A Right to Offend

Brian Winston

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781849664400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Over the past two decades, there have been a series of events that have brought into question the concept and practice of free expression. In this new book, Winston provides an account of the current state of freedom of expression in the western world. He analyses all the most pertinent cases of conflict during the last two decades - including the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the incident of the Danish cartoons and offended celebrities - examining cultural, legal and journalistic aspects of each case. A Right to Offend offers us a deeper understanding of the increasingly threatening environment in which free speech operates and is defended, as well as how it informs and is central to journalism practice and media freedom more generally. It is important reading for all those interested in freedom of expression in the twenty-first century.

PART ONE

Prosecution

1

The Shadow of the Fatwa

On 12 February 1989, the mob irrupted in Pakistan. In London the previous September, Salman Rushdie had published in English his novel, The Satanic Verses. A section of this, some 70 of the book’s 500-plus pages, satirized Islam, the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad. It had been translated into Urdu, apparently badly, and its insults were being cried through the streets of Pakistan. In Islamabad, a crowd of 10,000 attacked the American Cultural Center. They managed to burn an American flag but not much else. The police opened fire and five protesters were dead. A sixth fatality was one of the Center’s Pakistani guards, also shot dead (Pipes, 2003: 25). The following day, in a further commotion occasioned by the book in Srinagar, Kashmir, another man died and sixty were injured. The Satanic Verses affair, which was to mark a new stage in the complex and vexatious history of the West’s struggle for liberty – specifically liberty of speech – had claimed its first blood.

Outrage about The Satanic Verses had been simmering among British Muslims for months and large demonstrations had occurred in northern English cities at which copies of it had been publicly burned. A high-level campaign, fronted by Sunni interests funded by the Saudis, had mounted a sophisticated but futile effort to convince the Thatcher government to ban the book. In India, Khushwant Singh, a celebrated Indian Sikh writer who was Penguin of India’s editorial advisor, warned against releasing it because of its ‘derogatory’ references to Islam (K. Malik, 2009: 1). He was convinced it was going to ‘cause a whole lot of trouble’ and, by sharing this opinion with the Indian press, he ensured that it would. The Hindu Congress Party government promptly banned its publication in India at the behest of alerted Muslim politicians, whose votes were important to it.

From Western perspectives, such opinions and mayhem were somewhat incomprehensible, a complete over-reaction. Blasphemy – rude words about the deity – after long being in decline in the West was, in effect no longer any sort of offence. As for obscenity, the book was a dense fiction whose rudest word was ‘fart’.

Any believer in freedom of expression and in the function and validity of literature can appreciate why a Western reader, educated in a presumably secular, liberal-humanist culture, may be bedevilled by all the fuss and furore about a mere book, a work of fiction containing a troubling dream sequence. However, in order to understand the enormity of what has been done (by Rushdie), a circumspect, tolerant reader needs to appreciate what the Prophet Muhammad means to a Muslim across the Muslim world and throughout their immigrant communities in the West. (A. Malik, 2005: 100)

Banning and burning books, though, strains such appreciation. Circumspection needs also to acknowledge the strength of the West’s long liberal commitment to human rights, born of its own internal and often bloodstained struggles for freedom. This history centrally embraces the capstone of the right of free expression without which none other can be guaranteed. Moreover, despite the ever-increasing need in integrated Western societies to maintain social cohesion, the circumspect Westerner can also note that the ‘enormity’ of the book’s harm was entirely self-attested. It had provoked not the attacks of Western bigots but the violent reaction of outraged Muslims.

Despite their reaction, and without prejudice to its authenticity or the depths of its religious roots, there was nothing inevitable about the Rushdie uproar. Fictions by other Muslim authors had appeared in something of the same critical spirit. In 1959, for example, the greatest Egyptian writer of the Christian twentieth century, Naguib Mahfouz, produced Children of Gebalawi in which he rewrote the histories of the Abrahamic monotheisms as a modernist fairy-story. It was, some thought, ‘a humanist fable that questions the existence of god’ (Ruthven, 2006: 385); but, although it had caused controversy, its publication did not prevent him writing thirty-four more novels. In 1986, two years before The Satanic Verses, the highly regarded Somali novelist, Nuruddin Farah, published his novel Maps in English without uproar. This was despite the fact that he had ‘clearly taken the path of a cultural apostate’ (Mazrui, 1992).¹ Such equanimity, though, was to be no more. The British Muslim reaction and the Indian ban had rendered The Satanic Verses’ publication extraordinary.

