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One of the key events to provide a contextual backdrop to Cherkaoui’s choreographic explorations of religious themes is the Salman Rushdie affair. Controversy arose over the British-Indian writer’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, in the form of hostility and violent reactions by some Muslim groups. In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa or death sentence against Rushdie. The issue at the heart of the dispute was the tension between, on the one hand, freedom of speech as the epitome of Western libertarian values and, on the other hand, Muslim concerns about the dishonouring of die prophet Mohammed. The title of the book refers to verses that were allegedly dictated to the prophet by the devil and were later removed from the

Qur’an, and is regarded by some Muslims to be blasphemous. A number of people involved in the publication and distribution of the novel were killed, and several attempts were made on Rushdie’s life, causing him to live in exile for a considerable time. Literary scholar Margaret Scanlan regrets that the Rushdie affair has largely overshadowed the author’s work itself, and has prevented conventional literary criticism of The Satanic Verses, stating that ‘history has violated the boundaries of this fiction’ (1994, p.231). She evaluates the central premise of the book, which is ‘to imagine the possibility, which lurks in an apocryphal tradition, that the Qu’ran might be an edited text, that Muhammed might briefly have allowed into it a few verses of Satanic origin’, as being ‘harmless enough’ to postmodern readers who are used to stories being re-told in new registers (Scanlan, 1994, p.230). It is in this respect that Rushdie’s novel bears relevance to the study of Cherkaoui’s work. It will be argued in the section 5.2 that his work Apocrifu choreographically represents Holy texts as man- made, fluid and subject to revision and editing, thereby undermining religious fundamentalisms that consider Holy texts to literally be ‘the Word of God’.

There is an interesting branch of literary scholarship that usefully attempts to articulate Rushdie’s stance towards fundamentalism. Analysing Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh (1997), literary scholar Dohra Ahmad (2005) interrogates the term fundamentalism within the context of modernity, globalisation and late capitalism.

She proposes the pluralisation of the term - fundamentalisms - to indicate Rushdie’s stance ‘that fundamentalist mindsets infect not only Islam but also Hinduism, Christianity, Marxism, modem art, and for that matter even the doctrine of hybridity that so many of us would prefer to view as redemptively flexible (Ahmad, 2005, p.2).

Perhaps the relative absence of Islam and Muslim characters in this later novel occurred in response to the 1989 fatwa following The Satanic Verses, in the sense that

afterwards Rushdie dissociated himself directly from the Islamic world. However, the implicit meaning is that ‘Islam is only one of many rigid, totalizing visions that claim to rely on an eternal truth’ (Ahmad, 2005, p.2). In his choreographic representations of religious themes, Cherkaoui highlights a range of fundamentalisms across Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and thus echoes Rushdie’s indiscriminate critique of religious fundamentalisms.

In September 2005 and the ensuing months, another controversy dominated the news in the Western world, repeating similar arguments to those that fuelled the Rushdie affair. The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons depicting Mohammed - an act which is considered blasphemous in Islam, without taking into account that in one of the cartoons the prophet was depicted as a suicide bomber - aiming to stimulate the debate about the critical evaluation of Islam as part of free speech. The act was condemned by Islamic groups in Denmark and around the world as insensitive, Islamophobic and sacrilegious. Violent protests by these groups followed. It is thought that Jyllands-Posten's campaign was a response to the assassination of Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh by a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan origin in 2004, following Van Gogh’s collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali- bom writer living and working in The Netherlands as a politician. Van Gogh and Hirsi Ali produced the film Submission in 2004, which highlighted and criticised the abuse of women in Islamic societies. The film features scenes in which verses from the Qur’an proclaiming men’s superiority over women were painted on a woman’s naked skin. Poignantly, Cherkaoui s work Apocrifu, which will be discussed in more detail in section 5.2, also features a scene in which one dancer paints onto another dancer’s naked torso — albeit Japanese calligraphy rather than Qur anic verses.

In March 2006, a group of writers, including Rushdie and Hirsi Ali, signed a political manifesto published in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, entitled ‘Together Facing the New Totalitarianism’:

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

BBC News, 2006, online

These values are deemed by the signatories of the manifesto to be ‘universal’.

‘Islamism’, they claim.

[...] is nurtured by fear and frustration. Preachers of hatred play on these feelings to build the forces with which they can impose a world where liberty is crushed and inequality. [...] We reject the “cultural relativism” which implies an acceptance that men and women of Muslim culture are deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secularism in the name of the respect for certain cultures and traditions.

BBC News, 2006, online

However, anthropologist David Ferusek assesses the signatories’ dismissal of cultural relativism in the context of the ‘free-floating signifier’ he argues it has become in postmodern argumentation (2007, p.830). Their rejection of the concept, Ferusek argues, is not the result of their being ‘narrow minded absolutist (they are not)’, but of a careful evaluation of contemporary anthropology’s misuse of the term (2007, p.831). He astutely notes

that those signatories and all who share their view have themselves long cultivated and relied upon the intellectual stance of cultural relativism in order to interpret and, in many cases, re-present the world around them [...] [and]

that they themselves would be intellectually paralyzed without it.

Ferusek, 2007, p.831

Andrew Shryock, in his introduction to the edited volume Islamophobia/Islamophilia, heavily criticises the manifesto as being ‘simplistic and alarmist’ (2010, p.5) and problematizes its conflating of Islam and Islamism, a supposed ideology which is, however, scantily defined. In the manifesto, the authors defensively, and - in Shryock’s eyes - ineffectively, renounce the label ‘islamophobic’:

We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of

“Islamophobia”, a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatisation of those who believe in it.

BBC News, 2006, Online

Overall, Shryock argues for a less essentialised understanding of Islam, given that it is hard to draw clear lines between Self and Other in an increasingly globalised world.

In conclusion, complex debates are held about these developments, invoking concepts and phrases such as fundamentalism, freedom of speech, blasphemy, new totalitarianism and Islamophobia. These redefinitions and misuses of the terminology indicate that the debates themselves are increasingly complex, with arguments and counterarguments continuously being thrown backwards and forwards. There is no straightforward right or wrong. It is in this context that Cherkaoui’s choreographic negotiations of religion should be evaluated as those of someone whose life has been located at the crossroads of religious tensions in Western Europe (see the discussion of the rise of the populist radical right in Flanders in Chapter 3). The rest of this chapter will argue, in line with what was argued in Chapter 3 in terms of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and Cherkaoui’s view that there is no longer a clear-cut aggressor and victim in that conflict, that Cherkaoui is positioning himself very carefully in this myriad of voices through subtle choreographic strategies.