Geoffrey Clarke

Chapter 3: The late-Victorian period

Moving in to the late-Victorian period between eighteen-eighty and nineteen hundred and one, we begin to find scholars who could look at Islam on its own terms.  Whilst nineteenth century writers are largely tarnished with the issue of imperialism, one or two of them like Rudyard Kipling, and his friend Rider Haggard, were largely able to escape a full-blown, imperialistic world view.

For Shamsul Islam, a Professor of Panjab University, Rudyard Kipling’s imperialism is only one aspect of his principles of law that challenges the “Dark Powers” that he encounters everywhere in his world.  His life in India gave him access to “diverse religious and philosophic traditions”,[96]  and these two traditions were experienced at first hand rather than in the abstract.  Shamsul Islam looks at how Kipling reacted to these traditions and formulated them into his own world outlook that he called ’the law’.  In Professor Islam’s opinion, Kipling sees “Islam and Muslims in a very positive light:”

Kipling was a real internationalist and his work or ideas are quite relevant to our post 9/11 world. This is particularly shown by his views on Islam and Muslims. Today when Islam and the Islamic world are under fierce Western attack and a new crusade or the so-called ‘clash of civilizations’ rages on, it is heartening to see how Kipling views Islam and Muslims in a very positive light. Perhaps it is high time that the West should listen to what Kipling has to say on the subject.[97]

In English writers’ attitudes to Indian religious traditions there remained much of a reprehensible nature.  Oriental religion was a subject for study by "Orientalists", but typical of the early scholars in their attitude of degradation of Indian religion in ‘A Christian’ was the statement that:

The most enormous and strange impurities; the most villainous frauds and impostures; the most detestable cruelty and injustice; the most filthy and abominable conceits; every corruption and indulgence, are presented to us in their histories, varied in a thousand forms.[98]

Let us consider the lines that appear to ascribe pagan ideas to the East:

 My brother kneels, so says Kabir

To stone and brass in heathen-wise.  [99]

It suggests that the East was idolatrous and that only Christians were in the right while, in their obeisance to pagan gods, Hindus were beyond the pale.

Kipling, on the strength of the word of Kabir, an Indian himself, holds similar views on religion in India.  He takes the attitude that idolatry is the basis of religious practice for his fellow man and: "His God is as his fates assign..."  And yet he goes on to modify this by: "His prayer is all the world’s and mine,"[100]  thereby endorsing a common divinity in all received religion.  It is a common theme in Kipling to resort to primitive beliefs in times of stress.  For in India, "most folk come back to simpler theories" he held in "The Conversion of Aurelian Mc Goggin".[101]  Kipling had a leaning towards the philosophies of the East, while Kim goes in search of the truth with the Lama, and it is suggested that:

All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed by the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers and visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end.  [102]

And also:

''...he is holy and thinks upon matters hidden from thee," says Kim in the Lama’s defence travelling in a crowded carriage to Umballa.[103]

What Kim owes to his guru, the Lama "the yellow-headed buck-Brahmin priest", is "wisdom from the Lama’s lips".  The spiritual guidance as he followed "the traces of the Blessed Feet throughout all India", was received from out of the mouth of the Lama.  And, the knowledge he obtained on the road perfected Kim's education, while his future vocation as a "chain man" was prepared for by his accompanying the Brahmin priest.

In the Indian Mutiny, 1857, it is not so much a case of the shortcomings of the British or the legitimacy of the Indians’ grievances, but rather that Anglo-Indian fiction shows it as a popular revolt and a large political movement.  Importance is placed by the late-Victorian author Meadows Taylor in ‘Seeta’,[104]  on the justification of ‘native’ soldiers in taking action against measures which were counter to their culture and religion.  He was supportive of the Indian soldiers on the threat to class or caste which was represented by the new ammunition which was issued to them, which was lubricated with pig and cow grease.  It contravened both Hindu and Muslim people’s religious duty to touch such items, and Meadows Taylor acknowledged that the new army regulations introduced in the 1850s were intrinsically hostile to fundamental Indian social beliefs.  These meant that the requirement for Hindu soldiers to use such tainted ammunition threatened the orthodox Hindu with the complete loss of caste and the Muslim soldier with social disgrace.

