A brief history of blasphemy
………………………………………………. .…
This version of Chapter 1 of A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and the Satanic Verses, follows the revised text prepared for the German translation, Erben des Hasses, Die Rushdie-Affäre und ihre Folgen, Knesebeck, 1992.
………………………………………………. .…
ON
FEBRUARY 14th 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his fatwa,
which was in effect a death threat against Salman Rushdie and his
publishers. Since then The Satanic Verses has probably occasioned
more comment in newspapers and journals than any book ever published.
During the year which immediately followed Khomeini’s intervention the
reaction to the novel was the subject of at least five conferences and
five books in the United Kingdom alone.[1] In view of
this it might well seem that everything that can be said about the
Satanic Verses affair has been said. I believe, however, that some
of the underlying issues have scarcely been dealt with at all, and that
there are a number of fundamental questions which still need to be both
asked and answered.
In seeking to
unravel the various strands in one of the most complex of all cultural
tragedies I am not arguing that we should ignore, or in any way deny the
reality of harsh rigidity which is sometimes shown by Islam. The Ayatollah
Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie and his publishers was
cruel, murderous and tyrannical – all the more so in that it would appear
that one of its main purposes was to shore up the narrow and repressive
regime which he had established in Iran. For the sake of Salman Rushdie
himself and for the sake of his publishers no effort should be spared to
bring about the lifting of the death threat. To this end the fatwa
should, I believe, be opposed passionately and continuously. But the terms
in which this is done should be chosen carefully. We gain little from
describing it as ‘cruel, murderous and tyrannical’, as I have done here,
if we contrive at the same time to forget that our own religious tradition
has very frequently been cruel, murderous and tyrannical, and that our own
forms of justice have, until relatively recently, reflected this fact.
In saying this I
am offering an implicit and deliberate criticism of some of the opinions
which have been expressed by those who, with every justification, have
offered Salman Rushdie their support. Indeed I am bound to confess that
ever since the Rushdie affair started there is one thing I have feared
more than the bombs of Islamic fundamentalists. It is the harm that can be
done by the machine-gun bullets of liberal self-righteousness. The
ricochet of those bullets can be heard all to clearly in the chauvinistic
tones of Fay Weldon’s Counterblast pamphlet, Sacred Cows and in the
hard rhetoric of some of Rushdie’s other supporters. If we allow ourselves
to be swayed by such rhetoric we are in danger, I believe, of seeing with
disproportionate clarity the cruelty and repressiveness of Islam, while
failing to register at all the rigidity and authoritarianism of some of
our own most revered cultural traditions.
What we need is a little less
pressure on the trigger of cultural patriotism, and a little more
historical perspective. For only then is it likely that we can take a more
balanced and considered view of one of the most disturbing cultural
clashes there has ever been and of a dilemma which is going to face
Western writers and intellectuals for many years to come, whether they
like it or not.
Of all the issues
which are raised by the Satanic Verses affair, and which clamour
for discussion, blasphemy is both one of the most important and one of the
most difficult. It is difficult partly because in our own society the law
against blasphemy is widely regarded as an archaic one – a kind of legal
appendix, which still survives in the body politic, but which seems to
have no real function. The last time a case of blasphemy was brought
before the British courts was in 1977, when Mary Whitehouse instituted a
private prosecution against Gay News for publishing a poem by James
Kirkup which seemingly portrayed Jesus as the object of love. Although
this prosecution was successful, one of the effects of Mary Whitehouse's
action was to bring the British laws of blasphemy, which had not been
invoked for more than half a century , into active disrepute, particularly
among writers and poets.
In the same year
that the prosecution was brought against Gay News, a number of
humanist organisations founded the Committee Against Blasphemy Law and
carried forward a vigorous campaign to abolish the offence. Although this
campaign attracted considerable support, it bore no immediate fruit in
spite of the fact that the abolition of the offence of blasphemy was also
advocated in 1979 by the Bernard Williams Committee in its Report on
Obscenity and Film Censorship.
The cause of the
abolitionists attracted even more support in 1985 when the Law Commission
published its report, Criminal Law: Offences against Religion and
Public Worship, which, broadly speaking, endorsed the humanist view.
It described the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel as
‘unsatisfactory and archaic’. It noted that the law offered protection
against blasphemy only to Christianity and went on to argue that in the
multi-cultural United Kingdom of the late twentieth century this ‘could
not be justified’. The Law Commissioners were not, as we will eventually
see, unanimous in their conclusion. But it is clearly significant that
their main report concluded by recommending abolition of the common law
offence ‘without replacement’.
In 1989, when
Muslims in Britain sought unsuccessfully to ; invoke the blasphemy laws
against Penguin Books for publishing The Satanic Verses, the
humanist and libertarian campaigns against the blasphemy laws were
revived. In particular, Article 19, a free speech pressure- group based in
London, took the initiative in forming an International Committee for the
Defence of Salman Rushdie and his Publishers. As well as organising
support for the threatened author, this committee began to campaign
against the blasphemy laws. Meanwhile, in Parliament on 12th April 1989,
Tony Benn presented a bill to the House of Commons to abolish the offence
of blasphemy. He was supported by MPs from all parties including David
Steel and Sir Ian Gilmour.
Soon after this
the International Committee published its pamphlet The Crime of
Blasphemy – Why it Should be Abolished.[2] This
pamphlet is, in some respects, a valuable one not least because it is
informed, like most humanist or secularist arguments, by a strong sense of
history. One of the ideas which has grown up around the blasphemy laws is
that their main purpose is to protect the tender sensitivities of
Christians. It is certainly true that the laws against blasphemy have
often served to do just this. But the International Committee puts forward
a much more robust view of their traditional function. This view is
perhaps most forcefully
expressed in a passage it quotes from an earlier pamphlet, Chapman Cohen’s
Blasphemy – a Plea for Religious Equality, which was published in
1922:
Blasphemy laws are a heritage from a
wicked and deplorable past. In their essence they belong to a period when
laws were far more ferocious than they are today, and when it was held the
duty of the State to enforce and openly coerce opinion. They are also part
of the general belief that the right discharge of the duties of
citizenship depends, in some more or less obscure way, on the holding of
right religious beliefs. In such circumstances, unbelief, heresy and
blasphemy partake of the nature of treason. The heretic is one who is a
threat to the welfare of the tribe or nation, and, in the interests of the
whole group, he must be suppressed … The blasphemy laws are aimed at
opinion and opinion alone. It is to the spirit of persecution they owe
their existence; it is the spirit of intolerance and persecution they
always serve.[3]
This passage could scarcely be
described as embodying a dispassionate approach to history. But it is
precisely because of this that it manages to convey a much more accurate
picture of the role played in European history by religious repression
than will be found in the work of many academic historians. That Cohen’s
robust view applies not only to Britain but also to other European
countries – and indeed to the United States – is amply confirmed if we
pause for a moment to consider the historical origins of the crime of
blasphemy.
The laws against
blasphemy which have, in one form or another, existed in most Western
countries in the last three centuries, grew out of the much older law of
heresy, which was designed to protect the Christian church against all
forms of dissidence. The origins of this law can in turn be traced back to
the New Testament.
Because the early
Christians saw themselves as possessors of the One Truth, they were
constantly wary of those who, by teaching false doctrines, or by insulting
God or Christ, threatened to defile this truth. Few upheld their own
version of the truth more zealously than Paul. In his second letter to the
Corinthians he lashed out at those Christians who opposed him, calling
them ‘false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles
of Christ.’ ‘And no wonder,’ he went on to say, ‘for even Satan disguises
himself as an angel of light. So it is not strange if his servants also
disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will
correspond to their deeds’ (2 Corinthians, 13-15).
In consigning
those who did not share his doctrine to the fires of hell Paul was in no
sense a theological revolutionary. For, according to the New Testament, a
similar idea had been propounded by Jesus. In the parable of the tares, to
take but one example, Jesus looks forward to the time when all unbelievers
will be burnt in hell. Speaking of the wheat and the tares which have been
sown in one field, Jesus says: ‘Let both grow together until the harvest:
and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together
first the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the
wheat into my barn.(Matthew 13: 30; see also John 15: 6; Matthew 7:19).
