[Telegraph] Honour 'justifies' suicide attack on Rushdie

Dude what are you talking about? Of his works since then, I believe I've read the Moor's Last Sigh, Fury, East-West, and SHalimar the clown. The Moor's last sigh didn't contain much about islam despite the title (it was the title of a painting). Fury didn't either (the weakest of the books of his I've read). I suppose Shalimar the clown did since it dealt with Kashmir, but then it didn't exactly extol the hindus either. East West was just an anthology of essays dealing with nothing in particular, though I barley remember them.

And oh my god, he was denouncing islamic terrorism after 9-11? You mean right after islamic terrorists kind of made the news, after he himself (again, an Indian Muslim though I'm sure he no longer practices) has been terrorized by islamic religious extremists for decades? Come on.

Maybe among people who have a dim recollection of him and who don't read. I know him as quite simply one of the greatest novelists of his time. And I'm far from the only one.

It seems pretty clear though that YOU want it to be true that he's only rememberd for the stupid fatwa as some sort of perverse morality tale.

As if the fatwa is his fault - he writes a novel, as a free citizen. A bunch of extremist religious wacko assholes in Iran, who can't read english anyway, get wind of it and deem him a threat to all of Islam - despite the fact that most of the islamic world, like them, would never ever ever even have the opportunity to read the work of an indian muslim magical realist working in england. So they make him into a political pawn and a propaganda tool and stir up a bunch of crazies to go murder him. Again, tell me how this is his fault? He's a british citizen as far as I know and free to publish whatever he wanted.

So then why hasn't he continued writing books mocking at islam then? If it makes him so much money then why doesn't he make a career out of it? Again, you're using subtext to make it seem like he's the HOward Stern of modern literature - it's just simply not even close to being true.

 

Kasakstan didn't put out a FATWA on Borat.

 

LOL! Trying to provoke me into a response, NY?

No, actually there are many.

There were protests in Venezuela and Argentina the last few years with multiple protesters burning American flags and chanting things along the lines of, "Death to America, Death to Imperialism" and other similar slogans. Not to mention more than a handful of protests in Britain where such slogans have become rather commonplace in recent years (One example: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/02/15/sprj.irq.protests/index.html )

Want something closer to home? How about a student on a U.S. campus?

http://michellemalkin.com/2007/03/20/death-to-america/

Anyway, it's besides the point. "Death to America" is nothing more than another anti-American slogan, no different than burning the American flag on the streets of London or Cairo or Islamabad or Jakarta. It's merely another expression of the same sentiment.

 

I am talking about op-eds, a number of lectures he gave on college campuses or interviews of his I've come across.

Sam, you know that's not what I meant. In a NYTimes article following the attack, he 'protested' the fact that some politicians/public figures were going out of their way to make the distinction between "Islam" and "terrorism", and then proceeded to pretty much insinuate that any Muslim who didn't share his vision of a 'secularized Islam' was backwards and dangerous.

He has his opinions, he lets them be known, that's fine with me. But to suggest that he has somehow 'dropped it' over the years is anything but true.

I am talking about public perception, what he has become associated with. I don't care about the few that actually read his work or are familiar with his novels, but rather of what his name has largely become associated with. Walk around any college campus and randomely ask students what comes to mind when you say, "Rushdie", and if they do recognize his name at all you will likely receive the following response, "isn't that the guy that the mullahs issued a fatwa against?"

That's what I mean when I say "it's his claim to fame". I am not discounting his work at all or his ordeal (in fact, I have much sympathy for him), just saying that's what he's become associated with now. It's mostly not of his own doing, but more of an unintentional consequence that he has to deal with.

Completely agree, that's precisely what I posted earlier in this thread.

Where did I say any of it was his fault? Living in the West, we all have (to some extent) the right to free speech/freedom of expression, but as we all know that could come at a price. Free speech isn't actually 'free' and can have consequences, which could lead to that individual being politically or 'socially-osterized', or in the case of Rushdie having a bunch of fanatics calling for his head (literally) and threatening to kill him.

It's unfair, it's disturbing, but it's the price that at times one must bear for his right to 'free speech'. Rushdie did not want nor deserve any of it, but his reality is different.

