[Reader-list] Does Salman Rushdie Exist?

[Amit Chaturvedi]

https://personalconcerns.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/satanic-verses/

On 30 January 2012 08:12, Yousuf <ysaeed7 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> These were exactly some of my thoughts when the book came out 24 years ago:
> ----------
>
> Does Salman Rushdie Exist?
> OXFORD DIARY | Faisal Devji
>
> The recent controversy over Salman Rushdie’s non-appearance at the Jaipur
> Literary Festival has been widely understood in the stereotyped terms of a
> threat to the freedom of expression. The belligerence of those Muslims
> protesting Rushdie’s presence, of course, as well as the eagerness of some
> Indian authorities to humour them, was entirely reprehensible. But lost in
> the anodyne narrative about free expression was also the controversy’s
> political meaning, which I will argue had little to do either with Rushdie
> or indeed the offended religious sentiments of certain Muslims. Instead
> this celebrated author has been reduced to a kind of billboard upon which
> almost any cause can be advertised, and it is in this purely functional
> guise that he is recognized in India, whether by supporters for whom
> “Salman Rushdie” represents the long siege of free expression in that
> country, or detractors who gain visibility for a variety of unrelated
> agendas by
>  threatening him. In this sense Rushdie, whose literary reputation has
> been in decline since The Satanic Verses, is no longer a writer at all but
> more like one of his own fictional characters, Gibreel Farishta to some and
> Mahound for others. The one thing not at issue in the Jaipur controversy
> was some theologically motivated attack on the freedom of expression.
>
> Of course Rushdie’s many defenders all recognize the opportunistic element
> in the threats levelled at him in Jaipur, tied as these were to the
> calculations of electoral politics in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where a
> number of parties are jockeying for the support of Muslim voters. This is
> why Rushdie’s previous appearance at the festival, in 2007, and his visits
> to India more generally created no stir. But instead of attending more
> closely to these circumstances in order to think seriously about the
> changing place and politics of free speech in contemporary India, its
> proponents have lapsed into an anachronistic narrative about circumscribing
> the reach of religious dogma in social life. In doing so these individuals
> have betrayed an attitude as “theological” as that attributed to their
> enemies. None have expressed a scintilla of self-doubt about this narrative
> or bothered to submit the position of their opponents to critical scrutiny,
> even as
>  they routinely berate the latter for behaving in exactly this manner.
> Rushdie himself led the way here, claiming quite falsely in a television
> interview with the Indian journalist Barkha Dutt that the famously
> nationalist seminary of Deoband, whose secretary-general had sought to
> prevent his visit to Jaipur, was responsible for the Taliban’s emergence.
>
> Rushdie's defenders claim that India’s tolerance of threats against free
> expression has remained unchanged since 1988, when The Satanic Verses was
> first banned, and that this tolerance is on display today in the Indian
> government’s efforts to win Muslim votes. This shows a decided contempt for
> history. Neglecting as they do the great transformations that Indian
> society has undergone in the last two decades for an account in which
> everything is timeless, they are unable to grasp the nature even of those
> political circumstances making for the controversy in which they are
> engaged. Far from illustrating yet another example of pandering to “vote
> banks,” today’s politics of Muslim representation in Uttar Pradesh, but
> also in the country as a whole, is unprecedented in the history of
> independent India. For the country’s large population of impoverished and
> marginalized Muslims, lacking any credible leadership, stands today on the
> threshold of its
>  most significant transformation since the partition of British India in
> 1947. Having quite understandably lost their political character with the
> creation of Pakistan that year, India’s Muslims have in the past
> half-century participated in their country’s politics mostly as
> self-seeking opportunists, supplicants, fixers or, at most, as the holders
> of a balance of power at the local level.
>
> Today these Muslims are poised for inclusion in the vast system of
> reservations (positive discrimination or affirmative action in education
> and employment) that have in the last two decades propelled lower caste
> groups to political power in India. Problematic and contradictory though it
> is in many respects, the system of reservations nevertheless constitutes
> the primary way in which political integration and empowerment is now
> achieved in the country. It is because Muslims have not been integrated
> into India’s political process that they are amenable to “religious” forms
> of mobilization as well as militancy. Integrating Muslims by invoking caste
> reservations as a model, however, not only risks displacing religion as a
> mobilizing factor, but is already beginning to fragment this “community”
> along socio-economic lines, with “backward” groups preferred over “forward”
> ones. Attempts to create Muslim solidarity on a strictly religious basis,
>  then, might well indicate a desire among some to forestall such an
> eventuality, creating media-amplified controversies like the one in Jaipur
> to jockey for position by in effect depoliticizing Muslims. For these forms
> of solidarity are invariably defensive and politically negative in nature,
> being incapable of proposing any vision of a future for the community.
> Given its lack of any popular response, however, this particular attempt
> seems to have failed as far as India’s Muslims are concerned.
>
> None of this is of any concern to the defenders of free expression, who
> are thus unable to understand the controversy that so preoccupies them, one
> in which Rushdie and his writing are, strictly speaking, irrelevant. This