Another work, Mrs Steel’s ‘On the Face of the Waters’ accepted, comprehendingly, that the ammunition was contaminated in that way.  She rejected, as well, the weak contention of the British authorities that they were ignorant of the religious scruples of the Indian people, complaining as she did of "the inconceivable folly and tyranny of initial responses to the soldiers’ disaffection".[105]  The result was that "85 of the best Indian soldiers at Meerut, for example, were set to toil for ten years in shackles because they refused to be so defiled".

It might be argued that no one needed what Islam could provide as much as Kipling did; with the pain and suffering he endured in the early years at “the house of desolation” in Southsea - the brutal cruelty of that boarding place - his lonely life in India and with his treatment at the hands of “the hated wife, Carrie Kipling” we can observe it.[106]  He experienced a decade of hating, pre 1914; and in later life, after the loss of his son, John, at the Battle of Loos during World War I, he suffered from depression.  Had he felt the consolation that religion can bring, arguably his redemption could have been procured and he may have escaped the anxiety and neurosis that he continually experienced.

Of the late-Victorian romance writers, Rider Haggard is the most sympathetic towards the Islamic world outlook.  In ‘She’, the character, Ayesha, possesses the supposed traditional qualities of super womanhood: permanent youth, perennial prettiness, supernatural strength; and she is white!  Ayesha, whose name is the same as the daughter of the prophet of Islam, is of the Arab nation for which Haggard felt a strong affiinity, regarding it as pure, and culturally in accord with his values, its people being strong, virile and attractive to westerners, a model for Haggard's heroes and protagonists.  She appears in historical costume and is very wise.  The American critic Morton Cohen[107]  sees her as Sagacity itself: Wisdom's Daughter he calls her, referring to another Haggard title.  She becomes in one (Jungian) theory, the projection of Haggard's unconscious ideal of the perfect love, an image varying only in small details that man has inherited in part as a legacy of his race's past history - what Jung terms "the race memory". 

In ‘The Brethren’ his character, Rosamund, a young heiress who has half Moorish blood descended from Saladin, is abducted and made hostage in Beirut.  Two of her suitors, Wulf and Godwin, the Brethren, travel to Lebanon to rescue her.  Masouda, a beautiful widow, arranges to meet the brothers when they arrive.  She is a spy for the Saracen, Sinan, but soon falls in love with Godwin.  She takes the brothers into Sinan’s territory to try to rescue Rosamund who is imprisoned by Sinan there.  A Christian in Muslim land, Masouda is portrayed as a sympathetic character, and glimpses of Saladin show him to be a great man with a profound sense of chivalry and honour, as we saw in Chapter 1.  Haggard conveys a balanced view of Saladin who displays a generosity of spirit and a valorous character compared to the bloodthirsty Christians, Lozelle and Palmer.  As with Haggard’s views of African characters which are often complimentary, he finds the Muslim characters attractive, especially since Haggard elevates Rosamund to sainthood and allows Saladin to spare the beleaguered Jerusalem, mirroring facts from the Crusades.

A writer who spent a great deal of energy and time in public works, completing pamphlets on Church and State, and a supportive book on the Salvation Army, ‘Regeneration’, with a long section dictated by its founder, General Booth, was one whose spirit and morality were close to the religious ideals of Islam.[108]

To segue from the previous discussion of William Muir [Chapter 1] to the 1980s is challenging, but his theme of the revelations supposedly from Satan takes me to the Indo-English novel, “The Satanic Verses”.  When Salman Rushdie startled the English literary world on the publication of his novel[109]  he immediately faced a Muslim backlash by extremists and others who considered his novel to be disrespectful not only to the then Prime Minister, the late Margaret Thatcher, but to Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam and revered holy prophet of tens of billions of Muslims, present and past.  Not only was it disrespectful, but it called into question the honour and dignity of a beloved and revered man who had united a movement, fought wars in the name of the religion and founded what was to be a major world denomination of believers in the one God.  The term ‘Satanic Verses’, or what Arabic scholars called the ’gharāniq’ verses, was drawn from a supposed reciting of a few verses of the Qur’an that were later withdrawn and discarded by prophet Muhammad as being from the devil, sent to deceive him as if coming from the word of God.  The words do not appear in the Qur’an in the original form, but refer to the pagan goddesses: Al-lāt, Uzza, and Manah according to the first biography of Muhammad by Ibn Ishaq.  The lines move from disallowance to approvedness, in their amended form:

Have ye thought upon Al-Lat and Al-'Uzza
And Manat, the third, the other?
Are yours the males and His the females?
That indeed were an unfair division!

They are but names which ye have named, ye and your fathers, for which Allah hath revealed no warrant.