The bundles of weeds to whose burning Jesus looks forward in this
parable of the Last Judgment are, of course, symbols; they stand for the
living bodies of those men, women and children who have not accepted the
Christian gospel and who are therefore destined to burn in the fires of
hell. The wheat stands for those believers who have submitted
to Christ’s rule and who will therefore find their place in
heaven. In Jesus’s essentially euphemistic parable the massive
destruction of human life through which the Kingdom of Heaven is to be
brought into being is portrayed as a stage in the gathering-in of an
abundant harvest.
In the New
Testament itself there is never any suggestion that this wrathful judgment
should be enforced by mere humans. The words of Jesus in this regard are
clear: ‘Judge not, and you will not be judged’ (Luke 6:37). But these
words were premised on the assumption which informs the whole of the New
Testament – that the apocalyptic moment when God himself would come to
judge the world was imminent and should be expected almost daily. When
that moment failed to come the temptation for those consumed by a burning
faith in a religion which was itself zealous for judgment was to assume
for themselves the role of the divine judge. Gradually the words of Jesus
and Paul which I have quoted above, taken together with many other
passages from the New Testament, came to be construed as a licence for the
persecution of all who were deemed heretics.
The persecution of
pagans, Jews, Muslims and dissident Christians began in the early middle
ages. But it did not emerge on a large scale until the creation, in the
first part of the thirteenth century, of the Inquisition. This
organisation was set up by the Pope and handed over in 1232 to the
Dominican order, who soon became known as ‘Domini canes’ or ‘the hounds of
the Lord’. From small beginnings the Inquisition rapidly grew to become
one of the mightiest and most powerful institutions in Europe. It took the
form of a travelling ecclesiastical court which warned towns of its
impending visits and encouraged individual Catholics to denounce all
‘heretical’ Christians or unbelievers. Parents were encouraged to betray
their children and children their parents; anonymous denunciations were
received with enthusiasm. Suspected ‘heretics’ were arrested and their
guilt was assumed. If the victim confessed to holding heretical views then
he or she was spared much suffering. If the victims made no confession
they were tortured:
The heretic was dragged into the torture
chamber and shown all the terrible instruments of torture. If this
dreadful display did not make him confess to his errors, then the
instruments were applied to his body, one by one, in a process of slowly
increasing pain … Tortures lasting three or four hours were not unusual.
While the victim was being tortured, the rack or other instrument was
frequently sprinkled with holy water. Countless frightful means were used
in the procedure, all with the sole purpose of crushing the victim’s
resistance and making him confess … A cloth was usually pushed into the
victim’s mouth to prevent the torturers from being distracted or irritated
by his wild screams. A heretic might be tortured in this way for hours,
until his body had become a flayed, bruised, broken and bleeding mass of .
om time to time he would be asked whether he was at last ready to confess.
Overwhelmed by pain and half out of his mind with anguish, he would
usually, after a few hours of this torment, give all the Information that
the Inquisitors wanted to hear … [4]
So extreme, and so
cruel were the measures adopted by the Inquisition to enforce the
supremacy of the Church and the suppression of dissent, that we sometimes
tend to regard it as belonging to the history of some barbarous
‘pre-culture’ which bears little relation to our own. Yet it is probably
true to say that the Inquisition was the greatest engine of ideological
conformity ever devised by the West and that its influence lasted long
after the institution itself was dissolved. Indeed, to a degree which is
scarcely ever acknowledged in our history books, the very Protestants who
had rebelled against its authority tended to make new constitutions and
new laws in the moulds which had been cast by their persecutors. Instead
of transcending the Inquisition they reproduced some of its most
repressive features.
For, contrary to a
widespread modern historical myth, it is not the case that the Reformation
replaced a state of religious tyranny by a state of religious freedom. It
may well be that Martin Luther is sometimes celebrated as a champion of
such freedom, but this view of his achievement rests upon a misconception.
His famous pronouncement at the Diet of Worms of 1521, ‘Here I stand. I
can do nothing else. God help me. Amen’, was certainly not a declaration
of untrammelled liberty. For, as Joachim Kahl has written: ‘Luther was
simply fighting against the authority of the pope in the name of an
authority which was even higher than that of the pope – the word of God.
Submission to this objectively present authority was freedom of conscience
as he understood it.’[5] Almost exactly the same point can
be made about the Puritan poet John Milton who tends to be regarded both
in Britain and in the United States as the father of modern intellectual
liberty.[6]
Contrary to most
modern assumptions Milton did not support freedom of the press except in
those areas where he felt his own liberty was constrained. In 1651 he
accepted an appointment as one of Cromwell’s censors. The freedom of
expression which Milton sought to seize for himself, in other words, was
of a kind which meant that a form of tyranny should be imposed on others.
More than a
century earlier, in 1531, Martin Luther gave evidence of his own
conception of religious freedom by assenting to Melanchthon’s suggestion
that Anabaptists should be punished by death. Although Anabaptism would
once have been regarded as a heresy, the term Luther preferred was
blasphemy. At various times, particularly, in the later stages of his
career, he condemned not only Anabaptism, but also Arianism, Judaism and
Islam as blasphemies. Sin was blasphemy, the political opinions of the
peasantry were blasphemy, even missing church was blasphemy. At times
Luther’s anti-Catholicism was even more violent than his anti-Judaism. All
Catholics were blasphemers. Their Mass was blasphemous and their popes
blasphemers and Antichrists. They should be compelled to worship in
Lutheran churches on pain of excommunication and exile. In 1536, after
some hesitation, Luther finally endorsed imprisonment and death for
Catholic blasphemies, in order to ensure that their contagion did not
spread. Luther, as the American historian Leonard Levy has written, may
have abused the word ‘blasphemy’, but he also ‘revived and popularised it.
It became part of the Protestant currency.’[7]
In Geneva Calvin,
after some initial signs of leniency, harshly opposed both blasphemy and
heresy as soon as he had the power to do so, calling heretics and
blasphemers ‘traitors to God’. In the case of Servetus he himself was
directly responsible for having a blasphemer killed. Servetus was a
gifted theologian and a scholar of genius. He had, however, opposed the
doctrine of the Trinity and he had imprudently compounded this crime by
openly opposing Calvin as well. Having unsuccessfully denounced Servetus
to the Catholic Inquisition, Calvin eventually had him arrested in Geneva
where he was tried for heresy and blasphemy and sentenced to death. In
this instance Calvin opposed death by burning as being too cruel and
endorsed Servetus’s request that he should be beheaded. He was overruled
by the court and Servetus was burnt the next day along with a copy of his
heretical book. The executioner used green wood which burnt slowly.
Servetus screamed continuously as the lower half of his body burnt. After
half an hour he passed out and died. His last words reportedly were, ‘O
Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have pity on me.’ This was taken to be
proof of his guilt, since he had not referred to the ‘Eternal Son of
God.’[8]
Both Luther and
Calvin were, in this regard, following the example of the Inquisition in
seeking to suppress opinions because they were deemed subversive of
religious authority. But one of the effects of the Reformation was
actually to extend the scope of such measures. For when the Reformation
made the monarch head of the established church, as happened in England,
religious and political questions became intertwined. The habits of
suppression which the Inquisition had created in the sphere of religion
were now extended to the sphere of politics. The sacredness and supremacy
of church and state were maintained by prosecuting dissidents for two
related crimes – on the one hand for heresy and on the other for treason
and sedition.
In England the
crime of speaking against God was punished as heresy until the early years
of the seventeenth century. The penalty was death. Gradually, however, the
old laws of heresy fell into disuse. This happened in most Protestant
countries, where, having been repeatedly accused of heresy themselves,
Protestants came to dislike the term.
