Candidly Speaking - 15/08/22

On Salman Rushdie, Islam, and Secularism

Note: I was going to offer the second part to a blogpost I published a month ago, “On Our Responsibility to Our Children”, but I decided that a few comments on the vicious attack on Salman Rushdie has to take priority. Nevertheless, Part 2 of the blogpost will be published next week. Stay tuned!

This weekend, news broke out of a horrific attack on Salman Rushdie, arguably the greatest of all living writers. Rushdie was due to speak on a New York stage, where a young man of 24 stabbed him multiple times. As of this writing, Rushdie has shown signs of recovery, much to the chagrin of the 24-year-old would-be assassin.

The journalism class will indicate that “no motive” has been established in regards to the attack, and all of us should prepare to roll our eyes at that. Do you mean to say that the “fatwa” against Rushdie, issued more than 30 years ago by Iran’s tyrannical “Supreme” Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, has nothing to do with this? Are you serious in claiming that the populous world of Islamic fundamentalism, egged on by a deranged cleric, has nothing to do with why an acclaimed novelist had to use a ventilator over the course of one weekend?

Like many who has found beauty in his works over the years, I was relieved to see that Rushdie is recovering. But I was also anxious, for this incident has continued the dangerous pattern of Islamic fundamentalism’s assault on free expression. The killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists in France, the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Pety (also in France)… How much blood must be spilled for us to face this illiberal doctrine head-on?

Nevertheless, one should state the problem clearly: it is not the religion of Islam itself, but the fundamentalist strain that has captured much of the Muslim population and its clerical class. In my last blogpost, I wrote about Maajid Nawaz’s strange journey into Conspiracy Land. Despite this odd development in his thinking, I would recommend the short volume Islam and the Future of Tolerance, a book he co-wrote with Sam Harris, as an introduction to the Mohammedan faith. The fact that Muslims like Nawaz, who have embraced secular Western values, have been vilified by the larger Muslim community, means that there is a desperate lack of secularism in the religion of Islam.

What does “secular” mean? Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines the word as: “not overtly or specifically religious.” Unlike “atheist”, which has come to mean “against religion”, “secular” simply means “separate from religion.” Just like not everything has to be political (unless you live in a totalitarian state), not everything has to be religious. Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, is neither a work of theology nor politics. But under the command of Khomeini, it was viewed as an anti-Muslim tract. Iran’s former Supreme leader, as well as his fundamentalist successors, reminds me of Uncle Leo in Seinfeld, who treats every slight against him as an act of anti-Semitism. This ridiculous way of construing things was not lost on Seinfeld’s co-creator, Larry David, who constructed a multi-episode arc in his own show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, about him being “fatwa’d” by the Ayatollah because he wrote a musical based on Salman Rushdie’s experiences.

I think any non-Muslim, especially those living in the West, should seek out the works of historian Bernard Lewis, the West’s greatest chronicler of the Middle East. It was due to reading his works that I got to better understand and appreciate the religion of Islam. For example, he pointed out that the so-called “fatwa” against Salman Rushdie went against Islamic law - it is merely a legal ruling issued by a Muslim jurist in order to elaborate on Islamic legal precedent, not a death sentence. This example alone shows how far fundamentalist Islam has strayed from its civilizational glory days.

Just as the West should learn about Islam, the Islamic world should learn of the West, both its Christian tradition and its secular humanist tradition. Bernard Lewis also wrote about how in the world of Islam, Western technology and scientific achievements are welcomed, from the radio to the nuclear bomb, but Western philosophy is altogether banished. This leads to the Muslim-majority countries’ slow progress on women’s rights, explicit rejection of freedom of speech and religion, as well as the nasty repudiation of the state of Israel. The idea of individual freedom, conceptualized by the Islamic clerical class of both the West and the Middle East, is barred from entry into the Muslim political thought. As evidenced by Yasmine Mohammed’s memoir Unveiled, Muslims, especially Muslim women, living in the free West are not free from fundamentalist repression. Even Communists living in the West routinely enjoy the liberties they love to hate.

In the memoir of late Fouad Ajami, a student of Bernard Lewis and the West’s other great interpreter of Middle Eastern affairs, the author recalls a case of a woman named Dalal, who was a victim of the barbaric practice known as honor-killing: “The coroner’s and police reports about the terrifying day were met with the usual derision: the verdict of suicide, it was said, was secured by the payment of a large bribe. An ivory tusk, an expensive one of which Dalal’s family was proud, had exchanged hands and now adorned the coroner’s living room. The officials were men of this society, after all: they knew their world and what it drove men and women to do.” This practice, which claims more female lives than males, is tolerated in the world of Islam. What other religion can you name which permits a woman to be murdered by her own family, or on the behalf of her family? (Granted, Abraham was an outlier, but Judaism itself condemns killing within your own blood).

I am not a Muslim, so I am not sure if any of the 1-billion-strong Muslims would stumble upon this piece. But if this does reach the hands (or the social media feed) of one, I would just say that I respect your faith, but I am appalled that how your leaders make your faith known to the world. Coerced virtue (and I count faith as a virtue) is only coercive, and not virtuous. Assassinating an author only because you don’t like his book will not win you any favors with your God, the same God I believe in. I Pray that we can come to understand one another, so that this bloodshed will stop.