ISLAMABAD — Pakistani Islamic scholars honoured Osama bin Laden in response to Britain’s knighthood for Salman Rushdie, as a senior ruling party member said he would not hesitate to kill the novelist.
Meanwhile the country’s religious affairs minister, who caused outrage by remarking that the award given to the “Satanic Verses” author justified suicide attacks, announced that he may visit Britain next month.
The Pakistani Ulema Council, a private body that claims to be the biggest of its kind in the country with 2,000 scholars, said it had given Bin Laden the title “Saifullah”, or Sword of Allah, its top accolade.
“We are pleased to award the title of Saifullah to Osama bin Laden after the British government’s decision to bestow the title of ‘Sir’ on blasphemer Rushdie,” council chairman Maulana Tahir Ashrafi told AFP.
“This is the highest title for a Muslim warrior.”
Whenever someone protests against Salman Rushdie they are thrown a question at “Did you read the Satanic verses?” the protester is stumped as they have usually never read the book. So why the uproar?
Here are some excerpts from wikipedia.
“The novel consists of a frame narrative, using elements of magical realism, interlaced with a series of sub-plots that are narrated as dream visions experienced by one of the protagonists. The frame narrative, like many other stories by Rushdie, involves Indian expatriates in contemporary England. The two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors of Indian Muslim background. Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specializes in playing Hindu deities. Chamcha is an emigrant who has broken with his past Indian identity and works as a voice over specialist in England.”
The controversy is here
“One of these sequences contains most of the elements that have been criticized as offensive to Muslims. It is a transformed re-narration of the life of the prophet Muhammad (called “Mahound” or “the Messenger” in the novel) in Mecca (“Jahilia”). At its centre is the episode of the “Satanic Verses”, in which the prophet first pronounces a revelation in favour of the old polytheistic deities in order to win over the population, but later renounces this revelation as an error induced by Shaitan. There are also two fictional opponents of the “Messenger”: a demonic heathen priestess, Hind, and an irreverent skeptic and satirical poet, Baal. When the prophet returns to the city in triumph, Baal organises an underground brothel where the prostitutes assume the identities of the prophet’s wives. Also, one of the prophet’s companions claims that he, doubting the “Messenger”‘s authenticity, has subtly altered portions of the Qur’an as they were dictated to him.”
“The second sequence tells the story of Ayesha, an Indian peasant girl who claims to be receiving revelations from the Archangel Gibreel. She entices all her village community to embark on a foot pilgrimage to Mecca, claiming that they will be able to walk on foot across the Arabian Sea. The pilgrimage ends in a catastrophic climax as the believers all walk into the water and disappear, amid disturbingly conflicting testimonies from observers about whether they just drowned or were in fact miraculously able to cross the sea.
“A third dream sequence presents the figure of a fanatic expatriate religious leader, the “Imam”, set again in a late-20th-century setting. This figure is a transparent allusion to the life of Ayatollah Khomeini in his Parisian exile, but it is also linked through various recurrent narrative motifs to the figure of the “Messenger”.“
This is more than enough to justify the protests. The Iranian government had the “things” to issue a religious death decree, due to which Salman Rushdie went into hiding for nearly 10 years. According to a documentary on National Geographic, he actively sought help from top officials of US and UK governments to pressurize Iranians to cancel the Fatwa.
Iran did suspend the fatwa on 1998, to improve relations with UK. However the reward money was offered in 1999. The National Geographic documentary covers the matter in great depth. I wish I could get that documentary.
Perhaps the best piece assessing the present situation is written by Raza Rumi at Pakistaniat, which perhaps is a rare display as the ‘intellectuals’ avoid writing on such controversial events. He quotes one of his friends who rightly points out that the knighthood is a politically charged move.
“Clearly, lack of self-awareness and an inability to be self-critical is a global phenomenon. Rushdie was just another Booker-prize winning author hailed by the British literary establishment and unknown otherwise. He is a western icon today, because he is the poster-boy for the Western construct of a Muslim-bashing “civilized Muslim.” That is why he has been knighted and why he is so hated. Just because he is the poster-boy of Western Islamophobia, Rushdie should not be awarded the status of hate-figure in the Muslim world. By elevating him so, it is in fact Muslim extremists who place him in a position of centrality instead of the insignificant and irrelevant place he deserves.” Pakistaniat
The major reason why this is so is because Rushdie no longer enjoys the status of a good writer. This is because of the recent decline in the quality of writing.
Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Shalimar the Clown, is enough to add to one’s misery. I finished browsing it; what else can you do with such stuff posing as quality fiction? As if the name of the central character “Shalimar” was not enough to offend a native reader such as I, the heroine “India Ophuls” changing her name to “Kashmira” was the ultimate illustration of cheap exoticism and a hackneyed dive into passé magical realism. Alas, Rushdie has started believing in his own mantra and the twisting of historical narrative. It simply does not work now. He is more of a bard for the ascendancy of the global tide against Islamism and perhaps he should stick to that. Better if he were to provide some intellectual depth to Fox News, or even better, if he started writing scripts for his young wife’s tele-plays. Shalimar successfully completes the trilogy of Rushdie’s worst novels, the other two being The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury . Aijaz Ahmad, a US-based academic, argued a long time ago that Rushdie and Naipul were avatars of ‘oriental’ consciousness. Small wonder that they are reviewed, exalted and globally hyped. Pakistaniat
It needs not to be said that the west is going all out against the Muslims. It is about time we realized that.
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