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

This article appears in Fallout: free speech and the economic crisis. Click here for subscription options and more.

The post Should religious or cultural sensibilities ever limit free expression? appeared first on Index on Censorship.

While they exist harmoniously on paper, free expression and religion often conflict in practice, and free speech is often trampled in the name of protecting religious sensibilities — whether through self-censorship or legislation that censors.

History offers many examples of religious freedom being repressed too. Both free expression and religious freedom need protection from those who would meddle with them. And they are not necessarily incompatible.

Over 200 years ago, the United States’ founding fathers grouped together freedom of worship and freedom of speech. The US Constitution’s First Amendment, adopted in 1791, made sure that the Congress couldn’t pass laws establishing religions or prohibiting their free exercise, or abridging freedom of speech, press and assembly.

More recently, both religion and free expression were offered protection by The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) drafted in 1949. It outlines the ways in which both free expression and religious freedom should be protected in Articles 18 and 19. Article 18 protects an individual’s right to “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion” and the freedom to change religion or beliefs. Article 19 states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Why is it, then, that for centuries — from the Spanish Inquisition to the Satanic Verses — free speech and religion have been cast as opponents? Index on Censorship has explored, and will continue to explore, this crucial question.

Offence

Muslims gathered in Malaysia’s capital to protest against the controversial Innocence of Muslims film (Demotix)

Sporadically explosive conflicts arrise when words or images offensive to believers spark a violent response, the most recent example being the reaction to the controversial Innocence of Muslims film. Index has stated before that the majority of states restrain by law distinct and direct incitements to violence; however, causing offence doesn’t constitute an incitement to violence, much less a good excuse to react with violence. Yet violent protests sparked by the YouTube film led many countries to push for the video to be taken down. As the controversy unfolded, digital platforms took centre stage in an age-old debate on where the line is drawn on free speech.

The kind of connectivity provided by the web means a video uploaded in California can lead to riots in Cairo. Real-time transmission, real-time unrest. It presents a serious challenge for hosts of user-generated content like YouTube and Facebook.

Before the web, British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie’s “blasphemous” 1988 novel — The Satanic Verses — sparked protests and earned its author a death sentence from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who called upon Muslims to assassinate the novelist, his publishers, and anyone else associated with the book. The Japanese translator of the Satanic Verses was killed, and Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher was shot and wounded, leading some to think twice about publishing works potentially “offensive to Islam”.

These fears were renewed after the 2005 decision of Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten to publish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, which were protested about in riots worldwide, largely initiated as a result of agitation by Danish clerics.

The Jewel of Medina, a historical novel about the life of Muhammad’s wife Aisha was due to be published by Random House in the US in 2008, but it was pulled when an academic warned the publishers of a possible violent backlash to the novel. After the UK-based publisher Gibson Square decided to take on the novel, Islamic extremists attempted to firebomb the home of the company’s chief executive. More recently, ex-Muslim and author of The Young Atheist’s Handbook Alom Shaha wrote that initially, staff at Biteback publishing had reservations about releasing his book in the UK. Upon being presented with the book, one staff member’s reaction was, “we can’t publish this, we’ll get firebombed”.

Protecting religious sensitivities at price of free expression

Many countries have legislation designed to quell religious tensions and any ensuing violence.

India, for example, has a Penal Code with provisions to protect “religious feelings”, making “acts” or “words” that could disturb religious sensitivities punishable by law. However, while such laws exist to address prevent sectarian violence their vagueness means that they can also be used by groups to shut down free expression. This opens up a question, which is when do states have the right to censor for public order reasons even if the actual piece of writing, art or public display is not a direct incitement to violence.

Indian artist and Index award winner was forced to leave his native India in the 1990s after being threatened for his work

In the 1990s, Indian artist and Index award winner MF Husain was the subject of a violent intimidation campaign after painting Hindu gods and goddesses naked. He received death threats and had his work vandalised. Hundreds of complaints were brought against the artist, leading to his prosecution under sections 295 and 153A of India’s Penal Code, which outlaw insulting religions, as well as promoting animosity between religious groups. Locally these laws are justified as an effort to control sectarian violence. While the cases against Husain were eventually thrown out, the spectre of new legal battles combined with violent threats and harassment pushed Husain to flee his home country. He never returned, and died in exile last year.

Across the world restrictions on free expression are imposed using laws designed to protect religious sensitivities.

Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are notorious for being abused to silence and persecute the country’s religious minorities. Although the country’s Penal Code has always had a section on religious offence, clauses added in the 1980s set a high price for blasphemy or membership of the Ahmadi sect of Islam — an Islamic reformist movement. These laws, including a possible death sentence for insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad, have been slammed by civil society inside and outside of Pakistan.

A report issued in September by the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue, says that blasphemy laws should be repealed. Controls on free speech in order to protect religious sensibility seem to run parallel to controls on religion.

Globally, restrictions on religious expression have increased according to a report released last month by the Pew Research Center. In 2010, the study found that 75 per cent of the world’s population lived in countries where restrictions placed on religious practice were rated as either “high” or “very high”. The study found that the greatest restrictions on religion take place in the world’s most heavily populated countries — India, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, and Russia stood out on the list.