Both in England
and in colonial America the concept which gradually took the place of
heresy was that of blasphemy or blasphemous libel. Throughout the
seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the courts frequently
invoked the blasphemy law with a quite vicious repressiveness against
those who made disrespectful references to God or Jesus or the Church. In
particular ribaldry or obscenity directed against Christianity was
rigorously outlawed. Even those who rebelled on doctrinal matters or who
questioned the doctrine of the eternal punishment of the wicked might find
themselves arraigned on a charge of blasphemy and they could by no means
be certain of acquittal. In 1729, for example, the Cambridge academic and
deist, Thomas Woolston, was successfully prosecuted for writing a series
of pamphlets in which he denied the literal truth of the miracles of the
New Testament and argued that they should be construed allegorically.
These pamphlets were held to have struck ‘at the very root of
Christianity’ and Woolston was detained until he died in 1733.[9]
Woolston’s fate
was relatively mild. For originally, at least, the punishment of
blasphemers sometimes involved not only imprisonment but also torture. In
1656, for example, James Nayler, a Quaker from Bristol, was charged with
claiming equality with God. He was tried before the High Court of
Parliament, and it was decreed ‘that he be repeatedly set in the pillory
and scourged; that he be branded on the forehead with the letter ‘B’; that
he have his tongue bored with a iron and be confined afterwards in prison
and set to hard labour’.[10]
It should not be
thought that these measures had a merely religious significance. For to
interpret them in this way would be to introduce a distinction between
religion and politics which was foreign to seventeenth-century Europe.
This was made abundantly clear in England in 1676, after the prosecution
of an apparently deranged man, who claimed that Jesus Christ was a and a
whore-master and that religion was a cheat. During the trial the Lord
Chief Justice, Sir Matthew Hale, articulated clearly the principle which
had always been implicit in the English concept of blasphemous libel –
namely that Christianity was part of the law of England, and that a threat
to the Church was, by its very nature, a threat to the State. He said:
‘That such kind of wicked and blasphemous words were not only an offence
against God and religion but a crime against the laws, States and
Government … and therefore punishable in this court, that to say religion
is a cheat, is to dissolve all those obligations whereby civil societies
are preserved; and Christianity being parcel of the laws of England,
therefore to reproach Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the
law.’[11]
Hale’s judgment
succinctly expressed an attitude towards blasphemy which could be found
throughout seventeenth century Europe and which was particularly strong in
Protestant countries. The laws against blasphemy were not simply
restraints on religious freedom. They were a crucial part of an entire
body of legislation whose other major instrument of suppression was the
law against sedition. This in effect transferred the aura of sacredness
and holy dread which had been developed around Christianity to the laws of
the state and the government which upheld them; speaking critically or
disrespectfully about the government or its officers was construed as a
kind of political blasphemy and was punished no less severely than its
religious counterpart.
With some
variations between different countries, these legacies of the Inquisition
were preserved throughout most of Europe. Contrary to the received view
they were not even abolished in the United States. For although those who
framed the First Amendment to the American Constitution believed
passionately in ‘freedom of speech’, their ultimate commitment, like that
of Luther and Milton before them, was to the authority of God. Only those
who bowed to this authority were deemed worthy to enjoy the liberty which
the First Amendment guaranteed. In theory at least those who opposed
either God or the revolution which had been brought about in his name
could claim no such freedom, for both the law of blasphemous libel and the
law of seditious libel remained in force. ‘Liberty of speech,’ as the
historian Arthur Schlesinger put it, ‘belonged solely to those who spoke
the speech of liberty.’[12] In this respect as in others,
America preserved the legal and constitutional inheritance of what might
be called the Protestant Inquisition.
In Britain and
America and in many European countries the continued support for
tyrannical laws, and for the legacy of suppression which derived from the
Inquisition, sprang from what might be termed ‘the floodgate theory’ of
morality. This theory almost always operates in nascent or immature
democracies. In such democracies laws against freedom of expression are
invoked frequently and censorship is often pervasive and violently
enforced. The underlying fear is that, if freedom of expression were to be
permitted even in the smallest degree it could eventually lead to a flood
of conspiracies, revolutions and internal disorders which would rock all
stable government and eventually submerge the state itself.
Parallel fears can
be seen clearly in the history of attitudes towards obscenity. For in most
European countries the responsibility and restraint which were considered
a precondition of the ‘freedom of expression’ which we now enjoy were
inculcated into successive generations through a long series of purity
campaigns. The organisers of these campaigns never hesitated to use the
most violent sanctions provided by the law in order to restrain the
imagination and outlaw any form of art which might be deemed
immoral.
Again and again
campaigners for purity have invoked the ‘floodgate theory’; they have
warned that to relax the rigour of the law in the smallest way, to allow
even a trickle of transgression, will ultimately lead to a flood of
immorality which it will be beyond the power of governments to
control.
Those who have
campaigned with the most vigilance against blasphemy have frequently done
so for similar reasons, often invoking the ‘floodgate theory’ directly by
arguing that, if blasphemy were to be tolerated in a single instance,
impiety might rapidly spread throughout the land. Indeed, there has always
been a close relationship between obscenity laws and blasphemy laws, with
obscene or scurrilous language tending to be construed as one of the
characteristics of blasphemy.
Blasphemy laws
survived in Britain, America, and many European countries including
Germany throughout the nineteenth century. But in our own century these
laws have gradually fallen into disuse. In Germany the law against
blasphemy has been abolished. In Britain laws against blasphemy remain in
force and, in theory at least, they are still the main means whereby
Christianity is protected against obscene or extreme abuse. In practice,
however, they have scarcely played any role for many years. Indeed in 1949
the distinguished British judge Lord Denning declared the British law
obsolete and at the same time consigned the floodgate-theory to the
history books:
The reason for this law was because it
was thought that a denial of Christianity was liable to shake the fabric
of society, which was itself founded upon Christian religion. There is no
such danger to society now and the offence of blasphemy is a dead
letter.[13]
As has already
been noted, in 1977 the offence of blasphemy was fleetingly revived in
Britain. This was when the modern purity campaigner, Mary Whitehouse,
instituted a private prosecution against the magazine Gay News for
publishing an erotic poem about Jesus. Although this prosecution was
successful, one of the effects of Mary Whitehouse’s action was to bring
the blasphemy laws into active disrepute, particularly among writers and
poets. The result was a vigorous campaign to abolish the laws, a campaign
which has been renewed in the wake of the Rushdie affair.
*
Although the
account of the blasphemy laws which I have given here diverges
significantly from the orthodox libertarian view, the path I have followed
so far is at least within shouting distance of that well-beaten track.
Where I find myself parting company with the received view completely is
when it is suggested that ‘true’ intellectual freedom and religious
liberty can somehow be established by the simple expedient of abolishing
tyrannical laws. The basis of my disagreement is very simple. For what
students of religious and social history have almost always failed to
observe is that the seeming obsolescence of blasphemy laws does not
indicate simply that we have grown out of them. Both in cultural and in
psychological terms, it might be a great deal more accurate to suggest
that we have grown into them, and that, behind the change in legal
attitudes towards blasphemy, there lies a profound process of cultural and
psychological internalisation.
Such a process of
internalisation is unlikely ever to be complete. But, to a certain degree
at least, it seems reasonable to argue that respect for the figure of
Jesus, and for Christianity in general, has been inculcated so widely,
even among non-believers, that the restraints of ‘good taste’ have
gradually made the restraints of the law all but redundant. In any
ordinary social relationship it would be considered an unpardonable breach
of good taste for a sceptic or a non-believer to engage in obscene
blasphemies against Jesus or against the Christian faith in the presence
of a devout Christian. So profoundly do we seem to have accepted the
sacredness of the Christian religion that such blasphemies would probably
be considered distasteful even if they were uttered only in the company of
fellow sceptics or unbelievers. Indeed, it is probably true to say that
the majority of people who live in societies which were once deemed
‘Christian’, whether or not they have had a religious upbringing, would
find it psychologically difficult to engage in extreme or obscene
blasphemy even in the privacy of their own imaginations.