> failure of understanding, I suspect, is built into the anachronistic
> language of freedom of expression, which is premised upon the existence of
> theological and other illiberal threats directed against it. But apart from
> some invocations of apostasy, which lent the radical novelty of Muslim
> protest in 1988 a suitably medieval veneer, this was not even the case in
> the original “Rushdie Affair,” when the closest Muslim protestors came to a
> theological argument was to demand that their religion be included under
> Britain’s blasphemy law. In other words the only traditionally religious
> element of that controversy had to do with Christianity, and with the
> desire of Muslim immigrants to be integrated into British society. Otherwise
>  Muslims demonstrating against Rushdie referred to their feelings of
> outrage at his depiction of Muhammad by using the secular language of
> libel, defamation and hate-speech. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini’s infamous
> edict made no reference to any theological point, not least because his
> Shiite creed gives no credence to the story of scriptural interpolation
> upon which Rushdie’s offending book was based.
>
> Great writers are meant to have a privileged insight into the societies
> and issues they analyze, but Rushdie was alone in focusing on the religious
> element of the controversy that overtook him. For the weight that The
> Satanic Verses gave the eminently theological issue of scriptural
> interpolation evoked no response from his Muslim foes. These men and women
> were concerned instead with defending a prophet who seems to have lost his
> religious status and become a ward of his followers, vulnerable to attack
> precisely because he was no longer a theological figure but integral rather
> for their personal identity. Indeed one reason why even the most virulent
> attacks on God give rise to no upheaval in the Muslim world, something that
> only insults to the Prophet and his Book are capable of doing, is because
> the former has suffered a kind of “death” while the latter has increasingly
> been divested of his metaphysical attributes. Providing as it did an
> occasion
>  for the first great demonstration of Islam’s globalization, the “Rushdie
> Affair” also signalled the breakdown of traditional metaphysics and
> theological modes of authority to democratize Islam, as if in a Reformation
> of the kind that so many critics of Muslim radicalism yearn for without
> realizing the violent consequences this event had for Christian Europe.
>
> As an admirer of Rushdie’s earlier work I remember being disappointed when
> The Satanic Verses first came out in 1988. It wasn’t provocative enough in
> my eyes, being taken up with an undergraduate reading of a theological
> issue that had long become irrelevant in the Muslim world. I also found the
> book annoying because it made no attempt to address those whose beliefs it
> apparently dealt with, instead situating its author in a position familiar
> from colonial times, as the native informant there to traduce his people
> for the pleasure and plaudits of foreigners. Of course this did not justify
> threatening Rushdie with violence or even banning his book, but what I
> found interesting was the fact that in the course of the controversy his
> Muslim critics managed to forcibly insert themselves into the exclusive
> conversation he had set up with their religion as its subject. Unacceptable
> as they were, the threats against Rushdie offered him the opportunity to
>  become a real hero in the cause of free expression. But he has never had
> the courage of his convictions, first voicing his contempt of Rajiv Gandhi
> for banning the book in a context where Indian citizens were being killed
> in police firing, then apologizing to the Iranian regime for writing it,
> only to recant once again when his contrition wasn’t deemed to go far
> enough.
>
> Even in Jaipur, where there was no credible threat to Rushdie’s person, as
> he admitted in a television interview with Barkha Dutt, the great defender
> of free expression chose to stay away in order, he said, to protect others
> from possible violence. These are noble sentiments, no doubt, but crowds
> can be controlled and buildings secured, with Rushdie’s arrival in the city
> capable of galvanizing both the government and his supporters to face the
> threat they so persistently inveigh against. Was it not a risk worth taking
> for the cause of freedom of expression? But these apostles of the principle
> have always shirked displaying the kind of courage by which India’s own
> freedom was won, instead calling for the deployment of the state’s
> repressive force against their enemies. Well, they are entitled by law to
> such protection, but the inability to stand up for so dearly held a
> principle in its absence does little to inspire confidence. The only people
> who
>  behaved with dignity during this sorry affair were the organizers of the
> Jaipur Literary Festival, who understood their duty to the organization,
> its sponsors, participants and audience, and in doing so realized the
> shallowness of the posturing over free expression that threatened to derail
> the event. Perhaps the refusal of any political party in the country to
> weigh in on this controversy, even if only to score debating points with a
> rival, has little to do with some absurd fear of alienating voters. It is
> motivated rather by the recognition of Rushdie’s anachronism in today’s
> India, with its many new problems and great promise for a democratic future.
>
> I am grateful to Shruti Kapila, with whom I talked and thought this piece
> through.
>
> --
>
> Faisal Devji is University Reader in Modern South Asian History at St.
> Antony's College, Oxford University, and the author of two books,
> Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Hurst, 2005), and
> The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics
> (Hurst, 2009).
>
>
> http://www.currentintelligence.net/analysis/2012/1/30/does-salman-rushdie-exist.html
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-- 
Amit Chaturvedi
Ph.D. student,
Department of Sociology,
Delhi School of Economics,
University of Delhi.
Blog:https://personalconcerns.wordpress.com/