Outrage and incitement to religious hatred

In 1977 Christian campaigner Mary Whitehouse successfully brought charges against the publishers of a magazine that printed a graphic sexual poem about Jesus Christ

In 2007, the UK introduced the offence of “incitement to religious hatred”, which some feared was merely a replacement for the scrapped blasphemy law, made more wide-ranging by covering not just Christianity but all religions. The last conviction under that law was the infamous 1977 Gay News case, where Christian campaigner Mary Whitehouse brought a successful private prosecution against the publishers of Gay News magazine for publishing a poem describing a Roman soldier’s fantasy of sex with Jesus Christ.

In the UK, one of the most pernicious means by which restrictions on free speech have grown tighter has been through the use of incitement laws, both incitement to hatred and incitement to violence and murder. In some cases, as in the outlawing of incitement to religious hatred through the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, the law is being used to censor genuine debate. In other cases, incitement law is being used to shut down protest, as in the convictions of Muslim protestors Mizanur Rahman and Umran Javed for inciting racial hatred and ‘soliciting murder’ during a rally in London against the publications of the Danish Muhammed cartoons. Over the past decade, the government has used the law both to expand the notion of ‘hatred’ and broaden the meaning of ‘incitement’. Much of what is deemed ‘hatred’ today is in fact the giving of offence. And should’t the giving of offence be viewed as a normal and acceptable part of plural society?

In 2009, Ireland created for the first time a specific blasphemy offence. This law states a person is guilty of blasphemy if

“he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and

(b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.”

This wording was later used as a template for attempts to introduce the idea of “defamation of religion” as an offence at the United Nations. The attempt to introduce this concept failed, but the UN Human Rights Council did pass a resolution condemning “intolerance, negative stereotyping, stigmatisation, discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against, persons based on religion or belief”.

On the other hand, according to Frank La Rue, quoted by Journalism & Intolerance said: “blasphemy is a horrible cultural phenomenon but, again, should not be censored or limited by criminal law. I would like to oppose blasphemy in general by being respectful, but that’s something you build in the culture and the traditions and the habits of the people, but not something you put in the criminal code. Then it becomes censorship.”

Crushing religious freedom

Other European countries have had their own free speech versus religion battle when a push towards bans on the veil or niqab began, infringing on choices of Muslim women. France’s controversial ban on the niqab went into effect last year. Offenders must pay a 150 € fine or take French citizenship classes. There have been similar discussions in the Netherlands, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Belgium. Such bans are not restricted to Europe — in 2010 Syria banned face veils from university campuses. From 1998 – 2010, Turkey banned headscarves from university campuses. In fact, Turkey has a much wider ban on headscarves in public buildings, a ban the government faces difficulties overturning though it would like to. Just as troubling — countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia have strict dress codes for women that visitors must comply with as well.

Both enforced secularism and enforced religiosity constitute a form of censorship; the key word being “enforced” as opposed to “free”. Whether it is tackling enforced religion, religious offence, hatred and incitement to violence, or enforced secularism, only a constructive approach to free speech can genuinely guarantee freedom of conscience and belief, whether in one god, many or none.

Also read:

Kenan Malik on The Satanic Verses and free speech and Why free expression is now seen as an enemy of liberty

We need to talk about Islam says Alom Shaha

Salil Tripathi on how Pakistan’s deadly blasphemy laws have killed free speech

Michael Nugent on why Ireland’s 2009 blasphemy law is a backward step

The post Religion and free speech: it’s complicated appeared first on Index on Censorship.

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My first memories of censorship are cinematic: screen kisses brutalised by prudish scissors which chopped out the moments of actual contact. (Briefly, before comprehension dawned, I wondered if that were all there was to kissing, the languorous approach and then the sudden turkey-jerk away.) The effect was usually somewhat comic, and censorship still retains, in contemporary Pakistan, a strong element of comedy. When the Pakistani censors found that the movie El Cid ended with a dead Charlton Heston leading the Christians to victory over live Muslims, they nearly banned it until they had the idea of simply cutting out the entire climax, so that the film as screened showed El Cid mortally wounded. El Cid dying nobly, and then it ended. Muslims 1, Christians 0.

The comedy is sometimes black. The burning of the film Kissa Kursi Ka [Tale of a Chair] during Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency rule in India is notorious; and, in Pakistan, a reader’s letter to the Pakistan Times, in support of the decision to ban the film Gandhi because of its unflattering portrayal of MA Jinnah, criticised certain “liberal elements” for having dared to suggest that the film should be released so that Pakistanis could make up their own minds about it. If they were less broad-minded, the letter writer suggested, these persons would be better citizens of Pakistan.

My first direct encounter with censorship took place in 1968, when I was 21, fresh out of Cambridge and full of the radical fervour of that famous year. I returned to Karachi where a small magazine commissioned me to write a piece about my impressions on returning home. I remember very little about this piece (mercifully, memory is a censor, too), except that it was not at all political. It tended, I think, to linger melodramatically on images of dying horses with flies settling on their eyeballs. You can imagine the sort of thing. Anyway, I submitted my piece, and a couple of weeks later was told by the magazine’s editor that the Press Council, the national censors, had banned it completely. Now it so happened that I had an uncle on the Press Council, and in a very unradical, string-pulling mood I thought I’d just go and see him and everything would be sorted out. He looked tired when I confronted him. “Publication,” he said immovably, “would not be in your best interests.” I never found out why.

