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 Salil Tripathi explains how outdated Colonial-era legislation is being used to curtail free expression.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

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

Muslim leaders had been calling for Indian-born Rushdie to be banned from the festival. Rushdie’s 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, which is inspired by the life of Muhammed, was perceived by Muslims to be blasphemous.  Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie, calling on all good Muslims to kill the author. The book was banned across the world, including in India, where it is still banned.

This morning Rushdie announced his withdrawal from the festival.

Salman issued the following statement:

“For the last several days I have made no public comment about my proposed trip to the Jaipur Literary Festival at the request of the local authorities in Rajasthan, hoping that they would put in place such precautions as might be necessary to allow me to come and address the Festival audience in circumstances that were comfortable and safe for all.

I have now been informed by intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to “eliminate” me. While I have some doubts about the accuracy of this intelligence, it would be irresponsible of me to come to the Festival in such circumstances; irresponsible to my family, to the festival audience, and to my fellow writers. I will therefore not travel to Jaipur as planned.”

Following the announcement, writer Salil Tripathi, who wrote about the controversy surrounding Rushdie’s visit earlier this week, suggested all writers at the festival should read from The Satanic Verses:

All writers in jaipur shd read 2-3 pages in public from satanic verses (500+pages). A gandhian way to fight the ban and state’s cowardice.

— Salil Tripathi (@saliltripathi) January 20, 2012

Author Hari Kunzru agreed, and planned, alongside academic Amitava Kumar, to do just that.

About to defy bigots and shoe throwers, reading @SalmanRushdie Satanic Verses on stage with @amitavakumar at #jaipur#jlf

— Hari Kunzru (@harikunzru) January 20, 2012

Kumar tweeted:

Writers: assassins shouldn’t be allowed to stifle writers join us in reading from Satanic Verses. @harikunzru Jaipur Durbar Hall 5.15 PM

— Amitava Kumar (@amitavakumar) January 20, 2012

Organisers apparently ended the protest, warning those that individuals could face police action for reading a banned book.

Authors at #JLF who read @SalmanRushdie Satanic Verses + organizers now being investigated by police for reading fr a banned book

— Stephanie Nolen (@snolen) January 20, 2012

** Update 20 January 2012 ** – Salman Rushdie tweeted this morning:

Very sad not to be at jaipur. I was told bombay mafia don issued weapons to 2 hitmen to “eliminate” me. Will do video link instead. Damn.
— Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) January 20, 2012

Read more here

India used to be the land of “gup”, which meant talk, arguments, conversations, and debates. Babble and noise, that’s what “gup” is. But it is fast becoming the land of “chup”, of sepulchral silence, where people must think twice before they say what they feel. The hushed silence that “chup” demands is not the respectful silence of a library, but the silence of acquiescence; the people demanding the silence are the sort to burn or ban books.

The moment the organisers of the Jaipur Literature Festival announced the lineup of authors attending the prestigious cultural event from 20 January — which included Salman Rushdie, along with Tom Stoppard, David Remnick, Michael Ondaatje, Oprah Winfrey, and Hari Kunzru — it was clear that there would be some drama. The rector of the influential Islamic seminary in Deoband did not disappoint.

Maulana Abdul Qasim Nomani asked the Indian government to cancel Rushdie’s visa because he had hurt the feelings of Muslims. The Indian Government said that as a person of Indian origin (and born in India), Rushdie had the papers that allowed him to enter, and the government could not stop him. That’s when other groups demanded firm action. One group threatened to attack him and political parties joined the fray. India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, goes to elections next month, and some 18 per cent of the electorate is Muslim. No party wants to offend the Muslim vote.

The controversy goes back to 1988, when Rushdie wrote the novel, The Satanic Verses. The Indian government found the book so explosive it was banned. Announcing the ban, Indian officials said their decision had nothing to do with the literary merit of the novel, but as it contained passages that could be misinterpreted, leading to violence, India thought it safer to ban the book. Rushdie’s  earlier novel, Midnight’s Children, had put India on the world’s literary map.

Protests against The Satanic Verses followed worldwide, including the book being burned in Bradford in the United Kingdom. Vocal British Muslims marched in London demanding action against Rushdie (a British citizen). Britain stood firm in defending Rushdie’s freedom. In February 1989 the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa, calling for Rushdie’s death. Rushdie had to live in hiding for nearly a decade; he was able to return to some semblance of normalcy after Iran revoked the fatwa.

In the years since, Rushdie has returned to the country of his birth several times, including at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2007. The novel remains banned.

By demanding that Rushdie should not be allowed to enter India, fundamentalists are seeking to set the terms under which dialogue can occur in India. Muslims have been vocal in protesting against material they find offensive, with the Bangladesh-born novelist Tasleema Nasreen a frequent target.

