If my memory serves me right, I first saw Salman Rushdie standing next to his ex-wife Padma Lakshmi in a photo that was published in a magazine. Padma Lakshmi looked otherworldly beautiful in a knee-length dress and along with her was a middle-aged man with a rotund belly and a receding hairline. He had his hand comfortably gripping the dainty waistline of this model with a sheepish smile on his face. My reaction to the photograph was that of any teenager: how on earth?
Many years later while studying in England, I found his book Midnight’s Children, a powerful saga of postcolonial India through the eyes of a boy, Saleem, who is born at the time of India’s independence. Rushdie’s language and the use of incredibly imaginative prose lay the development of the generational shift that took place in independent India for the large audience outside of it. In a sense, Midnight’s Children is a story of a young, modern country that is licking its wounds while it wades ahead into a future of possibilities (though not bereft of violence).
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Midnight’s Children has since become a descriptive phrase for a generation of children that grew up with India. A generation that was brought up with stories of slavery of their ancestors, stories of India’s historic independence movement with the fresh pride of being a young autonomous state that holds a promise for its citizenry. The book sold millions of copies worldwide and won the Booker Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981. It was awarded the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and 2008 to celebrate the Booker Prize’s 25th and 40th anniversary, respectively.
However, his infamous work, The Satanic Verses, will remain the reason for his global notoriety. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini put Rushdie on the front pages of newspapers across the world by issuing a fatwa against him in the year 1989, ironically choosing the day of love, February 14. In conceited explanation, various Muslim scholars who justified the issuing of the fatwa, mentioned the apparent insults to Prophet Muhammad and his wives in the book. Curiously, Khomeini never read the book, as was revealed by his son Ahmed to Robin Wright, a former Washington Post journalist. This fatwa against the British American writer was a case of political opportunism to exploit the carnage that was unfolding in Pakistan, India and beyond, over a fictional dream sequence involving the Prophet Muhammad.
The book’s passages, which portrayed human weaknesses and undermined the Prophet’s credibility as a messenger of God, were considered an act of blasphemy by Muslims. Since the early 90s, the word blasphemy has been violated innumerable times in Pakistan and the alleged cases of blasphemy against infirm religious minorities have put the nation to shame. The outrage over Prophet Muhammad’s honour can’t be summarised better than the Persian hemistich, “Ba Khuda Dewana basho, Ba Muhammad Hoshiyar (Say what you want about God, but be careful about your utterances about Prophet Muhammad).” It is compelling to note that throughout the history of poetry in the subcontinent and in Arabia, there have indeed been many verses written against the might of the Almighty but almost none against Prophet Muhammad. This famous couplet by Kabir is one notable example:
Kankar pathar jod ke, Masjid laye banay
Taa chadh mulla baang de, kya behra hua khudaey.
(Using stones and pebbles was mosque made,
The mullah then climbs up on it to give azaan.
Has God turned deaf)
In religious Muslim societies to opine that a ‘man’ could have fallibility in his character is considered a sin that merits death by chopping the head of the sinner. Muhammad has been called al-Kamil (The one who has achieved perfection). The Quran describes Muhammad as a prophet who was given the Quran to spread God’s message.
The recent murderous attack on Rushdie in New York is another in a series of attacks that have been executed against Muslims and non-Muslims for allegedly mocking the Islamic Prophet. However, this spate of violence in Muslim societies is a post-modern phenomenon and has mostly received tutelage from quasi-dictatorial nation-states that have applauded such acts. In the recent case, in a matter of few hours post the attack on Rushdie, the Iranian media praised the attacker. Kayhan, whose editor is appointed by the Ayatollah, declared, “A thousand bravos to Hadi Matar the brave and dutiful person who attacked the apostate and evil Salman Rushdie in New York.”
It is quite ironic that while the citizens of countries such as Iran and Pakistan look to settle in secular countries like England and USA due to their tolerance for diverse ethnicities and religions, even the slightest remark attributed to their Prophet becomes a matter of life and death. The idea that Allah and the Prophet’s honour needs to be saved and upheld at any cost, has firmly made a home in the Muslim mindset. It simply reeks of the fragility of such a doctrine that its followers perhaps need constant reaffirmation to stay relevant in modern times.
The 2019 Netflix comedy, The First Temptation of Christ, describes Jesus as a gay man caught in the whirlwind of protests. Since homosexuality is considered a grave sin by the Roman Catholic church, to term Jesus as a gay man—albeit in a comical sense—is simply unacceptable to devout Christians. However, even in the deeply conservative Christian societies, the response to the film was that of peaceful protests and tweets that rubbished the film. In a modern world, where the role of religion in society is constantly evolving, Muslim conservative sections want Islamic jurisprudence to be arrested in the 14th century.
This isn’t a clash of civilisations that we are witnessing before our eyes, nor is it a battle for free speech. Human civilisation is at a pivot that will decide whether the idea of religion will comply with the understanding of modern life, or pave the way for its very degeneration. As for Rushdie, the magical world of his stories will live on, and so will their magician.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Protecting the Perfect One")
(Views expressed are personal)
Amit Bamzai is a Kashmiri entrepreneur and an avid cricket buff who has played the game at club level in India and England
