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

The Struggle for Respect
Shabbir Akhtar declared that "any Muslim who fails to be offended
by Rushdie's book ceases, on account of that fact, to be a Muslim."
Conor Cruise O'Brien responded: "A Westerner who claims to
admire Muslim society, while still adhering to Western values, is
either a hypocrite or an ignoramus, or a bit of both." Principled civil
libertarians in the ACLU were reviled as the hired guns of pornographers
or Nazis. At the same time, each collectivity displayed major
fissures: feminists over pornography, Muslims over the fatwa, Jews
over civil liberties, British intellectuals and politicians over Rushdie.
Because status competition is a zero-sum game conducted
through the medium of values, compromise is extremely difficult.
Civil libertarians quickly become moralistic absolutists. The Executive
Director of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union declared:
"Bookstores cannot be censored. That's all there is to it." The
Chicago ACLU public relations director characterised those who
sought to stop the Nazi march as "the enemy, possessed of sinister
motive and intent" and declared that "the Village of Skokie shredded
the First Amendment." Francois Mitterand declaimed: "All dogmatism
which through violence undermines freedom of thought and the
right to free expression is, in my view, absolute evil." Rushdie
concluded that "free speech is life itself." On the other side,
MacKinnon demanded zero tolerance for "the sexually explicit
subordination of women," many Jews would deny Nazis any right to
speak, and many Muslims would accept nothing less than suppression
of The Satanic Verses and execution of its author.
Once offensive speech had impaired its victims' status, they
demanded a remedy that would correct the inequality. Apology is
just such a degradation ceremony. Rushdie offered an apology after
the fatwa, acknowledging and regretting the hurt his words had
caused, but Khomeini refused to forgive. Almost two years later
Rushdie made another obeisance, embracing Islam, repudiating his
characters' words, and postponing translations and a paperback.
The rejection of this self-abasement, which crowned a "degree
course in worthlessness," convinced Rushdie that "there is nothing I
can do to break this impasse." Further apologies threatened annihilation:
he "might as well be dead." To restore his self-respect and
reputation, he denied that he had ever "disowned" The Satanic
Verses or regretted writing it. Describing suspension of the paperback
as a "surrender," he secured its publication within months.
And he re-asserted his worth as a "writer," a "maker of stories," an
"arguer with the world."
These narratives pose an intractable problem. Speech is essential
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