(A worth reading analysis and historic perspective by Kenan Malik on how Muslims in the West have reached a stage where their very existence is looked upon with suspicion. Kenan Malik is an author, speaker and broadcaster based in London. F. Sheikh)
On 14 February 1989, Valentine’s Day, the Ayotollah Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie. It was a brutally shocking act that forced Salman Rushdie into hiding for almost a decade.
26 years later, on 7 January 2015, came an even more viscerally shocking act, when two gunmen forced their way into the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, sprayed the room with machine gun fire, killing 12, and injuring another 11.
What I want to look at today is what each of these events represented, and how we made the journey from the one to the other.
When The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988, Salman Rushdie was perhaps the most celebrated British novelist of his generation. The novel was not, it’s worth reminding ourselves, a novel solely, or even primarily about Islam. It was, Rushdie observed in an interview, about ‘migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death’, as well as an attempt ‘to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person’.
It’s also worth reminding ourselves that until the fatwa most Muslims had ignored the book. The campaign against The Satanic Verses was largely confined to India, Pakistan and Britain. With the singular exception of Saudi Arabia, whose authorities bankrolled the initial efforts to ban the novel, there was little anti-Rushdie fervour in the Arab world or in Turkey, or among Muslim communities in France or Germany. When at the end of 1988 the Saudi government tried to persuade Muslim countries to ban the novel, few responded except those with large Indian subcontinental populations, such as South Africa and Malaysia. Even Iran was relaxed about Rushdie’s irreverence. It was available in Iranian bookshops and even reviewed in Iranian newspapers.
It was the fatwa that transformed the Rushdie affair into a global conflict with historic repercussions. It was through the Rushdie affair that many of the issues that now dominate political debate – multiculturalism, free speech, radical Islam, terrorism – first came to the surface. It was also through the Rushdie affair that our thinking about these issues began to change.
To understand these changes, and how they led to a world in which the Charlie Hebdo killings became possible, I want to look at three issues of the post-issues of the Rushdie world that are particularly pertinent to this discussion.
The first is the changing character of Islam and of Muslim identity. Until the late 1980s the idea of a Muslim community barely existed in the West, while Muslim identity meant something different to what it does today.
Take Britain. The first generation of Muslims in the 1950s and 60s, largely from South Asia, were religious, but wore their faith lightly. Many men drank alcohol. Few women wore a hijab, let alone a burqa or niqab. Most visited the mosque only occasionally. Their faith expressed for them a relationship with God, not a sacrosanct public identity.
The second generation of Britons with a Muslim background – my generation – was primarily secular. Religious organizations were barely visible. The organizations that bound together Asian communities (and we thought of ourselves as ‘Asian’ or ‘black’, not ‘Muslim’) were primarily secular, often political.
It is only with the generation that has come of age since the late 1980s that the question of cultural differences has come to be seen as important. It was only now that the idea of a distinctly Muslim community emerged, as did a specific Muslim identity. Much the same process can be sketched out in France, in Germany, in the Netherlands.
The reasons for this shift are complex. Partly they lie in a tangled set of social and political changes, including the collapse of the left and of radical social movements. Partly they lie in international developments, from the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, that helped foster a heightened sense of Muslim identity. Partly they lie in the growing influence of Saudi Arabia on Islamic institutions in the West and its aggressive promotion of Wahhabism. Partly they lie in the rise of the politics of identity, an issue I shall address shortly.
posted by f.sheikh