Following on from my article last week about the protests at the time of the original publication of Salman Rushdie's book, The Satanic Verses, this week I want to address some of the criticisms I have since received, in particular, for my acceptance of the right to offend as a necessary freedom.
An open letter sent to major Muslim organisations in the UK from a longstanding conservative Muslim campaigner, Dr Abdul Majid Katme, charged me with having written a "horrifying article" in which I allegedly said that I "don't mind anyone abusing the Prophet [Muhammad]". That is just not true and shows a striking misunderstanding of what I had written. It is patently idiotic to say that the right to offend implies necessary approval or agreement with what is then said by somebody else. Vilification of the Prophet Muhammad is understandably hurtful to Muslims, including me. What I had argued for, however, was simply a recognition that people's words and writings cannot and should not be policed on the basis of what other people may or may not regard as offensive.
Dr Katme then protests that "we did not ask [for] that filthy book [the Satanic Verses] to be banned, we [just] asked the publishers to withdraw it".
It is certainly true that while some Muslims called for Rushdie's book to be banned, some others called on the publishers, Viking-Penguin, to withdraw and pulp their stocks instead. I have to confess that I have some trouble in sensing much of a distinction between the two positions. Still, it is worth querying how such a call was desirable or could in any case be successful now that we are in the age of the internet. And what about DVDs such as Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ? Jesus is regarded as a major prophet in Islam - would those DVDs also have to be pulped too? And what else besides? Can you just imagine? It seems to be an ill-thought-out and rather extreme position.
I raised this issue with the Labour peer, Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, this week and he agreed that any attempt to introduce a law prohibiting vilification or objectionable material about revered religious figures would be futile and counterproductive. British Muslims are already in the unfortunate position where they are viewed by too many of their fellow citizens as seeking to curtail some basic freedoms.
Is it not a more rewarding approach to wholeheartedly embrace those very same freedoms and recognise that the same laws that allowed Rushdie to have written the Satanic Verses are the ones that protect the right of Muslim authors to, for example, robustly criticise the concept of the Trinity as a deviation from the monotheistic teachings of Jesus or to vocally oppose the government's calamitous participation in the invasion of Iraq?
The Muslim philosopher Tariq Ramadan recently published a wonderful biography of the Prophet Muhammad that was evidently a work of devotion and love. Surely that is a far more worthwhile and sensible response to Salman Rushdie than calling for the Satanic Verses to be banned or withdrawn.
