K-grafted and parent USY zeolites

Rushdie’s relationship with and conception of Islam has undergone

remarkable changes over the course of his career. Whilst this thesis does not aim to add substantively to the vast volume of literature already generated in and about the Rushdie Affair, it seems apposite here briefly to chart his political and ideological trajectory with regard to Islam in the years following the fatwa. “In God We Trust”, a 1990 reworking of an 1985 essay, offers a commingling of an old academic interest in Islam derived from his study of the early history of the religion at Cambridge, and the first instance of the impassioned rhetoric of self-defence sparked by the

proclamation of the fatwa. His Rodinson-inflected account of Muhammad’s life quoted above is folded into a liberal narrative of Western monolithicisation of discrimination against Islam:

42 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest (Summer 1989). See also Fukuyama’s book-length study, The End of History and the Last Man (Illinois: Free Press, 1992).

The sloganizing of the term “Islam” by the West in recent years has been extensively examined by Edward Said in his book Covering Islam. What

“Islam” now means in the West is an idea that is not merely medieval, barbarous, repressive and hostile to Western civilization, but also united, unified, homogenous, and therefore dangerous: an Islamic peril to put beside the Red and Yellow ones. Not much has changed since the Crusades except that now we are not even permitted a single, leavening image of a “good Muslim” of the Saladin variety. We are back in the demonizing process which transformed the Prophet Muhammad, all those years ago, into the frightful and fiendish “Mahound”.

Whereas – and, like Said, I must make clear that it is no part of my intention to excuse or apologize for the deeds of many “Islamic” regimes – any examination of the facts will demonstrate the rifts, the lack of homogeneity and unity characteristic of present-day Islam.⁴³

It is difficult, with the double-authorship of pre- and post-fatwa Rushdies, to pin down his ideological position here with any clarity, but it is tempting to read this text as spanning a gap between earlier, more liberal accounts of the difficulties faced by migrants in the West, and the growing sense, gathering force from The Satanic Verses and through the first years of the fatwa, of Islam as Other to Western

concerns rather than semi-semblable. Sneaking into his Saidian portrayal of Islamic victimisation is the self-justifying reference to the naming of The Satanic Verses’

Muhammad-figure “Mahound” (a move which, as we saw in the preceding section, he inadequately attempts to gloss as a participation in the transformative reclaiming of opprobrious naming), as well as the reference to Saladin, here signifying the

43 Rushdie, “In God”, Homelands, 383.

historical figure celebrated by both Christendom and Islam, but subtextually

underlining the cross-cultural naming of one of The Satanic Verses’s protagonists.

“In God We Trust” and its companion piece “In Good Faith” are notable for their emphasis on the non-unified nature of Islam. Indeed, in “In Good Faith”

Rushdie very deliberately distances his attackers and detractors from the main body of Islam: “many Muslims up and down the country find it embarrassing, even shameful, to be associated with such illiberalism and violence”. Beyond this, he renders them part of the same anti-Islamic movement that he described, via Said, in the passage quoted above: “I have never given the least comfort or encouragement to racists; but the leaders of the campaign against me certainly have, by reinforcing the worst racist stereotypes of Muslims as repressive, anti-liberal, censoring zealots”.⁴⁴ He twice makes appeals – in the same words – to “that great mass of ordinary, decent, fair-minded Muslims” who, he says, “have provided much of the inspiration for [his] work” and whom he begs “not to let Muslim leaders make Muslims seem less tolerant than they are”.⁴⁵ Filtered into this appeal are the beginnings of

Rushdie’s self-identification as a secular Muslim, examined in the previous chapter, which come into full bloom in “One Thousand Days in a Balloon” written the following year (“Islam doesn’t have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization… open-minded… delightedly

disputatious”).⁴⁶ The impression we are left with is that Islam is not a unified entity:

there is a “bad Islam”, which is to say fundamentalist, which is the province of

“Muslim leaders” and a “good Islam”, which is represented by the benevolent

44 Rushdie, “Faith”, Homelands, 411.

45 Rushdie, “Faith”, Homelands, 395, 413.

46 Rushdie, “One Thousand”, Homelands, 435.

Muslim masses and which – the implication goes – is not so much religious as cultural or civilizational.⁴⁷

In Faith and Knowledge, Jacques Derrida writes

Our common “culture”… is more manifestly Christian, barely even Judaeo-Christian. No Muslim is among us, alas… just at the moment when it is towards Islam, perhaps, that we ought to begin by turning our attention. No representative of other cults either. Not a single woman!