Where did you get that part?

 

“One Thousand Days in a Balloon”, was an address given at Columbia University in 1991 while he was under an Iranian fatwa for ‘blasphemy’. This is a pretty interesting read...

One Thousand Days in a Balloon

A hot-air balloon drifts slowly over a bottomless chasm, carrying several passengers. A leak develops. The wounded balloon can bear just one passenger to safety. But who should live, who should die? And who could make such a choice?

In point of fact, debating societies everywhere regularly make such choices without qualms, for of course what I've described is the given situation of that evergreen favorite, the Balloon Debate, in which, as the speakers argue over the relative merits and demerits of the well-known figures they have placed in disaster's mouth, the assembled company blithely accepts the faintly unpleasant idea that a human being's right to life is increased or diminished by his or her virtues or vices--that we may be born equal but thereafter our lives weigh differently in the scales.

I have now spent over a thousand days in just such a balloon; but, alas, this isn't a game. For most of these thousand days, my fellow-travelers included the Western hostages in Lebanon, and the British businessmen imprisoned in Iran and Iraq, Roger Cooper and Ian Richter. And I had to accept, and did accept, that for most of my countrymen and countrywomen, my plight counted for less than the others'. In any choice between us, I'd have been the first to be pitched out of the basket and into the abyss. Our lives teach us who we are," I wrote at the end of my essay "In Good Faith." Some of the lessons have been harsh, and difficult to learn.

Trapped inside a metaphor, I've often felt the need to redescribe it, to change the terms. This isn't so much a balloon, I've wanted to say, as a bubble, within which I'm simultaneously exposed and sealed off. The

bubble floats above and through the world, depriving me of reality, reducing me to an abstraction. For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother an "affair." And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?
What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: "Not a lot." But I refuse to give up in my despair, because I know many people do care, and are appalled by the upside-down logic of the post fatwa world, in which a novelist can be accused of having savaged or "mugged" a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its victim) and the scapegoat for its discontents. (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)
I refuse to give in to despair even though, for a thousand days and more, I've been put through a degree course in worthlessness, my own personal and specific worthlessness. My first teachers were the mobs marching down distant boulevards, baying for my blood, and finding, soon enough, their echoes on English streets. At first, as I watched marchers, I felt them trampling on my heart.

Sometimes I think that one day, Muslims will be ashamed of what Muslims did in these times, will find the "Rushdie affair" as improbable as the West now finds martyr-burning. One day they may agree that--as the European Enlightenment demonstrated--freedom of thought is precisely freedom from religious control, freedom from accusations of blasphemy. Maybe they'll agree, too, that the row over "The Satanic Verses" was at bottom an argument about who should have power over the grand narrative, the story of Islam, and that power must belong equally to everyone. That even if my novel were incompetent, its attempt to retell the story would still be important. That if I've failed, others must succeed, because those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

One day. Maybe. But not today.

Back in the balloon, something longed-for and heartening has happened. On this occasion, mirabile dictu, the many have not been sacrificed, but saved. That is to say, my companions, the Western hostages and the jailed businessmen, have by good fortune and the efforts of others managed to descend safely to earth, and have been reunited with their own, free lives. I rejoice for them, and admire their courage, their resilience. And now I'm alone in the balloon.

Surely I'll be safe now? Surely the balloon will drop safely towards some nearby haven? Surely it's my turn now?

But the balloon is still sinking. I realize that it's carrying a great deal of valuable freight. Trading relations, armaments deals, the balance of power in the Gulf--these and other matters are weighing it down. I hear voices suggesting that if I stay aboard, this precious cargo will be endangered. The national interest is being redefined, am I being redefined out of it? Am I to be jettisoned, after all?

When Britain renewed relations with Iran at the United Nations in 1990, British officials assured me unambiguously that something very substantial had been achieved on my behalf. The Iranians had secretly agreed to forget the fatwa. They would "neither encourage nor allow" their citizens, surrogates or proxies to act against me. Oh, how I wanted to believe that! But in the year-and-a-bit that followed, we saw the fatwa restated in Iran, the bounty money doubled, the book's Italian translator severely wounded, its Japanese translator stabbed to death; there was news of an attempt to find and kill me by contract killers working directly for the Iranian Government.
It seems reasonable to deduce that the secret deal made at the United Nations hasn't worked. Dismayingly, however, the talk as I write is

all of improving relations with Iran still further. Is this a balloon I'm in, or the dustbin of history?