Next I persuaded Karachi TV to let me produce and act in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, which they liked because it was 45 minutes long, had a cast of two and required only a park bench for a set. I then had to go through a series of astonishing censorship conferences. The character I played had a long monologue in which he described his landlady’s dog’s repeated attacks on him. In an attempt to befriend the dog, he bought it half a dozen hamburgers. The dog refused the hamburgers and attacked him again. “I was offended,” I was supposed to say. “It was six perfectly good hamburgers with not enough pork in them to make it disgusting.”

“Pork”, a TV executive told me solemnly, “is a four-letter word.” He had said the same thing about “sex”, and “homosexual”, but this time I argued back. The text, I pleaded, was saying the right thing about pork. Pork, in Albee’s view, made hamburgers so disgusting that even dogs refused them. This was superb anti-pork propaganda. It must stay. “You don’t see”, the executive told me, wearing the same tired expression as my uncle had, “the word pork may not be spoken on Pakistan television.” And that was that. I also had to cut the line about God being a coloured queen who wears a kimono and plucks his eyebrows. The point I’m making is not that censorship is a source of amusement, which it usually isn’t, but that –– in Pakistan, at any rate –– it is everywhere, inescapable, permitting no appeal. In India the authorities control the media that matter — radio and television — and allow some leeway to the press, comforted by their knowledge of the country’s low literacy level. In Pakistan they go further. Not only do they control the press, but the journalists too. At the recent conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in New Delhi, the Pakistan press corps was notable for its fearfulness. Each member was worried that one of the other guys might inform on him when they returned — for drinking, for instance, or consorting too closely with Hindus, or performing other unpatriotic acts. Indian journalists were deeply depressed by the sight of their opposite numbers behaving like scared rabbits one moment and quislings the next.

The danger of suppression

What are the effects of total censorship? Obviously, the absence of information and the presence of lies. During Mr Bhutto’s campaign of genocide in Balochistan, the news media remained silent. Officially, Balochistan was at peace. Those who died, died unofficial deaths. It must have comforted them to know that the State’s truth declared them all to be alive. Another example: you will not find the involvement of Pakistan’s military rulers with the booming heroin industry much discussed in the country’s news media. Yet this is what underlies General Zia’s concern for the lot of the Afghan refugees. It is Afghan free enterprise that runs the Pakistan heroin business, and they have had the good sense to make sure that they make the army rich as well as themselves. How fortunate that the Quran does not mention anything about the ethics of heroin pushing.

But the worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument. It becomes almost impossible to conceive of what the suppressed things might be. It becomes easy to think that what has been suppressed was valueless, anyway, or so dangerous that it needed to be suppressed. And then the victory of the censor is total. The anti-Gandhi letter writer who recommended narrow-mindedness as anational virtue is one such casualty of censorship; he loves Big Brother — or Burra Bhai , perhaps.

It seems, now, that General Zia’s days are numbered. I do not believe that the present disturbances are the end, but they are the beginning of the end, because they show that the people have lost their fear of his brutal regime, and if the people cease to be afraid, he is done for. But Pakistan’s big test will come after the end of dictatorship, after the restoration of civilian rule and free elections, whenever that is, in one year or two or five; because if leaders do not then emerge who are willing to lift censorship, to permit dissent, to believe and to demonstrate that opposition is the bedrock of democracy, then, I am afraid, the last chance will have been lost. For the moment, however, one can hope.

Salman Rushdie’s latest novel is Luka and the Fire of Life. This article was first published in Index on Censorship Volume 11 Number 6

The post From the archive: Last chance? appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Legal proceedings have been filed against four authors that read aloud from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic verses. Salil Tripathi explains how outdated Colonial-era legislation is being used to curtail free expression. 

The saga refuses to end.

The Jaipur story has now taken a new turn, on Monday (6 February) two courts in the city began legal proceedings after complaints were filed by among others, members of an organisation that campaigned against Salman Rushdie’s participation in the Jaipur Literature Festival. They allege that the festival organisers and four authors who read from Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, hurt the religious sentiments of Muslims.

The four authors — Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzru, Ruchir Joshi, and Jeet Thayil — read from the novel to express solidarity with the absent Rushdie, and as a mark of protest. Rushdie did not go to Jaipur after he received plausible information that security forces had evidence of death threats against him. Now the festival’s organisers are also being charged under provisions of India’s criminal laws, which date back to the colonial era.

The complainants main contention is that the authors and the festival organisers conspired “to promote enmity on grounds of religion.” One magistrate has recorded the complaint to decide if the case has any merit before it is sent to the police to register a First Information Report. That case will now be heard on 8 March. Another magistrate will record a complainant’s statement today. When such complaints are filed, the court can either ask the police to register a report and launch an investigation, or examine the complaint on its own, before deciding if the matter deserves to be sent to the police for further action. The courts have decided to examine the matter first, before sending it to the police.

The relevant sections under the Indian law are:

295-A (which deals with deliberate and malicious act intended to outrage religious feelings)

298 (uttering words with deliberate intent to wound religious feelings),

153-A (promoting enmity between groups on religious grounds),

153-B (imputations prejudicial to national integration)

120-B (criminal conspiracy).

Preserving communal harmony is a serious matter in India. These laws empower the state to prosecute anyone whose intends to and acts in a way that outrages religious feelings or promotes “enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language,” and the all-important, all-inclusive “etc.”

