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

The Satanic Verses
spectre of a "Western conspiracy" against Islam, he issued a much
quoted warning: "the next time there are gas chambers in Europe,
there is no doubt concerning who'll be inside." 23 Qureshi and Khan,
who subtitled their own book on the controversy "Unmasking
Western Attitudes," located it within a larger war.
[The Satanic Verses] inflamed the feelings of nearly 1 billion
followers of Islam. . . . Attacking the Muslim community became
legitimate and fashionable for anyone for a variety of reasons.
Racists found a new cause in protesting against the protests of the
Muslim minority; the secularists found their cause in hatred of all
religion; others in anti-lslamism, if not anti-semitism, and the
assimilationists against muiti-culturalists. 24
Tariq Modood dismissed the book as "no more a contribution to
literary discourse than pissing upon the Bible is a theological argument."
25 Dr. Saki Badawi, liberal head of the Muslim College in
Ealing, protested that Rushdie had hurt Muslims worse than if he had
raped their daughters. 26 AN Mazrui, an American professor of
political science, reported that Pakistani friends told him: "It's as if
Rushdie had composed a brilliant poem about the private parts of his
parents, and then gone to the market place to recite that poem to the
applause of strangers . . . and he's taking money for doing it."
Mazrui himself proclaimed that " 'The Satanic Verses' could be one
of the most divisive books in world politics since Hitler's 'Mein
Kampf.' " 27 Hesham el Essawy, chairman of the Islamic Society for
the Promotion of Religious Tolerance in the U.K., urged Penguin to
withdraw the book; otherwise "we might as well knight muggers and
give mass murderers the Nobel prize." M.H. Faruqi, editor of Impact
International, described Rushdie as "a self-hating Indo-Anglian,
totally alienated from his culture, who has also learnt that it is
possible to make money by selling self-hate." Determined to "show
them all," he had engaged in "a continuous striptease, from soft to
hard and even harder porn." 28
Muslim outrage elicited unprecedented ecumenical solidarity.
The Archbishop of York asked why "the freedom of writers to write
what they like" was superior to all other claims of "sacredness." 29
The Archbishop of Canterbury declared that "offence to the religious
beliefs of the followers of Islam or any other faith is quite as wrong as
is an offence to the religious beliefs of Christians." 30 The Chief Rabbi
deprecated "not only the falsification of established historical
records but [also] the offence caused to the religious convictions and
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