The scale and speed of the Islamic advance have exacted a high price from Muslims themselves in the past decades. Their handicaps have mounted as a consequence of being seen as an actual or potential danger. After the 9/11 attacks, Muslims almost everywhere in the western world, Britain included, reported increasing hostility and discrimination. However, their negative “image”, about which Muslims are rightly anxious, has largely been of their own creation.
Not even well-intentioned liberals or human rights lobbyists have been able to protect Muslims from the effects of Islamist violence and threats. This was shown clearly in the Salman Rushdie case. After the Anglo-Indian novelist published The Satanic Verses, in which it was implied that the Koran was inspired by Satan, the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in February 1989 calling for zealous Muslims to execute the writer for his blasphemy, forcing him into hiding. It was a sentence designed to strike fear into others, as larger and other more terrifying events were to do in the following years.
“It is Islamic law. He must die,” asserted Sayed Abdul Quddus, the Bradford Muslim leader, at the time. There was no shortage of volunteers. “Ninety-nine per cent of Muslims would be prepared to kill him,” declared Mohammed Ismail Janjua, president of the Dudley mosque. There was also open incitement by Muslims in Britain to murder the “blasphemous dog”.
How to kill him occupied some; where to kill him, others. “I would welcome the opportunity to kill him myself if he was in an Islamic country,” declared Mohammed Sidique, president of the Muslim Youth Movement of Great Britain. “Let us take him to Medina,” said a 16-year-old Bradford schoolgirl, Safia Sheikh, “and let us stone him to death.” Others, despite the bravado, were morally less certain about whether Rushdie should die at all. “Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him,” said Iqbal — later Sir Iqbal — Sacranie of the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs. “His mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks forgiveness to almighty Allah.”
On closer examination, the divisions and uncertainties among Muslims about what to do with Rushdie were profound. Some Muslims held that Khomeini had not only been right in theological principle but right in decreeing the sanction of death. Other Muslims held that he was right in principle, but wrong to call for Rushdie to be killed. Yet others havered indecisively over both the principle and the practicality of the thing.
In Britain, Muslims were buffeted by internal conflicts between loyalty to faith and the need to observe domestic law, just as many Muslims were later to be divided in their responses to the London bombings. Some expressed an inflamed hostility to Rushdie; others feared the consequences for Muslims should he be killed. But few Muslims defended Rushdie’s freedom of speech, while those who approved of the novel itself were fewest of all. Considerations of right and wrong also took second place among Muslims to a wrestling with their duties in the non-Muslim world.
A fudged position was common. Zaki Badawi, chairman of the Imams and Mosques Council, thus described incitement to violence not as a wrong in itself but as “contrary to our faith”. The Merseyside Muslim Society, urging self-restraint, declared that the death sentence could be carried out only in an Islamic state — a case of Muslim transferring moral responsibility to Muslim.
But by December 1990 Rushdie had declared that he was ready “to accept the basic tenets of Islam”. In London, in the presence of six Muslim scholars, he affirmed his belief in “the oneness of God and the prophecy of the Prophet Muhammad”. It had not been his intention to offend people. A paperback edition of the novel would not now be published.
Most Muslims rejected his “conversion” despite the Koranic provision for a sinner’s repentance, and seven months later Rushdie himself repented of his repentance, explaining that at the time of his conversion he had been “in a state of some confusion and torment”.
But some non-Muslims had no such hesitation about their positions, coming to the aid of militant Islam at its worst in a way that is now still more common. In March 1989 the former US president Jimmy Carter used Islam’s own vocabulary in saying that The Satanic Verses was not only “an arrow pointed at Muslims” but at religion in general. Billy Graham, the American evangelist, also declared against Rushdie’s novel. The historian Lord Dacre said he “would not shed a tear” if British Muslims were to “waylay Rushdie in a dark street”. Similarly, in September 1990 the former cabinet minister Lord Tebbit described Rushdie’s “public life” as “a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality”. He had used the right of free speech to “insult, demean and degrade” and was, in short, “a villain”.
The education secretary at the time, Kenneth Baker, was more moderate. “Those who wish to make their homes in Britain,” he declared, “cannot deny to others the very freedoms which drew them to this country in the first place.” It was the same kind of position as was to be adopted by Tony Blair after the London bombings. Yet the Conservative government of the day betrayed Rushdie by condemning his book — an action demanded by Iran as the price of restoring diplomatic relations — but failed to get the fatwa rescinded; one of the many victories that militant Islam has secured against a divided West.
More unedifying was the playing upon Muslim feelings and interests by some Labour MPs who had large minorities of Muslim constituents. In the Leicester East constituency, Keith Vaz, a Catholic of Indian origin, led 3,000 Muslim demonstrators in an anti-Rushdie protest in March 1989. Vaz not only declared that “today we celebrate one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain”, but attacked his own party, on his Muslim constituents’ behalf, as “a godless party”.
Roy Hattersley, deputy leader of the Labour party, with 35,000 Muslim voters to concentrate his mind in his Birmingham constituency, announced his “vehement opposition” to the banning of books, but at the same time called for the paperback edition of Rushdie’s novel not to be published, and was accused of “trying to have it both ways”.
Such opportunism and muddle were not surprising, since politicians in many western liberal democracies were having to watch their backs as their Muslim electorates grew. But the confused combination of “respect” for, fear of, contempt for and truckling to the Muslim community was not governed by electoral considerations alone.
The deputy chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality declared that Britain could not afford to have “a large, proud and law-abiding minority withdrawing in a mood of deep sulk”. As for the Crown Prosecution Service, it refused to authorise the bringing by the police of any charges of incitement to murder Rushdie. And when European Community members backed away from an initial intent to present a common front of disapproval towards the Iranian regime, it was swiftly exploited.
The envoys, declared Ayatollah Khomeini, were “humiliated, disgraced, and regretful of what they had done”.
This was the skill of a powerful force in motion. Skilful, too, has been the use made by the Muslim and Arab worlds of their knowledge that western liberal societies are increasingly afraid of the progress of Islamic self-confidence and strength, and ever more deeply divided over how to respond to it. Indeed, even by 1990, critics of the approach to the Rushdie affair had concluded that “no one may say anything about Islam which in any way displeases Muslims, irrespective of its foundation in truth”.
Since then, increasing hostility to Islam in the non-Muslim world has increased the need of diaspora Muslims to transfer blame to others for the dilemmas they face. In 1989 and 1990 many Muslims in Britain made Rushdie the scapegoat for their troubles. In 2005, as the Islamic advance accelerates and anti-Americanism grows, Muslims throughout the world, now greatly strengthened by western liberal support, continue to blame everyone but themselves for Islamism’s violences and the angers that they arouse.
The Losing Battle with Islam by David Selbourne will be published in the United States next month
