Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cursed, 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 a hundred, be smashed to bits; but the hundredth time, will change the world?”
-Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie’s upcoming knighting has reignited the extremist voices that called for his murder back when The Satanic Verses came out. While there are a lot of things to dislike about the above-linked editorial, I’m with Ash when he writes:
The issue here is not whether Rushdie’s writing merits a knighthood or whether left-wing, cosmopolitan writers should accept honors from her majesty. (My answers are “yes,” and “why not?” but that’s by the way.)
The issue is whether people should be killed, or need to be protected from a serious threat of being killed, for what they say or write. And whether a sovereign, democratic state should censor its recognition of its own citizens in the face of such intimidation.
He doesn’t propose what we should (or even can) do about the people who put a reward on Rushdie’s head. And while I agree with him that Rushdie’s life shouldn’t be threatened, no matter how offensive his book,* Ash loses me when he starts finger-wagging at Muslims:
American Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously observed that a man should not be free to shout a false alarm of “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Now, the fact is that even if a secular liberal intellectual were to say, “Mad Mullah X deserves to be shot,” the likelihood that someone would go out and shoot Mullah X as a result is close to zero. There are no al-Darwinia brigades practicing bomb making in secret laboratories, awaiting an order from their beloved imam Richard Dawkins to assassinate Mullah X.
If, however, a Muslim cleric or intellectual says, “Salman Rushdie deserves to be shot,” there are people out there who may take it literally. Remember that Rushdie’s Japanese translator was murdered, his Italian translator was stabbed and his Norwegian publisher attacked because Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had called for everyone involved in propagating “The Satanic Verses” to be punished. Because of this explosive context, Muslim speakers need to exercise a particular care in their choice of words.
It doesn’t make sense to hold Muslims to a different standard just because they’re Muslim. Patterns of violence certainly do matter, and of course a statement from Pakistan’s religious affairs minister (who is also the son of the former military dictator Zia ul-Haq) that a suicide bombing is a justifiable response to Rushie’s knighting is much more threatening than some kid on the street commenting that Rushdie should be killed. But religion cannot be the basis upon which we deem threats, or calls to murder, credible — power, opportunity and influence are much, much more important. Of course, religious authority does go along with power, and there’s a certain zeal to religious extremists that doesn’t carry over into very many other spheres. But I’d rather have a Muslim kid on a street in London* call for my head than have, say, Richard Dawkins tell his followers that I must be killed.
But Ash seems to think that Muslims are mostly backwards cave-dwellers, confused by these things called “reason” and “democracy.” And, apparently, not regular L.A. Times readers — note how he addresses his audience as “We non-Muslims”:
We non-Muslims need, in return, to be generously clear about the distinction between what a free society requires of them and what we merely desire. We may desire that they abandon what we regard as outmoded superstitions, that they “see reason,” become modern, liberal and secular. But, in a free society, nobody should require that of them.
If “we” is supposed to mean “Americans,” then we don’t desire that they abandon outmoded superstitions, we desire that they exchange their outmoded superstitions for ours. We are, after all, one of the most religious nations on Earth — our current majority-Christian populace isn’t “modern, liberal and secular” much of the time. That isn’t to question the virtues of being modern, liberal and secular, but simply to point out that no religion has a monopoly on being backwards and theocratic, and people of every religion are quite capable of “seeing reason,” and of living in a modern, liberal secular democracy.
And people of every religion are capable of making the kind of us-versus-them divides that Ash does here. If we want all different kinds of people to be a part of our modern, liberal, secular society, then we probably shouldn’t label it “ours” and refer to “us” and “them,” as if “they” can’t understand secularism and rule of law. Killing people who offend your religious values isn’t exactly a new thing, and it’s definitely not an exclusively Islamic practice.
Which, of course, is not to excuse death threats. The people threatening Rushdie’s life are nuts, and it is scary that there are plenty of followers who will carry out the orders if given the opportunity. But pinning this on the inability of Muslim citizens to adjust to secularism is pretty short-sighted.
*Because it’s probably not obvious from this post, I’ll just add that I loved The Satanic Verses and I’m a huge Rushdie fan.
**Am I the only Rushdie reader who can’t read that word without thinking “Elloween Deeowen”?