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Secular Discourse and the Clash of Faiths: ‘The Satanic Verses’ in British Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Gavin D'Costa
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Let us never believe that the way in which the people in power tell us to look at the world is the only way we can look, because if we do that, then that’s a kind of appalling selfcensorship. (Salman Rushdie).

In Britain we believe in live and let live ... Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists and Rastafarians are all welcome to our tolerant society. But there is only one law for all of us ... Those who say their deep religious convictions prevent them from obeying the law of this land should quit Britain immediately and go and live in a country where the conflict does not exist. (Sunday Sport, 19 February, 1989 — editorial on Rushdie).

So the battle over The Satanic Verses is a clash of faiths, in a way. Or, more precisely, it’s a clash of languages. (Salman Rushdie, The Observer, 22 January, 1989).

Britain’s prized tolerant and pluralist society began to exhibit the power of its master code from the beginning of 1989, following the highly publicised second attempt at book burning by Bradford Muslims in January, 1989. (The first protest in Bolton, in December 1988, failed to get any media coverage—so it was repeated after advice that the national media be duly invited!). Text burning was encoded and enmeshed into two curiously related histories: that of Nazism and that of the history of religious bigotry and intolerance. Hence, from a major national quality paper: ‘following the example of the Inquisition and Hitler’s National Socialists, a large crowd of Muslims burnt some copies of the book’ (The Independent, 16 January, 1989).

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 71 , Issue 842 , October 1990 , pp. 418 - 432
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 From an interview on the Bandung File, Channel 4, 14 February 1989, cited in edited Appignanesi, L. & Maitland, S., The Rushdie File, Fourth Estate, London, 1989, p. 29Google Scholar.

2 See B. Parekh, ‘The Rushdie Affair and the British Press: Some Salutory Lessons’, in Free Speech, Commission for Racial Equality, 1990, p. 62.

3 For some analysis of internal Muslim differences see Ruthven, M., A Satanic Affair, Chatto & Windus, London, 1990Google Scholar; A. Al‐Azmeh, ‘The Satanic Flame’, New Statesman & Society, 20 January, 1989, pp. 16–7; B. Parekh, ‘Between holy text and moral void’, New Statesman and Society, 13 March, 1989, pp. 29–33; T. Modood, ‘Religious Anger and Minority Rights’, The Political Quarterly, July‐September, 1989, pp. 280–84.

4 Certeau, M. de, The Writing of History, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988, p. 30Google Scholar. I am indebted to Ken Surin for this quotation as well as the inspiration of his excellent article: ‘A Certain “Politics of Speech”: Towards an Understanding of the relationship Between Religions in the Age of the McDonald's Hamburger’, in ed. D'Costa, G., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, Orbis Press, New York, 1990Google Scholar. See also Foucault, M., The Archaeology of Knowledge, Tavistock Publications, London, 1972 (ET), esp. Pt. IIGoogle Scholar.

5 Rushdie, S., Is Nothing Sacred?, Granta, Cambridge, 1990, p. 5Google Scholar.

6 See Needham, A., ‘The Politics of Post‐Colonial Identity in Salman Rushdie’, The Massachusetts Review, 29, 1988/89, pp. 602–24Google Scholar; Amanuddin, S., ‘The Novels of Salman Rushdie: mediated reality as fantasy’, World Literature Today, 63, 1989, pp. 42–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Rushdie sanctioned this wider application ‘to just about any religion’ in an interview given to India Today, see eds. Appignanesi & Maitland, ibid, p. 39.

8 M. Dummett, The Independent, 11 February, 1990, p. 21.

9 See M. Ibn Ally's contribution to Law, Blasphemy and the Multi‐Faith Society, Commission for Racial Equality, 1989, pp. 21–2. This should not obscure the undoubted racism in much of the representation of the events and issues.

10 From American writers in support of Rushdie (February, 1989), cited in eds. Appignanesi & Maitland, ibid, p. 117. See Said's Orientalism, Pantheon Books, New York, 1978Google Scholar; and also, Covering Islam. How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981Google Scholar. He uses the word ‘Orientalism’ to indicate the systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage–and even produce–the Orient. Said's own attitude to the Rushdie affair is ambivalent.

11 See Said op. cit. Daniel, Norman, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, University Press, Edinburgh, 1960Google Scholar; and The Arabs and Medieval Europe, Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1975Google Scholar. Daniel acts as a counterbalance to some of Said's excesses, as does Southern, R.W., Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 1962CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Cited in Said, Orientalism, p. 66.