But in the past quarter century, other groups have also joined in, increasing the clamor against free thought, and narrowing public discourse. Hindus drove India’s most famous painter, MF Husain, into exile, and the nonagenarian painter died in London in exile last year. Other artists have been attacked for depicting images that some groups have found offensive – last week, the painter Balbir Krishan was assaulted because his art dealt with gay themes. Delhi University withdrew an essay about the Sanskrit epic Ramayana and its variations by the late poet, AK Ramanujan, because Hindu nationalists found the essay offensive.

Mumbai University withdrew Booker Prize nominee Rohinton Mistry’s novel, “Such A Long Journey,” after the grandson of a chauvinist politician protested that his community (Marathi-speakers) was portrayed badly in the novel.

Other groups, including barbers, police officers, cobblers, and lawyers, have protested against films at different times, getting titles changed, scenes edited, or songs dropped, because they find something in that work offensive.

The inevitable result is deadened polity. While the People’s Union of Civil Liberties has admirably spoken out in defence of Rushdie, other Indian civil society groups have been reticent, unwilling to take on the intolerant, who respond not with argument, but with violence. A few columnists and Bollywood personalities have also criticised the fundamentalists. But no politician of consequence has done so.

India wasn’t supposed to be like that — as Amartya Sen famously characterised his compatriots, Indians were supposed to be argumentative.

Stressing the importance of Rushdie’s voice in Jaipur, the Indian critic Nilanjana Roy pointed out: “It would be a great loss if the manufactured controversy around (Rushdie’s) visit silenced his voice yet again. It would make India the land of ‘chup’.”

In Rushdie’s novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech is called Khattam-Shud, and he rules a land called Chup (silence), which has a cult that promotes muteness. It is a land at peace, in harmony. But that outward stability conceals inner fragility. Such societies force their citizens to live a lie: that their contrived cheer and forced harmony are superior. Open societies appear brittle and frail because outwardly they are cacophonous, where everyone can contradict everyone else, and where nothing is sacred. But there is inner strength. As Rushdie wrote: “All those arguments and debates, all that openness, had created powerful bonds of fellowship between them… The Chupwalas (those from the silent land) turned out to be a disunited rabble, suspicious and distrustful of one another. The land of Gup (talk) is bathed in endless sunshine, while over in Chup, it is always the middle of the night.”

We watch as India hovers over that precipice; it must decide what kind of society it wishes to be — where, as India’s greatest poet wrote, where the mind is without fear, or where words are swallowed, lest they offend somebody.

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

‘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.

In an extract from her new book in the Manifestos for the 21st Century series, author Kamila Shamsie explores the reasons why Islam has become synonymous with offence

There are moments in history when particular words seem to exert a magnetic field, drawing other words to them. In the early years of the present century, that magnetic field can be found around the word “Islam”,  pulling in a host of words of which the most thickly-clustered is “terror” and, hard on its heels, the word “offence”.

Living as I now do in London, where Muslims are a minority, though a significant one, it seems I can never go very far without running into the spectre of the offended Muslim. I ran into that spectre when asked to write this piece: two friends, independently of each other and neither of them Muslim, told me to “be careful”. And as they said the words I saw that spectre rise up before their eyes.

The more time I spend reading or hearing about this spectre from those who don’t live in the Muslim world, the more I am struck by the fact that, more often than not, the figure of the offended Muslim is merely partial. By “partial” I mean if you utter the words “Islam” and “offence” together, much of the non-Muslim world will doubtless think, “Danish cartoons … Satanic Verses … Teddy Bears named Mohammed … children’s stories with pigs as protagonists … women in skimpy clothes … bars and night-clubs”. In other words, offence is what happens when Muslims encounter the West.

Offence and Islam is a wide-ranging issue — I would go so far as to argue that it is primarily an intra-Muslim affair and only secondarily concerned with the non-Muslim world. And the manner in which offence is expressed varies almost as substantially as the causes of offence — from violent acts to tears shed in private, from parliamentary decrees to protest poetry.

One could ask, “why has the violently offended Muslim become such a prominent figure?” There are those who argue that Islam lends itself to violence, but this point of view entirely ignores the fact that the entwining of Islam, violence and offence has not existed in an unbroken thread through the centuries, but has become significant in very recent history.

To understand this entwining it’s necessary to step away from the partial viewpoint that regards offence through an Islam v the West prism. We cannot hope to understand any part of the diffuse and diverse Muslim world if we fail to take into account the internal history of different sects, groups, nations that has allowed the hardliners to grow in strength and put their stamp on the most visible global face of Islam. So rather than viewing the matter of offence as one of Muslims v the West, it might cast some light if we recast it as hardliners v anti-hardliners, a varied group that includes moderate Muslims, secularist Muslims, non-Muslims etc.

