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.
But we were equally hostile to the traditions that often marked immigrant communities, especially religious ones. Today, when people use the word radical in an Islamic context, they usually have in mind a religious fundamentalist. Twenty years ago, radical meant the very opposite: someone who was militantly secular, self-consciously Western and avowedly left-wing. Someone like me. I had grown up in communities in which Islam, while deeply embedded, was never all-consuming. Religion expressed a relationship with God, not a sacrosanct public identity. So what, I wanted to know, as I watched the news coverage of The Satanic Verses burning, had changed? Why were people proclaiming themselves to be Muslims and taking to the streets to burn books, especially the books of a writer celebrated for giving voice to the migrant experience? And was the dividing line really between a medieval theology and a modern Western society?
My day job then was as a research psychologist. But I also wrote the occasional article for the Voice, Britain's leading black newspaper. When the editor asked me to write something about the Rushdie affair, I jumped at the chance. I already knew Bradford and many of the players in the Rushdie drama, having organised anti-racist protests in the town. And so I arrived that February to talk to Sher Azam, president of the Bradford Council of Mosques, the man who had helped torch the book.
I came also to try to answer my own questions. It was a journey that would transform my views about myself, my politics and my faith. Little did I know that those questions would return to haunt me during the next 20 years or that the issues raised by the Rushdie affair -- the nature of Islam, its relationship to the West, the meaning of multiculturalism, the limits of tolerance in a liberal society -- would become some of the defining problems of the age, linking a burning book in Bradford to burning towers in Manhattan and a burning bus in London.
WHEN The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988, it had been expected to set the world alight, though not quite in the way that it did. Rushdie was perhaps the most celebrated British novelist of his generation. Not that he saw himself as British. He was, he said, someone inhabiting a world "in between three cultures": those of India, Pakistan and England.
Midnight's Children, his panoramic, humorous mock epic of post-independence India, was a literary sensation when it came out in 1981. It interlaced reality, myth, dream and fantasy, turned history into fable, yet directly addressed highly charged political issues. The swagger of its historical sweep, the panache of its confident, modernist prose, the knowingness of its infectious humour, the confidence with which it drew on European classics, Hindu myths, Persian fables, Islamic history, as well as popular cultures from Bollywood to Bob Dylan, and its insistence that the creative imagination was also a political imagination, all announced the arrival of not just a new literary voice but also a new kind of novel, the aim of which was to unlock the untold tales of those who, like Rushdie, inhabited the worlds in between.
Politicians, Rushdie once remarked, "have got very good at inventing fictions which they tell us as the truth. It then becomes the job of the makers of fiction to start telling the real truth." Two years after Midnight's Children came Shame, which retold the history of Pakistan as a satirical fairytale and consolidated Rushdie's reputation as a novelist and as a controversialist. Midnight's Children had been banned in India for its acid portrayal of the Nehru dynasty. Indira Gandhi sued for libel in a London court and won. Shame caused similar outrage among Pakistan's political elite and it, too, was banned.
Then came The Satanic Verses. Almost five years in the making, supported by a jaw-dropping $US850,000 advance from Penguin, and published in the wake of a much talked-about split between Rushdie and his long-time friend and publisher, Liz Calder of Bloomsbury, the novel had become myth even before the public had read a word of it. In an interview in the Australian literary magazine Scripsi in 1985, Rushdie mentioned that he was working on two novels. One was "about God ... that was not just a secular sneer"; the other was a "much larger project ... a novel set in the West that deals with the idea of migration". During the next three years, the two became stitched together into a not altogether coherent whole: one a fantastic tale about the migrant experience in Britain, the other a fable about the origins of Islam.
Rushdie seemed somewhat uncertain about the character of the novel, describing it as a "serious attempt to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person", and insisting that it "isn't actually about Islam but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death".
The Satanic Verses opens with a hijacked jumbo jet exploding above the Sussex coast. There are only two survivors. Gibreel Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who depicts gods and is revered as one by his fans. Saladin Chamcha is an Anglophile, so fanatically British that he wears a bowler hat even when tumbling from 29,002 feet. As they fall, Saladin and Gibreel metamorphose. Saladin becomes hairy and goat-like, his feet turn to hoofs and he sprouts horns. Gibreel acquires a halo that he has to hide under a hat. The two men become the unwitting, and unwilling, protagonists in an eternal battle between good and evil, the divine and the satanic.