They follow but a guess and that which (they) themselves desire.

And now the guidance from their Lord hath come unto them.  [110] 

The phrase 'Satanic verses' was not known to Muslims, but was invented by Western scholars specialising in the work of Arabia and the Near East.  For Muslims, the Indo-English Rushdie title remains sacrilegious, not being founded on Islamic jurisprudence or what is termed ‘fiqh’ in Mohammadan law.[111]  And as the Muslim philosopher, Shabbir Akhtar, has pointed out: “the confusion of the sacred and the profane, the good and the evil, allegedly revealed truth and purely human truth supplies the central theme of the novel.”[112]

Indeed, Eliot Weinberger argued in 1989, that passages in the novel were an "all-out parodic assault on the basic tenets of Islam.”[113]  As well as the characterisation of the prophet Muhammad in one chapter on Islam as ‘Mahound’, a pejorative term from the Crusades, allegedly meaning a conjurer, a magician or a false prophet, in another chapter it uses the names of the prophet’s wives, Ayesha, Khadiga and Hafsa taken on by prostitutes in a harem, thereby drawing an unpleasant inference by reason of their analogy, into the work.  After initial attacks in India, Muslim groups in Britain and elsewhere in Europe joined protests and some rallies resulted in the burning of the novel on the streets of Bolton and Bradford, London and other cities.[114]  The novel was subsequently banned in India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Malaysia and in the Sudan.

The account of the character ‘Mahound’, rather like Salman, is of one who, flirting with religion, even at a late stage attempts a return to the Islamic fold, and tries to attain a reprieve making the following statement which apologised profusely for:

the distress the publication has occasioned to the sincere followers of Islam. Living as we do in a world of many faiths, this experience has served to remind us that we must all be conscious of the sensibilities of others.[115]

The fictional character ‘Mahound’ is patently a reference to the prophet of Islam derived from apostate sources, and another character, Salman the Persian, refers to Mahound as a kind of false prophet who had “revelations of convenience.”  Again he says, “Mahound himself had been a businessman and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom organisation and rules come naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should come up with such a very businesslike Archangel who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if not corporeal, God,”[116]  The novel addresses aspects of Islam that Muslims take as sacrosanct and deliberately associates both biography and exegesis in a derogatory and mocking fashion. 

According to Geoffrey Robertson, the barrister who defended a legal challenge against Rushdie, the novel’s protagonist, Gibreel, pulverised “by his spiritual need to believe in God and his intellectual inability to return to the faith, finally kills himself.”  The plot, for Robertson in brief, is “not an advertisement for apostasy.”[117]

However, many Muslims, including the influential Kalim Siddiqui of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain [118]  took the view that not only the character, Gibreel, but the author Salman, were apostates, and agreed with the Grand Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini who issued a fatwa - a religious edict, on 14 February 1989 - condemning Rushdie to death on account of the defamatory nature of the text and its one sided analysis of Islam in what Merryl Wyn Davies and Ziauddin Sardar refer to as taking “what is defensible but let[ting] the indefensible slide without remarks.”[119]  The type of selective arguments that an apologist like Rushdie makes are the most puzzling aspects of Islamic intellectual theorisation, according to Wyn Davies and Sardar.  Ziauddin Sardar confessed himself to be "transfixed with fear, anger and hatred" on his reading of the novel.[120]  He sees it as part of the ‘’distorted imagination… a deliberate and calculated exercise that impedes mutual understanding between Islam and the West.”[121]   Ziauddin Sardar thought “that every word, every jibe, every obscenity in the ‘Satanic Verses’ was directed at me - personally.”  “Every Muslim would have felt the same”, he explained.  “Just as people threatened with physical genocide react to defend themselves’‘, Sardar emphasised.[122]

His co-writer, Merryl Wyn Davies was reduced to tears for days as a result of the “hate-speech” she had encountered in reading the novel, and vowed to counteract it with a book in refutation.[123]  As a Welsh convert to Islam, she was incensed that such an attack could be made against the very foundations of the beliefs of Muslims and particularly one who had studied the tenets of the holy Qur’an carefully and come to her informed decision to ‘revert’ to Islam, because all believers hold that one is born originally as a Muslim – one who submits to God. The philosopher, Shabbir Akhtar, in his admonitory work ‘Be Careful with Muhammad’ also warned: “If one handles precious things, one does well to handle them with care.”[124]

