Islam vs Rushdie

It is eight years now since Rushdie challenged Islam to reconsider its very foundations. The Satanic Verses exposed the hypocrisy, irrationality and fanaticism of Islam, the only faith in the world today that has followers self-righteous enough to be prepared to kill and get killed in their bid to prove their claim to superiority. In response, Islam raised a cacophony that drowned out the real issues. As the latest attempts to renew the anti-Rushdie campaign in Britain show, the Muslims are not yet prepared to address the vital issues raised by him. But they do so at their own peril.

Salman Rushdie is one of the greatest living writers but the most misunderstood of them all. The Satanic Verses has two themes, almost equally important, Islam and Democracy. It has two central characters, one explores the foundations of Islam and the other exposes the farce of Democracy. Rushdie has set out, in his own words, 8220;to name the unnameable, to point out frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.8221; And he doesn8217;t care 8220;if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict8221;. He does not recognise any jurisdiction except that of his Muse.

But the world Rushdie is going to shape is full of 8220;walking corpses, great crowds of the dead, all of them refusing to admit they are done for, corpses mutinously continuing to behave like living people, shopping, catching buses, flirting, going home to make love, smoking cigarettes.8221; No wonder he decides to use the technique of extreme provocation.

What is the task before Rushdie that is so important? Worth paying the ultimate price for a poet8217;s work8217;? What does he actually do in his Verses? Well, he has tried to sow doubt and confusion in the minds of the faithful. He has asked questions that they are too dead to think about. Certainty is death, for Rushdie. Confusion, life.

This man must be a manifestation of the Satan then, the faithful would naturally say. After all, sowing doubt and confusion in the minds of believers is precisely the task allotted to Shaitan in the divine scheme of things. But what his Muslim critics have, of course, forgotten is the repeated Koranic injunction to think and consider the revelations and not to believe in them unthinkingly. But why and what would you think if you have no doubt, no confusion, no questions?

God has, in His wisdom, blessed Rushdie with boundless imagination. He imagines life in Mecca before and after the victory of Islam that, despite obvious exaggerations, seems too real for comfort. Some questions arise. Was it right for the Prophet, for instance, to accept wholesale religious conversion of his bitter enemies in Mecca merely because they had failed to exterminate Islam despite their best efforts? Could these Meccans have become true Muslims just because they had been defeated? Could the present dichotomy between Islam and Muslims be a result of this initial blunder? But, on the other hand, could the Prophet have refused to accept them in his fold when they requested to join him just because he may have thought them insincere?

What had shocked the Muslims, particularly Asian Muslims, most was the vulgarity of Rushdie8217;s language. Rushdie allows obscenity to capture his imagination as well. He imagines a brothel where all the prostitutes assume names of the Prophet8217;s twelve wives. He is obviously trying to focus attention on a legitimate question which many neo-Muslims in Mecca must have asked: Why did the Prophet allow himself twelve wives while other Muslims are asked to marry only one, though permitted in certain special circumstances up to four? The Prophet8217;s wives are nevertheless revered as ummul momeneen, mothers of all Muslims. Can you really blame a Muslim from feeling provoked enough to kill?

But the fact that Rushdie succeeded only too well in his bid to provoke Muslims into thinking the unthinkable does not reduce the legitimacy of his questions. What is the nature of revelation? Would it be possible for the Satan to insert a couple of verses of his own in the process of divine revelations? Would the Prophet be able to detect the Satanic verses and tell them apart from the divine revelations, though he was in a state of trance at that time? What, if anything, does the personality of the Prophet contribute to messages from God? Can the Holy Koran be considered the work of God even though it contains unscientific statements regarding, for instance, the movement and axis of celestial bodies like the sun and stars? And so on. These are widely asked questions among thinking Muslims. As a Muslim myself, I have been thinking through many of these questions and find that Islam is able to answer them. But these questions cannot be debated and even answered properly in an atmosphere of rigidity, censorship and accusations of blasphemy.

By continuing with its rigidity, Islam may lose many intelligent followers, as it already has. Some Muslims have already become merely nominal Muslims. Christianity faced a similar crisis. Its blasphemy laws and a history of inquisition and witch-hunting saw to it that the religion became virtually moribund for the majority of Christians, so much so that now you can blaspheme Jesus to your heart8217;s content without bothering many Christians.

If Islam wants to continue as the living faith that it still is it cannot afford to dismiss Rushdie as a Shaitan. Islam has the option to treat him as a mujaddid renewer instead, despite his extreme irreverence, his tongue-in-cheek contract with the Devil. After all, the Devil may very well be just an aspect of the Divine. It is time for Muslims to follow Islam, to think and consider the Satanic, nay, the Divine Verses.