Shabbir Akhtar - Be Careful with Muhammad!: Salman Rushdie and the Battle for Free Speech

Copyright Shabbir Akhtar 1989, 2020
Publisher and Distributor: BIJAK Publishing, Jakarta, IndonesiaProject Manager: Anggita Dini Wulandari
Editor: Nageeb Gounjaria
Typesetting and Layout: Adhe Puspa Timika
Cartoonist: Adan Fajar a.k.a. Maruciel
Printed in Indonesia

Akhtar, Shabbir,
for Free Speech, Jakarta: Bijak, 2020, pp. 187.
ISBN: 978-623-94742-0-1 (ebk) | 978-623-94742-1-8 (pbk) | 978-623-94742-2-5 (hbk)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, nowknown or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This second revised edition with a New Preface is published by arrangementwith the author only. For publishing excerpts and longer quotations,address all inquiries to info@bijakpublishing.com

ContentsvPreface to the 2nd Edition viiPreface to the 1st Edition xxxvii

Salman Rushdie published e Satanic Verses in autumn 1988 and I published my response exactly a year later. My books title was inspired by the cautionary Persian proverb: Ba khuda diwana basho, ba Muhammad hoshyar. Take liberties with God but be careful with Muhammad! Rushdies challenge became a strategic concern for Muslims and equally for non-Muslims, especially Westerners. Like our current COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, Rushdies bookand the Muslim response to it stimulated fervent debate at all levels of Western society, whether literate or relatively uncultured. Its long-term consequences have proved salutary and beneficial but also regrettably influential and deleterious for the Muslim minoritys future coexistence inside Western liberal societies.

The British Muslim response to Rushdies book was acultural catalyst in the evolution of civic and political modernity forthe Muslim minority throughout Europe, though not in America

viiwhose Muslim minority, an isolated fragment of the global ummah, barely reacted to the notorious assault on the noble Prophet and the message he brought. In the United Kingdom, it was a clash of two principles principles embedded in the two cultures. The conflictwas between afanatical application of the otherwise morallyadmirable principle of free speech, shared in its proper form by both parties, and, for the peoples of Islam, the opposed principle of the unnegotiable honour of the Prophet of Islam. This clash created adeadlock. In America, there was virtually no such conflict between American society and its Muslim citizens since the melting pot of monocultural society honours an only God: Mammon, the deity of advanced capitalism. In multicultural Europe, however, we care aboutmaterial well-being but also about spiritual and moral values thattranscend mere comfort.

In this retrospective bifocal glance, I survey the causes, countless intended and unintended eects, and predict the future consequences of the Salman Rushdie aair as it has continued to unfold for some thirty years. It is a form of the Cold War, but notbetween communists and capitalists, members of the same Western family, but rather between Islam and liberal secularism, with the latter allied to a capitalist Christian humanism. It is a love triangle involving Europes two oldest rivals for the hand of grace, Christianityand Islam. Europe has seen two sectarian theocratic wars, two ThirtyYears Wars, originallyfrom 1618-48, the acrimonious Catholic- Protestant conflict which was terminated by the Peace of Westphalia(1648). Between 1914 and 1945, the world witnessed two European wars with global reach owing to Europes imperial adventurism supported by its Christian heritage. Was the Rushdie aair the opening shot of anew Thirty years war, only this time ongoing with no sight of a truce?

Only a rash historian would assess recent, as opposed to remote, history. However, the principled and brave, the determined if desperate, Muslim response to the Anglo-Rushdie provocation became, unintentionally, the political baptism of the British Muslims.

viii
They emerged out of the water, breathing and flourishing into adecidedly and proudly Muslim self-identity, rather than existing simply, in their opponents eyes, as Asian or black opponents of white racism and privilege, including class privilege, a crucial factorin understanding Rushdies self-image.

Be Careful with Muhammad! records a political campaign. Itwas initially considered for publication by famous publishers, such as Faber and Faber, but such oers were dropped after I won the Institute of Contemporary Art debate, against the passionatelypro-Rushdie writer Hanif Kureshi, in London in the summer of 1989. My book was finally published by a small non-Muslim house to avoid oending Rushdie and his powerful gang of allies in the publishing and broadcasting worlds. So much for the Muslim authors right to free speech. This work is republished here, onlylightly revised since it is not a sequel but a reprint. My message in this book is that moral progress in cultures is not achieved through distorting theirhistoryand self-image, and substituting acaricature, a false and insulting revisionist account of their origins as a faith and civilisation. Religions also have communal self- esteem. Their adherents can be wounded.