Now think again about what happened in Jaipur: the four authors read extracts from The Satanic Verses, whose import is banned in India. Note, its import is banned in India; lawyers have pointed out that the government did not ban its printing or publishing — rather, Penguin, which had the rights to publish it in India, chose not to do so after the import ban was imposed, and its consulting editor recommended that it would be unwise to publish the novel. Leading Indian lawyers say that bane does not extend to reading the novel, or reading from it. In fact, in the years after the ban, several lawyers and writers read from it in public, as a mark of protest. They weren’t charged at any time. At the Jaipur Festival, parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor, author and former diplomat, said he has read from, or cited the novel, without any problem.

And yet, now the four authors and the festival’s organisers — William Dalrymple, Namita Gokhale, and Sanjoy Roy — face the prospect of being charged under colonial-era laws. Such a prosecution mocks India’s fine judicial traditions and runs counter to its constitutional guarantees of free speech (which are, it must be said, limited). It means if you say anything that someone considers controversial or offensive, then either that individual or the state can begin proceedings that could lead to prosecution. This isn’t a theoretical proposition, nor is this the first such complaint. Many film-makers, authors, and artists have been scarred by threats of such prosecutions. Many have sued for peace by dropping contentious material before publication; some have been prosecuted. Higher courts have usually dismissed the charges, but not before a long process that’s costly and stressful. (There is also the other threat of vigilantes doling out justice in the form of ransacked galleries or theatres, or attacks on artists, with the police doing little to stop such violence). This is preposterous — but such is the state of affairs.

Neither the authors nor the festival organisers incited any community, nor did they intend to insult any religious group. The festival organisers have said they were not aware that the authors intended to protest. After the four read from the novel, the organisers even issued a statement saying the authors had acted on their own. But none of that seems to matter to the complainants.

The charge is even more confusing since there has been no violence. Nobody went on a rampage; there was no riot. The four had never intended to incite anybody, and nobody got incited. However, some Muslim fundamentalist groups had offered rewards to throw shoes at Rushdie, or spit on Rushdie. Others had said that even a video appearance by Rushdie could have repercussions, irrespective of what he might say. Many might regard these statements as threats, but as of now, no police officer has pressed charges against any of those individuals, who were at least implying that matters might get out of hand for which, of course, they would presumably claim no responsibility.

And so it is that the one who claims offence and threatens to take the law in his hands, or suggests others might do so, remains free; the ones who read from a book are being charged under laws meant to prevent violence.

The Indian Penal Code, from which these sections are derived, was drafted in 1860, and much of that law has stayed fossilised, even though India gained Independence in 1947. It is important to remember the circumstances under which that law was drafted. In 1857, many princely states in India rebelled against the rule of the East India Company, and what followed was what India calls the first war of independence, and what Britain remembers as the Sepoy Mutiny. Soldiers of the East India Company rebelled against the company, and united with various princely states in a vain attempt to overpower the colonial rule. The war ended in 1858, with the Indian states surrendering, and soon thereafter, company rule ended, and Queen Victoria became the Empress of India.

There were many reasons for the uprising, but the immediate spark was religious. Indian troops in the East India Company’s army were alarmed by rumours that the new British cartridges were greased with cow or pig fat. Hindu and Muslim soldiers alike were offended, unwilling to handle ammunition contaminated by animal fat which the respective faiths shunned.

Realising the combustible power of religion, the British decided to make maintenance of religious harmony their priority, and to do that, they took advantage of mutual suspicion among the communities. So anyone who disrupted harmony would be prosecuted, and people had the right to complain against anyone who disrupted such harmony, turning the “subjects” into informers. Colonial rulers had good reason to maintain such laws — to keep communities suspicious of one another and divided just short of fighting.

Free India is supposed to be democratic; its adult citizens vote their governments, and they argue with each other in a spirited manner. But these laws, relics of the raj, treat Indians as subjects, not citizens. They allow troublemakers to file spurious complaints under the provisions of these laws and restrict free expression, as had happened to the great painter, the late M.F. Husain, who was driven out of India, and died in exile in London last year. The same provisions are now being used against the novelists and organisers of a festival of literature.

This has gone on too long. Before it gets any worse, India needs adult supervision; it needs to repeal these laws, stop proceedings against the authors and festival organisers, and keep a stern eye on rabble-rousers who cry offence and threaten violence because they don’t like other people reading a book they haven’t read and which they are told they must dislike.

You can dislike a book; nothing is sacred. But if you don’t like a book, Rushdie had said in India in 2010, all you have to do is to shut it.

Instead, they want to shut conversations across the country through intimidation.

Salil Tripathi is a journalist and author and the chair of English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee

The post India: How to silence a nation appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Liverpool had its Fab Four, but now Jaipur in India has its own Fab Five — writers Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzru, Jeet Thayil, Ruchir Joshi and Anand.

When the Rajasthan police apparently concocted a fictitious assassination plot leading Salman Rushdie to stay away from the Jaipur Literature Festival, the mood in Jaipur was glum. Everyone took the plot to be real, until The Hindu reported the convoluted manipulation by the police.

Many in India wanted to hear Rushdie, who avoided India during the fatwa years and has been able to make only a few visits since 2000. Festival goers were hoping to hear him speak about the filming of Midnight’s Children and his forthcoming memoir. But protests from Muslim groups and the plausible threat made him change his mind.

Which is where the Fab Four came in. On Friday, Poughkeepsie, NY-based Kumar, who teaches at Vassar and who has irritated Hindu nationalists in the past with his magnificent, in-your-face memoir, Husband of a Fanatic started reading passages from The Satanic Verses. Hari Kunzru, a British-Indian novelist based in New York  also took a stand at the same panel discussion. Both novelists stopped reading after the alarmed festival organisers pleaded with them.

