Rushdie 2 Index on Censorship, etno, islam

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Index on Censorship
Shadow of the Fatwa
Kenan Malik
Index on Censorship
2008 37: 112
DOI: 10.1080/03064220802519588
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- Nov 1, 2008
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SHADOW OF
THE FATWA
Salman Rushdie’s critics lost the battle, but they won
the war against free speech, says Kenan Malik
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Demonstration outside Houses of Parliament, 1989
Credit: Eddie Boldizsar/Rex Features
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.’
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THE SATANIC VERSES AT 20
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 RandomHouse 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’.
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SHADOW OF THE FATWA
–
KENAN MALIK
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
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