Читать книгу You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom - Nick Cohen - Страница 12

I see no way to secure liberalism by trying to put its core values beyond any but internal or consensual reasoning. The resulting slide into relativism leaves a disastrous parallel between ‘liberalism for the liberals’ and ‘cannibalism for the cannibals’.

MARTIN HOLLIS

Islamism is a movement of the radical religious right. Its borrowings from fascism include the anti-Jewish conspiracy theory and the anti-Freemason conspiracy theory. It places men above women. It worships martyrdom and the concomitant cult of death. You do not have to stare too long or too hard at its adherents to realise that they are liberalism’s enemies. Yet the most jarring aspect of Khomeini’s denunciations was that he and his supporters implied that Western liberals should regard them as brothers in the struggles to defend the wretched of the earth. They used the anti-imperialist language the political left employed when it castigated the machinations of the White House and the CIA, and the anti-racist language it employed when castigating white oppression.

With a devious inversion, they turned the freedom to speak and to criticise into instruments of coercion the strong inflicted on the weak. If you wanted to be a genuine liberal, if you wanted to be on the side of the weak in their battle with the strong, you must be against Rushdie. Of all the lies that surrounded the fatwa, this was not only the most noxious but also the most farcical.

Rushdie was a typical leftist of the 1980s. He supported all the old causes. He was a candid friend of the Nicaraguan revolution, and wrote in defence of the Palestinians. At first, he welcomed the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the arrival of the Islamic revolution, although he changed his mind long before its admirers tried to kill him. In Britain, he was the first great novelist English literature had produced to confront the disorientation felt by migrants. By necessity, his subject and his own experience made him a tough and on occasion vituperative enemy of racism. In the early 1980s, he broadcast a blood-chilling description of Britain as an island saturated with chauvinism. Unlike the Germans, who had come through painful self-examination to ‘purify German thought and the German language of the pollution of Nazism’, the British had never come to terms with the evils of Empire, he told the liberal viewers of Channel 4, who were doubtless suitably guilt-ridden. ‘British thought, British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. It’s still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends. British racism, of course, is not our problem. It’s yours. We simply suffer from the effects of your problem. And until you, the whites, see that the issue is not integration, or harmony, or multi-culturalism, but simply facing up to and eradicating the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new and last Empire will be obliged to struggle against you.’

If Rushdie was an agent of the imperialists, he was operating under deep cover.

Assessing the response of liberals to the assault on liberalism and the attempts to murder one of their own is blighted by the old problem that we remember the best writers’ work, because it survives and moulds the future’s thinking, but forget the lesser journalists and authors who dominate debate at the time. The best left-wing writers of the 1980s understood that the left’s commitment to freedom of speech was far from certain. They knew that it had its own foul history of fellow travelling with tyranny. Their noses sniffed the air to catch the first whiff of treachery. In Culture of Complaint, his dissection of the politicisation of the arts and humanities in the 1980s, Robert Hughes lacerated the universities for their failure to defend Rushdie. Academics were forever berating dead white males for their failure to conform to exacting modern standards, he said, but stayed silent as murderers threatened the basic standards of intellectual life. On American campuses, they held that if a man so much as looked around with a lustful eye, or called a young female a ‘girl’ instead of a ‘woman’, he was guilty of gross sexual impropriety. ‘Abroad it was more or less OK for a cabal of regressive theocratic bigots to insist on the chador, to cut off thieves’ hands and put out the eyes of offenders on TV, and to murder novelists as state policy. Oppression is what we do in the West. What they do in the Middle East is “their culture”.’ Leftists could not make a stand, because to their minds defending Rushdie would at some level mean giving aid and comfort to racists and strengthening the hand of the one enemy they could admit to having: the imperialist warmongers in Washington, DC.

Rushdie’s friend Christopher Hitchens saw the centres of British cities clogged with men who wanted to pass blasphemy laws and give the police the power to control what free citizens could read. ‘That this ultra-reactionary mobocracy was composed mainly of people with brown skins ought to have made no difference. In Pakistan, long familiar with the hysteria of Jamaat Islami and other religio-dictatorial gangs, it would have made no difference at all. But somehow, when staged in the streets and squares of Britain it did make a difference. A pronounced awkwardness was introduced into the atmosphere.’