I remember quite clearly the first time the international figure of the offended Muslim acquired global significance. It was 1989: I was a teenager in Karachi with dreams of one day being a writer and a book called The Satanic Verses became the biggest news story of the day. With the exception of Turkey, every Muslim-majority nation — as well as several with large Muslim minorities — banned the novel on the grounds of its offensiveness to Islam.

The widespread banning of the novel certainly seemed to point to the fact that in the confrontation between freedom of expression and due respect for religion, an overwhelming majority of Muslims would come down in favour of the latter. But this confrontation and its outcome are not peculiar to Islam: in any religion where the word “blasphemy” exists there is a point beyond which freedom of expression becomes transgression. The confrontation and its outcome are far less significant than the particular nature of the response to transgression. The fact that so many believing Muslims were offended by The Satanic Verses — or rather by what they were told was written about Mohammed in the book — can pass almost without comment.

It is easy to see why anyone from the outside viewing the protests, the banning of the book, the calls for violence from Muslims in different parts of the world, would think they were viewing a monolith of the offended Muslim ranged against the freedoms of the West. But from where I was sitting, in Karachi, I remember the one question that had me transfixed: why are the British burning copies of this book? Even at 16 I could entirely understand the reasons for reactions in Pakistan being what they were, but what was going on in Britain? It was entirely baffling.

Years later, I saw the bafflement of my 16-year-old self reflected in my Pakistani compatriots when I returned to Karachi from London after the 7/7 bombings on the London Underground in 2005 to questions of, “What’s going on with these British Muslims? What does Britain do to these people?” While the British press was stressing the religion of the bombers, Pakistanis saw the root cause in the nation. “Sure, we have our own suicide bombers, but at least we know, broadly speaking, who they are, where they come from and why they’re doing it,” more than one Pakistani said to me. “These boys from Yorkshire just don’t make sense.”

The Bradford book burners didn’t make sense to me either because the fact that someone is Muslim has never been in itself an indicator or explanation of anything. I was living in a country that was 98 per cent Muslim which made for great heterogeneity, ranging from militant jihadis to whirling dervishes and to don’t-fast, don’t-pray, don’t-abstain-from-alcohol-or-premarital-sex but-of-course-I’m-a-believer Muslims. “Muslim” was a word that contained within it so many colours that it was itself without hue. The only way to prevent it from appearing as a blinding whiteness, revealing nothing, was to place it against some kind of defining context.

What I see is often frustrating, horrifying, maddening — but never baffling. The only thing that is baffling is expert commentators from outside the Muslim world who continue to quote the Quran and Hadith (sayings of the prophet) in explanation of Muslim reactions to offence rather than recognising the plurality of interpretation within the Islamic tradition and asking, more pertinently, why at a precise collision of history and geography certain forms of interpretations should be privileged over others, or gain ascendance in political, though not necessarily numerical terms, often in contravention of historical trends in that region. And why do the most damaging forms of interpretation currently co-exist at so many points of geographic and historic collision?

Anyone who doubts that there are widely varying forms of interpretation within Islam has clearly never watched Aalim Online a popular television show in Pakistan, where scholars from different sects debate religious questions. All the scholars proffer Quranic verses and Hadith in defence of their own positions and often end up with radically contrasting views. And yes, the position on the punishment for blasphemy and the authority necessary to make judgments about blasphemy does vary considerably among scholars.

This is an edited extract taken from the book Offence: the Muslim Case, from the Manifestos for the 21st Century series edited by Ursula Owen and Judith Vidal-Hall and published by Seagull Books

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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In common with many other writers, my reaction was immediate, and totally in opposition to the acts of prudence, the shillyshallying, indeed to the conciliatory –– not to say collaborationist –– declarations of the majority of political and religious leaders on the planet. It was instinctive and unconditional solidarity, with no fault and no debate, with the novelist whom they determined to kill.

And that was because I felt, then, that something essential was under threat, amongst all the confusion, the uproar, the cries of the assassins: a man’s life, of course; the right of a novelist to be free to write fiction, naturally; but also, and perhaps above all, a seismic shift, an unanswerable landslip, a definitive and fatal turning point in the course of 20th century
history.

Twenty years later my feelings remain unchanged.

Salman is today a little more at ease, almost free (I say ‘almost’… I say ‘a little’… because I know, even if he has the elegance to live as though it was nothing, that a suspended, or interrupted, fatwa that has never actually been annulled remains a fatwa and continues to weigh like an unlifted threat), but the feelings that I had then have been confirmed and honed with the years.