To say this is not
to endorse the standards of ‘good taste’ which now prevail. For we should
never forget that these standards are, in part at least, the historical
precipitate of torture and terror. It is simply to point out that when
repressive laws are enforced by terror, they tend to engender repressive
frames of mind, which are then passed down ‘invisibly’ to future
generations through the disciplines of child-rearing and schooling. In
highly disciplined industrialised societies such as our own, it is quite
possible to abolish old laws while leaving intact the habits of repression
which they originally helped to engender.
It is perhaps
partly because of this internalised repression that the role of artists,
poets, novelists and film-makers as ‘agents’ of blasphemy has become so
important in the twentieth century. Imaginative artists have, in effect,
been licensed to engage in blasphemy on behalf of those who, because of
their own relative imaginative rigidity, find it difficult to do so. But
even the licence we give to artists to blaspheme is itself severely
limited. Occasional blasphemies can be tolerated in the confidence that
their example is unlikely to be followed; there is no longer a danger of
the floodgates of impiety springing open. Extreme or obscene blasphemy,
however, is still effectively either outlawed or restricted to special
contexts. It is quite true that this kind of restriction is not normally
regulated by invoking the law. But here once again we encounter the
results of a process of cultural internalisation. Because of this process
individuals or organisations can, to a large extent, be relied upon to
impose the kind of censorship which was once enforced by the
state.
Very often it is
imposed by publishers themselves, and it is surprising how rapidly some
publishers have managed to forget their own recent history in this
respect. It is common knowledge that The Satanic Verses was
published in Britain by Viking, the hardback division of Penguin Books.
But it is not generally known that Rushdie’s novel is not the only Penguin
book which has been burnt in Britain in recent years. Not many years ago
almost the entire print-run of a Penguin book was burnt on the grounds
that its contents were blasphemous and would be deeply offensive to many
Christians.
The book in
question was Siné’s Massacre. Siné is one of France’s most acclaimed
cartoonists and Massacre contained a number of mordantly funny
scatological, anti-clerical or blasphemous cartoons, some of them with a
sexual theme. The Penguin edition of Massacre was introduced by
Malcolm Muggeridge and published in 1967 at the time that Penguin was
under the direction of the young publisher Tony Godwin. Many booksellers,
however, found the book deeply offensive because of its blasphemous
content and some conveyed their feelings to the founder of Penguin, Allen
Lane, who had by this time almost retired from the firm. His response was
swift and effective. One night, soon after the book had been published, he
went into Penguin’s main warehouse with four accomplices, filled a trailer
with all the remaining copies of the book, drove away and burnt them. The
next day the Penguin trade department reported the book ‘out of print’.
Allen Lane took this action not because he was a practising Christian
himself, but because many of his friends and bookselling colleagues were,
and had conveyed to him their strong distaste for the book.[14]
Of course it may
be argued that Allen Lane was wrong to act in the way that he did. But
given that he did it would be hypocritical not to recall his actions now.
For they place the controversy over The Satanic Verses in a much
needed perspective. They remind us above all that in Britain, as in most
other Western countries, the Christian religion and the sensitivities of
individual Christians are protected not so much by the force of law but –
far more significantly – by the manner in which ancient and seemingly
obsolete public blasphemy laws have been adopted as private standards. In
order to adhere to these standards almost all broadcasting organisations
in Europe and the United States routinely vet their programmes for
blasphemy. At the same time both publishing editors and proprietors like
Allen Lane frequently intervene in the publishing process in order to
moderate, edit, or indeed suppress works which might be considered
blasphemous.[15]
In 1976, nearly
ten years after Allen Lane’s dramatic intervention in the case of
Massacre, a significant controversy developed in Britain around the
Danish film-maker Jens Jorgen Thorsen, who was planning a film about the
sex-life of Jesus, The Many Faces of Jesus, involving both homsexual and
heterosexual sex. His proposal to make the film in Britain met with intense
opposition which was eventually successful. This opposition came not only
from pressure groups but also from the Queen, the Prime Minister, James
Callaghan, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan.[16]
In 1979 a similar
kind of censorship played a significant role in the handling of the
British film The Life of Brian. This film, made by the team
responsible for the successful satirical series Monty Python’s Flying
Circus, was a satire on religion set in the time of Jesus. As
blasphemy it was, even in its original version, extremely mild. Yet the
film was surrounded from its inception by intense anxiety, in some
quarters of the British Establishment, about the offence it might cause.
As a result it gained a certificate for general release only after some
cuts had been made. Perhaps more importantly still, the film was shunned
by British television companies, who declined to show it for fear of
offending Christians in this country. Once again a blasphemy was
restrained – or its circulation effectively curtailed – not by the force
of law but by the fears, anxieties and sensitivities of
individuals.
*
The action which
Allen Lane took in 1967, the successful campaign against The Many Faces
of Jesus, and the partial suppression of The Life of Brian tell
part of the story of the way in which attitudes towards blasphemy have
evolved. But it is not the whole story. A far more telling perspective on
the status of blasphemy is offered if we consider the manner in which, in
our once Christian state, the authority of the individual conscience has
gradually been accorded the same position, and been veiled with the same
sanctity, as the authority of the scriptures in earlier
centuries.
The elevation of
the individual conscience and the manner in which we now defer to its
authority is one of the most important parts of the Protestant
inheritance. Whereas the medieval Roman Catholic Church had developed a
vast apparatus of external authority, and a complex ecclesiastical
hierarchy by which all individual believers were bound, Protestants in
general – and Puritans in particular – regarded external authority with
distaste, and placed great emphasis instead on inner discipline. One of
the great ideals of the Puritan movement, deriving from St Paul – who had
in turn derived it from Old Testament prophets like Ezekiel – was that the
laws of God should be written not upon tablets of stone, but upon the
individual heart of every true believer. The believer’s lawful heart would
then become his Christian conscience, and this conscience would become the
ultimate religious authority. The Pope would, as it were, be humbly
enthroned in the palace of every individual soul and would there become
the infallible arbiter of God’s will, which would be performed not because
of some external discipline but because of an inner compulsion.
The emergence of
this trend can be discerned in Lutheran Protestantism, but it developed in
its strongest form in countries where the Calvinist influence prevailed,
particularly in Britain and America. The radical implications of the new
conscience-centred attitude towards Christian doctrine were spelt out by
John Milton. He was one of many seventeenth-century Puritans who, basing
his arguments in part on the corrupt and distorted nature of the text of
the Bible, rejected it as an infallible guide to the will of God.
According to this view, the authority of the Bible was to be subordinated
to what Puritans were wont to call ‘the Christ within’. For Milton, the
ultimate court of appeal always remained that of reason or the inner
conscience. If a particular passage of the scriptures could not be
reconciled with the cause of human or moral good, then it was to be
rejected: ‘No ordinance,’ said Milton, ‘human or from heaven, can bind
against the good of man.’ ‘Milton’, writes the historian Christopher Hill,
‘was glad to find that ideas which he arrived at by searching his own
conscience could be found in the Bible; but they had greater authority for
him because they were in his conscience than because they were in the
Bible.’ The same principle was widely upheld by other radical Puritans.
Jacob Bauthumely did not ‘expect to be taught by Bibles or books but by
God’. ‘The Bible without,’ he wrote ‘is but a shadow of the Bible which is
within.’[17]
The implications
of this conscience-centred revolution for the crime of blasphemy were
far-reaching indeed, and continue to make themselves felt today. As long
as the Bible continued to be regarded as the ultimate authority in matters
of faith, any attempt to quarrel with the sacred word or with the
traditional biblical images of God was anathema and was vigorously
condemned. But gradually, as the conscience-centred revolution deepened
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a conflict began to grow
between the old scriptural images of God and the new demands of the
internalised conscience.