These, though, were mere embers to be blown into a conflagration in Iran. Images of incensed Muslims crying ‘God is Great’ and being shot dead for their trouble in the Indian subcontinent had been widely broadcast across the Muslim world, the Umma, and beyond. In Tehran, they apparently shocked the Shi’a Republic’s supreme leader, the Imam Ruhollah al-Musavi al-Khomeini (Pipes, 2003: 26). It is possible that Khomeini knew nothing of Rushdie’s book before 13 February although it had been reviewed in Iran – in completely measured albeit negative tones, and extracts read on the Farsi services of foreign radio stations (K. Malik, 2009: 6; Moin, 1999: 283).² Be that as it may, following news of the riots, the Imam called in a secretary and dictated:

In the name of Him, the Highest. There is only one God to whom we shall all return. I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses – which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet and the Qur’an – and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death (K. Malik, 2009: 8)

The fatwa’s impact was to be immense, but only indirectly so. Despite the seriousness of Khomeini’s challenge to the fundamentals of Western liberalism, the licence he hereby gave for repeated outrages, the poison he injected into inter-communal relations, the deaths he aided and abetted, in immediate terms he failed, almost completely, to alter the situation. As far as the fatwa’s stated objectives went, the results were, basically, a fiasco. Rushdie, the author, yet lives; so do most of those ‘involved’ in publication of The Satanic Verses, although, disgracefully and outrageously, some of those peripherally concerned with the book were despicably murdered or grievously assaulted. It is only because Khomeini did not call for the book to be eradicated that its continued existence in the world (a copy, one of millions, lies on the desk as this is being typed) cannot also be claimed as part of his failure.

Nevertheless, the effect was to be electric – as electric as the seizure of the hostages at the American embassy in Tehran had been a decade earlier when Khomeini had been first consolidating his power. Internally in Iran and internationally, the fatwa was the act of a veritable caliph exercising global reach. It impacted on the inter-communal politics of states and Muslim communities worldwide.

The text of the fatwa led the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB aka Tehran Radio) news bulletin at 2 p.m. on 14 February. The following day was declared a day of national mourning because of the perfidy of the book. The nation was mobilized for a cause which, whatever its status as an outrage to Iranian public opinion, assuredly had nothing to do with the country’s manifold immediate problems. An Islamic charitable foundation posted a reward for Rushdie’s head: $1 million for a non-Muslim, 200 million rials ($3 million at the official rate of exchange, actually $170,000 on the market) for an Iranian. Assassins across the Umma promptly declared their intentions of obeying the Imam’s injunction.

The Tehran Radio broadcast had been picked by the BBC’s monitoring operation and it was the BBC World Service, seeking his reaction, who informed Rushdie that he had been condemned to death. Rushdie was hustled into hiding under British police protection. The massive disruption to his life was to persist for more than a decade. Immediately, though, he apologized for any offence he might have caused.

Khomeini responded that it was not enough.

That there were clear and obvious immediate political advantages to Khomeini in no way precludes the reality of the religious affront he, and millions of others, felt. Whatever the strength of self-attested feeling involved, however, the politics of the fatwa were immediately self-evident. As had happened with the hostages affair, Khomeini, at a stroke, silenced internal opposition, abandoned a decision on his successor which he had come to regret and stifled emerging moves seeking better relations with the West. Internationally, he consolidated his position as a defiant Muslim voice. Before February, it had been the Sunni, historically dominate within the Umma, who had led such protests against Rushdie as had happened. With the fatwa, defence of the Prophet’s reputation came to rest with the leader of their traditional rivals, the Shi’a. Khomeini spurred on the four quasi-Apocalyptic horses of censorship and fire, riot and blood. Previously, the censorship had been erratic, the riots few and fire had been manifested only in the minor form of symbolic burnings of the book. Spilt blood now appeared not as the collateral outcome of inchoate riot but as the cold-blooded result of planned murder and assault. What had been a canter became a gallop for all four horses.