Convinced of its apostasy, Kalim Siddiqui and others at the Muslim Parliament including Ghayasuddin Siddiqui [no relative] continued to support the ‘fatwa’ claiming that he had no authority to revoke the Islamic proclamation and that Rushdie‘s work was derogatory and defaming of Islam.  Ghayasuddin Siddiqui added: “We support the fatwa but at the same time we have always said that Muslims in this country should abide by the law and not carry out the killing."  He continued: "It has always been the situation that the fatwa remains in operation and valid."[125]

It was not, despite Siddiqui, until 2000 that the Islamic edict was allowed to be quietly dropped, but not until after the deaths of Hitoshi Igarashi and Ettore Capriolo, Rushdie’s Japanese and Italian translators, and the shooting and serious wounding of William Nygaard, his publisher in Norway, as well as countless other individuals in India and elsewhere.[126]

Of course, Rushdie’s was not the first racist attack in Britain, for the seventies had seen the era of ‘Paki bashing’, there had been the death in Handsworth of a West Indian youth, the stabbing of Tausir Ali in Bromley and the events around the Notting Hill carnival, as well as the later attacks in 1985 at Broadwater Farm and the Stephen Lawrence affair, leaving a fraught and difficult time in Black – British relationships.[127]

The whole issue that became so contentious revolves around the cultural requirement for freedom of speech in the West versus the belief by many Muslims throughout the world that there exists a law in all countries that “prohibits any publications or utterances that tend to ridicule or defame Islam".  The United Kingdom had laws that protected blasphemy against the Christian religion, but the blasphemy laws in England did not provide enough cover for a defence against the novel’s supposed sacrilegious nature to provide redress to Muslims.  The Attorney General did not allow a case to be put for blasphemy, even though Muslim jurists had applied for a case to be heard.

Its publishers, Penguin, were always adamant for its publication to stand and would brook no revocation.  There appeared to be a determination to publish at any cost.  Its chief executive officer, Peter Mayer, stated: “Any climb down now will only encourage future terrorist attacks by individuals or groups offended for whatever reason by other books that we or any other publisher might publish.”  He claimed that if “we capitulate there will be no publishing as we know it.”

He admitted that “Muslims needed protection from discrimination and hatred”,[128]  but it is just strange that he did not take such a consistent position over publications concerned with right wing terrorism, or, indeed, over revisionism of the Holocaust.  It is also bizarre that the insistence on publishing at all costs, despite the need for caution and due diligence, went against every faith calling for forbearance, charity and humility.  The contention that only secular humanism was an acceptable justification for all publishing meant that social accountability was minimal.  The fundamental insistence on total freedom of expression became a similarly fundamentalist, extremist position, like the one it was supposed to be attacking.[129]

So, in other words, Peter Mayer was arguing for total freedom without any responsibility.  Muslims today have not permitted further insults to go unaccounted for, however.  To contend that, thereby, they undermine values of tolerance and forgiveness is neither to understand the depth of hurt experienced by the Muslim community, nor to recognise the deep passion and love that they hold for their spiritual leader.[130]  They have, to follow Ziauddin Sardar, drawn a line under secularism as to how far it may go in its reaction to Islam and no further.  For “Islam is not Christianity”, they will no longer allow the mistreatment and “violence of the history, tradition and the sacred territory of Islam.”[131]

The novel, despite some artistic merit, shows the cultural neuroses and insecurities of a post-colonial writer deracinated from his Muslim religious roots, and through the English public school route shunted into a hybrid condition where he is of neither East nor West, and floundering to explain his predicament.  Gibreel Farishta, “the tuneless soloist” and “buttony, pursed Mr Saladin Chamcha” on board a fictionally doomed plane are oddly the precursors of that other airplane disaster of 11 September 2001 in which Mohammad Atta and Hani Hanjour, the erstwhile passengers on hijacked aeroplanes that fly into the ground, and who, as a coda to the story threaten: “Here we come!  Those bastards down there won’t know what hit them.  Meteor or lightening or threat of God.”[132]  It remains a metaphor for the coming attacks on the Twin Towers that were to devastate Muslim - Christian relations up to now and led, contrarily, to the backlash against Islamic fundamentalism in US attacks on Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in May 2003: metaphor and simile as predictors of a future Islamic/Christian tragedy.

