divide nor can one “draw a line”. And yes, “who should draw that line? and on what basis?” is critical and essential. I believe that should be reached through negotiation. The “wisdom” of something to exist is as important as its right to exist. But there is also the question of responsibility. Free speech cannot be “inherently good” or bad. The person who utters that speech must claim responsibility for its use and effects. The examples you cite above are not all equal. Yes, they all have the right to exist. But let’s think a bit about the Danish cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed as another example. Were they not an attack aimed to inflame Muslim communities? Was it not part of Islamophobia?
Was the aim not to ridicule and play off people’s fears and prejudices? How were they a critique of Islam? What was the point? It is not that “it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures” as you once said, but the how and why are just as important as the right to cause that offence. I agree with you that the fear of consequences has become a limitation, but that isperhaps because free speech has been abused.
Perhaps I am looking at this from a different point of view. As an educator, I often face the situation, equally here in the US and in the Middle East, of how to argue a point that has become of specific cultural/religious/political sensitivity to my students. If I offend them here, they will stop listening; in the Middle East, I will not be allowed to continue. What would I gain by doing that? By negotiation I test the limits and push gently. At least in academia, I think we are at a point where we have to teach our students to not get offended by an opposing opinion and to be able to accept various opinions and to be able to accept criticism. I don’t think I can achieve that through shock alone!
Best, Nada
Kenan Malik is a writer and broadcaster. His latest book is From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy (Atlantic Books)
Nada Shabout is associate professor of art education and art history at the University of North Texas and director of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Institute
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Tags: Tags: artistic expression, Behzti, Birmingham Rep, from the magazine, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, Jerry Springer: the Opera, Kenan Malik, Nada Shabout, religion and culture, Salman Rushdie, satanic verses, self-censorship, The innocence of Muslims,
October 5th, 2012
Today Index on Censorship launches Beyond Belief — a case study examining theatre, freedom of expression and public order. Kenan Malik explains why it is that the most censorious voices hold the greatest sway
To understand the issues around the production of Behud in the light of the Behzti controversy, we need to understand how two recent trends have combined to transform not only the way in which the role of theatre has changed in recent years, but the very character of censorship in the arts.
The first trend is a shift in the social meaning of theatre — and in the arts more generally — and in the perception of the role of the audience. The second is a change in our understanding of diversity and of how it should be managed. The consequence has been the remaking of censorship which, as Svetlana Mintcheva and Robert Atkins observe in the introduction to their book Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression(The New Press, 2006), has become “invisible”, operating increasingly as a moral imperative, or as the inevitable result of the impartial logic of the market, rather than as a legal imposition.
Over the past 20 years there has been a growing tendency to view the arts in terms of its social impact. There is nothing new, of course, in the idea that the arts should have a social function. What has changed, however, has been the development of an increasingly instrumental view of culture and the enthroning of the audience as the gauge of artistic value. These ideas have become embodied in two seemingly very different political philosophies: the Thatcherite free market ideology of the 1980s and the idea of social inclusion promoted by New Labour at the end of the following decade.
In the 1980s, the Conservative administration rowed back on state subsidies and opened up the arts to the market. This process of marketisation undermined “elite” forms of art and encouraged more populist programming. It also led to a new emphasis on the audience as the arbiter of artistic (and social) worth. “We are coming to value the consumer’s judgment as highly as that of the official or the expert,” wrote the Arts Council England (ACE) chairman William Rees-Mogg in his 1988 annual report. “The voice of the public must… be given due weight.” “The way in which the public discriminates,” he added, “is through its willingness to pay for its pleasures.” The meaning of “the public” had subtly changed here, referring not so much to the body politic of democracy as to the collective weight of individual consumers.
When New Labour came to power in 1997, these trends became intensified. At the heart of the new administration’s cultural policy was a belief that the arts had a crucial role in promoting economic growth, urban regeneration and, in particular, “social inclusion”. Cultural organisations had to think about how their work could support government targets for health, social inclusion, crime, education and community cohesion. In the words of one Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) study, “Culture on Demand” (2007), the wider social benefits of cultural involvement included “the reduction of social exclusion, community development, improvements in individual self-esteem, educational attainment or health status”. The Arts Council insisted that only works that sought “to provide positive benefits for communities, such as bringing different groups of people together, reaching people who experience particular disadvantage or deprivation” would receive funding.
