The following article was published in the Canberra Times on Monday 3 August 2009.
Fate of the curious fatwa
Muslims really are a pathetic lot. Even after two decades, 1.2billion haven’t collectively been able to knock off Salman Rushdie. Assuming, of course, they collectively wanted to.
The ABC Compass program’s website promotes its episode on ”The Satanic Verses Affair” by claiming the novel had sparked riots across the Muslim world.
I wish I knew what the precise boundaries of this ”Muslim world” are, given that some 30 per cent of Muslims live as minorities. And when 1.2billion people across the globe are spontaneously sparked into one huge riot, I’d expect the ozone layer to be almost destroyed and the Pacific Ocean to rise exponentially, overrunning even our Great Dividing Range. Alas, Lake George remains empty.
That’s not to say that there weren’t Muslims who objected to the book in various ways. Some refused to buy it. Others wrote passionate letters to the editor in newspapers. A number of protesters died, as did some translators of Rushdie’s book. Some people exploited the issue for their own political ends. The Compass program refers to one such person: ”Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini invoked a fatwa, effectively sentencing the writer to death.”
I’d just started my second year of university when the Satanic Verses controversy began. The late Ayatollah Khomeini’s self-styled Islamic revolution in Iran had just ended a disastrous war with Iraq. His revolution was demonised by the West for its role in sponsoring terrorist groups in Lebanon that had kidnapped numerous foreigners. In other words, Khomeini was condemned by America for doing what then United States President Ronald Reagan was busy doing in Latin America.
Khomeini was also demonised by Saudi Arabia, whose royal family and religious establishment had thus far had a monopoly over Islamic religious fervour, given its custody of the holy pilgrimage sites in Mecca and Medina. The Saudis painted Khomeini as a sectarian figure, a representative of Shia Muslims who made up hardly 10 per cent of the entire Muslim population. The Saudis, who funded and bankrolled Saddam Hussein’s army against Iran, painted the Iran-Iraq war as a sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shias, despite the fact that Iraq had a Shia majority and plenty of Shia troops fighting on the frontline.
In Australia, this rivalry between Saudi and Iranian political Islam played out in the form of free literature flooding mosques and Muslim youth groups. Iranian religious foundations had their literature promoting the revolution as a unifying force for all Muslims and painting the Saudis as champions of a fringe ”wahhabi” sect that despised both Sunnis and Shias. Saudi literature painted the Iranian revolution as a nefarious force seeking to infiltrate Muslim communities using intrigue and dishonesty.
Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie was curious.
Rushdie’s most offensive passages were reserved for Aisha, one of the prophet Muhammad’s wives who is often painted in an extremely negative light in traditional Shia devotional literature. Saudi-funded imams made full use of this fact to undermine the legitimacy of Khomeini’s fatwa.
So did any Australian Muslims support Khomeini’s fatwa?
In his book Australia for Pakistanis, Syed Atiq ul Hasan mentions the case of a Sydney Pakistani restaurateur interviewed by Jana Wendt on the Channel 9 A Current Affair on three consecutive nights. A Current Affair presented him as a prominent Muslim community leader, and showed him giving the Australian Government an ultimatum to remove all copies of the book from bookshop shelves within 48 hours.
”I am a very violent man and the people who are helping me are violent,” he was shown as declaring.
And which people were with him? Which Muslim community did he lead? We never quite found out. He was arrested and then released on bail. The magistrate obviously didn’t feel the man had too many followers, but the violence of his words proved instrumental in painting a negative picture in the minds of ordinary non-Muslim Australians.
Melbourne historian Bilal Cleland in his 2002 book The Muslims of Australia: a brief history mentions another incident around this time a Sydney-based Shia organisation holding a rally calling for Rushdie’s book to be banned. Children at the rally were photographed wearing T-shirts with the slogan ”Kill Rushdie”.
Cleland cites an article written by the late Pamela Bone in The Age entitled ”Malaise of the West drives more to Koran” in which she writes: ”Scores of Letters to the Editor and callers to talk-back radio in recent weeks indicate that Islam has a terrible image in the minds of many Australians.”
Cleland himself was inclined to agree: ”Even over a decade later the damage to the reputation of Islam attributable to this issue remains in the minds of many Australians.”
For most Muslims, the Rushdie fatwa and controversy was one huge embarrassment. In my own case, I couldn’t understand how a work of fiction could be deemed blasphemous. I also found it difficult to understand how some of my Pakistani Muslim ”unkulz” could find Rushdie offensive without having read his book.
Back then, few names as unusual as mine appeared as by-lines in mainstream English language newspapers. Indeed, the first such name I saw was that of Rushdie himself in a 1988 review he wrote for the Guardian of Palestinian academic Edward Said’s autobiography After The Last Sky. It was my first proper introduction to the Palestinian cause, one that did not involve images of plane hijackings.
I still haven’t read the controversial book. I tried reading it but was soon bored out of my brain. Still, writing boring books shouldn’t be deemed an act of blasphemy or a hanging offence. But nor should all those identifying as Muslims be lumped in with Khomeini’s crowd in the manner some of Rushdie’s defenders enjoyed doing.
On the eve of the Crusades, one Syrian Muslim scholar named Abul Ala al-Ma’arri was told of nasty uncivilised European crusader thugs who even resorted to cannibalism. His response? ”There are only two classes of people in this world: those with dogmatism but little intelligence and those with lots of intelligence but little dogma!”
Perhaps therein lies the lesson of the Rushdie affair.
Irfan Yusuf is author of Once Were Radicals: My Years as a Teenage Islamo-fascist (Allen & Unwin; 2009)