We ought to take this into account: speaking on behalf of these mute witnesses without speaking for them, in place of them, and drawing from this all sorts of consequences.⁴⁸

In response to this absence of Islam, he suggests the notion of “the Abrahamic” as a means of reconsidering the pervasive, problematic tendency to consider Europe as Greco-Roman, Christian, and secular. By “unsettling” this identity, as Garcia points out, “the Abrahamic resists the West’s cultural, political, and linguistic monopoly over prophetic history”.⁴⁹ This offers the possibility of a recuperation of history beside, beneath, and beyond the bi- or tripartite patterns of religio-historiographical division that produce and promulgate narratives of Otherness. This is a possibility that lurks tantalisingly in the wings of The Satanic Verses, but is precluded by the text’s preoccupation with a specifically Islamic prophet: with recitation rather than

47 This is a common move in Islamophobic discourses. See, for example, Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (London: Pantheon Books, 2004) and Andrew Shryock ed., Islamophibia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010).

48 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1-78, 5.

49 Garcia, Islam, 1.

pan-Abrahamic revelation.⁵⁰ Nevertheless, the sense of convergence between forms of religious and political despotism in both Rushdie’s fiction and non-fiction in the pre- and early-fatwa years speaks of a sense of cross-cultural and -religious

universality of experience when it comes to oppression.

Almost all of this is to be contradicted in Rushdie’s post-9/11 rhetoric – both in the essays immediately following the attacks on the twin towers and in the

retrospective gaze of Joseph Anton – but the most significant divergence is exemplified by an italicised sentence in the middle of “In Good Faith”, and a

phenomenon Rushdie comes to term “Actually Existing Islam”. “The responsibility of violence lies with those who perpetrate it… There is no conceivable reason why such behaviour should be privileged because it is done in the name of an affronted religion”.⁵¹ In “One Thousand Days in a Balloon”, he tells us, “I… found myself up against the granite, heartless certainties of Actually Existing Islam, by which I mean the political and priestly power structure that presently dominates and stifles Muslim societies. Actually Existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere on Earth”.⁵²

It is at this point that I must collapse the post-fatwa, post-9/11, and present-day Rushdies into one another for a moment. Whilst Joseph Anton is a valuably complete account of the fatwa years, featuring large sections of the published post-fatwa non-fiction writings as well as detailed information and snippets of

conversation clearly recorded in his journals at the time, it is also, as I have indicated, a work of retrospective self-fashioning couched firmly in terms of

50 See Louis Massignon on revelation and recitation in “The Three Prayers of Abraham” (1923), in Testimonies and Reflections: Essays of Louis Massignon, trans. Allan Cutler, ed. Herbert Mason (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989): 3-20.

51 Rushdie, “Faith”, Homelands, 411.

52 Rushdie, “One Thousand”, Homelands, 436-437.

Rushdie’s post-9/11 political agenda. In it, he writes of attending a meeting of the Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg in 1993, where he met Jacques Derrida.

He soon realised that he and Derrida would not agree about anything. In the Algeria session he made his argument that Islam itself, Actually Existing Islam, could not be exonerated from the crimes done in its name. Derrida disagreed. The “rage of Islam” was driven not by Islam but by the misdeeds of the West. Ideology had nothing to do with it. It was a question of power.⁵³

Adapted from the phrase “actually existing socialism” itself saturated with negative connotations of despotic soviet regimes in the Eastern Bloc, “Actually Existing Islam”, when it makes its appearance in “One Thousand Days in a Balloon”, marks a starkening in Rushdie’s view of the separation between (despotic) Muslim leadership and (oppressed) Muslim people. It recalls and re-contextualises his assertion in “In God We Trust” about the intrinsic inseparability of state from religion in Islam – recasting what was couched in neutrally scholarly terms as a point of societal difference into a searing polemical assertion of the impossibility of freedom in an Islamic state. It is difficult to say whether this speaks of unspoken prejudice lurking beneath the 1990 text, a residual mid-eighties distance from the material at hand, or a shift in political outlook in the year between the publication of the two texts.

