speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

The Struggle for Respect
banned the book, Shahabuddin wrote triumphantly to The Times of
India, denouncing Rushdie as an "overrated Eurasian writer," the
product of a "fatigued culture," spokesman for a West "which has
not yet laid the ghost of the crusades to rest. . . ." He reserved his
worst insults for the "Anglicised elite," the "pukka Sahibs," the
"entire 'liberal establishment,' " while welcoming the slurs of Rushdie
and his supporters: "Call us primitive, call us fundamentalists,
call us superstititious barbarians." He refused to read the book: "I do
not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is." 20
Rushdie responded in an open letter to Prime Minister Rajiv
Gandhi, stressing that the book was fiction, not history, and invoking
the support of Indian newspapers, publishers, and booksellers,
international organisations opposed to censorship, and "such eminent
writers" as Kingsley Amis, Harold Pinter, Stephen Spender, and
Tom Stoppard. 21 He followed this with an article in The Illustrated
Weekly of India, accusing Gandhi of playing communalist politics.
Perhaps you feel that by banning my fourth novel you are taking a
long-overdue revenge for the treatment of your mother in my
second; but can you be sure that Indira Gandhi's reputation will
endure better and longer than Midnight's Children? Are you
certain that the cultural history of India will deal kindly with the
enemies of The Satanic Verses? You own the present, Mr. Gandhi;
but the centuries belong to art. 22
Nevertheless, most countries with substantial Muslim populations
followed India in banning the book.
British Muslims quickly took charge of the attack. In a book
entitled Be Careful with Muhammad!, Shabbir Akhtar compared
Rushdie's "calculated attempt to vilify and slander the Prophet of
Islam" with the abortive 1970s plot by Jewish extremists to blow up
Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Rushdie was a "literary terrorist,"
who called the Prophet by the derogatory name Mahound, suggested
that the Qu'ran was not divine revelation, applied the adjectives
bum, scum, black monster and bastard to historical
personalities, and had prostitutes take the names of Mohammed's
twelve wives. "[A]ny Muslim who fails to be offended by Rushdie's
book ceases, on account of that fact, to be a Muslim." Christianity
had exposed its weakness in failing to respond to "continual blasphemies."
"Any faith which compromises its internal temper of
militant wrath is destined for the dustbin of history .... God does
not guide a people who sell his signs for a paltry price." Raising the
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