Although, as we
have seen, the state continued rigorously to enforce the law against
blasphemy, it frequently found itself in conflict not with scoffers,
unbelievers or atheists but with devout Puritans whose main crime was not
that they rejected Christ, but that they rejected the Christ of the
scriptures in order to follow the ‘Christ-within’. Indeed blasphemy, or
attitudes which verged on blasphemy, even began to have a certain
theological attraction for some of the most rigorous and conscientious
Puritans. According to Gerrard Winstanley, any traditional Christian, ‘who
thinks God is in the heavens above the skies, and so prays to that god
which he imagines to be there and everywhere … .worships his own
imagination, which is the devil’. Elsewhere Winstanley refers almost
contemptuously to ‘the outward Christ and the outward God’ and goes on to
speak of ‘the God Devil’. In 1646 another British Puritan, John Boggis of
Great Yarmouth, asked, ‘Where is your God, in Heaven or in earth, aloft or
below, or where doth he sit with his arse?’[18]
The trial of James
Nayler in 1656, which has already been referred to, is a perfect example
of this trend. For Nayler’s alleged claim of equality with God was
precisely the kind of claim which proceeded logically out of the Puritan
enthronement of the conscience. The blasphemous Nayler, and the Quaker
sect to which he belonged, were among the chief pioneers of the
‘internalised Christianity’ which would increasingly be adopted as an
orthodoxy not only in England and America but in Protestant countries
throughout Europe. In one sense, indeed, it would seem that blasphemy
provided some of the most rigid Protestants with a necessary psychological
path away from a traditional scriptural Christianity towards a new
religion of the conscience; it was only by pelting the traditional
scriptural image of God – the ‘Christ without’ – with the stones of
irreverence and blasphemy, that they were able to ‘kill off’ the old form
of religious authority and make room for a new form.
This religious
appropriation of blasphemy is by no means only a feature of our Protestant
past, for in some significant respects it continues today. Theologically
speaking, the heirs to Gerrard Winstanley and John Boggis are men like
Rudolph Bultmann and Herbert Braun in Germany and Bishop John Robinson and
Bishop David Jenkins in England. The books which they, and the other new
theologians of Protestantism have written, are earnest and utterly sincere
attempts to make private doubts public and, by doing so, to be ‘honest to
God’. But their books are at the same time coldly rational attacks on the
traditional scriptural image of God which many ordinary Christians
continue to worship and from which they continue to draw immense
psychological comfort. In terms of any traditional Christian view, the
vision of these new theologians is not simply radical or revolutionary. It
verges on blasphemy and is profoundly threatening. It is little wonder
that so many Christians have found these writings so hurtful.
In liberal
intellectual circles, however, there is scant sympathy for such Christians
and a great deal of fellow-feeling for the radical theologians who have so
scandalised them. In view of this, and in view of the way in which we have
virtually enthroned blasphemy as an orthodox part of modern Christian
theology, it is scarcely surprising that we find it so difficult to
understand the feelings of the countless thousands of ordinary Muslims who
were outraged by the publication of The Satanic Verses.
We should have no
doubt at all that in some cases this feeling of outrage was taken up by
Muslim extremists and exploited for their own religious and political
ends. But this exploitation was possible only because the original feeling
of outrage was genuine and quite independent of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s
death threat against Salman Rushdie. It was felt so strongly for the
simple reason that much of the Islamic world has not passed through the
kind of conscience-centred revolution which is such an important part of
our own historical experience. Islam has not yet established the primacy
and the sanctity of the ‘God-within’ and most ordinary Muslims have not
developed any attitude which parallels the Puritan notion of ‘a
Bible-within’. The Koran remains the essential and only sanctuary of God
and of the Prophet Muhammad, and any attempt to tamper with that sanctuary
or to abuse its holiness is seen as an attempt to destroy religion itself.
As Amir Taheri has written: ‘Most Muslims are prepared to be broad-minded
about most things but never about anything which even remotely touches
upon their faith. “Better that I be dead than see Islam insulted,” said
Ayatollah Majlisi in the last century. An Arab proverb says: “Kill me, but
do not mock my faith.”’[19]
It is because the
faith of ordinary Muslims relies so heavily on external authority and on
the sacred tradition of the Koran, and because they identify this
tradition with all that is precious and emotionally rich, that many
Muslims are prepared to defend the sanctity of the Koran and of the figure
of the Prophet with such passion and such apparent rigidity. It was this
seeming rigidity which in its turn evoked the fury of many liberal
intellectuals who believed that their own ‘sacred’ rights to free
expression were being infringed or destroyed.
*
By placing this
conflict in a historical context I hope I have made it clear that one
argument which is commonly advanced about The Satanic Verses is
unsound. For it is emphatically not true that most European Christians
enjoy now, or have ever enjoyed, an unlimited liberty to blaspheme against
the Christian faith. In some countries Christianity is still nominally
protected by the law. But in all Western countries, including the bastion
of free-speech, America, it is even more securely protected by a whole
series of taboos which have become a part of our culture. Because of this,
and because modern ‘death-of-God theology’ has tended to appropriate
blasphemy for its own religious ends, abolition of those blasphemy laws
which still exist, while it may well be advisable, would not have
the effect of placing all religions on an equal footing. It would actually
render the state of religious inequality which exists in all formerly
‘Christian’ countries more invisible. By banishing a palpable injustice in
order to ratify an impalpable injustice, it would almost certainly leave
the Muslim communities who live in these countries feeling more precarious
and more threatened.
To say this,
however, does not in itself resolve any of the most important questions
which have been raised by the publication of The Satanic Verses and
by the Muslim response to it. For the fact that Muslims – or for that
matter any other group of people – might feel threatened, discomforted or
offended by the publication of a novel is not in itself a reason for
suppressing that novel or declining to publish it in a paperback edition.
Truth itself is sometimes painful, disturbing and offensive. That being
so, the question which remains unanswered is whether blasphemy can itself
be a vehicle of truth, and whether the right to engage in blasphemy
against a particular religion, or indeed against all religions, is
therefore a precious right which should be defended at all costs. In order
to answer that question, I believe that we need to locate it not in some
hypothetical Utopia but in the real historical and political
world.
There are a number
of situations in which the right to blaspheme would indeed appear to be
worth defending. In any society where a tyrannical state authority is kept
in place by a policy of religious terror, then blasphemy might well be
seen as an important political act; by keeping alive the possibility of
dissent it subverts the state’s power and, perhaps, makes liberation more
likely.
In Calvin’s Geneva
– which John Knox once called ‘the most perfect school of Christ that ever
was on earth since the days of the Apostles’ – even the lightest action
was brought under a rigid spiritual rule. Drunkards, dancers and
adulterers were excommunicated, torture was used systematically, a child
was beheaded for striking its parents and, in sixty years, one hundred and
fifty men and women who had transgressed against Calvin’s spiritual
discipline were put to death by the city authorities. Calvin, in the
words of R. H. Tawney, ‘made Geneva a city of glass, in which every
household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police’.[20] In such a city it might indeed
seem that blasphemy offered a road to liberation, and that any God who was
invoked to justify such terror should be treated with open and systematic
disrespect.
Much the same
might be said of Russia during the time of Stalin. For although Stalin’s
regime was not sustained by any orthodox form of religion, Stalin so
managed the cult of his own personality that he himself effectively became
the ‘God’ of a tyrannical state-religion, surrounding his own image with
reverence, fear and the holy terror which would eventually claim the lives
of at least thirty million Soviet citizens. Dissidence, in such
circumstances, demanded a healthy disrespect for the god-like image Stalin
sought to project and once again it might be argued that any form of
‘blasphemy’, however scurrilously it abused Stalin, could be justified
politically as a step along the road to liberation.
I have introduced
these two examples quite deliberately, however, in order to show that,
although blasphemy may sometimes appear to be desirable, it is not always
politically expedient. For tyrants who use religious terror in order to
impose their own forms of political discipline do not make exceptions of
blasphemers; they make examples of them. In Calvin’s Geneva
Servetus was put to death. In Stalin’s Russia anyone so misguided as
to show public disrespect for Stalin himself was likely to be arrested and
either executed or tortured into submission.
