Rushdie's knighthood and "courage"
Self-pitying, pretentious and ungrateful - so why has Rushdie been knighted? | the Daily Mail
This is an article by Ruth Dudley-Edwards, criticising the decision to give a knighthood to the infamous Salman Rushdie. The contention is a familiar one - that his books, including Midnight's Children, which won him the 1981 Booker prize - aren't much good, and that he basked in the admiration of literary London after writing a gratuitously offensive book which led to him costing the taxpayer a huge amount of money for protection, and then went off to New York and started slagging off the UK, including that same literary community:
In his official citation, Rushdie gets his gong for "services to literature". To which the only sensible response is, "what services and what literature?". Like many who have attempted to read his work, I have never yet managed to make it to the end of one of Rushdie's books. I've tried, I honestly have. When he won the Booker Prize in 1981 with Midnight's Children, I conscientiously attempted to read it three or four times, but struggle as I might, I could never get past page 50: there was something about its portentous tone and an absence of simple humanity that irritated me profoundly. So too did the way he banged on relentlessly in public about his sufferings as a post-colonial expatriate. It seemed to me that he didn't like India, his birthplace, and he certainly didn't like the United Kingdom, his host country. But he was, of course, a wow with the masochistic liberal intelligentsia who loved his savaging of British values as insufficiently cosmopolitan. Yet, as a taxpayer, I never grudged a penny of the £10 million or so spent on protecting Rushdie for a decade after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his murder because he considered The Satanic Verses blasphemous towards Mohammed.
However, disputing the talk of his "courage", Dudley-Edwards contrasts his behaviour with that of Ayaan Hirsi and "Ed" Husain:
Certainly, Rushdie should never be compared with those brave Muslims who risk their lives by telling unpalatable truths about fanatical Islam - people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian who became a Dutch MP and because of her outspoken criticism of the treatment of Muslim women has had to seek refuge in America. Or Ed Hussain, author of The Islamist, who is under threat because of his revelations about how he was radicalised in 1990s London. They write to warn us of danger, not merely to blow a raspberry at the Ayatollahs.
This seems to be a standard tactic among Islamophobes: to wheel out "facts" which have long since been refuted in a forum where they are unlikely to be challenged. Either Dudley-Edwards is doing this here, or has simply not bothered to do basic research. Is she not aware that Ayaan Hirsi did not flee to the USA as a result of the danger she faced in the Netherlands, but because the sob story on which she based her political career was found to be unreliable? As for Ed Husain, he has busied himself attacking a target which poses no threat to anyone, namely Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and has written at least two articles in the past two weeks complaining about threatening material about him on the Internet, in the Observer and the New Statesman, even appearing on the front of the latter's website, but his central complaint in the NS piece proves unfounded (you can read the offending poem here and judge for yourself whether it really contains a coded call for his murder). Not once has he acknowledged the criticisms on the Muslim web of his writings and his subsequent media appearances by people who find his reading of events inaccurate.
I don't doubt that Ayaan Hirsi may have been in danger, of course, but like Salman Rushdie, who would have slipped into obscurity if Khomeini had not issued his fatwa in an attempt to boost his country's influence on the world's Muslims, it did bring her an awful lot of publicity and made her the toast of ignorant white 'liberals' (and of some not so liberal but equally ignorant). The fact that something takes courage does not make it worth anything in itself: what Ayaan Hirsi has done is issue broad generalisations about an entire religion and religious community, tarring the good with the same brush as the bad using an exaggerated "real life" horror story as a backdrop. That she was rescued when her house of cards came crashing down only reflects on the bad faith of those who took her in.
More: the Guardian, Dal Nun Strong @ Eteraz.org, Peace, Bruv, UmmahPulse.
Comments
Assalamualaikum I quite agree with your blog. As far as the courage of Ayaan Hirsi and 'Ed the reformed jihadi' - give me a break! Another good article about Rushdie is on ummahpulse.co.uk - very nicely written.
Posted by: Umm Ammara | June 20, 2007 10:30 AM
Salam.
That daily mail article starts of on the right track but then leaves a bad taste after praising the 'heroic' Ed and Hirsi Ali. But typical really, you can't expect too much. btw I didn't know all that about those two islamophobes. Good comments from you.
Posted by: Zhilaal | June 21, 2007 2:21 AM
Salam.
That daily mail article starts of on the right track but then leaves a bad taste after praising the 'heroic' Ed and Hirsi Ali. But typical really, you can't expect too much. btw I didn't know all that about those two islamophobes. Good comments from you. www.shadeofrahmah.blogspot.com
Posted by: Zhilaal | June 21, 2007 2:22 AM
Well said.
Posted by: sindbad | June 21, 2007 3:52 AM
A few points here.
Is anyone seriously suggesting that the life of Hirsi Ali is not at risk in the Netherlands? The murder of Theo Van Gogh surely illustrates that to deny this is to deny the realities of what might happen to anyone who questions the most radical Islamists.