Let me be clear: There is nothing I can do to break this impasse. The fatwa was politically motivated to begin with, it remains a breach of international law, and it can only be solved at the political level. To effect the release of the Western hostages in Lebanon, great levers were moved; for Mr. Richter, 70 million pounds in frozen Iraqi assets were "thawed." What, then, is a novelist under terrorist attack worth?

Despair murmurs once again: "Not a plugged nickel."
But I refuse to give in to despair.

You may ask why I'm so sure there's nothing I can do to help myself.
At the end of 1990, dispirited and demoralized, I faced my deepest grief, my sorrow at having been torn away from the cultures and societies from which I'd always drawn my inspiration--that is, the broad community of British Asians, the broader community of Indian Muslims. I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by what I did perhaps failed to see that I wanted to make peace between the warring halves of the World, which were also the warring halves of my soul.

The really important conversations I had in this period were with myself.
I said: Salman, you must send a message loud enough to make ordinary Muslims see that you aren't their enemy, and make the West understand a little more of the complexity of Muslim culture and start thinking a little less stereotypically.

And I said to myself: Admit it, Salman, the Story of Islam has a deeper meaning for you than any of the other grand narratives. Of course you're no mystic, mister. No supernaturalism, no literalist orthodoxies for you. But Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as

your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was. Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family.

I reminded myself that I had always argued that it was necessary to develop the nascent concept of the "secular Muslim," who, like the secular Jew, affirmed his membership of the culture while being separate from the theology. But Salman, I told myself, you can't argue from outside the debating chamber. You've got to cross the threshold, go inside the room, and then fight for your humanized, historicized, secularized way of being a Muslim.
It was with such things in mind--and with my thoughts in a state of some confusion and torment--that I spoke the Muslim creed before witnesses. But my fantasy of joining the fight for the modernization of Muslim thought was stillborn. It never really had a chance. Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say. In the West, some "friends" turned against me, calling me by yet another set of insulting names. Now I was spineless, pathetic, debased; I had betrayed myself, my cause; above all, I had betrayed them.

I also found myself up against the granite, heartless certainties of Actually Existing Islam, by which I mean the political and priestly power structure that presently dominates and stifles Muslim societies. Actually Existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere on Earth, and it wasn't about to let me, of all people, argue in favor of one. Suddenly I was (metaphorically) among people whose social attitudes I'd fought all my life--for example, their attitudes about women (one Islamicist boasted to me that his wife would cut his toenails while he made telephone calls, and suggested I find such a spouse) or about gays (one of the Imams I met in December 1990 was on TV soon afterwards, denouncing Muslim gays as sick creatures who brought shame on their families and who ought to seek medical and psychiatric help).

I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I'd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I've always understood as freedom. Actually Existing Islam, which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in.

Ibn Rushd's ideas were silenced in their time. And throughout the Muslim world today, progressive ideas are in retreat. Actually Existing Islam reigns supreme and just as the recently destroyed "Actually Existing Socialism" of the Soviet terror-state was horrifically unlike the utopia of peace and equality of which democratic socialists have dreamed, so also is Actually Existing Islam a force to which I have never given in, to which I cannot submit.

There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.

I have never disowned my book, nor regretted writing it. I said I was sorry to have offended people, because I had not set out to do so, and so I am. I explained that writers do not agree with every word spoken by every character they create--a truism in the world of books, but a continuing mystery to "The Satanic Verses'" opponents. I have always said that this novel has been traduced. Indeed, the chief benefit of my meeting with the six Islamic scholars on Christmas Eve 1990 was that they agreed that the novel had no insulting motives. "In Islam, it is a man's intention that counts," I was told. "Now we will launch a worldwide campaign on your behalf to explain that there has been a great mistake." All this with much smiling and friendliness. It was in this context that I agreed to suspend--not cancel--a paperback edition, to create what I called a space for reconciliation.
Alas, I overestimated these men. Within days, all but one of them had broken their promises, and recommenced to vilify me and my work as if we had not shaken hands. I felt (most probably I had been) a great fool.

