I’d like to take a moment to applaud the UK for knighting Salman Rushdie, one of the most brilliant artists of our time. I’d also like to denounce the outpouring of hate and igorance from Pakistan and other places. According to Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam, “Salman Rushdie has tried to insult and malign Muslims through his writings….” As I commented here about a year ago, citing Fred Halliday, this is a pernicious falsehood. The satirical portions of The Satanic Verses are not blasphemous — they are are based directly on medieval parables from the Islamic tradition itself. Today’s hardline Islamists have declared war on major portions of their own history — much like hardline Hindus have done with theirs. No one should take their arguments at face value.
[Update: There’s a UK-only petition to support Rushdie here. Scrolling through some of the comments, we find naysayers — one of them Tony Francis, who alleges that Rushdie “has stirred up racial hatred in the world,” of course citing no evidence because there is absolutely none. About the high officials in Iran and Pakistan who are very definitely stirring up hatred in the world, Francis has nothing to say. It’s all the novelist’s fault. Let his books burn. This is what passes for multicultural “sensitivity” today.]
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