Englands Darkest Knight

Wednesday, 02 July 2008 20:00 Sheharyar Shaikh Editorial Dept - Middle East
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The Queen of England, Her Majesty Elizabeth II, who was once likened by Salman Rushdie to a “smoked fish full of spikes and bones”, decided to honor Rushdie with knighthood for his “invaluable services towards literature”. The incident raises the questions of merit, timing and the Queen’s better judgment as well as that of a befitting Muslim reaction to an untoward provocation.

Going through blogs and emails, I found that many British consider Rushdie a heroic symbol of the West’s commitment to freedom of speech against the deadly forces of Islamic fanaticism. While some feel that the author received the award for his symbolic importance rather than the literary quality of his work, others ask: “How has Rushdie contributed to the lives of ordinary Brits, who have dished out millions of pounds for his protection, to now be referred to as “Sir” Salman?”

On the issue of freedom of speech, Muslims and many fair-minded people, British or not, note a double standard at play here. The freedom of speech is a cherished notion of the Western societies, and it should be, but it must be tempered in due measure with a sense of responsibility. It is not an absolute right. Imagine had Rushdie produced a novel depicting a fictitious people called The Slime as the curse of the world, warmongers, killers of Jesus and had celebrated Hitler as a hero-savior for eliminating them in large numbers, would the justifications had been:

 

“Oh God, it is only a work of fiction…”
“It is our notion of free speech, so live with it!”
“Go and read the book first” etc.?

Just to mention, merely denying the event of the Holocaust is a punishable crime in fourteen countries, including ours, precisely because we understand and accept that words, like bullets, have the power to hurt and are thus to be used responsibly in public. The Queen, whose honor is legally guarded in Britain, should know this more than anyone else. Would she have conferred the knighthood on Rushdie had Rushdie earned global recognition for insulting her person or her church?

But what did Rushdie write that was so offensive to the Muslims? Rushdie deliberately entitled his book The Satanic Verses so as to highlight a historical incident reported by Ibn Sa’d and al-Tabari involving Satanic intervention during the Prophet’s revelation process. The two verses allegedly inspired by Satan lauded the three pagan goddesses worshiped at the time and were later discredited by the Prophet in the same report as not part of the Quran. (Modern Islamic scholarship however has proven the entire incident as fictitious). Rushdie intently chooses the name “Mahound”, a corruption of Muhammed considered synonymous with the Devil in Medieval Europe, for one of the characters who incidentally is a “businessman-turned-prophet”. Rushdie’s Mahound is so amorous of Medinan women that his beard turns white in a year due to “God’s own permission to f*ck as many women as he liked”. Hijab, a noble Islamic concept, becomes a brothel in Rushdie’s twisted mind housing twelve whores that take the names and attributes of the Prophet’s wives. Eventually the twelve whores become so known for their sexual ministrations that their eager clients perform a Tawaf – a term denoting the circumambulation of the holy Ka’ba – around the brothel. Using fantasy as cover, Rushdie’s seething pen subjects Islamic heroes and figures to the vilest abuse: Bilal becomes “the enormous black monster”, Salman as “some sort of bum from Persia”, Abraham as “a b*stard” and the Prophet’s Companions as “f*cking clowns. (Nastaghfirullah min dhalik – We seek forgiveness from it).

'The Satanic Verses'

Rushdie, who declared having “a childhood of blasphemy” and as an adolescent found perverse pleasure in drawing the Arabic script for Allah “so that it resembled the figure of a naked woman” openly admitted once in a televised interview that his book The Satanic Verses is “almost entirely” based on the Qur’an and Islamic history.

It is of no wonder that the ex-President Jimmy Carter, a fair-minded Christian, was reported by NY Times as saying: “…we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgement that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated…” Predominantly non-Muslim countries like India, Kenya, Venezuela, Thailand and even South Africa banned Rushdie’s book owing to its offensive content within months of its appearance.

Yet the British High Commissioner to Pakistan, Robert Brinkley, denies that conferring knighthood on Rushdie was in any way an insult to Islam or the Prophet Muhammed. John Reid, the British Home Secretary reminds the Muslims to be “sensitive” and flatly refuses to apologize for honoring Rushdie 18 years after the first publication of his Satanic verses. The director of research at London’s Chatham House think tank, Rosemary Hollis, insists that “they (the nominating committee) really didn't consider the potential reaction,” Right. The truth is that the timing of this episode is clearly no fluke. One can easily surmise that the British government, which is an arm-in-arm ally of Bush’s hopeless war on terrorism, would have anticipated a fervent Muslim reaction against the Queen, provoked or not, quite handy for sustaining and shoring up domestic support for the failing wars abroad – wars that are incurring daily costs in terms of British money and lives amid growing public anger. Possibly the provocation was also intended to divert attention from the current woes of a Western-installed puppet military dictator in Pakistan, General Musharraf, who faces nation-wide protests for undermining the judiciary.

On the other extreme a tiny group of misguided Muslims never misses an opportunity to have a billion Muslims portrayed as highly irrational, unstable and reactionary to the slightest provocation from anywhere. Take for example Pakistan’s stage comedian-cum-religious affairs minister, Ijaz ul-Haq, who made a mockery of the 1200-year Islamic legal tradition by proposing a suicide bombing as the right response to uphold Prophet’s honor. What irony! The Islamic civilization that introduced to the world a proper court structure and seeking recourse through due process of the law finds itself tainted by ignorant calls for vigilantism and chaos (What, I wonder, the Barelvis made of Haq’s remark whose leadership regularly condemns the Deobandis, the academics and the Ahl-e Hadith for denigrating the Prophet).

The best way to deal with the Rushdie affair, as our Executive Director, Farouq Khan, rightly pointed out, is to set up an International Islamic Court of Justice through the OIC representing a panel of top judges from 54 Islamic countries. The court would subpoena Rushdie from England by an international arrest warrant on charges of heresy and blasphemy against Islam. The accused would be given every right to present his case and if convicted guilty would then be sentenced in accordance with the Shari’ah. In the case of England’s refusal to hand over Rushdie diplomatic pressure and subsequent economic sanctions would be imposed by the Islamic nations until the British authorities understand the costs of holding on to Rushdie as far outweighing his benefit to them. Dealing through a collaborative legal channel, not noisy protest marches, will undoubtedly grant legitimacy and pragmatism to the cause. Even if England realizes the risk of losing nearly a billion dollar a year worth of Arab tourism revenue as a small motivating factor be sure to have Rushdie offered stripped naked on a plate – along with his girlfriend.

Burning a British flag and chanting “Death to the Queen!” outside London’s Regent’s Park mosque, or any where else in the world for that matter, is not only impractical and an immature way to address the issue, it is bound to confirm to the world the many lies and fears perpetrated by the media against the Muslims. We must come to understand that we abide a world where books will be written, statements will be made, cartoon will be drawn, and movies will be produced, and unless we are able to deal with these instigations effectively, we might be better off ignoring them altogether. After all, the true status of Salman Rushdie does not change whether he is awarded knighthood once – or a thousand times.

But as a noted Islamic scholar recently put it: “They set a trap for us and we fall right in”.

Images Courtesy of WikiPedia and WikiMedia



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