I also think that to assert that her leaving for America is wholly to do with her immigration history is a red herring - a crumb of comfort for those who wish to ignore all that she says. Her story was known about for years before it was used against her in a rather nasty bit of politicking in the Netherlands - a country which has no idea which way to turn, being rather racist and yet fearful of upsetting its minorities.
As for Ed Hussain, the only parts of his book that I've read were the extracts dealing with Saudi life and which would, from all I hear of the Kingdom from expats, sound damningly accurate of another racist society which has little clear idea of how to face the future.
Mr Hussain's main points that I've seen him make in TV interviews, that there is a dangerous impetus towards reality-denying violence amongst British muslims, are also difficult to deny and so need to be denigrated by attacking his "right to speak" and insinuating that he might be an MI5 plant. Even if he were, his points would still need to be answered without taking refuge in irrelevant detail.
As for Mr Rushdie, a lot of people who actually read books (unlike, one suspects, Pakistani ministers and Iranian artistic arbiters) are a little puzzled - if you were going to knight anyone, Ian McEwan would have been a more obvious choice. Having said that, Midnight's Children was a landmark in Anglophone fiction - a true classic in which, it's often forgotten, he skewered the India of Indira Ghandi's "Emergency" of the 1970s.
Supposing that anyone there had been reading his works, perhaps Pakistan might have been upset by "Shame" the follow-up in which he lampooned the course of Pakistan's awful history.
Both of those works, however, owe an excessive debt to Gunter Grass and Gabriel Garcia Marquez respectively.
As for The Satanic Verses, people often forget that its major target was Thatcherism and British attitudes to immigration - the main reason why Norman Tebbit and the Daily Mail hated him so much.
On balance then, quite a few good things about him, then.
As a muslim friend said during the original row: "Do we have to kill him - can't we just cut a bit off?"
Posted by: Simon T | June 21, 2007 10:10 AM
I've yet to hear anyone actually say that "Ed" Husain is an MI5 plant; what they say is that he is an individual out to make money, who misrepresents the situation he was part of in Newham in the early 1990s, that he targets HT and talks of them as if they are still the same people as al-Muhajiroun, which they have not been since 1996, and that he fails to respond to reasoned criticism, but simply amplifies his cries of persecution in the press by (for example) falsely claiming that a satirical poem is a coded call for his murder. The situation in Saudi is a separate issue although even that is the subject of a lot of exaggeration and sensationalism, but over the years I've not met many Muslims with much good to say about it, other than those who are in the pro-Saudi wing of the "salafi" sect, and I've come across a lot of criticism of their stupid laws from very religious Muslims.
Like I said, I didn't dispute that Ayaan Hirsi was in danger in the Netherlands as we all know what happened to Theo Van Gogh. My point was that facing danger does not make Ayaan Hirsi's campaign worth anything as it also contains a lot of exaggeration and misrepresentation on, for example, the FGM issue, which she alleges is a religious problem perpetuated by "the imams", when it is in fact perpetuated by an older generation of women and opposed by many imams. And she used her "life horror story" as an authoritative backdrop against which to vilify the Muslims. That was my point - that "courage" doesn't add any value to an already worthless endeavour.
Posted by: Yusuf Smith
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June 21, 2007 10:48 AM
I don't think "Showkat" will get a knighthood [or damehood] for their contributions to literature.
"I dread the return of the Caliphate
Who will apply to extradite me
Put me on trial
And then execute me
As a traitor."
may not be a coded call for Hussein's murder, but it's a pretty plain wish that he could be killed for what he said.
One reason for hostility to "The Satanic Verses" among muslims who actually read it was that the offensive passages were the fantasies of a muslim and reflected the psychology and identification of some believers rather too well for their tastes.
Simon T, it isn't just a "dangerous impetus towards reality-denying violence" among some British muslims, but a dangerous and self-harming denial of reality
Posted by: Thersites | June 21, 2007 12:02 PM
In fact, a greater writer than Rushdie, and one with much closer connections to "the establishment", turned down a knighthood as beneath his dignity and explained why:
THE KING has called for priest and cup,
The King has taken spur and blade
To dub True Thomas a belted knight,
And all for the sake o’ the songs he made....
...“I ha’ harpit ye up to the throne o’ God,
“I ha’ harpit your midmost soul in three;
“I ha’ harpit ye down to the Hinges o’ Hell,
“And—ye—would—make—a Knight o’ me!”
http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/volumeXI/truethomas.html
Posted by: Thersites | June 21, 2007 8:03 PM
Salman Rushdie is a rubbish writer, but that is no reason to issue a fatwa on him.
In a country that has free speech, Mohammed, Jesus, God even is fair game for criticism.
If you don't like what is said, you argue against it, or don't buy the book.
Of course Rushdie shouldn't have been knighted - but on literary grounds only.
Posted by: Old Pickler | June 22, 2007 1:12 AM