“Consultation” became a 
centrepiece of arts policy. “Cultural planning,” as Graeme Evans and Jo Foord explained in Cultural Mapping and Sustainable Communities: planning for the arts revisited (2008), “is a process of inclusive community consultation and decision-making that helps local government identify cultural resources and think strategically about how these resources can help a community to achieve its civic goals”. It needed to be “a consultative and participatory process involving all interested groups within the local and artistic community”.
It was not enough to expect the audience to come to the theatre or visit a gallery or museum. The cultural institutions themselves had to develop their audiences by meeting the needs of diverse groups. All “ages, religions, cultures, sexualities, disabilities and socio-economic backgrounds… should be given the chance… to find their voice and to contribute to the culture, diversity and creativity of this country,” as Sir Brian McMaster, in his landmark report for the government on excellence in the arts, put it (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, January 2008).
And this leads us to the second important change over the past 20 years: the remaking of our understanding of diversity and of how it should be managed. In 2000, the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, set up by the Runnymede Trust under the chairmanship of political philosopher Bhikhu Parekh, published its report. Britain, the Parekh report concluded, was “both a community of citizens and a community of communities, both a liberal and a multicultural society”. Since citizens had “differing needs”, equal treatment required “full account to be taken of their differences”. Equality, the report insisted, “must be defined in a culturally sensitive way and applied in a discriminating but not discriminatory manner”.
The two arguments at the heart of the Parekh report — that Britain is a “community of communities” and that equality must be defined “in a culturally sensitive way” — have come to be seen as defining the essence of multiculturalism. These ideas first emerged in the 1980s as both local and national authorities attempted to respond to the anger of minority communities at the entrenched racism that they faced, an anger that exploded into the inner-city riots of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The riots led to the recognition that minority communities had to be given a stake in the system, a recognition out of which developed the policies of multiculturalism. The Greater London Council in particular pioneered a strategy of organising consultation with minority communities, drawing up equal opportunities policies, establishing race relations units and providing funding for minority organisations. At the heart of the strategy was a redefinition of racism. Racism now meant not simply the denial of equal rights but the denial of the right to be different. Different peoples should have the right to express their specific identities, explore their own histories, formulate their own values, pursue their own lifestyles. In this process, the very meaning of equality was transformed: from possessing the same rights as everyone else to possessing different rights, appropriate to different communities.
At the same time, as an instrumental view of culture encouraged arts institutions to view their work primarily through the lens of social inclusion and the commodification of culture placed a premium on audience development, the emergence of multicultural policies helped define both social inclusion and audience development in terms of the empowerment of communities. Central to empowering the community was ensuring that its culture and beliefs were not traduced.
For diverse societies to function and to be fair, so the argument ran, public discourse had to be policed both to minimise friction between antagonistic cultures and beliefs and to protect the dignity of the individuals embedded in those cultures. “If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict,” as the sociologist Tariq Modood has put it, “they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism”.
It was in the wake of the campaign against Salman 
Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) that this argument began to influence mainstream cultural policy. The philosopher Shabbir Akhtar became the spokesman for the Bradford Council of Mosques at the height of the Rushdie affair. “Self-censorship,” he insisted, “is a meaningful demand in a world of varied and passionately held convictions. What Rushdie publishes about Islam is not just his business. It is everyone’s – not least every Muslim’s – business.” In other words, in a plural society each community should have the right to decide what can be written or said about any matter that it regards as being of crucial cultural or religious importance.
Rushdie’s critics lost the battle – they failed to prevent the publication of The Satanic Verses. But they won the war. Policy makers and arts administrators have come broadly to accept the argument that it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures, and that every community possesses a right to be consulted over how it may be depicted. It was an argument that brought together a moral claim, a social aspiration and a commercial imperative. Communities had a moral right not to be traduced. Social inclusion required arts institutions to give communities a voice and allow them to depict themselves. And the market established the audience as a key arbiter of both the artistic value and the moral worth of a work. All three of these strands were woven into the Behzti controversy.
How do we define a community? That 
question has been all too rarely asked in the debate about cultural diversity and community empowerment. In fact, much cultural policy as it has developed over the past two decades has come to embody a highly peculiar view of both diversity and community. There has been an unstated assumption that while Britain is a diverse society, that diversity ends at the edges of minority communities. The claim that The Satanic Verses is offensive to Muslims, or Behzti to Sikhs, or indeed that Jerry Springer: The Opera is offensive to Christians, suggests that there is a Muslim community, or a Sikh community or a Christian community, all of whose members are offended by the work in question and whose ostensible leaders are the most suitable judges of what is and is not suitable for that community.