The progress of Saladin and Gibreel through the dark, surreal landscape of Vilayet (the Hindi word for foreign place, which Rushdie uses as a label for Britain) acts as the holding frame for the novel. Into this frame Rushdie inserts a number of novellas arising out of Gibreel's dreams, each of which confronts the nature of religion.
A work so boisterous, allusive and transgressive would never give itself up to a single reading. Yet it was also a politically engaged work that confronted many of the most charged questions of our time.
Western critics rarely saw beyond a migrant's tale. Many Muslims were blind to anything aside from what they perceived as a gratuitously blasphemous assault on their faith generally and the prophet Mohammed specifically.
Writing in The Guardian, novelist Angela Carter described the book as "an epic hung about with ragbag scraps of many different cultures", peopled mostly by "displaced persons of one kind or another. Expatriates, immigrants, refugees." Not once in her review did she mention Islam. For Muslim philosopher Shabbir Akhtar, on the other hand, Rushdie's novel was "an inferior piece of hate literature" that "falsified historical records" in a "calculated attempt to vilify and slander Mohammed".
From the space between these two readings emerged the Rushdie affair. It was the moment at which a new Islam dramatically announced itself as a significant political issue in Western society. In mid-February 1989, following a violent riot against the book in Pakistan, Iran's supreme leader ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on all good Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers. The most famous writer of the day went into hiding, under police protection.
MUSLIM fury seemed to be driven not by questions of harassment or discrimination or poverty but by a sense of hurt that Rushdie's words had offended their deepest beliefs. Where did such hurt come from and why was it being expressed now? How could a novel create such outrage? Could Muslim anguish be assuaged, and should it be? How did the anger on the streets of Bradford relate to traditional political questions about rights, duties and entitlements? Britain had never asked itself such questions before. Twenty years on, it is still groping for the answers.
The Rushdie affair was a turning point in the relationship between British society and its Muslim communities. It was a turning point for me, too. I was born in India but came to Britain in the 1960s as a five-year-old. My mother came from Tamil Nadu in southern India. She was Hindu. My father's family had moved to India from Burma when the Japanese invaded in 1942. It is through him that I trace my Muslim heritage. Mine was not, however, a particularly religious upbringing. My parents forbade me (and my sisters) from attending religious education classes at school because they did not want us to be force-fed Christianity. But we were not force-fed Islam or Hinduism either. I still barely know the Hindu scriptures and, while I read the Koran in my youth, it was only after the Rushdie affair that I took a serious interest in it.
What shaped my early experiences was not religion but racism. I arrived in Britain just as "Paki-bashing" was becoming a national sport. Paki was the abusive name for any Asian and Paki-bashing was what racists called their pastime of beating up Asians. My main memory of growing up in the '70s was of being involved almost daily in fights with racists and of how normal it seemed to come home with a bloody nose or a black eye.
Like many Asians of my generation, I was drawn towards politics by my experience of racism. I was left-wing and, indeed, joined some far-Left organisations in my 20s. But if it was racism that drew me to politics, it was politics that made me see beyond the narrow confines of racism. I came to learn that there was more to social justice than the injustices done to me and that a person's skin colour, ethnicity or culture was no guide to the validity of their political beliefs. I was introduced to the ideas of the Enlightenment and to concepts of a common humanity and universal rights. Through politics, too, I discovered the writings of Marx and Mill, Kant and Locke, Paine and Condorcet, Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James.
By the end of the '80s, however, many of my friends had come to see such Enlightenment notions as dangerously naive. The Rushdie affair gave notice not just of a new Islam but also of a new Left. Radicals slowly lost faith in secular universalism and began talking instead about multiculturalism and group rights. They became disenchanted with Enlightenment ideas of rationalism and humanism, and many began to decry the Enlightenment as a Eurocentric project. Where once the Left had argued that everyone should be treated equally, despite their differences, now it pushed the idea that different people should be treated differently because of such differences. During the past two decades many of the ideas of the so-called politics of difference have become mainstream through the policies of multiculturalism. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics, these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, anti-racist outlook and as the foundation stones of modern liberal democracies.