His fictional character Bilal X, might be taken to be metaphor for, or at least an allusion to, Cat Stevens, or Yusuf Islam as he is now known, the convert to Islam.  He is portrayed as a famous former pop singer who has converted to Islam, and is described by Salman as the "favored lieutenant" of "the Imam", a character modeled on the Shi’ite Ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini.  His "well-nourished, highly trained" voice might appear to be "a weapon of the West turned against its makers.”[133]  This caricature may have been responsible for Stevens’s reaction to the ‘fatwa’ which was allegedly supportive, but hotly denied by Yusuf Islam[134]  at the time.  Cat Stevens was the author of the seventies’ ballad that expressed the directionlessness, the rootlessness and the search for a spiritual element that characterised the decade, and led to his discovery of the Qur’an:

… and I'm on the road to find out 
Then I found my head one day when I wasn't even trying 
And here I have to say, 'cause there is no use in lying, lying 

Yes the answer lies within, so why not take a look now? 
Kick out the devil's sin, pick up, pick up a good book now 

Yes the - answer - lies - within, so why not take a look now? 
Kick out the devil's sin, pick up, pick up The Good Book now!  [135]

The lines suggest that a transition from international pop star to Islamic champion and educationalist were possible if one looked for redemption in the pages of the holy Qur’an.  In fact, Yusuf’s brother, David Gordon, brought him a copy of the Qur'an for his birthday after a visit to Jerusalem; he took to it immediately, and began his journey to Islam and his ongoing work for the Muslim community.

Salman Rushdie’s novel brings home tensions in the emigrant community between himself and the ‘Other’ or between ’us’ and ‘them’.  He/she can either identify with and integrate into an England (nevertheless of multicultural pluralism), or remain within his/her own cultural mindset.  Whilst Gibreel Farishta tries to take the latter position of holding on to his cultural identity and not adapting to English culture, Saladin Chamcha takes the former route of abandoning his identity and going with the flow.  Saladin grows horns and a hoof[136]  whilst Gibreel is awarded a halo for his non-adaptation.  The narrator resumes:

Should we say that these are two fundamentally different types of self?  Might we not agree that Gibreel,…- is joined to and arises from his past;..- so that his is still a self, which for our present purposes, we may describe as true…whereas Saladin Chamcha is a creature of selected discontinuities, a willing re-invention; his preferred revolt against history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, false,…- While Gibreel, to follow the logic of our established terminology, is to be considered ‘good’ by wishing to remain, for all his vicissitudes, at bottom an untranslated man. – But, and again but; this sounds dangerously like an intentionalist fallacy?  Such distinctions resting as they must on an idea of the self as being (ideally) his vicissitudes, at bottom an untranslated man – non-hybrid, ‘pure’, —an utterly fantastic notion! —cannot, must not, suffice.[137]

So, perhaps after twenty-five years the time has come to forgive Salman Rushdie; but Shabbir Akhtar has said that “any Muslim who fails to be offended by Rushdie’s book ceases on account of that fact” [that the Qur’an is the source and inspiration of Muslim teaching and that Muslims must interpret its ‘imperatives’ as they may] “to be a Muslim”: disinheritance by literary fatwa, and therefore an unconditional pardon can still not be issued by the fundamentalists.

The reverse position to Saladin Chamcha, where an Englishman reverts to an alien culture, has been described by T E Lawrence as a chameleon philosophy in ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’[138].  It is an attempt to fully integrate with the ‘Other’, but, at the same time, it is a duplicitous scheme where the Englishman pretends to take on the aspects of the foreigner, while, all along, hoping that they will become like him:

A man who gives himself to be in possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been. Then he is exploiting his old environment to press them out of theirs. Or, after my model, he may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back. Then he is giving away his own environment: pretending to theirs; and pretences are hollow, worthless things. In neither case does he do a thing of himself, nor a thing so clean as to be his own (without thought of conversion), letting them take what action or reaction they please from the silent example.

An earlier work by Salmon Rushdie was entitled ‘Midnight’s Children’.  Annoying Mrs Indira Ghandi, the Indian Premier, was Salman’s strategy with his rebarbative novel.  Rushdie was sued successfully in London for this piece of libel, and, indeed, Rushdie recognised in a personal statement that “incorporating such momentarily ‘hot’ contemporary material in the novel was a risk – and by that I meant a literary risk, not a legal one.”[139]  The general purport of “Midnight’s Children” is to show two parallel lives in the reborn India of 1947: Saleem Sinai and his future wife, Padma.  It is an allegory of the rebirth of India before and after Partition and employs ‘magic realism’ as a plot device.  Those children who were born at the hour of midnight on the day of Partition were endowed with special psychic powers.  Saleem is riven by doubt: “He was caught in a strange middle ground, trapped between belief and disbelief, and this was only a charade after all.”[140]  His novel steers away from any certainties, maintains doubt at all times, and is a paean to loss of faith, uncertainty, migration and discontinuity.  An incoherent story, it has links, through Islamic allegory, to 'The Satanic Verses' and veers between two Indias, pre and post Independence.