Too many of his former comrades were dodging the issue by imagining a false moral equivalence, he said. Rushdie and his oppressors were to their minds equally guilty. They could not see that ‘all of the deaths and injuries – all of them – from the mob scenes in Pakistan to the activities of the Iranian assassination squads were directly caused by Rushdie’s enemies. None of the deaths – none of them – were caused by him, or by his friends and defenders. Yet you will notice the displacement tactic used by … the multicultural left which blamed the mayhem on an abstract construct – “the Rushdie Affair”. I dimly understood at the time that this kind of post-modern “left” somehow in league with political Islam was something new. That this trahison would take a partly “multicultural form” was also something that was ceasing to surprise me.’

The Western leftists Hughes and Hitchens had in their sights were making the elementary howler of confusing ethnicity – which no one can change – with religions or political ideologies – which are systems of ideas that men and women ought to be free to accept or reject. As that howler now howls like a gale through liberal discourse, we had better take the time to explain why its assumptions are false before moving on.

When Serb extremists killed Bosnian Muslims because of their religion, their lethal religious prejudice was indeed akin to lethal racial prejudice. When employers from the old Protestant ascendancy in Northern Ireland refused Catholics jobs because they were Catholics, a comparison with colour bars against black workers in the old American South applied. When people said that a conspiracy of American Jews controlled American foreign policy, or that Muslim immigrants were imposing a jihadi theology on Europe, they were propagating racist conspiracy theories. Moral equivalence held in all these cases.

When supporters of Rushdie opposed the murder of authors, however, their ideals could not have been further from the dark fantasies of racial hatred. Islamists could call them ‘Islamophobes’ if they wanted, for they were indeed opposing reactionary Islamic doctrines, but they were doing so because they were liberals who wanted to show solidarity with liberals from the Muslim world, not because they were filled with an irrational loathing. When Catholic reactionaries accuse opponents of papal doctrine on contraception and abortion of ‘anti-Catholicism’, and when believers in a greater Israel accuse opponents of Israeli expansion into the West Bank of anti-Semitism, they too are palming a card from the bottom of the deck. They are trying to pass off rational morality as an irrational hatred.

In 1989, such confusions lay in the future. Hitchens and Hughes may have realised that an ominous shift was taking place, but most commentators at the time did not. Liberal opinion seemed to me and many others to reel from the threats of the extremists, collect itself and fight back.

Liberalism’s First (and Last) Stand

The staff and directors of Penguin, Rushdie’s publishers, showed steadiness under fire. Led by Peter Mayer, the chief executive, they contemplated the consequences of withdrawing The Satanic Verses. Penguin would not suffer alone, they decided. Every other publisher putting out works that a demagogue could take offence at might become a target.

Mayer and his colleagues were living in fear. The sneering claim that they ‘knew what they were doing’ when they published The Satanic Verses was contradicted by their evident astonishment. As furious men plotted murder, they had to worry about keeping Rushdie from harm. They had to protect their buildings and shops in Britain, and their export offices all over the world. They had to agonise about their staff, most of whom did not realise that they were signing up to fight for freedom of speech when they signed on for mundane jobs. Despite what critics said against them, they had to and did worry about British Muslims, trying to integrate into a new culture. And when the heat was at its fiercest, they had to worry about protecting their own lives and the lives of their families.

They did not spend too much time thinking about Milton or Galileo, Mayer recalled, ‘but I did think of books we and others had published that some Catholics probably did not like; other books that offended some Jews or evangelical Christians, or minorities who felt their beliefs, values or ethnicity had been treated negatively. And what of books that offend majorities, a subject I heard no one raise? Cease to publish those books, too, when someone raised a hand against them?’ Workers in bookshops, who were neither well paid nor well protected, said that they must continue to stock it. Even bookshops Islamists bombed kept it under the counter when they reopened. The customer only had to ask.

The mediocrity of Rushdie’s critics in the West strengthened the resolve of liberals. Most of his enemies came from the political right. American neo-cons, who a few years later would shout until they were hoarse about the threat of Islamism, were delighted that the dictatorial regimes and movements of the poor world were targeting a left-wing novelist. Whatever their politics, comfortable English intellectuals were equally incapable of seeing extremist blackmail for what it was. John le Carré, whose George Smiley seemed to understand that political freedom had to be defended, saw no similar case for a defence of religious freedom. There was ‘no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity’, he said, apparently unaware that the law of the land he lived in specifically protected its citizens from assassination. It was not that he supported the fatwa, of course. But his anger was directed at the writer, not the men who wanted the writer dead. ‘When it came to the further exploitation of Rushdie’s work in paperback form, I was more concerned about the girl at Penguin books who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was about Rushdie’s royalties. Anyone who had wished to read the book by then had ample access to it.’