Kunzru, a former English PEN vice-president, takes freedom of expression seriously. When the European Writers’ Parliament met in Istanbul and Turkish authors protested against the presence of VS Naipaul, forcing Naipaul to cancel his appearance, Kunzru spoke out. Reading from Rushdie’s controversial novel was no different.

The mood in Jaipur had changed. By  Friday afternoon, unexpectedly, the poet and novelist Jeet Thayil picked another passage from The Satanic Verses, and read aloud. Finally, Ruchir Joshi, film-maker and novelist, whose magical The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is an uproarious account of a futuristic India, read from The Satanic Verses. Tensions rose.

Soon thereafter, the police arrived, making inquiries about illegal conduct at the festival. Importing The Satanic Verses into India is prohibited but the law is unclear if possessing the novel is a crime, or reading aloud an extract from it is a crime. A lawyer or the People’s Union of Civil Liberties, the only local civil society group to support Rushdie last week, said that as the four authors read extracts from downloads, and not a book, it may not be a crime. Shashi Tharoor, novelist, diplomat, and parliamentarian pointed out he has routinely quoted and cited from The Satanic Verses and never been troubled.

In any case, the police should not throw around terms terms such as “guilt” and “crime”, as they have been doing, when they haven’t filed charges, nor proved their case before a judge.

The government could claim that by reading from the novel the authors incited the public. But incited to do what? Demand overturning the ban, nothing more. In fact, eyewitnesses say that the four authors were listened to in respectful silence, and warmly applauded. In any case, if the government wishes to proceed against the authors and is really mean-spirited, it could do so under S. 295A which gives the state the power to use criminal law against individuals who may have intended to cause trouble. But was there criminal intent, or mens rea? Sure, this is defiance, and it challenges a governmental act but it is Gandhian in its peaceful nature.

Police are seeking recordings of the reading, which, at the time of writing, the festival organisers are refusing to hand over. It is clear that the Rajasthan Police’s actions are meant to intimidate the authors and their supporters.

The role of the festival organisers — while their position is delicate — also requires scrutiny. If an author read from Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma, or Liu Xiaobo’s poems, or displayed Ai Wei Wei’s art at a public event in China, one would expect that the police would swoop down, and the organisers would very likely be forced to hand over the author to the Chinese security.

But this is India; a nation that holds elections, calls itself a democracy, and has a constitution that offers some protection for free speech. The actions of the Indian government in recent days, the intimidation of the five writers and its pusillanimity over Rushdie’s visit fall considerably short of India’s aspirations and claims.

While the organisers haven’t yet handed over the tapes, they told the authors to leave Jaipur immediately, lest they be arrested. It is not known if they offered them any protection. Worse, a lawyerly statement was issued, which in effect blamed the authors for “disturbing the peace”, because they acted outside the confines of the law. The organisers dissociated themselves from the action — which they can make a case for,  but did not uphold the four’s right to speak freely, which is harder to justify. They should have said that even though they disagreed with the action, they’d defend the principle of free speech. But India isn’t there yet, it seems.

Future participants, apparently, will have to conform to rules not yet defined, so that they act within the confines of the law. Such rules defeat the rationale of a festival of literature, where ideas are expressed to be argued over and debated; such rules restrict fundamental freedoms.

On Sunday, the writer Anand —who publishes dalit literature under the imprint Navayana — joined the protests, reading an eloquent passage from The Satanic Verses, which underscores the spirit of the protests:

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive: or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits: but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

On Monday, leading Indian writers began to circulate a petition to the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, calling for the ban on The Satanic Verses to be lifted. The battle to undo the damage of the past quarter century has begun.

There are no ifs and buts. As Rushdie wrote in The Satanic Verses:

A Poets work (is) to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

It is time for India to wake up.

Sign the petition for the ban on The Satanic Verses to be lifted

Salil Tripathi is a journalist and author and the chair of English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee

The post Writers take a stand against Rushdie ban appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Index on Censorship is sad to report that Rafiq Tagi died from his wounds in hospital on 23 November

In Azerbaijan, whenever you share your criticisms of religion or the government you know that it may be the last time you are able to do so. This thought might have run through the mind of prominent writer Rafiq Tagi when he was stabbed on Saturday, 19 November in Baku. According to Tagi, an unknown man “who was very nervous and did not say a word” knifed him from behind several times and then ran away. The writer survived (though he is still in hospital), just as he survived his stint in prison.

Tagi was sentenced to three years in jail for a 2006 article published an article in Senet newspaper. “Europe and us” criticised Islam and argued that the religion holds back the economic and political development of some Muslim countries, including Azerbaijan. Religious groups in Azerbaijan and neighbouring Iran reacted with anger, saying he had insulted the Prophet Mohammed, and Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Fazel Lankarani issued a fatwa calling for his execution. Tagi served eight months of his prison term, but following international criticism Tagi and four other journalists were pardoned by the president.

Following the attack on Tagi, I asked myself a series of questions. If the attack was motivated by his criticism of Islam, did it follow that he was considered to be the ultimate evil, an evil that disturbs Muslims’ peace and harmony and prevents them from scientific development or from bringing about justice in their own societies? Though the Koran promotes peace and considers the rejection of violence to be a profound victory — an example set by the prophet in the chapter (or surra) “victory” —  are those who physically attack Tagi really saying that Islam supports violence, seeing it as the only way to solve conflict? My own father died while I was in jail and I asked the same question of a mullah who preached hatred and violence against non-Muslims at my father’s small funeral ceremony, which I organised in jail. That mullah never answered my questions. He ran away and avoided meeting me for the rest of my stay in jail.

