Available online from good bookstores
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Excerpts
A brief history of
blasphemy
Liberalism's holy war
Reconsidering the Rushdie
affair
Imaginary
homelands
History
and hatred
The
dark mirror of Islam
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A Brief History of Blasphemy
Liberalism, Censorship and ‘The Satanic Verses’
by RICHARD WEBSTER
The Orwell Press,
1990, pp. 152; 15 black and
white illustrations
A PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
This study of
the Rushdie affair surveys the history of blasphemy and
goes on to examine in detail the conflict which arose over The Satanic Verses. What is revealed is not a battle between authoritarianism and freedom but a clash between
two forms of rigidity, two kinds of fundamentalism.
In the resulting Holy
War neither side has understood the destructive role which has been played
throughout history by obscene blasphemies directed against other
people‘s religious faith. At the same time liberal
intellectuals have frequently failed to understand the history of
Puritanism and the repressive origins of their own doctrines of
freedom.
| ‘Remarkable, bold and vigorously written. . .worthy
of the age of Burke indeed. . .grave and sensible.’ |
| BERNARD CRICK, Political
Quarterly |
| ‘Treads an exceptionally fair-minded and
intellectually rigorous path between the orthodoxies and
illiberalisms on both sides.’ |
| RICHARD
HOGGART |
| ‘I was immensely impressed by it, and by its
resistance to cant, and above all by its humanity and essential
tolerance.’ |
| JOHN LE
CARRÉ |
| ‘Webster's feel for political psychology is
sure. Islam now fills the niche in the national subsconscious once
occupied by Catholics or Communists or Jews, and he offers his
analysis to preclude the fixation having tragic consequences.’ |
| JULIAN BELL, Times Literary
Supplement |
| ‘Instructive, elegantly argued and full
of startling and important ideas.’ |
| RANA
KABBANI |
| ‘A Brief History of Blasphemy is
suffused by an even-handed sensitivity, an intelligent insight and a
deeply felt concern that raise it many levels higher than almost all
that has been written about this sorry episode.’ |
| MICHAEL DUMMETT, The
Tablet |
‘. . . a truly brilliant study . . .’
 ZIAUDDIN
SARDAR, Muslim World Book Review
| ‘Although Webster insists he is not a disciple
of Orwell, or anyone else for that matter, he shares Orwell's
readiness to contest the received ideas of the intellectual
establishment.’ |
| RICHARD WEST, The Times |
‘Richard Webster, in his immensely intelligent and independent essay on the Rushdie affair, observes that absolute freedom of speech is not in fact either a possible or a desirable state of political affairs. The fact is that ‘in the real political world which we all perforce inhabit, words do wound, insults do hurt, and abuse – especially extreme and obscene abuse – does provoke both anger and violence . . . Webster – who is not a religious believer of any kind – offers some extraordinary examples of “liberal” aggression and ignorant bigotry in his account of the reactions in 1989 and 1990 to the furore over the fatwa against Rushdie.’
 ROWAN WILLIAMS, Archbishop of Canterbury
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