This was also the period, or so I like to think, when Britain became aware that it was changing, or, in effect, had already changed from a monocultural to a multi-racial society, and had realised, at last, that there was no going back. This wasn’t a mere confrontation with simple racism, the kind of thing I’d grown up with, which was usually referred to as ‘the colour problem’. (When I was a young man it was taken for granted that to be black or Asian was to be inferior to the white man. And not for any particular reason. It was just the case: a fact.)
No, it was much more. Almost blindly, in the post-war period, a huge, unprecedented social experiment had been taking place in Britain. The project was to turn — out of the end of the Empire and on the basis of mass immigration — a predominantly white society into a racially mixed one, thus forming a new notion of what Britain was.
And now was the time for this to be evaluated. The fatwa in 1989, and the debate and arguments it stimulated, seemed to make this clear. Was it not significant that many of these discussions were about language? The Iranian condemnation of a writer had, after all, been aimed at his words. What, then, was the relation between free speech and respect? What could and could not be said in a liberal society? How would different groups in this new society relate — or rather, speak — to one another?
The coercive force of language was something I had long been aware of. As a mixed-race child growing up in a white suburb, the debased language used about immigrants and their families had helped fix and limit my identity. My early attempts to write now seem like an attempt to undo this stasis, to create a more fluid and complicated self through storytelling. One of the uses of literature is that it will enable individuals to enlarge their sense of self — their vocabulary, the store of ideas they use to think about themselves.
In the 1970s, many of us became aware, via the scrutiny of the gay, feminist and Black movements, of the power that language exerted. If the country was to change — excluding fewer people — so did the discourse, and why not? Language, which implicitly carried numerous meanings, developed all the time; if it was never still it could be revised, coaxed in other directions. There were terms applied to certain groups which were reductive, stupid, humiliating, oppressive. (Children, of course, are described constantly by their parents in ways which are both narrowing and liberating — and they have a good idea of what it is to live in an authoritarian world. It wasn’t for nothing that I had been fascinated in my late teens by Wittgenstein’s apophthegm, ‘The meaning of a word is its use.’)
If there were to be better words the language had to be policed in some way, the bad words being replaced by the good. This, of course, became known as Political Correctness, where language was forced to follow the — usually Leftist — political line. Inevitably there was a backlash, as this form of political control seemed not only harsh and censorious but sometimes ludicrous and irrelevant.
Liberals were in a tricky position, having to argue both for linguistic protectionism in some areas and for freedom in others. So that when some Muslims began to speak of ‘respect’ for their religion and the ‘insult’ of The Satanic Verses the idea of free speech and its necessity and extension was always presented as the conclusive argument. Criticism was essential in any society. This could be said, but not that. But how would this be decided, and by whom?
The Marxists, too, were finding the issue of the fatwa difficult. It was only partly a coincidence that Islamic fundamentalism came to the West in the year that that other great cause, Marxist-communism, disappeared. The character of the stuttering socialist teacher in The Black Album — Deedee Osgood’s husband Brownlow — was partly inspired by some of the strange convolutions of the disintegrating Left at the time.
At a conference in Amsterdam in 1989 I remember arguing with John Berger, who was insisting that complaints about the Satanic Verses were justified, as they came from the downtrodden proletariat. Why, he said, would he want to support a privileged middle-class artist who was — supposedly — attacking the deepest beliefs of an otherwise exploited and humiliated Muslim working class? This seemed to me to be an eccentric and perverse point of view, particularly from a writer who had previously valued freedom, and when it was obvious that the opportunity to dissent, to be critical of leaders and authorities — and to be free of censorship — was necessary for anyone to live a good life, as the many writers, critics and journalists in prison in Muslim countries would no doubt attest.
To struggle my way through this thicket of fine distinctions, difficult debates and violent outcomes, I invented the story of Shahid, a somewhat lost and uncertain Asian kid from Kent — whose father has recently died — and who joins up, at college, with a band of similar-minded anti-racists. The story develops with Shahid discovering that the group are going further than anti-racist activism. They are beginning to organise themselves not only around the attack on Rushdie, but as Islamo-fascists who believe themselves to be in possession of the truth.
This is a big intellectual leap. As puritanical truth-possessors, Riaz’s group and those they identify with, have powerful, imperialistic ideas of how the world should be and what it should be purged of. Soon, believing the West has sunk into a stew of decadence, consumerism and celebrity obsession — a not untypical fantasy about the West, corresponding to a not-unsimilar fantasy of the West about the sensual East, as Edward Said has argued — they believe it is their duty to bring about a new, pure world. They want to awaken benighted people to the reality of their situation. To do this they insist on a complete dominance of people’s private lives, and of female sexuality in particular.
Some of these attitudes were familiar to me, as I grew up in the 60s and 70s, when the desire for revolution, for violent change, for the cleansing of exploitative capitalists and a more moral world, was part of our style. Almost everyone I knew had wanted, and worked in some way to bring about, not only the modification of capitalism, but its overthrow. For us, from D. H. Lawrence to William Burroughs and The Sex Pistols, blasphemy and dissent was a blessed thing, kicking open the door to the future, bringing new knowledge, freedom and ways of living. The credo was: be proud of your blasphemy, these vile idols have been worshipped for too long! The point was to be disrespectful, to piss on the sacred. As Guy Debord wrote, ‘Where there was fire, we carried petrol.’
But there was, mixed in with this liberation rhetoric, as in all revolutions — either of the left or right — a strong element of puritanism and self-hatred. There was a desire for the masochism of obedience and self-punishment, something not only illustrated by the Taliban, but by all revolutionary movements which are inevitably bloated with the egotism of self-righteousness and in love with self-sacrifice. This concerns not only the erotics of the ‘revolutionary moment’, the ecstasy of a break with the past and the fantasy of renewal, but also the human penchant for living in authoritarian societies and intransigent systems, where safety and the firm constraint of the leader is preferable to liberal doubt, uncertainty and change. As Georges Bataille reminds us in an essay written in 1957, ‘Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him.’