In one of his rare public interventions during his underground life, an icy Rushdie wrote from his secret address to say that le Carré was taking ‘the philistine, reductionist, militant Islamist line that The Satanic Verses was no more than an insult’, and that anyone ‘who displeases philistine, reductionist, militant Islamist folk loses his right to live in safety. He says that he is more interested in safeguarding publishing staff than in my royalties. But it is precisely these people, my novel’s publishers in some thirty countries, together with the staff of bookshops, who have most passionately supported and defended my right to publish. It is ignoble of le Carré to use them as an argument for censorship when they have so courageously stood up for freedom.’

The Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who wasted his time and talent in snobbish feuds, revelled in Rushdie’s suffering. ‘I wonder how Salman Rushdie is faring these days,’ he mused, ‘under the benevolent protection of British law and British police, about whom he has been so rude. Not too comfortably, I hope … I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit and literature would not suffer.’ Roald Dahl said that Rushdie knew what he was doing, an assertion which was not true but allowed him to turn the blame from the potential murderers to their intended victim. ‘This kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent book on to the top of the bestseller list,’ he continued, ‘but to my mind it is a cheap way of doing it.’

The English establishment has a dictionary of insults for men and women who take on the futile task of making it feel guilty – ‘chippy’, ‘bolshie’, ‘uppity’, ‘ungrateful’ … It directed them all at Rushdie.

I do not think I am reading too much into Dahl’s accusation of cheapness or Trevor-Roper’s hope that Islamists would beat manners into an author in a dark alley when I say that members of the traditional intelligentsia could not support Rushdie because in his success they could sense their decline. The Indian and South American magical realists of the 1980s foretold a time when great literature would not come from the world they knew. Rushdie was the master of the English language, their language. He came to literary London and took their prizes at the Booker awards. Reviewers in their serious newspapers praised him for his ability to draw from different cultures and ideas. The immigrant from a Muslim family, the most famous Indian in England, seemed interested in everyone except them. He did not describe the agonies of the English upper-middle class or the life and loves of Oxbridge dons, but the slums of London and the politics of the subcontinent, while never forgetting to remind the well-bred among his readers of the shame of British imperialism and the persistence of white racism.

Conservatives claimed that the slippery foreigner ‘knew what he was doing’. Rushdie deliberately insulted Islam because he wanted to make money from the controversy, and then forced the taxpayer to meet the cost of his police protection. They made him into a figure from Tory fantasy: the highbrow scrounger, the champagne socialist, who collected his royalties while milking the public purse. When a snide Prince Charles joined the hostile chorus, Ian McEwan said that His Royal Highness’s security cost far more, even though the prince ‘had never written anything worth reading’. Understandably, Rushdie was more outraged than amused. It took him four years to write The Satanic Verses. Did his opponents not find it strange that a serious writer would spend a tenth of his life creating something as crude as an insult? But of course, his enemies could not accept that he was a serious writer, he said. In order to attack him and his work, it was necessary to paint him ‘as a bad person, an apostate traitor, an unscrupulous seeker of fame and wealth, an opportunist whose work was without merit, who “attacked Islam” for his own personal gain. This was what was meant by the much-repeated phrase “He did it on purpose”.’

Those who have never believed in universal human rights described the persecution of Rushdie as the first manifestation in the West of a ‘clash of civilisations’. We had ‘our values’ – human rights, freedom of speech – the Islamic world had theirs – fanatical blasphemy laws, the oppression of women – and never the twain would meet.

Rushdie’s persecution and the reactions to it showed that from the beginning the clash-of-civilisations hypothesis was condescending and bovine. It flattered the West by ascribing to its leaders a virtue they did not possess. Hardly anyone in a position of authority was prepared to speak up for ‘our’ values. Religious leaders were as keen as upper-class intellectuals were on shutting up Rushdie. Immanuel Jakobovits, the then Chief Rabbi of Britain, said Penguin should not have published. Robert Runcie, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, proposed that the government extend England’s blasphemy law to cover Islam. In these and similar statements from religious conservatives, you could see Christian and Jewish leaders sensing an opportunity. Maybe they could use the violence of Jamaat and the Khomeinists to create an ecumenical taboo that might protect all religions from criticism, even though those religions were incompatible, and their adherents had spent the best part of two millennia killing each other. If writers became frightened of taking on Islam, the reasoning ran, maybe they would keep away from Christianity and Judaism too.