All such supposed communities are viewed as uniform, conflict-free and defined primarily by ethnicity, culture and faith. As a Birmingham Council report acknowledged about the council’s own multicultural policies, ‘the perceived notion of homogeneity of minority ethnic communities has informed a great deal of race equality work to date. The effect of this, amongst others, has been to place an over-reliance on individuals who are seen to represent the needs or views of the whole community and resulted in simplistic approaches toward tackling community needs.’
The city’s policies, in other words, did not simply respond to the needs of communities, but also to a large degree created those communities by imposing identities on people and by ignoring internal conflicts and differences. They empowered not individuals within minority communities, but so-called 5 “community leaders” who owed their position and influence largely to the relationship they possessed with the state.
Shabbir Akhtar no more spoke for Muslims than Salman Rushdie did. Both represented different strands of opinion. So did Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti and the outraged protesters outside the Birmingham Rep. In both cases, the conflict was not between a community and the wider society, but was one within that community itself. In fact, in almost every case, what is often called “offence to a community” is actually a dialogue or debate within that community. That is why so many of the flashpoints over offensiveness have been over works produced by minority artists — not just Salman Rushdie and Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti but also Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, Sooreh Hera, Taslima Nasrin and countless others.
Thanks, however, to the perverse notion of diversity that has become entrenched, Shabbir Akhtar has come to be seen as an authentic Muslim, and the anti-Behzti protesters as proper Sikhs, while Salman Rushdie and Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti are regarded as too Westernised, secular or progressive to be truly of their community. To be a proper Muslim, in other words, is to be offended by The Satanic Verses, to be a proper Sikh is to be offended by Behzti. The argument that offensive talk should be restrained is, then, both rooted in a stereotype of what it is to be an authentic Muslim or a Sikh and simultaneously helps reinforce that stereotype. And it ensures that only one side of the conversation gets heard.
Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer, broadcaster and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey. With research by Bogdan Dragos.
February 14th, 2011
It is 22 years since Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death sentence against the author Salman Rushdie. The author’s critics lost The Satanic Verses battle but won the war against free speech, argues Kenan Malik
‘Shadow of the Fatwa’ first appeared in Index on Censorship, Volume 37, Number 4, 2008
The Satanic Verses was, Salman Rushdie said in an interview before publication, a novel about “migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death”. It was also a satire on Islam, “a serious attempt”, in his words, “to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person”. For some that was unacceptable, turning the novel into “an inferior piece of hate literature” as the British-Muslim philosopher Shabbir Akhtar put it.
Within a month, The Satanic Verses had been banned in Rushdie’s native India, after protests from Islamic radicals. By the end of the year, protesters had burnt a copy of the novel on the streets of Bolton, in northern England. And then, on 14 February 1989, came the event that transformed the Rushdie affair — Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa.
“I inform all zealous Muslims of the world,” proclaimed Iran’s spiritual leader, “that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses — which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the prophet and the Quran — and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents are sentenced to death.”
Thanks to the fatwa, the Rushdie affair became the most important free speech controversy of modern times. It also became a watershed in our attitudes to freedom of expression. Rushdie’s critics lost the battle — The Satanic Verses continues to be published. But they won the war. The argument at the heart of the anti-Rushdie case — that it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures — is now widely accepted.
In 1989, even a fatwa could not stop the continued publication of The Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding for almost a decade. Translators and publishers were assaulted and even murdered. In July 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, a Japanese professor of literature and translator of The Satanic Verses, was knifed to death on the campus of Tsukuba University.
That same month, another translator of Rushdie’s novel, the Italian Ettore Capriolo, was beaten up and stabbed in his Milan apartment. In October 1993, William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, was shot three times and left for dead outside his home in Oslo. None of the assailants was ever caught. Bookshops in America and elsewhere were firebombed for stocking the novel. It was rumoured that staff at the Viking Penguin headquarters in New York were forced to wear bomb-proof vests. Yet Penguin never wavered in its commitment to Rushdie’s novel [see pp121---126].
Today, all it takes is a letter from an outraged academic to make publishers run for cover: earlier this year, Random House torpedoed the publication of a novel that it had bought for $100,000 for fear of setting off another Rushdie affair. Written by the American journalist Sherry Jones, The Jewel of Medina is a historical romance about Aisha, Mohammed’s youngest wife.