During my own time in prison, I read a short story by Rafiq Tagi, published in the literary magazine Alatoran. I asked myself: Can this man still be alive after writing so daringly? He was merciless in his criticism of religion and the current government. Exercising free speech in an authoritarian state is a deadly risk — even if that country is only “softly” authoritarian. It’s an even greater risk when its neighbour, Iran, is ruled by a brutal theocratic regime.

One of Tagi’s recently published articles is entitled “Iran and Globalisation”. It is a devastating assessment of the system of values currently dominant in Iran. In an interview following the assassination attempt, he suggested that this article may of sparked the attack.

One of my friends, philosopher Agalar Mammadov, once said that “words are dead in Azerbaijan”. But the number of attacks on activists like myself, and journalists like Tagi show that words are not obsolete. You can be punished for your words; killed for what you think and write. Rafiq Tagi lives in Azerbaijan and has no plans to leave the country. Unlike Salman Rushdie, he does not get a police escort when he appears in public. He has not run away; he stands behind his words. That deserves huge respect regardless of what we may think of his views on religion, God or life in general.

Emin Milli is a writer currently studying in the UK. He was imprisoned for his critical views of the government of Azerbaijan in 2009. In 2010, he and fellow activist Adnan Hajizade were nominated for an Index on Censorship freedom of expression award .

The post Azerbaijan: dangerous words appeared first on Index on Censorship.

‘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.

The post Shadow of the fatwa appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Plus: Bernard-Henri Lévy says the fatwa marked a retreat from tolerance
Kenan Malik on why Rushdie’s critics won the war
Peter Mayer on how Penguin faced down the threats
Malise Ruthven describes a political storm
Salil Tripathi says religious offence stifles debate

It is August 1988. I am lying in the sun on a Mallorcan hilltop. Behind me the children and their cousins are cavorting in a pool, but all my attention is on the proof copy of the book in front of me. It is by a writer whom I’m proud to call a friend. His last two novels, Midnight’s Children and Shame, have blown me away. They’re a striking blend of the visionary, the realist and the mock heroic. They marry the social and historical breadth of a Tolstoy, the comic élan of a Dickens with the political astuteness and ironies of a Günter Grass. But the voice is racy, colloquial and all his own. It often has me in stitches. Rushdie is the satirical stand-up of the lie-down-to-read novel. His metaphors transport and play in a language which works its way into your inner ear and carries on sparking and tickling. The English language has never been used quite like this before. Nor has the literary imagination. I know. I’m a serious, youngish literary woman and I’ve read rather a lot.

In fact, Salman Rushdie is unique. And for me, coming as I do from the northern reaches of empire in Canada, his subject matter is unique, too. Paul Scott apart, I have never been inside the mind and times of characters who have been shaped within that vast bit of geography which is India and Pakistan, let alone the forces that connect it to Britain.

And now, as I read under the Mallorcan sun, I’m tumbling from the sky towards the English Channel with two singing men. A jet has exploded 29 thousand and two feet above the ground. I’m not in Paradise Lost falling with that brazen angel, Lucifer, towards devilish fires, but with Gibreel Farishta, an overblown Bollywood deity and his bowler-hatted companion, ‘buttony pursed Mr Saladin Chamcha’, two of a group of brownish migrants and their wives, who have been ‘grilled by reasonable, doing their job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ genitalia’. Floating alongside them through the skies, there are not only the remnants of the plane, but ‘the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home’.

I know, as I read, that I’ve entered a brilliant metaphor of the immigrant experience. To be torn asunder and born into new, sometimes monstrous and humiliating forms is what migration can impose. Tumbling through the air, our heroes engage in a process of metamorphosis. Chamcha grows horns, Farishta a halo. His song –– ‘O my shoes are Japanese/These trousers English, if you please./On my head red Russian hat; my heart’s Indian for all that’ — expresses his multiple being. Hybridity is the name of the contemporary game: there are no single pure identities, however some false prophets and demagogues may long for them.

Along with the racism of the host country, this has long been Rushdie’s subject. His televised attack on racism in Britain is already legendary, and on the platforms of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, where — when I’m not holidaying — I work, he has often evoked the hybrid life of the migrant and those ‘imaginary homelands’ so many carry within themselves. (Colour is not the necessary precondition here: in one event when he challenged the largely white ICA audience to put up their hands if they thought of themselves as English, only three hands went up. Their owners were quick to add that they were half Welsh or had a Scottish mum.)

I read the epic, phantasmagoric saga of Gibreel and Saladin in this vein. The book seems to me to be an excoriating portrait of the glittering, populous, but rotting hulk that is Thatcher’s Britain: its surreal flights are the hyperbolic comedy which exposes the tragedy that displaced people –– immigrants, refugees, expats –– too often live.