The early part of the story sees Saleem Sinai (“Snomouse, Stainface, Baldy, Buddha or even Pieces of the Moon”) at prayer, and others mock his prostrations and his recitation of ‘Al Fatihah’ - the Opening, the first verses of the Quran which are basic principles of the religion:  Bismillah rahmana rahim - Praise be to Allah Cherisher and Sustainer of the Worlds: Al hamdu lillahi rabbil 'alamin – Most Gracious Most Merciful:  Maalik yawm al-deen - Master of the Day of Judgment.[141]  The text makes an allegory of the holy Quran and turns it into a mockery:  “here was Ingrid, her face scorning him for this Mecca – turned parroting; here their friends Oskar and Ilse Lubin the anarchists, mocking his prayer with their anti-ideologies.”

But it is not enough to say that this is a fiction; there is a direct connection between the holy text and its subsumption by his scathing friends – a situation that he does not defend or deny.  Salman Rushdie’s literary ability is not doubted, but deference to people’s susceptibilities is not one of his strong areas, nor his political interface with religion.  The effect of his book on the Muslim community, as worthy of burning for its insult on the prophet, remains just as US Pastor Terry Jones’s book “Islam is of the Devil” remains an unworthy symbolism for his burning of the Quran.[142]  In a fictional response to an actual book burning, Samad Iqbal in Zadie Smith’s ‘White Teeth’ declares to his wife, Alsana Begum, ‘’It is not a matter of letting others live.  It is a matter of protecting one’s culture, shielding one’s religion from abuse.  Not that you’d know anything about that, naturally.’’[143] 

‘Midnight’s Children’ is equally scathing of Mahatma Ghandi, the great Indian pacifist, and Rushdie comments that “even language obeys the instructions of Ghandiji”.  He goes on to accuse Kashmiris of cowardice and the British of stifling political resistance [this last not an unfair criticism, actually]:

Aziz thought the Indians have fought for the British; so many of them have seen the world by now, and been tainted by Abroad.  They will not easily go back to the old world.   The British are wrong to try and turn back the clock. ‘It was a mistake to pass the Rowlatt Act,’ he murmurs. ‘What rowlatt?’ wails Naseem. ‘This is nonsense where I’m concerned!’ ‘Against political agitation,’ Aziz explains, and returns to his thoughts. Tai once said: ‘Kashmiris are different. Cowards, for instance. Put a gun in a Kashmiri’s hand and it will have to go off by itself – he’ll never dare to pull the trigger. We are not like Indians, always making battles.’ Aziz, with Tai in his head, does not feel Indian, Kashmir, after all, is not strictly speaking a part of the Empire, but an independent princely state. He is not sure if the hartal of pamphlet mosque wall newspaper is his fight, even though he is in occupied territory now. He turns from the window…  To see Naseem weeping into a pillow.  [144]

To move on, a retrospective of the events by Salman Rushdie in 2012 entitled ‘Joseph Anton’ attempts reconciliation between then and now and continues to address the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini as “the edict of a cruel and dying old man.”[145]  He compares the Imam in ‘The Satanic Verses’ as: “An imam grown monstrous, his gigantic mouth eating his own revolution.”  Narrated oddly in the third person, Joseph Anton is a composite name reduced from Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov, two far more famous writers than Rushdie.  It serves as a memoir to Salman’s time as a fugitive and is clearly a self appraisal of the literary character he became in the western cultural pantheon.

