Deborah Hope: Fatwa on freedom
OPINION
Deborah Hope
October 07, 2006
theaustralian.news.com.au
IN 1989 Iran's mullahs accused Salman Rushdie of blasphemy and declared a fatwa against everyone associated with publishing The Satanic Verses. The novelist went underground for the next decade, followed by a 24-hour security detail. The Japanese and Italian translators of the book were stabbed two years later, Hitoshi Igarashi fatally.
At the time, the fatwa was seen as an isolated stroke of lunacy by a crazed Islamic regime. Westerners were troubled but few ruminated on the possible link between this assault on freedom of speech and the Islamist bombs that were targeting US embassies in Africa, or envisioned what they augured for the future.
Five years after the September 11 attacks the world is a foreign place. Identity is the West's obsession; one of its core values, freedom of speech, is under assault; and Europe is convulsed by the rise of Islamism within its borders.
In the new climate, in which some Danish cartoons and the Pope's use of a quotation by a 14th-century Byzantine emperor sparked violent, even murderous, protests by Muslims across the world, terrorists' bombs caused mass slaughter in Madrid and London, and the children of North African immigrants torched schools, community centres and 10,000 cars in riots across France, a fatwa against Rushdie would be less remarkable.
Only two weeks ago, German opera house Deutsche Oper halted the production of Mozart's Idomeneo citing an "incalculable risk" because of scenes in the production dealing with Islam.
At the heart of the West's identity crisis is where to mark the limits of tolerance.
Since its release last month, this increasingly loud debate about how much intolerance the West can suffer and still survive has focused on Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam, his book about the ritual killing of the uncompromising Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh.
Identity is terrain Buruma has charted before in books on Japan, occidentalism and Anglomania. The Dutch-born journalist and essayist returned to Amsterdam to explore van Gogh's murder and the wider issue of Europe's clash of values with its fast-increasing Muslim population.
According to Buruma's count, by 2015 Muslims will make up 52 per cent of The Netherlands' population. There are five million Muslims in France, while across the English Channel, notes Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept, polling shows 40 per cent of Britain's 1.6 million Muslims would like to see the country under sharia law.
Not since the Ottoman Turks were hurled back at the siege of Vienna in 1683, writes Martin Walker in The Wilson Quarterly, the journal of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, "has Europe been gripped by such apocalyptic visions of a Muslim invasion".
Before she died in September, outspoken Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci had sold more than one million copies of her 2004 book The Force of Reason. Fallaci argues that "Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia', a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought for the concept itself of liberty."
Van Gogh's murder was preceded by another brutal killing: the 2002 assassination of Dutch gay anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn. Yet despite this foretaste, the civilised, tolerant Dutch could not conceive of a death such as the one van Gogh met on November 2, 2004.
Riding to work on his bicycle, the film-maker was shot by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Muslim fanatic. Bouyeri then cut van Gogh's throat, nearly decapitating him.
The offence that led to his slaughter is well documented. Submission, the short film he made with anti-Muslim activist and Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, included quotations from the Koran projected on to naked female bodies.
Instead of being lionised, the Somali-born Ali, a former devout Muslim turned atheist, was hounded out of The Netherlands, leaving within a month of the April release of her new volume of essays, The Caged Virgin.
Her new base is conservative think-tank the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, where she has been offered intellectual freedom and is planning to soon begin filming Submission: Part 2. The new film will reportedly include a conversation set in New York between the prophet Mohammed and Western thinkers.
Buruma's central concern is whether multiculturalism in the liberal form in which it has been practised for decades in The Netherlands can work when the group being assimilated rejects the social order.
In immigrant communities in The Netherlands, similar to the Moroccan one where Bouyeri grew up, authorities have been known to redesign public housing to allow Muslim women to enter and exit the kitchen unseen.
Writing in The New Republic last month, Buruma points out that the threats against Rushdie and the silencing of van Gogh are just two of many instances of suppression carried out in the name of a new, twisted form of tolerance.
He argues this is a product of the kind of multiculturalism idealised in Europe; one that presumes minorities would rather be represented by ethnic or religious leaders than by national ones. One that thwarts all rational discussion.
Monica Ali's best-selling novel Brick Lane, set among a community of Bangladeshi Muslims in Britain, was to be filmed in situ in Bangladeshi East London. A new location had to be found when businessman Abdus Salique organised a campaign against the film and threatened to burn Ali's books, claiming the novel did not portray the Bangladeshi community favourably.
The mind-set that tolerates attacks on free speech is not limited to Islam. In Birmingham Behzti (Dishonour), a play by a British Sikh author Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti about sex abuse and murder among British Sikhs, was discontinued after Sikhs staged a riot outside the theatre. Community leaders, invited to attend a dress rehearsal, had been offended by the play's ostensibly negative portrayal of Sikhs.
Novelist Martin Amis, musing in a recent interview, observed that with writing a matter of life and death in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair, envy over prizes and standing in the literary pecking order has become trivial.
A perhaps more urgent issue that resurgent Islamism poses is self-censorship.
In a 12,000-word essay published in The Observer, Amis describes his unfinished satirical novella The Unknown Known, based on the muddled rhetoric of Donald Rumsfeld and the life and times of Sayyid Qutb, the radical Egyptian Muslim whose 1966 hanging and martyrdom was central to the founding of modern Islamism. My interpretation is that he abandoned the work feeling the risk of carrying on was too great.
Buruma's conclusion is one that few will dispute. Immigrants and their offspring must learn that to be offended is the price we all must pay for our freedom of speech and freedom of thought: "Since many immigrants come from places where such freedom does not exist, they should be the first to appreciate its benefits." |