In that first reading, at first I don’t realise that Shaitan is Satan. It also takes me some time to realise that the city of Jahilia, built entirely of sand, and the businessman turned prophet Mahound are not only figments of Gibreel’s hallucinatory dream, but an imaginary recreation of the birth of Islam and an interrogation of the place of the poet and revealed faith. I’m an ordinary westerner, after all, and largely ignorant about matters Muslim. What I think of when I reach for literary comparisons is Joseph Heller’s biblical comedy God Knows, which has come out not so long before and in which an irrepressible, fast-talking David querulously waits for God to apologise for his teeming wrongs. I like big, inventive, daring books which make us see and think the world afresh. This is what literature is for.

I am hardly prepared for the events of the coming months and years. Nor were any of Rushdie’s first reviewers.

By the time some 7,000 Muslims marched through the small northern town of Bolton on 2 December 1988 and torched a copy of The Satanic Verses, the book had already been banned in India and apartheid South Africa (which had also had the dubious honour of banning Black Beauty and obviously took pride in liberal doses of censorship). The book had also won the Whitbread best novel prize.

In India, The Satanic Verses fell into the troubled waters of communitarian strife and underwent the first of its own many metamorphoses. It became a cudgel to wield against those who might be deemed to insult Islam: viz the Hindus and a liberal, English-reading elite.

The man who brought the ‘insulting nature’ of The Satanic Verses to then Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi and the Indian Finance Ministry’s attention was the Muslim fundamentalist MP Syed Shahabuddin. In a letter to the Times of India (13 October 1988), he was proud to announce that he had neither read the book nor had any intention of doing so. Not unlike Mary Whitehouse in Britain, who had long campaigned against ‘smut’, he had no need ‘to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is’. Nor did Shahabuddin and his like-minded peers feel their grievance against the ‘intelligentsia’ in any way appeased when in that same month the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for literature to the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz: the Arabic language, the language of the Quran, it seemed, did not have the same political impetus as English. The Empire was striking back.
The telephone lines between India and Muslim leaders in the north of England were busy during those autumn weeks. And if the British media were not as alert to the Bolton protest as they might have been, by the time of the Bradford book burning on 14 January 1989, the cameras were in place.

I watched those images of the book on the pyre with a sense of disbelief. Like so many, I felt a prickle down my spine. Heine’s words – ‘There where books are burned, they will ultimately burn people’ — came to mind. The only book burnings I had ever seen images of were conducted by the Nazis back in 1933. Heine’s books were amongst those thrown into the flames. Ironically, Heine had written these words in a condemnatory reference to the burning of the Quran during the Spanish Inquisition.

The faces of the people who conducted the burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford were mostly young and, as far as I was concerned, thoroughly British. They looked, and in many instances were, the same people who had marched and rocked against racism. Amongst their kin who went to the huge demo in Hyde Park on 27 January 1989 and petitioned Penguin, the book’s publishers, I knew several. None were particularly pious. Nor had many ever read the Quran. But politics were shifting and new loyalties were beginning to be forged around religion and indeed secularism. New loyalties were being
forged around religion and secularism Britain had Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, Saudis and Algerians, and, of course, that then current catch-all of ‘blacks’. But we had never before thought of Muslims as a contemporary category with political implications. Nor had many of the ‘Muslims’ I sat on panels with: several were quick to point out that the word ‘Muslim’ covered a huge variety of people and conflicting interests and they were eager to distinguish between Islamism, a political ideology, and belief. But faith was quickly acquiring a political configuration in Britain, as it already had elsewhere. The unabating racism which Rushdie had so pungently attacked and evoked in the pages of The Satanic Verses fuelled the shift.

Demands from newly prominent and often enough self-appointed Muslim leaders to extend the dusty British blasphemy laws to cover Islam and ban The Satanic Verses now became vociferous. In January, the then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd had to announce that the government had no plans to change them. On secular fronts, a call to ban the blasphemy laws was hardly new: but it now became even clearer that a plural society could not give a single religion a privileged status without enflaming divisions.

Meanwhile, the global dimensions of the Satanic Verses affair were exposed. Few –– even amongst the ‘Muslim’ protesters –– might initially have been alert to the direct links between India, Bolton and Bradford. But as the riots in Islamabad, where six were killed, and in Kashmir, where over a hundred were injured and one died, were unleashed, the symbolic potential of a British book so very few had read took on a terrifying reality. When, on Valentine’s Day 1989, the ageing Ayatollah Khomeini, whose star was fading after the disaster of the long Iran-Iraq war, strategically declared his fatwa, that killing review of Rushdie and his publishers, which was also a pre-emptive strike for his brand of revolutionary Islam, the nature of our
global village stood revealed.

Bangladesh, Sudan and Sri Lanka had already banned the book. After the fatwa, Indonesia, Tanzania, Singapore, Kenya and Thailand followed. In the coming years, the arrival of the worldwide web would consolidate the forces those months had signalled. The response to the Danish Mohammed cartoons is one of several recent examples.

Twenty years is a long time. Yet I still viscerally remember the openmouthed astonishment that attended the fatwa and the subsequent pervasive anxiety. Fear was everywhere. Foreign government hit squads were on their way, by Special Branch assessment, which is why the Thatcher government stepped in to protect Rushdie. Penguin erected barricades and airport-style screening facilities. When we held a conference at the ICA to debate and examine the fatwa and the current situation, we were told not to advertise and to screen the public. A year later, when Harold Pinter delivered Rushdie’s memorable fatwa-anniversary lecture ‘Is Nothing Sacred’? from the ICA stage, security had to be redoubled and Special Branch was at hand.