The Economist looked at the trade unionism of the faithful and said, ‘Rabbis, priests and mullahs are, it seems, uniting to restrain free speech, lest any member of their collective flock should have his feelings hurt … The Rushdie affair is showing not just that some Muslims do not understand the merits of free speech. It shows that many Western clerics do not either.’

Nor did many politicians in Margaret Thatcher’s government and George Bush senior’s administration understand either. ‘The British government, the British people have no affection for this book,’ said Britain’s then Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe. ‘It compares Britain with Hitler’s Germany.’ Rushdie did not compare Britain with Nazi Germany, as it happens, and hundreds of thousands of British readers bought and enjoyed his novels. If these were forgettable mistakes from an ignorant man, Howe’s next words proved fateful. ‘We do not like that any more than people of the Muslim faith like the attacks on their faith.’

Western governments followed the same script. After anti-Rushdie riots in Islamabad, the US State Department said, ‘The Embassy wishes to emphasise that the US government in no way associates itself with any activity that is in any sense offensive to Islam or any other religion.’ Margaret Thatcher, adopting the royal ‘we’ as was her wont in her last days in power, said, ‘We have known in our own religion people doing things which are deeply offensive to some of us. We feel it very much. And that is what is happening to Islam.’ Thatcher’s acolyte Norman Tebbit called Rushdie an ‘outstanding villain’, and asked, ‘How many societies having been so treated by a foreigner accepted in their midst, could go so far to protect him from the consequences of his egotistical and self-opinionated attack on the religion into which he was born?’

From their different perspectives, Susan Sontag, one of Rushdie’s most loyal defenders, Daniel Pipes, an American conservative, and, later, Kenan Malik, a British historian of the struggles for free speech, all noticed the dangers of London and Washington’s stance. They were telling Muslim democrats, free-thinkers, feminists and liberals that human rights were Western rights, and not for brown-skinned people from a clashing ‘civilisation’. You can call this cultural relativism, but ‘racism’ is a blunter and better word.

Consider the position of the West in 1989. It had looked upon Iran as a threat from the moment the ayatollahs took power in 1979. It had given air cover to Saddam Hussein’s genocidal regime during the Iran–Iraq war because it thought that any enemy of Iran was better than none. Western politicians lectured their own Muslim citizens on the need to adapt to the Western way of life, but then assumed that all Muslims wanted to burn books and murder authors. Freedom of speech was a Western value, not a universal right. Muslims could not be expected to handle it.

The best in the Muslim world did not want Westerners to patronise them or protect them from dangerous books. They wanted the freedom to challenge theocracy and tradition. The bravest was the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who put his life on the line by condemning Khomeini as a terrorist. One hundred Arab intellectuals joined him when they came out in solidarity with Rushdie. One hundred and twenty-seven Iranians signed a declaration condemning the ‘terrorist and liberty-cide methods’ of the Islamic Republic.

The Rushdie affair was not a ‘clash of civilisations’ but a struggle for civilisation. On 27 May 1989, rival demonstrations in central London made the choice on offer clear to anyone willing to look. Thousands of anti-Rushdie protesters came to the capital. Malise Ruthven, author of one of the first accounts of the controversy, was shocked by the violence of their slogans. ‘Rushdie is a devil’. ‘Rushdie is a son of Satan’. ‘Kill the bastard’. ‘Jihad on Agnostics’. ‘Devil Rushdie Wanted Dead or Alive’. One poster showed Rushdie, with devil’s horns, hanging from a gallows. Another had his head on the body of a pig surrounded by the Star of David.

Shameless Labour MPs, who were prepared to court the ethnic vote by forgetting what liberal principles they had once possessed, addressed them. Ranged against them in Parliament Square were two counter-demonstrations. Skinheads from the neo-fascist National Front were hanging around on the fringes, looking for a fight. Meanwhile, in the lawn in the centre of the square, a small band of Asian women who ran hostels for battered wives and safe houses for the victims of misogyny staged a protest of their own.