We should not
conclude from this that dissidents living within such regimes should
always avoid blasphemy. For cursing God privately in Calvin’s Geneva or
cursing Stalin during the time of the Great Purge might well have provided
individual dissidents with necessary psychological relief; at times
furtive blasphemies exchanged by dissidents might even have become the
secret and necessary opium of dissent. But in such regimes any dissidents
would be unwise to regard blasphemy as a permanent political duty. Rather
it should be seen as an extremely difficult political art in which
would-be blasphemers play a game of brinksmanship, balancing the
disrespect they express for the regime under which they suffer against the
chances of punishment.
Of those who
played this deadly game in Stalin’s Russia – including Akhmatova,
Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak – not all were equally effective,
and not all survived. But, almost by definition, ‘successful’ dissidents
avoided unbridled public vilification of Stalin himself. Even Osip
Mandelstam’s ‘mistake’ was not that he openly declaimed his poem attacking
Stalin, but that he read it privately to ‘a tiny circle of his closest
friends’, one of whom betrayed him.[21] What is
certain is that to have engaged in open vilification of Stalin would not
have been an act of political courage; it would have been an act of
supreme political folly. At best it would have been to throw away valuable
human resources by going to war with a strategically useless weapon. At
worst it would be the equivalent of supplying arms to the enemy. For
tyrants are almost always skilled at taking the scurrilous insults and
obscenities which are associated with blasphemy and directing these back
against the blasphemer. What happens, in effect, is that those who engage
in blasphemy against repressive regimes provide the leaders of those
regimes with the very kind of unclean Antichrist they need in order to
unite followers behind them and sustain and redouble their repressive
zeal.
Blasphemy, then,
when it is exercised by the powerless against the powerful, may
seem to be justifiable, but it is often politically naive and it
may have the effect of strengthening the authoritarianism of the regime
which is attacked. In this respect it is very like violence or terrorism.
Terrorist attacks on extreme repressive regimes may sometimes seem morally
right, but they are not always advisable. This is partly because of the
danger of detection, and partly because political violence can all too
easily give a propaganda-advantage to the enemy and allow a repressive
state to fortify itself further against ‘the enemy within’.
In the particular
case of The Satanic Verses, we should have no doubt at all that
Salman Rushdie’s intention was to use blasphemy as a way of attacking
unjustifiable forms of political and religious rigidity. In reality,
however, it seems reasonably clear that his book has had precisely the
opposite effect to that which he intended. For instead of leading to a
significant weakening in the power structures of Islamic fundamentalism,
the real and deeply felt offence caused by the book to many ordinary
Muslims was actually seized upon by Khomeini to help shore up his own
shaky political regime. At the same time many Muslims, above all in
Britain, have been deflected from a path of religious moderation towards
forms of extremism which had previously held no attraction for them. In
this respect it would seem that Rushdie’s own sophisticated insensitivity
to the language of faith and to religious politics in general has actually
played into the hands of fundamentalists. By allowing himself to be cast
as a rigid and intolerant Antichrist-figure, surrounded and supported by
the seemingly militant liberal armies of the West, he has effectively
redoubled the very rigid zeal he set out in his book to
diminish.
*
What is perhaps
even more serious and more dangerous in this whole affair, however, has
been the insensitivity of almost the entire Western intellectual
establishment to some of the deepest imaginative currents of
Judaeo-Christian and Islamic history and in particular to the role which
has been played by blasphemy in the relationship between the three
‘religions of Abraham’.
One of the reasons
that this dimension of the problem has been ignored is that we tend to
think of blasphemy as an essentially ‘irreligious’ act; indeed, until the
Satanic Verses affair placed the whole subject in a wider context,
blasphemy was often thought of as implying disrespect specifically for the
Christian religion. It is this view which is reflected in almost all
surving Western laws against blasphemy. It is sometimes assumed that these
laws reflect a general antipathy to blasphemy of any kind, and that the
specific and narrow application of the law is merely a historical
accident. Such a view would certainly seem to correspond to the current
position of the many Christian leaders in Europe and America who have
shown great restraint, wisdom and sensitivity throughout the Rushdie
affair. If, however, we look at the problem of blasphemy in the long
perspectives of history, we will find that the Christian church as a whole
has generally interpreted the law against blasphemy in a quite different
way. For, while fiercely resisting and punishing blasphemies directed
against God, Christ or against the Christian faith, the church has at
times actively encouraged Christians to use both blasphemy and obscenity
as weapons with which to insult and humiliate rival faiths.
Historically the
main victims of such religiously motivated blasphemy have been Jews and
Muslims.[22] As Christian scholars have
themselves now recognised, Western anti-semitism is a specifically
Christian phenomenon which stems from the New Testament itself – and not
only from the writings of Paul, but also from the gospels, whose
anti-Jewish bias is clear and consistent.[23] In the
twentieth century, anti-semitism has lost much of its religious colouring.
In earlier centuries, however, the religious basis of anti-semitism was
almost always clear and explicit. In his Of the Jews and their
Lies, to take but one example, Martin Luther condemned all Jews as
greedy and maggoty: ‘You are unworthy to look at the outside of the Bible,
let alone read inside it. You should read only the Bible which is under
the sow’s tail, and gobble and guzzle the letters which fall from it.’[24]
Luther went on to
identify the sow with the Talmud and this idea was taken up by a fellow
Christian, the Professor of Hebrew at Wittenberg University:
What shall we say of the deep obtuseness
of the Jews! The Son of God came to save his people, but they would not
recognise him … They had been called and elected to be God’s mouth, to
fulfil God’s word; but they closed their mouths to the flow of all the
good from God and opened their mouths and all their sense to the Devil who
filled them with … lies, impiety, blasphemy … The Rabbis, enemies of God
and blasphemers against the Messiah and his most holy Mother … do not
understand anything divine. Instead of the flowing water of eternal life,
they suck the milk of a sow … they eat nothing … but excrement and dung …
They take all their mysteries from the piggish Talmud, they suck all the
impurity from the teats of swine. Thus cut off through incredulity from
the olive and vine of Christ, they eagerly pursue only the most impure
filthiness. Having deserted Christ they adhere to a sow; having despised
the doctrines of the messiah, they devour dung; having neglected the word
of life, they suck in their muddy milk …[25]
The pronouncements
of Martin Luther and his Christian colleague at the University of
Wittenberg were, we should not doubt, motivated by a passionate devotion
to the Christian faith and to the teachings of Jesus. Their purpose was to
defend this faith against those who seemed to threaten it and to do so in
terms which would be approved by Jesus, who had Himself, according to the
gospel of John, anathematised all Jews as ‘children of the devil’. Yet it
will be clear to almost all modern observers that these ‘holy’ words are
also profoundly blasphemous, and that contemporary Jews would have found
them deeply hurtful and offensive to their religious faith.
This particular
kind of Christian anti-semitism uses one of the commonest of anti-semitic
motifs – that of the Judensau. This form of anti-Jewish insult, in
which Jews were portrayed sucking on the teats of a sow or greedily eating
its excrement, was central to Christian anti-semitism in Germany for more
than three centuries. The motif was eventually secularised by National
Socialists, and made one of its last appearances in 1937 in the form of a
cartoon in Julius Streicher’s anti-semitic newspaper Der Stürmer.
More generally, scurrilous and obscene blasphemies directed against Jews
and against Jewish forms of religious observance, or against Muslims and
their faith, have formed one of the most significant elements in Christian
apologetics for very many centuries.