13 R. Kabani, ‘Words for Rushdie’, New Statesman and Society, 31 March, 1989, p. 27. Kabani, however, fails to point out that Rushdie is aware of the medieval usage of ‘Mahound’.

14 N. Daniel, The Arabs and Medieval Europe, p. 231.

15 Said, ibid, p. 206.

16 Said, ibid, p. 122; see also Hacker, P., Kleine Schriften, Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1978Google Scholar, for essays tracing certain modern Hindus' self‐representation in the image of the German Romantic tradition in which German Orientalists had constructed Hinduism; see also Chaudhuri, N., Hinduism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979Google Scholar, especially part 1. P. Almond has now provided an archaeology of Buddhism within British Orientalism in The British Discovery of Buddhism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988.

17 This is why Brennan is incorrect in locating Rushdie's critique in the Sufi tradition, an interpretation not supported by Rushdie's essays. See. Brennan, T., Salman Rushdie and the Third World: The Myths of the Nation, Mcmillan, London, 1990Google Scholar.

18 Rushdie, S., The Satanic Verses, Viking, Penguin, 1988, p. 93Google Scholar.

19 Daniel, ibid, p. 231.

20 For a more detailed discussion of Rushdie's portrayal of Islam in the book, see Akhtar, S., Be Careful with Muhammad! The Salman Rushdie Affair, Bellew Publishing, London, 1989Google Scholar, esp. chs 1–2; B. Parekh, ‘The holy text and the moral void’, ibid; A. Marrui, ‘The Satanic Verses or a Satanic Novel? Moral Dilemmas of the Rushdie Affair’, in Free Speech, Commission for Racial Equality, 1989, pp. 79–103.

21 Rushdie, ibid, pp. 382–83.

22 Rushdie, Bandung File, ibid, p. 30.

23 Parekh, ‘The Rushdie Affair’, ibid, pp. 61–2.

24 B. Parekh, The Independent on Sunday, 11 February, 1990, p. 21.

25 See, for example, Chadwick, O., The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988Google Scholar; Berger, P., Facing up to Modernity, Penguin, London, 1979Google Scholar; MacIntyre, A., After Virtue, Duckworth, London, 1981Google Scholar.

26 See B. Parekh, ‘Rushdie and the British Press’, Social Studies Review, November 1989, pp. 44–7.

27 The Independent on Sunday, 11 February, 1990, p. 21.

28 The further irony is that the same theatre that removed Perdition, the Royal Court, mounted Tariq Ali and Howard Brenton's play Iranian Nights—appropriately criticised for perpetuating gross misunderstandings of Muslims by D. Caute, in ‘Iranian Nights’, New Statesman and Society, 25 April, 1989, pp. 14–6. See also S. Benton's catalogue of socially accepted limitations to freedoms in British society: ‘Do we really want freedom?’, New Statesman and Society, 3 March, 1989, pp. 12–3.

29 Ally, ibid, pp. 21–2.

30 Mazrui, ibid, p. 85.

31 Ally, ibid, pp. 23–4.

32 See S. Poulter, ‘Cultural Pluralism and its Limits: A Legal Perspective’, in Britain: A Plural Society, Commission for Racial Equality, 1989, pp. 3–28; see also the excellent legal discussion of S. Lee, in Law, Blasphemy and the Multi‐Faith Society, pp. 4–20; and A. Allot, ‘Religious Pluralism and the Law in England and Africa. A Case Study’, in ed. Ian Hamnett, Religious Pluralism and Unbelief. Routledge, London 1990, pp. 205–26.

33 The Independent on Sunday, 11 February, 1990, p. 20.

34 See MacIntyre, A., Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Duckworth, London, 1988Google Scholar.

35 See Kerr, F., Theology after Wittgenstein, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986Google Scholar for a penetrating criticism of Cartesian foundationalism.

36 All subsequent page references given in the text, and those with ‘I’ preceding the page number, refer to Rushdie's article in The Independent on Sunday, 14 February, 1990.

37 S. Mendus, ‘The Tigers of Wrath and the Horses of Instruction’, Free Speech, pp. 3–17.

38 Rushdie, S., Shame, Jonathan Cape, London, 1983, p. 71Google Scholar.

39 Appendix E, Law, Blasphemy and the Multi‐Faith Society, p. 89, and p. 39 for Ven. Vajiragnana's agreement on the WBO's statement, made before the Rushdie Affair.