‘Here to doubt/Here to stay/Muslim leaders won’t have their way,’ they chanted. The police had to protect them from the Asian religious demonstrators, who hated them for not being submissive, and from the British neo-fascist demonstrators, who hated them for not being white. The women never forgot the experience of seeing apparent enemies unite against them.

‘Approximately fifty women were marooned between a march of young Asian men calling for a ban on The Satanic Verses and National Front supporters. Instead of tackling the National Front, the Asian men verbally and physically attacked Women Against Fundamentalism, which then had to rely on the police for protection whereas previously WAF members would have been marching alongside their Asian “brothers” against police and state racism!’

They were not all atheists, the women said. They just wanted to be modern British citizens, and to dispute the power of their fathers and brothers to force them into arranged marriages.

The Rushdie Affair became the Dreyfus Affair of our age because it revealed how, when faced the threat of violence, ordinary political categories collapse. Whatever your opinions, if you supported Rushdie, you supported the freedom to write, read and publish what you liked, even when (I would say especially when) books were being burned and death threats issued not in some far away and forgettable dictatorship but in your own land. You supported the rule of law, for Rushdie had committed no crime, and you placed the right of the individual to express him or herself above the rights of the collective. The enemies of Dreyfus said that they must keep an innocent man in prison to protect the collective honour of the French army and French state. The enemies of Rushdie said that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s incitement to murder was understandable or excusable because it protected the collective honour of Muslims. No one who professed a belief in freedom of conscience and thought could hesitate for a moment before taking Rushdie’s side.

Gita Sahgal and her sisters at Women Against Fundamentalism did not have the smallest doubt that Rushdie’s struggle was their struggle, and that Rushdie’s enemies were their enemies. ‘At the heart of the fundamentalist agenda is control of women’s minds and bodies, such as the imposition of restrictions on the right to abortion, on free and equal education and on the right of women to organise autonomously,’ said the group’s statement on Rushdie. ‘We reject the idea the fundamentalists can speak for us. We will continue to doubt and dissent and will carry on the fight for our right to determine our own destinies, not limited by religion, culture or nationality … We are taking this opportunity to reaffirm our solidarity with Salman Rushdie.’

How hard was it to be on their side? Who in conscience would not choose to stand with them and against Jamaat-e-Islami, craven Indian politicians, apartheid South Africa, Islamist Iran, Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, the Tory intelligentsia, the Tory government, shabby Labour MPs playing Chicago politics, book-burners, life-deniers, witch-finders and murderers?

I can place public figures of my generation by where they stood on Rushdie. His friends believed in imaginative freedom and the right of the individual to argue with the world. Even if they did not agree with him, they knew that those who were trying to silence him would silence millions if they could. His enemies did then and have since put the collective before the individual. The conservatives among them talked about realpolitik and keeping the natives happy. The leftists talked of the rights of ‘the other’ and cultural imperialism. Both would throw out freedom of thought, freedom of speech and the rights of women, if sectarian power or realpolitik demanded it.

Hundreds of thousands of people thought that the choice between defending Rushdie or joining his critics was no choice at all. They ensured that the censors could not stop The Satanic Verses, although the censors inflicted a terrible price. An unknown assailant murdered Hitoshi Igarashi, The Satanic Verses’ Japanese translator, by stabbing him in the face. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was knifed in his apartment in Milan, but lived. William Nygaard, Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher, was shot three times and left for dead at his home in an Oslo suburb. Nygaard was not a man who frightened easily. He recovered, and published the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, who had described the massacres of Hindus in the 1971 genocide, and received the obligatory death threats. In Turkey, the satirist Aziz Nesin started a translation. On 2 July 1993 he attended an Alevi cultural festival in the central Anatolian city of Sivas. Alevis are a tolerant and egalitarian Shia sect, and suffer the consequences. A mob gathered around the hotel where the Alevis were staying, calling for Sharia law and death to infidels. Nesin and many guests escaped. The killers murdered thirty-seven others.

The victims did not appear to have suffered in vain. Rushdie lived, and The Satanic Verses remained in print and sold around the world. Battered but unbeaten, liberalism triumphed.

Or appeared to triumph.

For here is something strange. Between the fatwa and the present, religious killers have murdered just one Western artist – the Dutch director Theo van Gogh, assassinated in 2004 for making a film with the Somali feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yet in the same period Western culture changed, and not for the better. The change can fit into a sentence. No young artist of Rushdie’s range and gifts would dare write a modern version of The Satanic Verses today, and if he or she did, no editor would dare publish it.