The Iranian president was not the only one to ask that Rushdie apologise. Several leading British writers called for the same and thought he had grown too big for his writing boots. What was a mere novel in the face of offended religion, let alone a storm of rioters? Others, and they were many, disagreed; the writers of English and American PEN prominent amongst them. Harold Pinter led a delegation to Downing Street. Soon a Rushdie Defence Committee was established under the auspices of Article 19 and eventually the leadership of the indomitable Frances D’Souza.

What many did not realise at the time was that we had entered a new political era. Apology was not what it was about. When Rushdie offered one on 19 Febrary, Iran quickly rejected it. Everywhere, cultural and religious identities –– and these, whether they’re Christian, Hindu, Muslim or Jewish, are hardly equivalent to personal faith –– were beginning to take precedence over other kinds of political groupings. With the toppling of the Berlin Wall, the end of communism and the Cold War, this became even more emphatically the case.

Cultural identities need symbols and these were in short supply. The Satanic Verses, and where one stood in relation to its imaginative enterprise and its author, provided one such. For protesting Muslims, the name of the book became a banner to wrap around a sense of grievance and victimhood and consolidate an ‘offended’ identity. For others and for many writers, The Satanic Verses became another kind of marker. Did we want to live in a world where creative freedom and free expression were subject to the whims of distant clerics and those who wanted to burn books? Or did we want to stand by those hard-won freedoms that underpinned an open society? I knew where I stood. So did writers from around the world, from Edward Said to Susan Sontag to Mario Vargas Llosa to Naguib Mahfouz who spoke in defence of Rushdie and free expression.

Many who as hot-headed youngsters participated in the Bradford moment have changed their minds radically and are now keen to defend that freedom too. Regimes that curb speech rarely stop the curbing at the single point that any single group or individual finds ‘offensive’.

Rushdie’s personal plight during those months, which extended into ten long years, is all too easily forgotten or reduced to media wisecracks. People connected with The Satanic Verses were being attacked and murdered. Bookshops in the US and the UK were being bombed and attacked. In 1993, the hotel where Turkish intellectuals were taking part in a conference, which included Rushdie’s translator, was torched and 37 died.

To be transformed from being simply a writer to a man on the run, effectively a hostage, whom a good part of the world wants to kill, is hardly easy. Nor is being told by some of your peers that your writing has deliberately perpetrated violence, when what you have done is what all writers do: use your imagination to arrive at various kinds of truths. Then, too, no writer knows quite how a book will be read or, as in this case, used. And used The Satanic Verses was: it became a political football not only for Muslims protesting against the British establishment, but for Shias against Sunnis, Indian Muslims against Hindus, politically correct multiculturalists against upholders of the First Amendment.

Some of this only became clear to me when, after an ICA conference in March 1989 on the the Satanic Verses affair, Sara Maitland and I decided to put together a document to chronicle what had happened and how it had been reflected upon around the world thus far. The publication of The Rushdie File itself became part of the story of the times. Harper Collins had commissioned it, but when it was delivered, took fright and changed its mind. To follow in the footsteps of Penguin and live behind barricades was not what its incoming chief executive wanted. A small new publisher, Fourth Estate, bravely stepped into the breach.

The cover copy I wrote for the volume stands as a signal of how much that is part of our contemporary climate began with the Rushdie affair.

‘Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses has provoked a furore of global dimensions. It has also firmly placed on the cultural agenda a series of basic questions to which writers, thinkers, politicians — all of us — have been stirred to respond. How do we cope with the competing freedoms of expression and religion? What are the limits of liberalism, the threats of fundamentalism of whatever creed?’

Looking back over the distance of 20 years, certain things come into focus. In Britain, the Satanic Verses affair forced government, and indeed all of us, to attend to the inequalities in our midst, let alone the conditions in so many of our inner cities. Brown faces appeared increasingly in our media. Different voices, some strident, some sensible, were heard. If some of the multicultural policies that ensued — for example, the government’s hurry to
name ‘clerics’ as the spokespersons of the so-called and never unitary Muslim community — in the longer-term aggravated matters, resulted in partial ghettoisation, and gave too much power to religious hierarchies, it nonetheless brought new previously unheard groupings into the political arena.

In world politics, the furore over The Satanic Verses was symptomatic of the new forces that were coming into play. The later events of that astounding year marked the end of the era of communism and the Cold War. The Rushdie affair could have been an isolated incident but sadly it fell onto fertile ground where the new shoots of religious and cultural conflict were taking root. New alliances and power blocs were emerging. Their full fury would erupt over the Twin Towers when a real, not a fictional, airplane entered history.

The post The Satanic Verses at 20 appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Kenan Malik, author, From Fatwa to Jihad: the Salman Rushdie affair and its legacy (Atlantic Books: 2009)
Tariq Modood MBE, professor of sociology, Bristol University; director, University Research Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship.

Claire Fox will then chair a panel debating the issues and the audience will also have their say in what promises to be a lively discussion.

Respondents include:

Stephen Law, Provost, Centre for Inquiry London
Amol Rajan, reporter at the Independent
Jo Glanville, editor, Index on Censorship
Maheila Malik, Reader in Law at King’s College London
Inayat Bunglawala, Muslim Council of Britain

This debate is presented by Institute of Ideas and Bishopsgate Institute, in association with Index on Censorship.

Tickets are £7 (£5 Concs.)

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Thursday, February 12, 2009, 7pm — 9pm

Bishopsgate Institute
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The post Event: Twenty years of free speech wars appeared first on Index on Censorship.