Censorship: following a meeting of Muslim foreign ministers a month after the fatwa in Riyadh, a ban – but not, significantly, Rushdie’s head – was called for. Within the Umma, only in Turkey was the book to remain legal and in a number of states – Zanzibar, Malaysia, Indonesia – possession of it was made a crime. Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Tanzania, Liberia and Sierra Leone also joined the ban.

Fire spread. After the book was published in the United States, which had gone ahead as planned on 22 February 1989, arson became the weapon of choice for those obeying the Imam’s writ in the West. The Riverdale Press, a 12,000 circulation suburban New York weekly newspaper, was firebombed on 28 February following the publication of an editorial in Rushdie’s defence. Eleven days after the book appeared, the Modesto Bee reported two explosions in a bookstore in Berkeley, ironically the ‘birthplace of “The Free Speech Movement”’, as the story highlighted (Maclay, 1989: B4). Two major American bookstore chains withdrew the book. In April, May and September no less than ten British bookstores, half of them run by Rushdie’s publisher Penguin, were firebombed. One blast injured a passer-by (Hansard, 1994). None of this had an appreciable effect on sales. The two chains of US bookstores, their commitment to profit reversing their early failure to defend free expression, stocked the book but did not display it. With or without their efforts, within a month The Satanic Verses was top of the New York Times bestseller list where it remained for two months more. It was on the list for a total of six months, a more than respectable outcome for a dense, thick literary fiction.

Riot: Indians took to the streets again in Mumbai. Forty people were wounded and twelve died within days of the fatwa. On 27 May, 15–20,000 gathered in Parliament Square in London and, under rumoured Shi’a auspices, burnt the book and Rushdie in effigy, peacefully (as it were). Worse, though, was yet to come. Years after the fatwa, on 2 July 1993, a hotel at which a conference celebrating a Turkish poet of the sixteenth century was being held was fired by a mob demanding the head of the book’s Turkish translator, Aziv Nesin. They held back the firefighters and thirty-seven people were incinerated, confirming an observation made long ago by the poet Heinrich Heine: ‘Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen’ (‘Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people’) (Heine, 1823). Nesin had been smuggled out and survived.³

Blood: the rampaging mob is one thing but cold-blooded murder is of a different order. Deaths, as in Turkey, arising from the mob’s mayhem are a species of collateral damage; conspiracy to kill is not. Just as inchoate thoughts of suicide become infinitely more dangerous to the person having them when considered planning begins, so here the danger to the West of mass anger becomes the more chilling when the killing becomes so considered. It took more than two years for the assassins to strike. When they did so, it was against a very peripheral actor in the publishing process, a practitioner of ‘the most anonymous of professions’: translation (Weinberger, 2000). Rushdie’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, forty-four, an associate professor at the University of Tsukuba, north of Tokyo, was an Islamic scholar, educated in part in Iran prior to Khomeini’s revolution. He was stabbed to death in his office at his university by an unknown assailant on 11 July 1991. The Japanese police have never apprehended the killer. Others escaped death but were seriously wounded. Just before Igarashi’s murder, Ettore Capriolo, the book’s Italian translator, was stabbed many times at his flat in Milan. He survived, as did William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher who was shot on 11 October 1993. These assailants were never caught either.

To defend, in any way, the censorship, riot, arson and murder that marked The Satanic Verses affair in the name of a faith is surely to offer a slur on that faith far, far worse than any mere novelist’s words could. It is to go beyond the madness of crowds. There can be no moral fudge here. From the Western standp...

Table of contents

• A Right to Offend
• Copyright
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Assumptions
• PART ONE: Prosecution
• PART TWO: Defence
• Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index