Certainly the phrase “he made his argument” in the Joseph Anton account of the 1993 meeting suggests that by this point the notion had become an intrinsic part of his stance on Islam, or at least that is how it seems to him now. Most significantly, the distance between Islam as an ideology, despotic Islamic leaders, and oppressed Islamic peoples has been collapsed by the point of his encounter with Derrida. The

53 Rushdie, Joseph, 438.

idea that “[t]he responsibility of violence lies with those who perpetrate it” has now been completely overturned: violence committed in the name of Islam is no longer to be distinguished from Islam itself and considered the work of wrongful

individuals, it is now to be linked inseparably to Islam. And this is not an Islamic world that is to be considered as operating dialectically (even in the violent dialectic of war) with the West. This is a consolidated, fundamentally abhorrent entity.

Indeed, the notion of an Islamic world – an Islamic East – has been stripped of its geo-political borders and collapsed into an abstract: Islam.

This tendency crystallised further – and only found full voice in his published writings – after the attack on the World Trade Centre. In his essays which followed 9/11, this conception of an ideologically, politically, culturally, and geographically consolidated Islam is ranged against a “West” into which, as we have seen, abstracts such as freedom of expression, freedom of imagination, freedom, and Enlightenment had been telescoped. In “Not About Islam?” he writes that Islam, for the vast

majority of Muslims, stands for “the fear of God … the sequestration … of their women,” and a “loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over – ‘Westoxicated’ – by the liberal Western-style way of life”.⁵⁴ Where the pre-9/11 Rushdie had been careful – at least in public – to temper his anti-fatwa rhetoric with assertions that “the great mass” of Muslims were

“ordinary, decent, fair-minded,” for the post-9/11 Rushdie “fair-minded” Muslims had become the minority, and liberalism was intrinsically Western⁵⁵. Statements naming “the authority of the United States… the best current guarantor of…

freedom,” and declaring that “to oppose the spread of American culture would be to take up arms against the wrong foe,” in an uneasy cultural-geographical transposition

54 Rushdie, “Islam?” Step Across, 395.

55 Rushdie, “Faith”, Homelands, 395.

or collage, render the USA the new location of Rushdie’s continental vision of Enlightenment: the new Gup.⁵⁶

Beyond any of this, the move in Joseph Anton to vilifying the notion of Islamophobia moves Rushdie the furthest away from his philosophe ideal.

Something new was happening here: the growth of a new intolerance. It was spreading across the surface of the earth, but nobody wanted to know. A new word had been created to help the blind remain blind:

Islamophobia. To criticise the militant stridency of this religion in its contemporary incarnation was to be a bigot. A phobic person was

extreme and irrational in his views, and so the fault lay with such persons and not with the wide belief system that boasted over one billion

followers worldwide. One billion followers could not be wrong, therefore the critics must be the ones foaming at the mouth. When, he wanted to know, did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire?⁵⁷

Rushdie’s vision of the Enlightenment, whilst not specifically referenced here, resonates beneath the repeated invocation of his watchwords – reason, unreason, superstition and satire. It is a final, even shocking, move away from the discourses of intercultural tolerance that he had propounded, in diminishing measures, through the 1980s, 1990s, and even into the early twenty-first century. The Saidian

awareness of the vilification of Islam that still glimmered in his early-fatwa rhetoric

56 Rushdie, “Islam?” Step Across, 392, 297.

57 Rushdie, Joseph, 344-345.

has now not only been extinguished, but rendered illogical – reactionary and extremist. The Voltaireian doctrine of tolerance (“I may not agree with what you say…”) which lit and shaped early responses to the fatwa from Rushdie and his supporters has become, bizarrely, a call to arms for the intolerance of tolerance. The gap between Rushdie’s vision of himself as the new Voltaire and the philosophe credentials of his literary output have been stretched to breaking point.