Mick Hartley

Thierry Chervel, former cultural correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and publisher of Germany's largest independent online cultural magazine Perlentaucher (English signandsight.com), looks at the Rushdie affair 20 years on (via A&L Daily):

The cultural pages of Europe's newspapers continue to avoid the subject even now. But the confrontation with Islam and Islamism – one of today's central political issues – is essentially a cultural matter. The fatwa functions as an act of censorship and has left a deep imprint on the West. Communism also used to manipulate public opinion this side of the Iron Curtain, with the aid of its secret services and corruption. But Islamism, although a far more informal system, exerts a much more effective influence over the minds of Western cultural and media leaders. The fear is rationalised with the word "respect." Playing with the symbols, discourse and constraints of Christianity has long been taken for granted in Western culture. But playing with the symbols of Islam has been out of bounds since the fatwa, ostensibly out of "respect."

A gigantic taboo zone has been created, repeatedly reiterated and expanded with the well-intentioned collaboration of Western intellectuals. Tariq Ramadan, for example, the moderate Islamist from Geneva, won his first spurs by preventing a production of Voltaire's "Mahomet." Sweetly smiling women in head scarves distributed leaflets in Geneva in protest against the play. The city withdrew its support from the production. "They call it censorship, but I see it as tact," said Ramadan in gratitude.  […]

At the high point of the dispute over the [Danish] cartoons, the Dutch politicican Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to Berlin, of all places, to give a speech defending the rights of the cartoonists. She herself pointed out the connection between the two totalitarianisms. As a dissident Muslim, she used the example of Eastern European dissidence which was rewarded with the collapse of the Wall. But her gesture was not understood. Essentially, what happened to her was worse than what had happened to Rushdie, who was at least defended and protected. In 2004 a young extremist named Bouyeri assassinated the filmmaker Theo van Gogh who, together with Hirsi Ali, had made the film Submission". Bouyeri thrust a dagger into van Gogh's chest, to which was attached a note: "I know, oh Ayaan Hirsi Ali, that you shall go under / I know, oh fundamentalists of unbelief, that you shall go down." These words got around.

Writers like Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash took them up and amplified them, half-consciously, half-unconsciously, equating the "fundamentalists of the Enlightenment" with Islamic fundamentalists. Garton Ash later recanted. What remained was the insistence by Hirsi Ali's opponents that her activities were useless, that her intransigence was itself driving Muslims into a corner, that her denial of the faith meant she represented nothing and thus was unable to contribute to the integration of Muslims into Western society. Tariq Ramadan was the man to listen to, they said. Hirsi Ali was threatened with losing her Dutch citizenship. She left for the United States whereupon the Dutch government stopped paying for her security. Cassandra doesn't live here anymore. God is great.

The European Left cried no tears for her. She had long been decried as a useful idiot of reactionary forces. In a striking parallel to the fate of many ex-Communist dissidents, Hirsi Ali found no home on the Left. Rushdie, too, had to admit that he had been mistaken. In his "Satanic Verses" he had declared that the war on racism in Britain, on Hindu nationalism in India, on Islamism, was part of the Left's greater purpose. But he was doubly mistaken: Islamism has a universalist thrust which makes it more dangerous than mere xenophobia. Yet the Left prefers battling Islamic dissidents to fighting Islamism.

Is this a reassessment of all our values, or a distortion beyond all recognition? In the confrontation with Islamism, the Left has abandoned its principles. In the past it stood for cutting the ties to convention and tradition, but in the case of Islam it reinstates them in the name of multiculturalism. It is proud to have fought for women's rights, but in Islam it tolerates head scarves, arranged marriages, and wife-beating. It once stood for equal rights, now it preaches a right to difference – and thus different rights. It proclaims freedom of speech, but when it comes to Islam it coughs in embarrassment. It once supported gay rights, but now keeps silent about Islam's taboo on homosexuality. The West's long-due process of self-relativisation at the end of the colonial era, which was promoted by postmodernist and structuralist ideas, has led to cultural relativism and the loss of criteria.

Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" show that enlightenment is not a path to bone-dry reason. The novel is packed with riddles and wonders, top-heavy with symbols and postmodern brouhaha, colourful as a Pakistani bus. It is a swift, inspired, extremely ambitious act of liberation. It is Gibreel's ham sandwich. Today one trembles at its impudence. The Prophet is called Mahound. Mohammed's twelve wives are reflected in the twelve prostitutes in a brothel. Not just enlightenment, it tells us, but blasphemy, too, leads humankind out of its self-imposed immaturity, an act of liberation which makes our hearts beat wildly, in euphoria and panic. The novel insists that we can ride our bicycles without stabilisers. It is beyond this act that the here and now awaits. This novel, written by an immigrant challenges Europe not to lose sight of its selfhood.

But Europe prefers not to listen.