There are four nations in the United Kingdom that contribute to literature in the English language.  The Muslim convert from Wales, Merryl Wyn Davies, looks at the situation of Muslims in Britain and concludes that the religionists have gone on to the defensive because they have needed to rally together to protect themselves against the constant criticism and what has become the nasty word ‘Islamophobia’, or the diversionary word ‘Orientalism’ in Western – Muslim relations.  Wyn Davies says that Orientalism has caused a problem for Muslims because it has created a sense of apartness for Muslim communities.  She sees Orientalism as a mélange of propaganda and argument that became a justification for Christianity to retake the Holy lands:

The basic representation of Muslims that emerged was of militant, barbaric fanatics, corrupt, effete sensualists, people who lived contrary to the natural law — a concept defined by canon laws and philosophy of Christianity.  Even when Muslims were portrayed in popular medieval literature as equivalents of knightly Western counterparts, they were completely Other because they were beyond the pale of Christianity, addicted to wrong religion which they persisted in passionately believing.  The failings of Muslims stemmed from their beliefs.  What medieval Europe made of Islam and Muslims has been described by British historian Norman Davies as ‘knowledgeable ignorance’, defining a thing as something it could not possibly be, when the means to know it differently were available.

These attitudes continued to appear, she states, because of the growth of the Ottoman Empire with its control of access to the Far East, and also in the period of colonialism:

Orientalism is not simply prejudice, it is also knowledge.  The real problem with Orientalism and the authority it gives to Western experts on Islam and Muslim affairs is not that it is knowledge, but that it is knowledge that does not appreciate that it is wrong.  The authority of Orientalism is that it makes Muslims incomprehensible yet predictable… There is a sense in which Osama bin Laden is utterly predictable, since he embodies so many of the essential details of the time-honoured image of what the West expects from a Muslim iconoclast in ideas, rhetoric and action. 

It is clear that Wyn Davies regards the West and Islam to be in an irresolvable contest and that Orientalism is a tool for managing other cultures and peoples.  For Wyn Davies, Orientalism has become a greater problem that covers every Muslim’s sense of the disinheritance and the alienation, not only of radical extremists but of ordinary people”:

the authority of Orientalism as knowledge has immense practical consequences. It structures the learned books as well as the popular press; it finds its outlets in plasterboard movie villains as well as strategic political thinking. But most of all it inhibits constrains and provides an edge of fear and discomfort in the relations between ordinary people, the non-Muslim and Muslim populations of Western nations.  Racism and discrimination in towns and cities across Europe and North America exist not only in the attitudes and actions of an obnoxious extreme fringe: they can be implicit in the commonplace attitudes and information of well- meaning and well-intentioned nice, sensible people. But in recent years Orientalism has become an even greater problem. It has become the scapegoat, the shield and sword of Muslims themselves. Among Muslims the existence of Orientalism has become the justification for every sense of grievance, a source of encouragement for nostalgic romanticism about the perfections of Muslim civilization in history and hence a recruiting agent for a wide variety of Islamic movements. It has generated a sense of exclusivity, of being apart and different within Muslim communities and societies that has no precedent either in Islam as religion or Muslim history.  [146]

Wyn Davies sees the Muslim community as having descended into a defensive, reactive rather than proactive, state in continual opposition to those who are not ‘of’ the Muslim populations:

So, what we have is not a clash of civilizations but mutual complicity in proliferating mutual incomprehension. On both sides, wilful, determined, distorted, imaginings and knowledgeable ignorance propels, fuels and then justifies aggression, oppression, dispossession and dehumanization of anyone who is not ‘us’. The consequences are real, appalling human suffering whether in Palestine or Israel, Baghdad or New York or on the streets of Britain.[147]

Wyn Davies’s assessment was accurate and timely.  Apart from ‘Wilful Imaginings’, she wrote three books with Ziauddin Sardar by way of reply to the criticism of Islam expounded by Rushdie, “The No-Nonsense Guide to Islam’, ‘American Dream, Global Disaster’ and ‘Why Do People Hate America?’ that looked into the problem of why the actions of the United States, particularly in its foreign policy, have led to such a fraught and anxious response among disaffected and thinking people to policies such as “Shock and Awe” in Iraq, to pre-emptive strikes against fundamentalist Muslim leaders in foreign lands and, latterly to drone strikes by unmanned aircraft which kill and maim innocent bystanders willy nilly and lead to a sense of despair that the mightiest military machine in the world, generally regarded as the world’s policeman, could turn into the world’s terrorist.