In April 2008, Random House sent galley proofs to writers and scholars, hoping for cover endorsements. One of those on the list was Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of history and Middle East studies at the University of Texas. Jones had used Spellberg’s work as a source for her novel. Spellberg, however, condemned the book as “offensive”. She phoned an editor at Random House, Jane Garrett, to tell her that the book was “a declaration of war” and “a national security issue”.
Spellberg apparently claimed that The Jewel of Medina was “far more controversial than The Satanic Verses or the Danish cartoons”, that there was “a very real possibility” of “widespread violence” and that “the book should be withdrawn ASAP”. The American academic Stanley Fish, writing in the New York Times, rejected the idea that the Random House decision to pull the novel amounted to censorship. It is only censorship, he suggested, when “it is the government that is criminalising expression” and when “the restrictions are blanket ones”. Random House was simply making a “judgment call”.
There is indeed a difference between a government silencing a writer with the threat of legal sanction or imprisonment and a publisher pulling out of a book deal. It is also true that other publishers picked up Jones’s novel, including Beaufort in America, and Gibson Square in Britain. But Fish misses the point about the changing character of censorship. The Random House decision is not a classical example of state censorship.
It is, however, an example of the way that free speech is becoming more restricted — without the need for such overt censorship. The directors of Random House had every right to take the decision they did. But the fact that they took that decision, and the reasons for which they did, says much about how attitudes to free speech have changed over the past 20 years. In the two decades between the publication of The Satanic Verses and the pulling of The Jewel of Medina the fatwa has effectively been internalised.
After Random House dropped The Jewel of Medina, Sherry Jones’s agent tried other publishers. No major house was willing to take the risk. Nor is it just publishers that worry about causing offence. These days theatres savage plays, opera houses cut productions, art galleries censor shows, all in the name of cultural sensitivity.
“You would think twice, if you were honest,” said Ramin Gray, the associate director at London’s Royal Court Theatre, when asked if he would put on a play critical of Islam. “You’d have to take the play on its individual merits, but given the time we’re in, it’s very hard, because you’d worry that if you cause offence then the whole enterprise would become buried in a sea of controversy. It does make you tread carefully.”
In June 2007, the theatre cancelled a new adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, set in Muslim heaven, for fear of causing offence. Another London theatre, the Barbican, carved chunks out of its production of Tamburlaine the Great for the same reason, while Berlin’s Deutsche Oper cancelled a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo in 2006 because of its depiction of Mohammed.
That same year, London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery removed life-size nude dolls by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer from a 2006 exhibit just before its opening, ostensibly for “space constraints”, though the true reason appeared to be fear that the nudity might offend the gallery’s Muslim neighbours. Tim Marlow of London’s White Cube art gallery suggested that such self-censorship by artists and museums was now common, though “very few people have explicitly admitted [it]”.
Islam has not been alone in generating such censorship. In 2005, Britain’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre cancelled a production of Bezhti, a play by the young Sikh writer Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, that depicted sexual abuse and murder in a gurdwara. There had been protests from community activists who had organised demonstrations outside the theatre.
In the wake of those protests, Ian Jack, then editor of the literary magazine Granta, nailed his colours to the cause of artistic self-censorship; a necessity, he believed, in a plural society. “The state has no law forbidding a pictorial representation of the prophet,” he wrote. “But I never expect to see such a picture.” An individual might have the abstract right to depict Mohammed, but the price of such freedom was too high when compared to the “immeasurable insult” that the exercise of such a right could cause — even though “we, the faithless, don’t understand the offence”. And that a year before the cartoon controversy.
All this reveals how successful the fatwa has been, not in burying The Satanic Verses, but in transforming the landscape of free speech. From the Enlightenment onwards, freedom of expression had come to be seen as not just as an important liberty, but as the very foundation of liberty.
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” wrote John Milton in Areopagitica, his famous “speech for the liberty of unlicenc’d printing”, adding that “He who destroys a good book destroys reason itself.” All progressive political strands that grew out of the Enlightenment were wedded to the principle of free speech.