Nor would it be
fair to see this tendency to exploit or idealise sectarian blasphemy as an
exclusively Christian phenomenon. For the systematic use of blasphemy lies
close to the imaginative heart of the writings of the Old Testament
prophets. Again and again the zeal which is shown by these prophets to
serve the God of Israel goes hand in hand with their rage to denounce the
gods of every other religion – especially the religion of the Canaanites –
as inferior and evil. Specifically, prophets such as Amos, Ezekiel and
Jeremiah introduced into Western religion the notion that any form of
religious faith which set itself up against the pure cult of Yahweh was to
be imagined in obscene terms as a prostitute, and its adherents reviled
accordingly. It was this idea which was taken up in late Jewish and
Christian apocalyptic and developed, through the figure of the Whore of
Babylon, into one of the central motifs of all sectarian conflict within
the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
Partly because
Islam itself grew out of this tradition it too has frequently demonised
rival faiths. Indeed this common tradition of blasphemous abuse helps to
explain why the Christian West, Judaism and Islam have become, in Karen
Armstrong’s phrase, ‘locked in a murderous triangle of hatred and
intolerance’. Each of these three religious traditions has at times
initiated abusive attacks on one or both of the others. In many cases the
main object of these attacks has been the perceived bigotry of an opposing
tradition, and the declared purpose of the attack has been to undermine or
destroy this bigotry. Almost inevitably, however, such attacks succeed
only in enlarging the legacy of hatred out of which they arise. For
blasphemous assaults on other people’s faith, far from being subversive of
authoritarianism, are themselves one of the main engines of religious
bigotry. By rewarding believers according to the intensity of the insults
which they hurl, and by enraging those whose faith is attacked, such
strategies strengthen the hand of religious extremists on all sides and
turn even moderates towards militancy.
It is because a
tradition of blasphemous abuse lies so close to the heart of
Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy – and to Judaeo-Christian authoritarianism –
that those who play imaginative games with blasphemy in the name of
liberty are in reality engaged in an extraordinarily dangerous ploy, whose
ultimate effect is likely to be both destructive and repressive. This is
particularly so when the artist in question writes from a position of
cultural dominance – from within the all but impregnable political,
economic and cultural fortress of a Christian or post-Christian country in
the First World. The greatest danger of all is that his blasphemies will
be construed as belonging to the strongest tradition of Western blasphemy
– a tradition which is both profoundly authoritarian and full of racial
and religious hatred.
It is exactly this
which appears to have happened in the reception of The Satanic
Verses. For Muslims do not perceive the Rushdie affair as an isolated
skirmish in an otherwise harmonious relationship between Islam and the
West. They see it as the latest battle in a long history of religious and
cultural tension which goes back to the seventh century, when Islam first
emerged as a religion with the power to challenge Christendom.
This tension was
expressed in its most destructive form in the Crusades, during which
hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed by Western zealots. The
Crusaders’ bitter legacy to the Christian West, for whose supremacy they
fought, was a dramatic intensification of traditional Christian
anti-semitism. This new, intensified anti-semitism was expressed both
against Jews and against Muslims. Partly because it was older and had its
roots deep in the New Testament, it was anti-Jewish hatred which became
most strongly established in Western Europe. And for geographical and
demographical reasons, as well as for historical reasons, it was
anti-Jewish prejudice which became one of the most decisive forces in
European history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the
early part of the twentieth century.
Throughout this
period, however, the ancient hostility to Islam was kept alive. This
hostility was so deep because it was based on a real power-struggle for
control of Europe. The Arab invasion of Western Europe was stopped at the
battle of Tours in 712. But the military and political threat which Islam
posed to Christendom continued. The Turks were halted at Vienna as late as
1683 and even after this, some parts of what had once been Christendom
remained under Turkish rule. Christian fears of Islam, then, were based in
part on a real perception of its military, political and cultural
strength. But the tendency of Christians to demonise their enemies meant
that realistic fears of Islam were increasingly overlaid by demonological
fantasies in which Muslims in general, and Muhammad in particular, were
seen as satanic beings.
Throughout almost
the whole of Christian Europe these fantasies about Muslims developed
alongside much more powerful demonological fantasies about Jews. During
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries both fantasies were gradually
rationalised in secular terms, on the one hand by theorists of race, and
on the other hand by orientalists. When, in the face of the deeds of
Hitler’s Germany, Christian and post-Christian Europe began to recoil in
horror from its tradition of anti-Jewish prejudice, there was no parallel
diminution in its ancient tradition of hatred for Islam. Indeed one of the
changes which began to take place in the cultural imagination of the West
was a gradual displacement of prejudice from Judaism to Islam – from Jews
to Muslims and Arabs.
With the notable
exception of Karen Armstrong, whose profound study of the religious
origins of the Middle East conflict, Holy War, deserves to be
better known than it is, most Western commentators seem scarcely to have
noted this disturbing historical process, still less analysed it. But it
has been observed by some who are themselves more closely involved in the
conflict. In 1973, at the time of the OPEC crisis, the Palestinian
literary critic Edward Said noticed the appearance in America of cartoons
depicting an Arab standing beside a petrol pump:
These Arabs, however, were clearly
‘Semitic’: their sharply-hooked noses, the evil, mustachioed leer on their
faces, were obvious reminders (to a largely non-Semitic population) that
‘Semites’ were at the bottom of all ‘our’ troubles, which in this case was
principally a gasoline shortage. The transference of a popular
anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly,
since the figure was essentially the same.[26]
Quoting Said’s
words, Karen Armstrong comments that ‘this is a precisely observed example
of the frightening fact that the hatred we used to allow ourselves to feel
about the Jews has been transferred in toto to the “Arab”’. She
goes on to observe that this new kind of racial stereotyping is
particularly dangerous now that the Arabs are seen as the enemies of the
Jews and the new anti-semites:
Much of our new prejudice is a transfer
of unmanageable guilt. The Arab is being made to carry a double load of
hatred in Europe: besides bearing the traditional Western hatred of the
‘Muslim’, he is now having to take on our load of guilt for our …
anti-semitism.[27]
Recognition of
this new and potent form of prejudice is necessary, I believe, if we are
to understand the extraordinary violence of the Muslim reaction to the
treatment of Islam in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic
Verses.
To the casual
Western observer the Satanic Verses affair seemed, in its early
stages at least, a more or less internal squabble in which a Muslim
writer, who happened to live in a Western country, was being reviled for
daring to attack, in a distinctively modern way, the religious faith in
which he had been brought up. Since Islam was perceived by such observers
as a uniquely cruel and repressive religion, it tended to be assumed
automatically that Rushdie’s blasphemies were offered in the name of life,
liberty and imaginative exuberance.
To most Muslims,
however, Rushdie’s offence is quite different. For some of the passages
from The Satanic Verses which they find most offensive draw on
motifs and on characterisations of Muhammad which are not modern at all.
They belong rather to the ancient tradition of religiously inspired
contempt for Islam which was nurtured by the Christian Church in the West
throughout countless centuries. It is from this tradition and its secular
transformations that Rushdie draws the character of his Muhammad-figure,
Mahound. As a result, the prophet emerges from Rushdie’s novel as an
insincere businessman, ‘a calculating opportunist devoid of conscience,
making and breaking rules as he pleases, confusing (or perhaps
deliberately identifying) good with evil as the mood takes him’[28] The words are those of the
Muslim writer Shabbir Akhtar. In his book, Be Careful With Muhammad!,
Akhtar goes on to expound some of the more general Muslim complaints about
Rushdie’s novel:
The Satanic Verses is written in a language that is at times gratuitously obscene
and wounding. In the controversial sections about Mahound, the locales
Rushdie selects are almost always sexually suggestive … and sometimes even
degrade human nature. Much of the abuse, though, is straightforwardly
explicit. Bilal, Khalid and Salman, who are three of Mahound’s most
distinguished companions, emerge as drunkards, idlers and fools, ‘the
trinity of scum’, ‘that bunch of riff raff’, ‘ ing clowns’. Mahound
himself is portrayed as a debauched sensualist, a drunkard given to
self-indulgence. He is depicted lying naked and unconscious in Hind’s tent
with a hangover …
There is a sustained attack on values
such as chastity and modesty too. In a , provocatively called The
Veil, the prostitutes assume the names and roles of Mahound’s wives.
The anti-Islamic poet Baal becomes the husband of the wives of the
‘businessman prophet’ …
The scene is of course purely imaginary;
even Christian polemicists have drawn the line at this kind of insult.