Yet there is a much darker side to multiculturalism, as the Rushdie affair demonstrated. Multiculturalism has helped foster a more tribal nation and, within Muslim communities, has undermined progressive trends while strengthening the hand of conservative religious leaders. Although it did not create militant Islam, it helped create for it a space within British Muslim communities that had not existed before.
I WAS in a drab Victorian semi near the university that housed the Bradford Council of Mosques, waiting to speak to Sher Azam, when suddenly, I heard a familiar voice. "Hello, Kenan, what are you doing here?" It was Hassan, a friend from London whom I had not seen for more than a year. "I'm doing some interviews about Rushdie," I told him. "But what are you doing in this godforsaken place?"
Hassan laughed. "Trying to make it less godforsaken," he said. "I've been up here a few months, helping in the campaign against Rushdie." Then he laughed again when he saw my face. "No need to look so shocked," he said. He had had it with the "white Left". He had, he said, lost his sense of who he was and where he had come from. So he had returned to Bradford to try to rediscover it. And what he had found was a sense of community and a "need to defend our dignity as Muslims, to defend our values and beliefs". He was not going to allow anyone -- "racist or Rushdie" -- to trample over them.
The Hassan I had known in London had been a member of the far-left Socialist Workers Party (as I had been for a while). Apart from Trotskyism, his other indulgences were Southern Comfort, sex and the Arsenal soccer club. We had watched the Specials and the Clash together, smoked dope and argued about football. We had marched together, chucked bricks at the National Front, been arrested. This was what it was like for many Asians growing up in Britain in the '80s. Hassan had been born, as I had, on the subcontinent (in Pakistan) but grew up in Britain. His parents were observant Muslims but, like many of their generation, visited the mosque only whenever the "Friday feeling" gripped them. Hassan had attended mosque as a child and learned the Koran, but by the time he left school God had left him. "There's a hole inside me where God used to be," Rushdie once said. I had never detected any such hole in Hassan. He seemed to have been hewn from secular rock.
But here he was in Bradford, an errand boy to the mullahs, inspired by book-burners, willing to shed blood for a 1000-year-old fable he had never believed in. Unlike Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, Hassan sported neither horns nor a halo. But his metamorphosis from left-wing wide boy to Islamic militant was no less extraordinary than that of the antiheroes of The Satanic Verses. In that metamorphosis lies the story of the wider changes that were taking place in Britain and other Western nations, changes that made possible not just the Rushdie affair but eventually 9/11 and the London terrorist attacks of July 7, 2005, changes that trace a road from fatwa to jihad.
ANGELS and devils. Myths and monsters. These are at the heart of The Satanic Verses. The struggle of Saladin and Gibreel, with themselves and with each other, is a struggle of the human imagination against the constraints placed on it. One is a devil, the other an angel, yet they continually betray their natures. When Saladin is arrested, Gibreel, the angel, refuses to help him. When the two meet up again in riot-torn east London, Gibreel appears as Azraeel, the most terrible of angels, wreaking fire and destruction. But even as he is hunted down by Gibreel, the demonic Saladin risks his life to save a family trapped in a burning house. What Rushdie wants us to see is that the distinction between devil and angel lies less in their inner selves than in the roles that humans ascribe to them. If religion creates the divine and the satanic in the image of man, secular society makes men in the image of devils and angels. Religious faiths as well as secular societies deploy their angels and demons to justify their otherwise unjustifiable actions, to create boundaries that cannot be transgressed.
"Angels and devils -- who needed them?" Rushdie asks in The Satanic Verses. The answer seems to be those who wish to subdue the human spirit. Gibreel, despite born-again slogans, new beginnings, metamorphoses, has wished to remain, to a large extent, continuous, joined to and arising from the past. Saladin, on the other hand, has shown a willing reinvention, a preferred revolt against history. Angels, in other words, mean constancy while devils rock the boat. Angels are used to maintain tradition while those who bring about unacceptable change -- secularists to a religious faith, immigrants in a secular society -- are demonised.
But change and transformation, Rushdie insists, are what make us human. "Human beings," he observed in an essay, In Good Faith, "understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee, whether to gods or to men." The Satanic Verses, he has said, is a "work of radical dissent". What does it dissent from? "From the end of debate, of dispute, of dissent," Rushdie answers. Rushdie's sympathy is clearly with the devil.
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.