Of course, few liberals advocated absolute freedom of expression. Most accepted that in certain circumstances speech could cause harm and so had to be restricted. The most celebrated expression of such a view came in a judgment given by the American Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes who in 1919 pointed out, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
What actually constitutes the political and social equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theatre has been the matter of fierce debate. Politicians and policy makers have, over the years, cited a whole host of harms as reasons to curtail speech — threat to national security, incitement to violence, promotion of blasphemy, the undermining of morality or the spread of slander or libel. Milton himself opposed the extension of free speech to Catholics on the grounds that the Catholic Church was the biggest obstacle to the extension of freedom and liberty.
Yet, however hypocritical liberal arguments may sometimes have seemed, and notwithstanding the fact that most free speech advocates accepted that the line had to be drawn somewhere, there was nevertheless an acceptance that speech was an inherent good, the fullest extension of which was a necessary condition for the elucidation of truth, the expression of moral autonomy, the maintenance of social progress and the development of other liberties. Restrictions on free speech were seen as the exception rather than the norm.
It is this idea of speech as intrinsically good that has been transformed. Today, in liberal eyes, free speech is as likely to be seen as a threat to liberty as its shield. “Speech is not free,” as the lawyer Simon Lee put it in his book The Cost of Free Speech, written in the wake of the Rushdie affair. “It is costly.” By its very nature, many argue, speech damages basic freedoms. Hate speech undermines the freedom to live free from fear. The giving of offence diminishes the freedom to have one’s beliefs and values recognised and respected.
In the post-Rushdie world, speech has come to be seen not as intrinsically good, but as inherently a problem, because it can offend as well as harm, and speech that offends can be as socially damaging as speech that harms. Speech, therefore, has to be restrained by custom, especially in a diverse society with a variety of deeply held views and beliefs, and censorship (and self-censorship) has to become the norm.
“Self-censorship,” as the philosopher Shabbir Akhtar put it at the height of the Rushdie affair, “is a meaningful demand in a world of varied and passionately held convictions. What Rushdie publishes about Islam is not just his business. It is everyone’s — not least every Muslim’s — business.” Increasingly, western liberals have come to agree.
Whatever may be right in principle, many now argue, in practice one must appease religious and cultural sensibilities because such sensibilities are so deeply felt. We live in a world, so the argument runs, in which there are deep-seated conflicts between cultures embodying different values, many of which are incommensurate, but all of which are valid in their own context. The controversy
over The Satanic Verses was one such conflict.
For such diverse societies to function and to be fair, we need to show respect for other peoples, cultures, and viewpoints. Social justice requires not just that individuals are treated as political equals, but also that their cultural beliefs are given equal recognition and respect. The avoidance of cultural pain has therefore come to be regarded as more important than what is often seen as an abstract right to freedom of expression.
As the British sociologist Tariq Modood has put it, “If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each other’s fundamental beliefs to criticism.” In a plural society, it is both inevitable and important that people offend others In fact, the lesson that we should draw from the Rushdie affair is the very opposite.
Critics of Rushdie no more spoke for the Muslim community than Rushdie himself did. Both represented different strands of opinion within Muslim communities. These days the radical, secular clamour, which found an echo in The Satanic Verses, has been reduced to a whisper. In the 1980s, however, it beat out a loud and distinctive rhythm within the Babel of British Islam. Rushdie’s critics spoke for some of the most conservative strands.
The campaign against The Satanic Verses was not to protect the Muslim communities from unconscionable attack from anti-Muslim bigots, but to protect their own privileged position within those communities from political attack from radical critics, to assert their right to be the true voice of Islam by denying legitimacy to such critics. They succeeded at least in part, because secular liberals embraced them as the authentic voice of the Muslim community.
Far from mutually limiting the extent to which we subject each other’s beliefs to criticism, we have to recognise that in a plural society it is both inevitable and important that people offend others. Inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable. And we should deal with those clashes in the open rather than suppress them. Important because any kind of social progress requires one to offend some deeply held sensibilities.
“If liberty means anything,” as George Orwell once put it, “it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” The trouble with multicultural censorship, and self-censorship, is not just that it silences dissenting voices. It is also that it often creates the very problems to which it is supposedly a response. Take the furore over The Jewel of Medina. Not a single Muslim had objected before Random House pulled the book. It is quite possible that none would have, had the publishers gone ahead as planned. But once Random House had made an issue of the book’s offensiveness, then it was inevitable that some Muslims at least would feel offended.