The suspension of the paperback began at once to look like a surrender. In the after math of the attacks on my translators, it looks even more craven.

It has now been more than three years since "The Satanic Verses" was published; that's a long, long "space for reconciliation." Long enough. I accept that I was wrong to have given way on this point. "The Satanic Verses" must be freely available and easily affordable, if only because if it is not read and studied, then these years will have no meaning. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

"Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own--and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs--then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. ~ Yet I must cling with all my might to my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic. out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how grey the storm. And if that plunges me into a contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.

"Free speech is a non-starter." says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

What is my single life worth?

Is It worth more or less than the fat contracts and political treaties that are in here with me? Is it worth more or less than good relations with a country which, in April 1991, gave 800 women 74 lashes each for not wearing a veil; in which the 80-year-old writer Miriam Firouz is still in jail,

and has been tortured; and whose Foreign Minister says in response to criticism of his country's lamentable human rights record, "international monitoring of the human rights situation in Iran should not continue indefinitely . . . Iran could not tolerate such monitoring for long"?

You must decide what you think a friend is worth to his friends, what you think a son is worth to his mother, or a father to his son. You must decide what a man's conscience and heart and soul are worth. You must decide what you think a writer is worth, what value you place on a maker of stories, and an arguer with the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, the balloon is sinking into the abyss.

 

Agreed with everything SamFisher posted. I recently spoke with Rushdie at the NY PEN World Voices festival and he seemed very soft-spoken and thoughtful. But besides that, I think Mr. Rushdie is a secularist that sees a lot of faults with all religions... if you read his books.

It's unfortunate that Satanic Verses got singled out, but I respect him for writing about something that speaks to his beliefs -- it's unfortunate because that particular book really illustrates how a belief system can be warped and misused by extremists.

I think in most of his books, he shows the hypocrisy of everything: religion, academics, artists, etc. But not surprisingly, people rather tear art down rather than engage in dialogue.

While free speech may have its price.. that doesn't mean you can't place a value judgment on those who are blinded by hate.

 

Of course you can, no one is saying otherwise. However, one must be willing to deal with the consequences of free speech.

Truth be told, my only 'beef' with Rushdie is that he 'backed off' his position -- temporarily -- at one point to attempt and placate the religious establishment (he pretty much admits that in the article posted above). I thought that was gutless, you either stick with what you said and 'take the heat' or don't say it at all if you're unwilling to deal with the possible 'blowback' it might create.

Personally, that's the only thing I hold against him to this day. I might be too harsh on him, but I thought his attempts to 'negotiate' his way out of his troubles was a blemish on his career.

 

For starters, how about a current minister -- Sheikh Rashid Ahmed -- that has run terrorist training camps? Is that type of support vocal enough for you?

first, some background on Sheikh Rashid Ahmed:

a description of some of the activities that have got him elected 6 times:

as for how many were trained, and exactly what type of training they received:

Of course, Sheikh Rashid denies such involvement now, but more than one source (and all of them are Pakistani) has corroborated Yasin Malik’s claims:

in case you were wondering, the camp trained not only JKLF cadres in the late 80s and early 90s, but also those associated with the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen in the years following that. There is evidence that the same terrorist training camp is still operational in Pakistan, despite Musharraf's claim that he has shut down all of Pakistan's terrorist infrastructure.

Background on the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen:

by the way, there was this choice nugget from the first article I quoted which I thought was funny:

 

What's funny about your link is that it doesn't specify who the few were that had "death to America" signs. You know, it could have been Muslims...

Ok, and then your other example is some kid who is hiding himself because he's afriad to even show himself with that sort of sign.

You're right, you've proven without a doubt that everyone wishes death to america and it doesn't mean anything but a figure of speech to me - hey america, you are bad!

That's what the folk who fly planes into buildings were thinking right? Suicide bombers were just kidding around when they pledged to kill infidels right?

Why are you defending extremists?

 

No, unfortunately I think we let the daisy cutters do our talking for us.