Of fatwa, freedom and a fake name

“‘What will be will be’?—
A vain Tautology!
O passive friend
Just come with me!”
From Khayyam’s Temptations
by Bachchoo

Salman Rushdie has at last published the memoirs of his tribulations and triumphs under the shadow of the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini and reiterated by those who think (is that an appropriate verb?) that abuse of their religious sentiment is a capital offence. I desperately want to read it but was told by my local bookshop that it wasn’t yet out. I saw Rushdie on a news programme in which he said that the fatwa against The Satanic Verses was the precursor to 9/11.
At first this connection to our continuing age of Islamist terror escaped me, but as I meditated and said a small prayer to be granted wisdom, I saw it. The Great Satan must be behind both the bad book and any tall building which house the administrative machinery of capitalistic degeneration. Hah! So, perhaps, Rushdie is right and The Satanic Verses was at the hub of contemporary world history.
The “affaire Satanique” certainly was, in Britain at least, a point at which the “multiculturalism” of the country needed re-examination and, perhaps, redefinition. Here were thousands of Bangladeshi and Mirpuri Muslims holding rallies on Britain’s streets and burning copies of a book by a fellow immigrant British writer.
The Muslims who gathered to burn the book, and publicly vow to carry out the Ayatollah’s death threat, had not read it. Several of them were asked by reporters and contemptuously replied that they would rather die than read blasphemous rubbish. Rushdie obviously didn’t share their religious sentiments and, however committed he may still be to direct protest on the streets in support of this or that cause, would not have participated in book-burning even if the book was a contemporary Mein Kampf.
So if Britain’s multiculture was and is the effulgence of its multi-ethnicity, the development of this diversity would bear looking at. One didn’t have to look too hard. The writer was from a subcontinental class whose individuals came to Britain to study and imbibed and enrolled in the intellectual traditions of the West. In Rushdie’s case Cambridge, satirical theatre, a flirtation with left-wing politics, educated and certainly middle-class partners, world literature from Tristram Shandy to Günter Grasse and Gabriel Marcia Márquez and an attitude to being free to say what one chose however critical of power or piety.
The book-burners and fatwa-ists or their fathers came to Britain from, in the main, rural Pakistan or Bangladesh to work in the mills, on the night shifts of factories or to clean the streets and as a consequence to set up enclaves if not ghettos of ethnicity. They would not have attempted to read Finnegans Wake.
Multiculturalism was the attempt of liberal Britain, first unofficially and then officially, to accommodate this new population. It was a hard ride through the Sixties and Seventies when schools altered their uniform codes to accommodate covered legs and heads for Muslim girls, changed their school catering to accommodate halal meat, suspended the protocols of swimming lessons, celebrated Diwali and Id and modified the curriculum of Religious Studies to include Hinduism and Islam.
There were accommodations beyond schools in the wider society, though they never amounted to changing the law to include the precepts of Sharia. Awkward questions arose. Could multiculture include Sharia practice on divorce or did British secular law hold? What did the feminist supporters and celebrators of multiculture think of forced marriages and legal polygamy?
There were small and heinous incidents which gave multiculturalism a bad name. A Muslim man slaughtered a goat in a sacrificial rite on the street and his white neighbours objected. Families coerced their daughters into returning to Punjab or to Pakistan for enforced marriages; the girls ran away and some were murdered by their families.
Britain didn’t support these aspects of multiculture. Then the book-burning. Rushdie and his supporters asserted his rights firmly in the traditions of the Western freedoms. The protesters’ only concession to civilised process was the demand that Islam be protected by a change in blasphemy laws to prosecute Rushdie and execute him or at least have bits of him lopped off without the benefit of a plastic surgeon.
It was the moment when accommodating these insistences in the evolved cultures of Britain became impossible. Universal civilisation was a myth — the movement of labour carrying with it the dark assumptions of past centuries had made the fragmentation obvious.
The Satanic Verses contains sections, as do some of Rushdie’s other books, which manifestly empathise with the very immigrant mentality that would have him dead. I wonder what this latest book has to say about his persecutors. The serialised extracts don’t tell me. They are mainly chosen for the bitchy remarks about his previous wives — which, of course, is inviting another sort of fatwa as one or two of them are well-connected in the world of New York fashionistas and literary vituperators.
The one shameless invention of the book is, of course, the title. The author invents the name Joseph Anton for himself, after Conrad and Chekhov. If I were he with a pronounced fatwa which had claimed the life of at least two people associated with the book, I would have done more than dreamt up a fantasy name. In the Sixties a minister of the labour government named John Stonehouse went swimming in the sea and was presumed drowned because his clothes were found on a beach. It was later discovered that he had swum back to another spot, changed clothes and identity and gone to Australia. All for some paltry financial gain.
After the Ayatollah’s pronouncement I thought of this as a perfect ploy. Rushdie could fake his own death, change his identity, disappear and write his subsequent books under the name Joseph Anton, or Farrukh Dhondy or any such.
He was braver. He sat it out as Joseph Anton. Perhaps I should sign this column “Lev Rudyard”.