At the anti-Rushdie demonstration in Hyde Park in 1989, a group of Asian female demonstrators — perhaps from a group not unlike the Southall Black Sisters — who were carrying placards saying ‘Women Against Fundamentalism’, were attacked by Muslim men. As these dissident voices were suppressed, as secular and socialist Asian voices were discouraged across the community, a range of new issues emerged, many to do with the idea of speaking, books, writing, words, and the place of the artist and intellectual as critic.
During the ten years between the Southall riot and the demonstration against The Satanic Verses, Islam imposed an identity and solidarity on a besieged community. Radical Islam came to mean rebellion, purity, integrity. But it was also a trap. Once this ideology had been adopted — and political conversations could only take place within its terms — it entailed numerous constraints, locking the community in, as well as divorcing it from possible sources of creativity: dissidence, criticism, sexuality. Its authoritarianism, stifling to those within, and appearing fascistic to those without, rejected the very liberalism the community required in order to flourish in the modern world. It was tragic: what protected the community came to tyrannise it.
The Arduous Conversation Will Continue
We no longer know what it is to be religious, and haven’t for a while. During the past two hundred years sensible people in the West have contested our religions until they lack significant content and force. These religions now ask little of anyone and, quite rightly, play little part in our politics.
The truly religious, following the logic of submission to political and moral ideals, and to the arbitrary will of God, are terrifying to us and almost incomprehensible. To us ‘belief ’ is dangerous and we don’t like to think we have much of it.
Confronted by this, it takes a while for our ‘liberalism’ to organise itself into opposition and for us to consider the price we might have to pay for it. We also have little idea of what it is to burn with a sense of injustice and oppression, and what it is to give our lives for a cause, to be so desperate or earnest. We think of these acts as mad, random and criminal, rather than as part of a recognisable exchange of violences.
The burning sense of injustice that many young people feel as they enter the adult world of double standards and dishonesty shocks those of us who are more knowing and cynical. We find this commendable in young people but also embarrassing. Consumer society has already traded its moral ideals for other satisfactions, and one of the things we wish to export, masquerading as ‘freedom and democracy’, is that very consumerism, though we keep silent about its consequences: addiction, alienation, fragmentation.
We like to believe we are free to speak about everything, but we are reluctant to consider our own deaths, as well as the meaning of murder. Terrible acts of violence in our own neighbourhood — not unlike terrible acts of violence which are ‘outsourced’, usually taking place in the poorest parts of the Third World — disrupt the smooth idea of ‘virtual’ war that we have adopted to conquer the consideration of death.
‘Virtual’ wars are conflicts in which one can kill others without either witnessing their deaths or having to take moral responsibility for them. The Iraq war, we were told, would be quick and few people would die. It is as though we believed that by pressing a button and eliminating others far away we would not experience any guilt or suffering — on our side.
By bullying and cajoling the media, governments can conceal this part of any war, but only for a while. If we think of children being corrupted by video games — imitation violence making them immune to actual violence — this is something that has happened to our politicians. Modern Western politicians believe we can murder real others in faraway places without the same thing happening to us, and without any physical or moral suffering on our part.
This is a dangerous idea. The only way out is to condemn all violence or to recognise that violence is a useful and important moral option in the world. Despite our self-deception, we are quite aware of how necessary it is, at times, to kill others to achieve our own ends and to protect ourselves. If we take this position we cannot pretend it is morally easy and seek to evade the consequences.
We were dragged into this illegal and depressing war by many lies and much dissembling. A substantial proportion of us were opposed to it. During wars ordinary citizens feel they lack information and moral orientation while governments act decisively and with brutality.
Governments may be representative but they and the people are not the same. In our disillusionment, it is crucial that we remind ourselves of this. States behave in ways that would shame an individual. Governments persuade individuals to behave in ways that individuals know are morally wrong. Therefore governments do not speak for us; we have our own voices, however muffled they may seem. If communities are not to be corrupted by the government, the only patriotism possible is one that refuses the banality of taking either side, and continues the arduous conversation. That is why we have literature, the theatre, newspapers — a culture, in other words.
War debases our intelligence and derides what we have called ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’ and ‘freedom’. If it is true that we have entered a spiral of violence, repression and despair that will take years to unravel, our only hope is moral honesty about what we have brought about.
And not only us. If we need to ensure that what we call ‘civilisation’ retains its own critical position towards violence, religious groups have to purge themselves of their own intolerant and deeply authoritarian aspects.
The body-hatred and terror of sexuality that characterise most religions can lead people not only to cover their bodies in shame but to think of themselves as human bombs. This criticism on both sides is the only way to temper an inevitable legacy of bitterness, hatred and conflict.
The Carnival of Culture, 28 July 2005
Recently a friend sent me an article which he thought I’d find interesting, as it was an attempt to sustain a non-violent version of Islam, one in which meddling and manipulative clerics had no authority. Without the requirement of intermediaries, no one could come between you and God. The clerics were seen here as political figures, rather than the best interpreters of Islam. If these fanatics and fundamentalists had twisted the word of God for their own political ends, why shouldn’t the Koran be reclaimed and reinterpreted by the better intentioned? This, the writer stated, was the only way for Islam to go.
In the early 1990s, after my first visit to Pakistan, where I’d had a taste of what it was like to live in a (more or less) theocratic state; after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and, finally, the death of my father, I began to visit various London mosques. Perhaps I was trying to find something of my father there, but I was also beginning to research what became The Black Album, a novel which concerned a group of students, young radical Muslims in west London, who burn The Satanic Verses and, later, attack a bookshop. A film I wrote for the BBC, My Son the Fanatic, about a young man who becomes a fundamentalist while his father falls in love with a prostitute, also emerged from this material.