Unlike his Western supporters, Rushdie himself writes with an insider’s
awareness of the outrage such a portrayal would cause. Muhammad’s spouses
are instructed, by the Koran, to remain unmarried after their husband’s
death, so that they can assume the honorific title, ‘the mothers of the
believers’. Muslims have reacted to what they take to be a straightforward
personal attack.[29]
Frequently Western
intellectuals have attempted to dismiss such Muslim reactions as the
product merely of prudishness or repression. This is scarcely fair since,
though Islam clearly has its own forms of puritanism, it is no more
anti-sexual than Judaism, and a good deal less so than Christianity. The
Muslim objection is not, at root, an objection to the isation or the
eroticisation of the Prophet. For that is not how the relevant passages of
the novel are perceived. They are perceived as an attempt to use obscenity
not to enrich but to smear. The objection is not to sex but to the use of
sex as a form of vilification. Nor should it be assumed that this kind of
reaction is peculiar to Muslims. For it was a very similar reaction which,
some ten years ago, triggered the campaign against Jens Jorgen Thorsen’s
film The Many Faces of Jesus. British Muslims, it would seem, have
something in common with a former British Prime Minister, a former
Archbishop of Canterbury and the Queen.
It must be said,
however, that Muslims have very good reasons to be especially sensitive to
such treatment of their own sacred figures. For both Christian polemicists
and Western orientalists sought for centuries to denigrate Islam by
attributing to it a fantastic, disreputable or demonic . And what almost
all Muslims know, from their intuitive grasp of their own history, is that
there is nothing remotely liberating in this kind of Western fantasy. For
in the past such fantasies have always tended to belong to the propaganda
which has preceded the sword, the bullet and the bomb. What Muslims see in
Rushdie’s fictional adaptations of ancient stereotypes is not simply
hatred, but the long, terrible, triumphalist hatred which the West has had
for Islam almost since its beginnings.
To find such
hateful stereotypes revived not by one of their traditional enemies, but
by a writer who was himself born to a Muslim family in Bombay, and who has
in the past sided with Muslims, was especially hurtful. When ordinary
Muslims in Britain saw that writer richly repaid for his irreverence,
feted and celebrated both by intellectuals and by the Western media, while
they were rewarded for their faith with ill-disguised contempt, it is
little wonder that some of them felt betrayed in the most intimate and
cruel manner, and felt at the same time that their own future existence,
security and safety in the West were threatened. Given all this, it should
not be surprising that Muslims in Britain reacted to the publication of
Rushdie’s book in the way that they did, and that a number of them wrote
in passionate terms to Penguin Books pleading for the book’s withdrawal.
It is not surprising either that, when these passionate pleas failed to
produce any real response, these Muslims should have resorted to more
dramatic methods, burning the book in public in an attempt to interest the
media in their campaign.
Nor is it entirely
surprising that, when they succeeded and Western intellectuals,
journalists and writers rose in order to condemn them and to defend
democracy and its freedoms, Muslims responded by redoubling their
campaign. For, as at least one Muslim spokesman pointed out at the time,
one of the most precious rights in any democracy is freedom of
association. In availing themselves of that freedom and of their entirely
legal right to demonstrate against a book by which they felt insulted,
they were simply using the very democratic liberties their critics claimed
to be defending. Moreover, possessing still the visceral sense of history
which Western intellectuals have destroyed, most Muslims knew all too well
what this Western passion for freedom had meant in terms of their own
history. They knew that the cutting edge of the Western conscience was a
sword, and that democracy usually appeared in the form of an invading
army. It is the long history of humiliation at the hands of the West,
particularly in Iran under the Shahs and in Palestine, which helps to
explain the intensity of the rage with which Muslims responded to The
Satanic Verses.
Perhaps the most
unfortunate aspect of the entire Rushdie affair was that this Muslim rage
tended to be met not with the moderation which liberal intellectuals
preached but with their own more sophisticated forms of rage. It is true
that some individuals and organisations responded in a very different
manner. In Britain, for example, both the Commission for Racial Equality
and the Inter Faith Network, made immensely constructive efforts to bring
about a real dialogue between the various participants in the debate. But
in the immediate aftermath of the fatwa this represented a minority
response. Indeed a number of intellectuals and writers made the situation
a great deal worse by resorting to forms of anti-intellectualism, in which
careful analysis was eschewed in favour of the reflex chanting of the
slogans and shibboleths of liberalism. The British intellectual
Christopher Hitchens, who is often a cogent and perceptive cultural
critic, made the following speech during the course of a rally of American
writers:
As writers and soi-disant
intellectuals, it is most often our job to stress complexity, to point out
with care and attention that ‘it’s not as simple as that’. But there are
also times when it is irresponsible not to stress the essential clarity
and simplicity of a question. The almost boastful threat to murder not
just a book but an author is one such time. Moments of this sort have a
galvanizing effect on our standby phrases and our most cherished cliches …
[30]
Other writers have
responded in a way which has both revived and intensified the relatively
new form of religious and racial hatred which we have just examined.
For confirmation
of this we only have to look at some of the responses which the Rushdie
affair has evoked from those who might once have been regarded as
‘liberals’. In her essay on the Rushdie affair, Sacred Cows, we
find the British feminist novelist Fay Weldon, who was not previously
known for her Christian zeal, endorsing the Bible as a sound basis for a
society while, in the same breath, she condemns the Koran:
The Koran is food for no-thought. It is
not a poem on which society can be safely or sensibly based. It gives
weapons and strength to the thought-police – and the thought-police are
easily set marching and they frighten … You can build a decent society
around the Bible … but the Koran? No.[31]
This passage is
quoted by Rana Kabbani in her own contribution to the Rushdie debate,
Letter to Christendom. Understandably enough Kabbani reproves Fay
Weldon both for her ‘cultural arrogance’ and her ‘rash judgments’. She
then quotes the even more remarkable words of the Irish journalist and
former United Nations diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien, in a review published
in the the Times in May 1989:
Muslim society looks profoundly repulsive
… It looks repulsive because it is repulsive … 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. At the heart of the matter is
the Muslim family, an abominable institution … .Arab and Muslim society is
sick, and has been sick for a long time. In the last century the Arab
thinker Jamal al-Afghani wrote: ‘Every Muslim is sick and his only remedy
is in the Koran.’ Unfortunately the sickness gets worse the more the
remedy is taken.[32]
Having quoted
these contemptuous and racist words, which were written by a former
Editor-in-Chief of the Observer, but which could not conceivably
have been published in a British newspaper before the Rushdie affair,
Kabbani goes on to discuss the sense of grievance felt by Muslims because
of their experience over the centuries of being colonised, manipulated and
despised. ‘In today’s scale of values,’ she writes, ‘a Muslim life seems
to weigh a good deal less than a Christian or a Jewish life.’ These words
are chilling, I suspect, precisely because they express a truth which it
is taboo to utter. Kabbani herself eventually comes to a conclusion very
similar to that which I have already suggested:
I have come to think that anti-semitism,
endemic in western culture, has more or less been forced underground.
Thankfully, and for good historical reasons it is no longer easy to attack
Jews publicly or depict them in fiction as unpleasant caricatures. But
these salutary taboos do not extend to Muslims. I would even be so bold as
to argue that there has been a transfer of contempt from Jews to Muslims
in secular Western culture today. Many Muslims share this fear: indeed,
one has written that ‘the next time there are gas chambers in Europe,
there is no doubt concerning who’ll be inside them’.[33]
The words which
Kabbani quotes are those of the young Muslim philosopher Shabbir Akhtar.
These words may seem to exaggerate the predicament of European Muslims.
But, whether or not this is the case, I am quite sure that they reflect,
as accurately as any of the words which were spilt during the recent
controversy, how it sometimes feels to be a Muslim in the middle of
secular Europe in the latter part of the twentieth century. Nor should we
rule out the possibility that Akhtar, far from exaggerating, is actually
showing a terrible prescience.
This version of
Chapter 1 of A Brief History of
Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and the Satanic
Verses, follows
the revised text prepared for the German translation, Erben des
Hasses, Die Rushdie-Affäre und ihre Folgen, Knesebeck,
1992.
