Delectable Lie: a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism by Mansur Salim

Author:Mansur, Salim [Mansur, Salim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mantua Books (August 29, 2011)
Published: 2011-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

II.

The “Rushdie affair” became the template of the campaign, pushed by Muslims and their innumerable organizations in the West, to restrict free speech in Europe and North America on the grounds that free speech cannot be a license to offend the feelings of cultural and religious minorities. Salman Rushdie did not commit any crime, nor had he broken any British or European law in the writing of his fictions including the novel The Satanic Verses. He was known to be a man of the left, an opponent of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in Britain, and a defender of immigrants in their effort to gain equal treatment in their adopted country. But none of that mattered to those Muslims, a majority in Britain from South Asia, who saw Rushdie’s fiction as a thinly disguised insult directed at their faith and their prophet. Their outrage was heard back in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In October 1988 the Indian government under instructions of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi placed Rushdie’s novel on the list of proscribed books fearing communal disturbances ahead of the scheduled federal election for the following year. Malise Ruthven writing about the “Rushdie affair” astutely observed, “In the electronic age, the quarrels of frontier villages erupt into people’s living rooms every day” (1990: 163).

Salman Rushdie was, ironically saved by the fatwa (an Islamic religious ruling) of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for his death that sent him into hiding, or he might have met the fate of Theo van Gogh in the hands of some enraged Muslim. There could not have been a more clear and unambiguous indication than what was provided by the “Rushdie affair” that freedom of speech, as one of the fundamental principles of liberal democracy, was under assault. But neither the governments nor the public in the West were seriously alarmed by the notion that in the late twentieth century anyone needed to worry about demands to ban books, put limits on free speech, censor films, forbid making cartoons of certain subjects, and be fearful for the safety of public individuals should they speak and write on Islam and related matters that offend Muslims. Yet this is the direction in which the West was headed with the “Rushdie affair” even as the Berlin Wall got dismantled, a divided Europe became re-united, and the Soviet Union disintegrated.

The murders in Amsterdam in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington on September 11, 2001, and with Hirsi Ali requiring protection as was extended by the British government to Salman Rushdie, indicated the extent to which freedom of speech came under siege across the West. In such circumstance the irreverent cartoon drawings of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 20, 2005 amounted to throwing a lighted fire into a tanker full of oil. These cartoons enraged Muslim opinion and violence erupted across the Middle East and beyond directed at the Danish embassies with demands for apology, retraction of the cartoons, punishment for the cartoonists, and boycott of Danish goods.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.