Salaams,

We know this isn’t entirely true. I think what we have here are not one but two Rushdies. Rushdie may have been a voice of “art” once upon a time, but there is a paradigmatic shift from the post-Satanic Verses crisis. I don’t know whether he was influenced by his fascist friend Christopher Hitchens more or it was the other way round, but what you call giving a voice to “Moroccans going wild in Holland, Algerians nuts in France, and Lebanese behaving badly in Oz” is false. The Rushdie we now know would dismiss these same people as “Islamo-fascists”. And if you read some of his interviews or articles, you’ll find contemptuous references to Islam. He describes Muslims as averse to “kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.” Nothwithstanding the Socialist ideals, we find in his words a condescending tone, as if Muslims don’t have “freedom”, “music”, “beauty”, “love” etc. He claims to have all these. What’s he on anway? Wife number four. We poor Muslims should stretch our hand for that bacon sandwich as well. Primayvada Gopal in the Guardian hit the bull’s eye:

“The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon but is iconic of a more pernicous trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally western ideas that have to be defended as such.”

No wonder he supported the bombings of Afghanistan and Iraq…on “humane” grounds, if he wasn’t pompous already. Sept 11, 2001 (as different from Sept 11, 1973) got him to reinforce how horrible Islam was to the men in suits and ties. But he wasn’t showing any humanity for Muslim victims. They are all the same. He’d rather understand the war criminal Paul Wolfowitz. They’re both “good” men.

Salman Rushdie Defends His Padma
Don’t make him get out his baseball bat!

On February 8, Guy Trebay wrote about Salman Rushdie’s wife, Padma Lakshmi, in the Times. In the “Hindu pantheon,” he observed, “Lakshmi is the domestic deity representing wealth and the embodiment of beauty, grace, and charm . . . In the current fashion pantheon, Ms. Lakshmi similarly stands for a love of money and commodity. A burgeoning brand married to a global brand, she has no problem making public an inventory of brands she chooses to wear.”

Understandably, her husband was not amused. Witnesses say Rushdie walked up to Trebay at a National Arts Club event three days later and said, “If you ever write mean things about my wife again, I’ll come after you with a baseball bat.” Shaken, Trebay, who was on his way out, left. Of course, many found it ironic that Rushdie was threatening a writer with bodily harm for something he’d published. He didn’t return messages, and Trebay refused to comment. But a fellow attendee would: “She’s an ambitious person with a lot of hustle. I would think by celebrity standards she’s fair game. Have you seen her Website?”
-Jacob Bernstein

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/.....cer/11167/

Just one thing to clarify:

I really have no reason to suspect he’s being rewarded solely – two deaceds after the event – for offending some Muslims with the Satanic Verses.

I never said that. I said the scandal over the book provoked lots of gushing in general. Seriously, one could easily argue that Salman Rushdie is more famous for that than his body of work.

But since we’re all getting along, and I haven’t needed to invoke Dan Brown again, I’ll stop.

One thing to keep in mind: Rushdie has always been a writer’s writer. He single-handedly sparked a generation of English-language, Sub-continent extracted genre of literature. Even many non-subcons (eg Zadie Smith) aped his style. He liberated what had been a large sector of the world (post-colonial immigrants and their children) without a voice.

When we see Moroccans going wild in Holland, Algerians nuts in France, and Lebanese behaving badly in Oz, what we see is a confluence of many factors. What we see particularly is a failure in the state’s ability to provide Dutch-ness, French-ness, or Australian-ness (to a much lesser degree, of course) to these people, and the failure of these youths to establish an identity for themselves. While Rushdie is certainly not the answer to these ills, he alone started a movement that has the power to counteract somewhat the sense that these young folk have nothing to say and nowhere to say it. The more a pissed off young second generation type can garner respect and honour through art, perhaps we’ll see a little less of that terrifying inarticulate rage that makes the blood run cold on occasion. Certainly sparking a literary genre of that scope is worthy of a small kiss from the lovely Queen?

But let’s say, for a minute that there is nothing redeeming in Rushdie’s work at all. It is still incumbent upon us as Muslims, who have consented to abide by the laws of our State, and who take the injuntion against murder (and its corrollary, incitement) as seriously as both secular and religious law demand, to speak forcefully.

It is not enough that we say that the nutcases are distasteful. We must get very Voltaire on this one. Otherwise – apart from anything else – we tacitly diminish the currency of our own faith and people. We allow the nutters to dictate the debate’s perameters.