The Satanic Verses affair or, more precisely, the global reaction to the novel’s condemnation, the embarrassed declarations on the one hand, the gestures of appeasement on the other –– the declaration, for example, of the French president at the time, condemning the fatwa of course but not without also condemning in the same breath the ‘provocation’ which brought it about –– initiated a series of retreats which would be repeated at intervals over the course of the next two decades; the two latest examples being the affair surrounding the non-publication [by Random House in the US] of Sherry Jones’s novel and the more serious affair of the cartoons of Mohammed that were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. These are different circumstances. And there is no straightforward analogy with Salman Rushdie. But, particularly in the case of the cartoons, it is the same fear. The same reaction infected those mainstream newspapers, which are in principle free but which, with rare exceptions, took great care not to align themselves with their vilified colleague. The same capitulation [that we see in France] to those groups, in this case Islamist extremists, who demand that their religious laws be substituted for the laws of the Republic.

A diminishing of freedom of expression. The failure of the principle under which freedom of speech suffers no exceptions other than those that the civil courts of a democratic society may, if they are called upon, pronounce. In France, the weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo [which printed the Danish cartoons --- translator’s note] was the only publication to salvage
our honour.

The affair marked a turning away from the ideal of tolerance that is central to our notion of democracy. Tolerance, until the fatwa, was the principal according to which the voice of the majority acceded to the claims of the minority and conceded public spaces for minorities to express themselves. Since the fatwa, an almost imperceptible series of shifts of meaning now grants any minority the right to express sentiments that are the actual negation of the democratic spirit and that threaten the dignity, even the lives, of men and particularly of women.

Thus, in Amsterdam, we were witness to the notion that the opinions that armed the murderer of
the film maker Theo Van Gogh must be tolerated to the same degree as the ‘provocative’ views of Van Gogh himself. Thus, in Paris, we witnessed the idea that the feelings of Islamist leaders who felt offended by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s apostasy are no less admissable than those of the former member of parliament who insists on the indefeasible right, for every man and woman, to choose to be a member of, or to cease to be a member of, a religion. And thus, everywhere, we see this idea of tolerance brandished like a banner by all those who insist on judging by the same standards those cultures where women are seen as a different species, where they are perceived and treated as disturbing elements whose bodies and faces must be hidden.

Multiculturalism. Differentialism. Moral relativism and, should the occasion arise, assassin. That is the other legacy of the Rushdie affair.

The affair marked a real retreat from what we used to call — and, thank heavens, still do call in Europe and the United States –– the spirit of the Enlightenment. What does it mean, the Enlightenment? It is the right to believe, or not to believe. It is the right of the unbeliever to mock others’ beliefs. It is the right to blaspheme, in other words, which was a real victory of the philosophical spirit of Voltaire and which was eventually imposed, not without pain and drama and convulsions, on Jewish and Christian monotheism; and which, in the wake of the Rushdie affair, is once more being called into question from within Islam, by those who murmur, insinuate and sometimes yell: ‘Freedom of opinion, all right; the right not to believe, all right; but only on condition that that is expressed quietly, without any fuss or noise and without it being perceived in any way as offensive by the community that does believe; on condition that the very idea of God should not be insulted or sullied by the unbeliever.’ I won’t dwell on the feeble notion of God entertained by those who think that a novelist or a cartoonist or a God-doubter might have the power to sully it. I’ll pass over the fact that the true caricaturists of the prophet, those who insult him most deeply and who disfigure his noble message, are those who make him the
figurehead of their urge to commit murder and ethnic cleansing. The truth is that a world where we no longer have the right to laugh at dogma would be an impoverished world. The truth is that a world where we are not permitted to write fiction on any and every subject would be a much sadder place where whole areas of freedom will cave in. Dark times. The darkening of the
spirit. The spirit of the times.

The ayatollahs are not the first to burn books and murder writers. The fascists did it before them. Fascists of all kinds. Such attacks on the integrity of the spirit have almost always been an early warning sign of the imminent worsening of the prevailing order. Which is a way of suggesting that the Rushdie affair was also perhaps an early sign. Of suggesting that it too had
the same purpose, to sound the death knell of the old world. And perhaps it is one of the dates, if not the actual date, which marked the appearance in broad daylight of this new variation of fascism that I have named ‘fascislamism’. There was 11 September and its three blows … the death of [Ahmad Shah] Massoud, the prologue … the martyrdom of Daniel Pearl, a little later … the mass murders in Algeria, earlier … the persecution of women, everywhere … the slow but steady awakening of the spirit of the Muslim Brotherhood, in the only part of the world where one might have thought it possible to effect a true denazification … the first part of the sequence, the fundamental moment of the revival, of the real beginning of this terrible history and the point at which an entire wing of Islam entered an era of darkness, was without the slightest doubt the death sentence passed on a writer found guilty of causing offence to the word of the Quran.

What a strange adventure, for an enchanter of letters to have become the emblem of a dark moment in the history of literature and ideas.

Translated by Natasha Lehrer

This article is taken from the new issue of Index on Censorship. To read more exclusive content, and to find out how to get your copy of Index on Censorship, click here