I believed that questions of race, identity and culture were the major issues post-colonial Europe had to face, and that intergenerational conflict was where these conflicts were being played out. The British-born children of immigrants were not only more religious and politically radical than their parents — whose priority had been to establish themselves in the new country — but they despised their parents’ moderation and desire to ‘compromise’ with Britain. To them this seemed weak.
My father was an Indian Muslim who didn’t care for Islam; his childhood hadn’t been much improved by a strict schooling, and teachers with sticks. Towards the end of his life he preferred Buddhism to Islam, as there was less aggression and punishment in it. (‘And altogether less religion,’ as he put it.) He had also become disillusioned with the political version of Islam, which my father’s school friend, Zulfi Bhutto — who the liberal classes thought would become a democratic and secular leader in the new Pakistan — was introducing to Pakistan.
The mosques I visited, in Whitechapel and Shepherd’s Bush, were nothing like any church I’d attended. The scenes, to me, were extraordinary, and I was eager to capture them in my novel. There would be passionate orators haranguing a group of people sitting on the floor. One demagogue would replace another, of course, but the ‘preaching’ went on continuously, as listeners of all races came and went. I doubt whether you’d see anything like this now, but there would be diatribes against the West, Jews, and — their favourite subject — homosexuals. In my naivety I wondered whether, at the end of his speech, the speaker might take questions or engage in some sort of dialogue with his audience. But there was nothing like this. Most of the audience for this sort of thing were, I noticed, under thirty years old.
I had the good sense to see what good material this was, and took notes, until, one afternoon, I was recognised, and four strong men picked me up and carried me out on to the street, telling me never to return.
Sometimes I would be invited to the homes of these young ‘fundamentalists’. One of them had a similar background to my own: his mother was English, his father a Muslim, and he’d been brought up in a quiet suburb. Now he was married to a woman from the Yemen who spoke no English. Bringing us tea, she came into the room backwards, and bent over too, out of respect for the men. The men would talk to me of ‘going to train’ in various places, but they seemed so weedy and polite I couldn’t believe they’d want to kill anyone.
What did disturb me was this. These men believed they had access to the Truth, as stated in the Koran. There could be no doubt — or even much dispute about moral, social and political problems — because God had the answers. Therefore, for them, to argue with the Truth was like trying to disagree with the facts of geometry. For them the source of all virtue and vice was the pleasure and displeasure of Allah. To be a responsible human being was to submit to this. As the Muslim writer Shabbir Akhtar put it in his book A Faith for All Seasons, ‘Allah is the subject of faith and loving obedience, not of rational inquiry or purely discursive thought. Unaided human reason is inferior in status to the gift of faith. Indeed, reason is useful only in so far as it finds a use in the larger service of faith.’
I found these sessions so intellectually stultifying and claustrophobic that at the end I’d rush into the nearest pub and drink rapidly, wanting to reassure myself I was still in England.
It is not only in the mosques but also in so-called ‘faith schools’ that such ideas are propagated. The Blair government, while attempting to rid us of radical clerics, has pledged to set up more of these schools, as though a ‘moderate’ closed system is completely different to an ‘extreme’ one. This might suit Blair and Bush. A benighted, ignorant enemy, riddled with superstition, incapable of independent thought, and terrified of criticism, is easily patronised.
Wittgenstein compared ideas to tools, which you can use for different ends. Some open the world up. The idea that you can do everything with one tool is ridiculous. Without adequate intellectual tools and the ability to think freely, too many Muslims are incapable of establishing a critical culture which goes beyond a stifling Islamic paradigm. As the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan states, ‘Muslims now need, more than ever, to be self-critical. That means educating young Muslims in more than religious formalism.’
If the idea of multiculturalism makes some people vertiginous, monoculturalism — of whatever sort — is much worse. Political and social systems have to define themselves in terms of what they exclude, and conservative Islam is leaving out a lot. In New York recently, a Turkish woman told me that Islam was denying its own erotic heritage, as shown in the Arabian Nights, The Perfumed Garden, and the tales of Hamza. Indeed, the Arabic scholar Robert Irwin states, of the Arabian Nights, ‘In the modern Middle East, with certain exceptions, the Nights is not regarded by Arab intellectuals as literature at all.’
It is not only sexuality which is being excluded here, but the whole carnival of culture which comes from human desire. Our stories, dreams, poems, drawings, enable us to experience ourselves as strange to ourselves. It is also where we think of how we should live.
You can’t ask people to give up their religion; that would be absurd. Religions may be illusions, and they may betray infantile wishes in their desire for certainty, but these are important and profound illusions. But they will modify as they come into contact with other ideas. This is what an effective multiculturalism is: not a superficial exchange of festivals and food, but a robust and committed exchange of ideas — a conflict which is worth enduring, rather than a war.
When it comes to teaching the young, we have the human duty to inform them that there is more than one book in the world, and more than one voice, and that if they wish to have their voices heard by others, everyone else is entitled to the same thing. These children deserve better than an education which comes from liberal guilt.
Humouring the State: The PEN/Pinter Prize Lecture, 2010
I would like to thank PEN and the judges, and say what a huge pleasure and honour it is for me to receive this prize.
Harold Pinter is a writer I have enjoyed and loved since I was a teenager, coming up from Bromley on the train to queue for tickets to see, several times, Gielgud and Richardson in No Man’s Land. And I’d read, while waiting on the station, the famous 1966 Pinter interview in the Paris Review, where he states clearly the writer’s task, ‘One tries to get the thing … true.’
Before this I had seen The Caretaker somewhere, and, to my surprise — having heard that Pinter was a difficult, if not opaque writer — laughed as much as if I’d been at a farce.
Harold Pinter is well-known for his mastery at representing the unfortunate preoccupations of the twentieth century — terror, paranoia, persecution — both domestically and, later in his career, in larger politics. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that Pinter is a comic writer, and a devil with the mad insult. This is from The Homecoming: ‘He brings a filthy scrubber off the street … I’ve never had a whore under this roof before. Ever since your mother died.’
Pinter brilliantly understands how wit and humour can be used as a medium of humiliation and degradation, to destroy the victim’s defences and turn the individual into nothing. But he is also aware of how language as wit can be used to attack authority, to undermine power and pomposity, to subvert.