The Satanic Verses marked a turning point in relations between Muslims and the West, writes Kevan Malik
May 06
IN February 1989 I was in Bradford, a grey town in northern England dominated by derelict woollen mills, huge Victorian structures that seemed to reach up into the clouds. A decaying town of little note: until a month earlier, that is, when 1000 Muslim protesters marched with a copy of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses before ceremoniously burning it. The book was tied to a stake before being set alight in front of the police station.
It was an act calculated to shock and offend. It did more than that. The burning book became a symbol of the rage of Islam.
Sent across the world by the news media, the image proclaimed, "I am a portent of a new kind of conflict and of a new kind of world."
Ten months after that demonstration an even more arresting image captured the world's imagination: protesters pulling apart the Berlin Wall. These two images -- the burning book in Bradford, the crumbling wall in Berlin -- came to be inextricably linked in many people's minds.
As the Cold War ended, so the clash of ideologies that had defined the world since 1945 seemed to give way to what American political scientist Samuel Huntington would later make famous as the clash of civilisations (a phrase he had borrowed from historian Bernard Lewis). The conflicts that had convulsed Europe through the past centuries, Huntington wrote, from the wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics to the Cold War, were all "conflicts within Western civilisation".
The "battle lines of the future" would be between civilisations. Huntington identified several civilisations but predicted the primary struggle would be between the Christian West and the Islamic East. Such a struggle would be "far more fundamental" than any war unleashed by "differences among political ideologies and political regimes".
Huntington did not write those words until 1993. But already, four years earlier, many had seen in the Rushdie affair just such a civilisational struggle. On one side of the fault line stood the West, with its liberal democratic traditions, a scientific world view and a secular, rationalist culture drawn from the Enlightenment; on the other was Islam, rooted in a pre-medieval theology, with its seeming disrespect for democracy, disdain for scientific rationalism and deeply illiberal attitudes on everything from crime to women's rights.
"All over again," novelist Martin Amis would later write, "the West confronts an irrationalist, agonistic, theocratic-ideocratic system which is essentially and unappeasably opposed to its existence." Amis wrote that while still in shock over the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US. The germ of the sentiment was planted much earlier, in the Rushdie affair.
Shocked by the sight of British Muslims threatening a British author and publicly burning his book, many people started asking a question that in 1989 was startlingly new: Are Islamic values compatible with those of a modern, Western, liberal democracy?
I had watched the burning of The Satanic Verses with more than a passing interest. Like Rushdie, I was born in India, in Secunderabad, not far from the writer's birthplace of Mumbai, but grew up in Britain. Like Rushdie, I was of a generation that did not think of itself as Muslim or Hindu or Sikh, or even as Asian, but rather as black. Black was for us not an ethnic label but a political badge. Unlike our parents' generation, which had largely put up with discrimination, we were fierce in our opposition to racism.
Kenan Malik explores these ideas in his new book, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy, to be published in July by Atlantic Books.
Source: The Australian
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