The problem was exacerbated by the actions of Denise Spellberg. Not only did she describe the novel as a “very ugly stupid piece of work” that amounted to “soft-core pornography”, she also went out of her way to draw attention to the book among sections of the Muslim community. In April, she informed Shahed Amanullah, a guest lecturer on one of her courses and an editor of a popular Muslim website, about a new book that “made fun of Muslims and their history”. Amanullah sent emails to various student forums claiming that he had “just got a frantic call from a professor who got an advance copy of the forthcoming novel Jewel of Medina — she said she found it incredibly offensive”. It was almost as if Spellberg was trying to incite a controversy.
Amanullah himself has insisted that The Jewel of Medina should not be withdrawn and has pointed out that “no one has the absolute right not to be offended, nor does anyone have the right to live without the uncomfortable opinions of others . . . we all need to develop thicker skins, more open minds, and a common understanding of the principles of free speech,” he suggested.
But by then the damage had already been done. ”I am disgusted by the inflammatory language Denise Spellberg used,” Sherry Jones told me. “If Random House had simply published my book, I don’t think there would have been any trouble. The real problem is not that Muslims are offended but that people think they will be. It is a veiled form of racism to assume that all Muslims would be offended and that an offended Muslim would be a violent Muslim.”
On Saturday 27 September, just weeks before Gibson Square was due to publish The Jewel of Medina in Britain, the publisher’s London headquarters were firebombed. By an eerie coincidence, the attack took place almost 20 years to the day The Satanic Verses had originally been published. Whether the perpetrators knew the significance of the date no one knows.
Nor is it possible to know whether such an attack would have happened had Random House simply gone ahead with publication without any fuss. There will always be extremists who respond as the Gibson Square firebombers did. There is little we can do about them. The real problem is that their actions are given a spurious legitimacy by liberals who proclaim it morally unacceptable to give offence and are terrified at the thought of doing so.
Shabbir Akhtar was right: what Salman Rushdie or Sherry Jones says is everybody’s business. It is everybody’s business to ensure that no one is deprived of their right to say what they wish, even if it is deemed by some to be offensive. If we want the pleasures of pluralism, we have to accept the pain of being offended. Twenty years on from the Rushdie affair, it is time we learnt this lesson.
Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. He is the author of Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate (Weidenfeld/Reuters). His new book From Fatwa to Jihad is published in the spring by Atlantic Books.
April 7th, 2010
April 10th 2010 11am – 6pm
A day of discussion to accompany the premiere run of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s new play Behud at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry
‘Behzti Five Years on’ – panel discussion
Chaired by Kenan Malik (writer, broadcaster), author of From Fatwa to Jihad.
Panellists: Giles Croft (Nottingham Playhouse); Hamish Glen (Belgrade Theatre), Sunny Hundal (Asians in the Media, liberalconspiracy.org), Trina Jones (Birmingham Rep), Hardish Virk (Multi Nation Arts).
In 2004 there were concerns that the fallout from the ‘Behzti’ affair would have a chilling effect on British theatre and that it would become increasingly difficult to stage controversial work. ‘Behzti Five Years On’ focuses on theatre in the Midlands, asking to what extent this has come true. Theatre has a distinct role in reflecting contemporary society, and in influencing, shaping, and interrogating our shared culture. Are we witnessing a trend towards subtle forms of censorship, underpinned by the government’s national security agenda? Is support for freedom of expression on the decline?
The panel discussion will be followed by lunch and the matinée performance of Behud by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. We will then have an after-show discussion with Lisa Goldman, Hamish Glen and members of the cast, chaired by Jo Glanville (editor of Index on Censorship).
The discussion events are free and the matinee performance is priced as on theatre website . For those who wish to attend the whole day we are offering a ticket priced £20, £10 concession to cover a light lunch, refreshments and the matinee performance. Call 024 7655 3055 to book tickets.
Behud (Beyond Belief) is also running in London’s Soho Theatre, from 13 April to 8 May, 2010. Book online here.
For more information please visit http://art.indexoncensorship.org
May 10th, 2009
Writer and Index on Censorship trustee Kenan Malik joins feminist writer Julie Bindel and Index on Censorship news editor Padraig Reidy at Queer Up North Festival in Manchester on Saturday 16 May. The pair will be taking part in a panel debate chaired by Christoper Cook. The debate entitled: “You can’t say that! –– The culture of offence” takes place at Friends Meeting House, 12.30pm – 1.50pm.
For more details about the event and to book your ticket click here
