At the end we sighed. Relief was palpable. Bowie saw, though, that some of the music altered the mood of the scene. Repeatedly he re-wrote, adjusted cues and thought about how composing music for films is different to writing songs. Later he produced an excellent album called The Buddha of Suburbia, developing ideas he’d begun on the film.
They were heady, enjoyable days. The series was, in the end, broadcast as we’d made it. Typically, the BBC did, the day before transmission — although they’d had the tapes for months — attempt to censor it a little, but their nerve held.
The Road Exactly: Introduction to My Son the Fanatic
The idea for My Son the Fanatic, as for The Black Album, was provided by my thinking about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, announced in February 1989. At that time various politicians, thinkers and artists spoke out in the media about this extraordinary intellectual terror. A surprising number of statements were fatuous and an excuse for abuse and prejudice; some expressed genuine outrage, and most were confused but comfortingly liberal. The attack on Rushdie certainly made people think afresh about the point and place of literature, about what stories were for, and about their relation to dissent.
But few commentators noticed that the objections to The Satanic Verses represented another kind of protest. In Britain many young Asians were turning to Islam, and some to a particularly extreme form, often called Fundamentalism. Most of these young people were from Muslim families, of course, but usually families in which the practice of religion, in a country to which their families had come to make a new life, had fallen into disuse.
It perplexed me that young people, brought up in secular Britain, would turn to a form of belief that denied them the pleasures of the society in which they lived. Islam was a particularly firm way of saying ‘no’ to all sorts of things. Young people’s lives are, for a lot of the time, devoted to pleasure: the pleasure of sex and music, of clubbing, friendship, and the important pleasure of moving away from one’s parents to develop one’s own ideas. Why was it important that this group kept pleasure at a distance? Why did they wish to maintain such a tantalising relation to their own enjoyment, keeping it so fervently in mind, only to deny it? Or was this puritanism a kind of rebellion, a brave refusal of the order of the age — an over-sexualized but sterile society? Were these young Muslims people who dared to try nothing? Whatever the reason, there was, clearly, a future in illusion; not only that, illusions were once more becoming a sound investment. But what sort of future did they require?
To the surprise of most of us, it sometimes seems that we are living in a new theocratic age. I imagined that the 1960s, with its penchant for seeing through things, and pulling them apart with laughter and questions, had cleared that old church stuff away. But the 1960s, in the West, with its whimsy and drugged credulity, also helped finish off the Enlightenment. It was during the 1960s that weird cults, superstitious groups, new agers, strange therapists, seers, gurus and leaders of all kinds came to prominence. This need for belief and the establishment of new idols was often innocuous — a mixture of the American idea of self-fulfilment and the Greek notion of fully extended man, vitiated by a good dose of ordinary repression.
But the kind of religion favoured by the young Muslims was particularly strict and frequently authoritarian. An old religion was being put to a new use, and it was that use which interested me. I wondered constantly why people would wish to give so much of their own autonomy, the precious freedom of their own minds, to others — to Maulvis, and to the Koran. After all, the young people I met were not stupid; many were very intelligent. But they put a lot of effort into the fashioning of a retributive God to which to submit.
Clearly, where there is a ‘crisis of authority’, when, it seems, people aren’t certain of anything because ancient hierarchies have been brought down, the answer is to create a particularly strict authority, where troubling questions cannot be admitted. ‘There’s too much freedom,’ one of the young men, Ali, kept saying to me, someone who’d always thought that freedom was something you couldn’t get enough of. This intrigued me.
Ali worked for a well-known supermarket chain, stacking shelves, though he had a degree. It was boring work; to get anywhere you had to grovel, or go to the bar and drink and exchange unpleasant banter. Sometimes you had to shake hands with women. Anyhow, the Asians didn’t get promoted. A reason for this, he liked to muse, was that the major businesses were run by Jews. He applied for jobs all the time, but never got them. I couldn’t see why this was so. He was certainly courteous. He brought me presents: a tie, mangos, the Koran. He was intellectually curious too, and liked showing me the new books he bought constantly. He knew a great deal about the history and politics of the Middle East, about which, he claimed, the average Westerner knew little. Ali knew the West, but the West didn’t know him except through tendentious media images. The West, therefore, had no idea of its own arrogance, and was certainly not concerned about the extent to which it had no interest in anything outside itself.
Just when I thought there wasn’t much Ali and I could argue about, he would say he didn’t disapprove of the killings of journalists — and others — in Algeria. They were ‘enemies’; he took it for granted that they were guilty. Perhaps, for him, the fact they were murdered made them guilty. During such conversations he liked to quote Malcolm X’s phrase at me: ‘By any means necessary’, a modern motto of liberation thus becoming a tool of tyranny. I couldn’t recall the context in which Malcolm X’s phrase was first used, but it was clear that it could be applied to anything; its meaning had become unstable. These days not even language would hold still. Indeed, Ali himself could be called a ‘fundamentalist’, a word newly minted to mean a fanatical Muslim. It was a word he even applied to himself. At the same time he complained about Muslims being portrayed in the press as ‘terrorists’ and ‘fanatics’. This argument, which had begun because of a book, continued to be about language and about what words mean, as much as anything.
The ‘West’ was a word, like liberalism, for anything bad. The West’s freedom made him feel unsafe. If there was too much freedom you had to make less of it. I asked him about the difficulty of giving up things. He had been keen on clubs; he’d had an affair with a married woman. Renunciation made him feel strong, he said, while giving in made him feel weak. Wasn’t the West full of addicts?
The West, therefore, was a place full of things he disliked — or where he liked to put them; and where people gave in to things he disapproved of. He gave me a flyer for a Muslim rally in Trafalgar Square that stated, ‘Endemic crime, homosexuality, poverty, family breakdown, drug and alcohol abuse shows Western freedom and democracy just aren’t working.’ Because of this, Ali and his friends would never bring up their children here. But it also meant that he hated his own background, the forces that influenced him and the place he lived in.
His attitude kept reminding me of something I had heard before. Finally I realised it took me back to a paragraph in Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind (Milosz is here referring to Eastern European communist intellectuals): ‘The official order is to evince the greatest horror of the West. Everything is evil there: trains are late, stores are empty, no one has money, people are poorly dressed, the highly praised technology is worthless. If you hear the name of a Western writer, painter or composer, you must scoff sarcastically, for to fight against “cosmopolitanism” is one of the basic duties of a citizen.’