Most of these waiters were keen on their work; feeding others was important for them. They had worked hard, and either they, or their families, had endured a traumatic transplantation to find a place in this country. They were Muslims; they prayed; they went to the mosque. But, as Shabbir Akhtar says, ‘For most Muslims, Islam is a “Friday religion”.’ The Islam they wanted was not incompatible with the West. The waiters wanted their children — boys and girls alike — to be well-educated; they required a health service, housing and a democratic political structure. They were not segregated; they were important, well-known and respected in their town. They had multiple identities: being British, Bengali, and Welsh too. They were truly multicultural.
However, one of the waiters said to me recently, indicating his arm, his skin, his colour, ‘Now they are blaming us all.’ He wanted me to know he saw the present danger as a resurgence of racism, this time aimed specifically at Muslims. The idea might be to root out extremists, but a whole community may end up becoming stigmatised. One of the waiters mentioned his fear that rather than embodying the ‘immigrant dream’ of wealth, individuality and respect, they would become the permanent scapegoats of British society, as the blacks have become in the US. I have heard calls among the British for the re-installation of Englishness, as though there has been too much multiculturalism, rather than not enough. This wish for rigid, exclusive identities mirrors extreme Islam itself; it is an attempt to counter fundamentalism with more fundamentalism. This is a form of shame, when it is our excesses we should celebrate. We have been beset by bogeys before — Papists, communists, pornography — without losing our minds.
Not that monoculturalism can work now: the world is too mixed. But there is the possibility of many new conflicts. After everything immigrants and their families have contributed to this country, the years of work and the racism faced, the war in Iraq, which Blair thought he could prosecute without cost or social division here, has brought more fragmentation. If Blair’s ‘third way’ implies consensus and the end of antagonism, our literature will sharpen and map differences. ‘Over-integration’, the erasing of racial and religious differences, can become coercive or even fascistic. It can give rise to more racism, anger and resentment.
Edward Said wrote of the way Western writers constructed the East: the Orient as a convenient and simplistic fabrication, often as an obscene fantasy. Not that this is a fair picture of the work of writers like Forster or Orwell, who, from the inside, offered devastating critiques of their own class. Not that fantasies don’t go both ways. Among Muslims, there has been a reverse Orientalism, or ‘Occidentalism’, at work. Many of the fundamentalists I met, indeed many Muslims, were keen to see the West as corrupt and over-sexualised; there was ‘too much freedom’. The West could seem chaotic, over-individualistic; the family was less important, or constantly mutating. These Muslims refused to look at Western culture and science, or the institutions which can only flourish in a relatively free atmosphere, preferring to see the inevitable underside: addiction, divorce, social breakdown.
In the light of such deliberate mutual incomprehension, we might ask ourselves what the use of writing is. However, you might as well ask what the use of speaking or telling stories is. Edward Said identified useful writing as ‘speaking the truth to power’. The attacks on Rushdie show us, at least, that the Word is dangerous, and that independent and critical thought is more important than ever. In an age of propaganda, political simplicities and violence, our stories are crucial. Apart from the fact that the political has to be constantly interrogated, it is in such stories — which are conversations with ourselves — that we can speak of, include and generate more complex and difficult selves. It is when the talking and writing stops, when the attempt is to suppress human inconsistency by virtue, that evil takes place in the silence. The antidote to puritanism isn’t licentiousness, but recognition of what goes on inside human beings. Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind, but a live culture is an exploration, and represents our endless curiosity about our own strangeness and impossible sexuality: wisdom is more important than doctrine; doubt more important than certainty. Fundamentalism implies the failure of our most significant attribute, our imagination. In the fundamentalist scheme there is only one imaginer — God. The rest of us are his servants.
The freedom to speak is not only our privilege, but is essential to the oppressed, unheard and marginalised of the Third World, as they struggle to keep their humanity alive in conditions far worse than here. To retreat into a citadel of ‘Englishness’, to refuse to link up or identify with them, is to deliver them over to superstition and poverty of the imagination.
The Rushdie case remains instructive. In the end it is Islam itself which suffers from the repudiation of more sensual and dissident ideas of itself. Shabbir Akhtar — and his like — cannot understand that by leaving out, or attempting to suppress, so much of themselves, by parting company from an essential component of their own heritage, they are losing access to a source of enjoyment, energy and understanding. Radical Islam, then, far from looking like a new revolutionary movement, has come to rather resemble other totalitarian systems like Catholicism and communism, neither of which — under the rule of dull old men — could see the value of obscenity.
Immorality and blasphemy require protection. The roll-call of the censored is an account of our civilisation. If Islam is incapable of making any significant contribution to culture and knowledge, it is because extreme puritanism and censoriousness can only lead to a paranoia which will cause it to become more violent and unable to speak for those it is intended to serve. That which we seek to exclude returns to haunt us.
Fear Eats the Soul
In 1974 the renowned and often notorious young German director Rainer Fassbinder made a simple and relatively small film set mostly in a Munich bar and an apartment. This modest but resonant piece concerns the relationship between a late-middle-aged cleaning woman, Emmi, and Ali, a Moroccan immigrant she meets and dances with in a bar near her flat after a thunderstorm.
I can’t have seen Fear Eats the Soul until the early 1980s, when I suspect that though it might be quite different in its details, it reminded me of the relationship between my parents. (The film could easily have been set in any British town.) Although Britain and other European countries were changing rapidly in terms of their racial identity, I wasn’t aware of any other films about European racism or ‘integration’, and this film seemed to be saying something important and necessary.
Fassbinder was an extremely imaginative artist with his own somewhat peculiar preoccupations; however, there are few directors as aware of their time and place as him. He was born at the end of the war and became obsessed with its consequences, making films with women at the centre of them. (He had many relationships with actresses, as well as with men.) Fassbinder resembles Brecht in his ability to combine political analysis with a passion for understanding women. Like Brecht he wanted to see the centre from the position of the outsider; that way he could speak the forbidden. The dignified presence of El Hedi ben Salem as Ali — a lover of Fassbinder, who hanged himself in a French prison just before the director’s last film, Querelle, was released — can only remind us of how few black and Asian actors appeared in the great European cinema of the 60s and 70s.