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Another Friday in Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi -- and as if on cue, the
hoarse, bearded and pyromaniacal pour out of the mosques into the
streets armed with Union Jacks and effigies of Queen Elizabeth II, Tony
Blair and the newly knighted Sir Salman Rushdie. Having protested
Danish cartoons and popish detours into Byzantine history to the point
of exhaustion, the proverbial Muslim street is once again seething.
Pakistan's minister of religious affairs said Mr. Rushdie's award
justified suicide bombings, while a group of traders in Islamabad banded
together to place a $140,000 bounty on his head. Fathi Sorour, the
speaker of Egypt's parliament, declared that, "Honoring someone who has
offended the Muslim religion is a bigger error than the publication of
caricatures attacking Prophet Muhammad." Malaysian protesters besieged
the British high commission (embassy) in Kuala Lumpur chanting, "Destroy
Britain" and "Crush Salman Rushdie." With the irony perhaps lost in
translation, Iran, whose president thinks nothing of threatening to wipe
Israel off the map, condemned the award and called it a clear sign of
(that mysterious new ailment) "Islamophobia."
For many of us, however, her majesty's conferral is a welcome example
of something that has grown exceedingly rare: British backbone. After
years of kowtowing to every fundamentalist demand imaginable -- from
accommodating the burqa in schools and colleges to re-orienting prison
toilets to face away from Mecca -- the British seem to be saying enough
is enough. Nobody expects Mr. Rushdie to be awarded the Nishan-e-Pakistan,
the Collar of the Nile or Iran's Islamic Republic Medal, but in Britain,
as elsewhere in the civilized world, great novelists are honored for
their work. A pinched view of the human condition or poorly imagined
characters may harm your prospects. Blasphemy does not.
In the larger struggle against Islamism -- the ideology that demands
that every aspect of human life be ordered by the seventh-century
Arabian precepts enshrined in Shariah law -- the Rushdie affair carries
totemic significance. In 1989 the late Ayatollah Khomeini declared a
price on Mr. Rushdie's head for the crime of apostasy, after reading
about his mockery of the prophet Mohammed in "The Satanic Verses." At
the time, few could have predicted that this was merely the first act of
a drama that's still unfolding.
Eighteen years after the ayatollah's fatwa, since lifted, but thanks
to freelance fanaticism, never quite extinguished, the Bombay-born Mr.
Rushdie has managed to lead a full life. He has turned out eight novels
and essay collections, married twice (most recently the model and
actress Padma Lakshmi), mentored a generation of young Indians writing
in English, and spoken out against obscurantism and religious bigotry of
every stripe. He has also witnessed -- mirrored in his own predicament
-- the consequences of a Europe too paralyzed by deathwish
multiculturalism and moral relativism to recognize the danger it faces.
It has become a continent where an Islamist stabs a film director in
broad daylight in Amsterdam, where bombs go off in Madrid commuter
trains and London buses, where writers, directors and cartoonists
suddenly find themselves bound by sensitivities imported not merely from
alien lands but from another age altogether.
No Western country has done more to accommodate Islamists than
Britain, and none better shows the folly of this course. Successive
governments feted organizations such as the Muslim Council of Britain
and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, and welcomed as refugees a
stable of jihadist clerics, including the Syrian-born Omar Bakri
Muhammad and the hook-handed Abu Hamza al-Masri. Rather than moderate
Muslim passions, this climate of permissiveness gave us Richard Reid the
shoe bomber, Daniel Pearl's murderer, Omar Saeed Sheikh, the quartet
behind the 2005 London bombings and the plotters who ensured that we
must now worry about carrying moisturizing lotion and baby formula each
time we board an airplane. A recent poll by Policy Exchange, a London
think tank, shows that 28% of British Muslims would rather live under
Shariah than under British law.
But at last it looks like the pendulum has begun to swing the other
way. Mr. Rushdie's elevation signals an intention to draw a line between
respecting Islam and allowing a small minority of Islamists to impose
their hairtrigger hysteria on secular Muslims and non-Muslims. It
highlights two of the core values of Western civilization conspicuously
absent in most of the Muslim world: freedom of speech and freedom of
inquiry. It squarely rejects the notion that the fossilized norms of
Mecca and Mashhad hold sway over Manchester and Middlesex, and beyond
them, over Malmo and Minneapolis. Above all, it honors a brave man who
has come to symbolize our turbulent times. A little old-fashioned
British spine has never been more welcome.
Mr. Dhume is a fellow at the Asia Society in Washington, D.C. "My
Friend the Fanatic," his book about the rise of radical Islam in
Indonesia, will be published next year. |
Salman Rushdie by Kyle Kassidy
When I heard about this knighting I was
stunned. I'm also thrilled that someone has enough backbone to recognize
literary excellence in the face of religious wrath. It seems many are
willing to put aside basic human freedoms of choice to appease these
fundamentalists who would rather we go back 1000 years.
Thank god, freedom of speech still rises
over demagoguery in some places. |