In Hanif Kureishi’s novel ‘Something to Tell You’,[148]  the narrator explains the British attitude to race: “officially, as it were, we were called immigrants, I think. Later, for political reasons we were “blacks”… In Britain we were still called Asians, though we’re no more Asian than the English are European.  It was a long time before we became known as Muslims, a new imprimateur, and then for political reasons.”  For the Muslim television producer and writer, Kenan Malik, to be black “was for us not an ethnic label but a political badge (although we never defined who exactly could wear that badge). Unlike our parents’ generation, who had largely put up with discrimination, we were fierce in our opposition to racism.’’  But he goes on to say that he was quite antipathetic to the religious and cultural traditions of his parents, too.[149]

It does seem, now the issue of ‘Islamophobia’ is so prevalent, that an even new turn is taking place where the Muslim is becoming a figure of distrust, where every Afghani or Arabic-looking person is treated with suspicion, and even disgust; when the finger is pointed at anyone wearing an ‘abaya’ or veil, and as statistics reveal that policemen are up to 28 times more likely to use ‘Stop-and-Search’ powers against ethnic, minority and black people than white people.[150] 

Thus, when minority groups make an attack to draw attention to foreign policy matters, the reaction from angry sections of the unenlightened public — for whom every Islamic fundamentalist or Salafist attack is an indication that Muslims are evil — is often disproportionate, yet understandable.  The recent events, as I write, in May 2013 when a loyal British soldier has been brutally murdered outside his barracks in Woolwich, London, by a terrorist who shouted that: “The reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers.  And this British soldier is one. It is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. By Allah, we swear by the almighty Allah we will never stop fighting until you leave us alone’’,[151]  are deeply worrying. 

A woman who confronted the terrorist with calm determination reasoned:

I don't think these men have rejected Britain, I don't think they ever accepted it, even though they were born and raised here. Maybe converting to Islam was the only way they could find to be different, a bit like teenagers rebelling against their parents? They are bitter with Britain because of their life growing up. I think they are using Islam as an excuse. This third generation from immigrant families has had enough, it seems, and are now going back to their own roots…[152]

This action and these remarks by the terrorist are roundly condemned by all Muslim NGOs and organisations, who stress that we are favoured to be living in a highly liberal climate in England, taking the benefits of hospitals, schools, welfare and, indirectly, overseas aid.  We need to acknowledge that such attacks are totally unIslamic and that we require as a community to recognise, engage with, and fundamentally, yes, fundamentally with no pun intended, because their fundamentalism is incorrect, reform those elements who are radicalised, diverted, and distorted in their one-eyed vision of the peace-loving religion of Islam.  Their hermeneutics is based on a single-line, out-of-context, interpretation of the Qur’an, which through ‘mysterious irrationality’ and misplaced emotion, on their side, turns to violent action.

Their fundamentalism is incorrect because, in Islam, to kill one person, even by means of suicide, is to kill the whole of mankind.  The only way that warfare is permitted is by states and state agencies who are arraigned in battle, in uniform, against each other in man to man combat.  This rules out independent action by groups or individuals such as we have seen by terrorists and even affiliated terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and al Shabab.  So how are Muslims to gain redress for the perceived grievances they feel, it may be asked.  The way forward is through the reeducation of youth and young men and women in the Madrassas (places of Islamic learning) and mosques and for youth leaders and preachers to come to grips very thoroughly with them to channel their energies and activities into proper Islamic activity.  This may require modern technology such as the use of social media to reinforce such teachings, but urgency and serious application are needed from the Muslim community.  Some have suggested that there is a secret admiration by many ordinary Muslims for the activities of terrorists, as Merryl Wyn Davies has hinted, (‘’Racism and discrimination … can be implicit in the commonplace attitudes and information of well- meaning and well-intentioned nice, sensible people’’) such as activities in resisting perceived offences against Muslims, but this is improper because it is Islamically unsound.

It can appear now that all Muslims are terrorists and that a backlash against Islam and Muslims has set in; and yet police crime records for 2005 - 2006, covering the aftermath of the London bus attacks, record that only 43 religiously aggravated crimes were prosecuted in that period, and that Muslims were the victims in only eighteen of those.  Just 41.86% of the religiously aggravated attacks, but a surprisingly small percentage, 0.00018 of the total daily population of London – ten million. 

What these figures may reveal is that the Metropolitan Police‘s narrative is one where effective policing and community engagement have kept the situation well under control,[153]  or, alternatively, that religiously motivated hate crimes are not flagged up as such, being lost in other categories, and therefore many more attacks occur than are recorded under this banner.  A recent survey by the police entitled the ’’British Crime Survey’’ suggests that there were 260,000 religiously motivated hate crimes in 2010/11, but it pointed out that the police were notified of less than 50% of these crimes and that a considerable number more were reported, but not included within the police hate crime data. [154

Chapter 4