open Democracy News Analysis - Salman Rushdie's honour, Lisa Appignanesi - Comments

whigpresident on "Salman Rushdie's honour"

whigpresident — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 14:45:46 +0000

The necessary research involved for this piece includes having read the book. This story weakens significantly because of the author's lack of knowledge and hearsay reporting of what the book involves. This is the same problem with the surging protesters and grandstanding Pakistani politicians. I can't imagine that someone can walk away from a Rushdie book outraged, even Satanic Verses. His work always displays a deep love for humanity and a kind, smiling love for the fragile beauty of the world. When religion is a cause of that fragility, as it often is, it doesn't receive a positive light in his work. How can that be surprising? The original fatwa against Rushdie caused Islamic thought to lose an enormous amount of legitimacy, and cast it on the side of wrong. To revisit that stance is ridiculous, and very unhelpful for legitimate causes that the Islamic world takes up with the West. Rushdie would likely have been up for the Nobel prize if it weren't for this controversy. A knighthood was long overdue but came at a wonderful time following his powerful Shalimar the Clown which offers a vision of hope and understanding in a Post 9/11 world. Rushdie experienced early the fear of personal terrorism for over a decade before that dread descended on the West wholesale. The wisdom that he gained and shared from the experience provides an example that the dread will one day lift. Don't take my word for it, read the book involved before publishing a piece on it.

willow28 on "Salman Rushdie's honour"

willow28 — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 08:41:12 +0000

In response to the above person, Ms Appignanesi correctly stated that it was the Queen's advisors who proposed the award, not HMQ herself. Mr Rushdie richly deserves his knighthood for services to literature. Mr Rushdie is a writer of Fiction. Kindly note that final word - Fiction. Hardly the first time that religious extremists (that includes Christians as well as Muslims) have had trouble differentiating between Fact and Fiction; but, if you think about it, hardly surprising either.

olivia.dixon on "Salman Rushdie's honour"

olivia.dixon — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 11:39:39 +0000

Lisa Appignanesi is quite naive in thinking that the Queen actually proposed that Rushdie should have a knighthood: this sort of honour falls from the hand of our government, and probably came about from the Prime Minister's own leaving list of honours. I personally think it is absolutely outrageous that he should have been given a K. This is a man who was born in India and now lives in the United States. His books are nearly all unreadable, very boring, and dull: nothing much happens in them. The only thing one can say about them is that they might be somewhat innovative in style as he has a habit of running a lot of words together to form one. And, I am not an uninformed member of the public but a post graduate in English literature! The honour is extraordinarily badly timed, and it is astonishing that the Government should at such a very difficult time in our relations with Islam decide to honour a man who has apparently has cricticized that religion. If one is going to honour writers' and I absolutely applaud this, why not give the honour to a really great English writer, like say Ian McEwan.

m.jamil on "Salman Rushdie's honour"

m.jamil — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 04:49:41 +0000

As both a Muslim and an intellectual, i understand the structural conditions that enforce and reinforce ignorance, fears and emotional outbursts among Muslim masses. An overwhelming majority of Muslims remain mired in a hopelessness stretching from colonial through neo-colonial subjugation and failures of nationalism, socialism, and now capitalism. I cannot thus blame that multitude. I do, however, condemn so-called Muslim leaders for their calculated exploitation of the Rushdie affair. Having read and reread "Satanic Verses" (SV) before and after the initial crisis over its supposed insult to Islam and Prophet Mohammed, I found no insult. Rather, I delved ever more deeply into a brilliant exposition of Indo-Pakistani Muslim culture embedded in a tragically humorous critique of the paradoxical conditions within which their diaspora continues to unfold. Literate Muslims with experience in the Indo-Pak cultural mosaic should read Rushdie as both mirror and microscope to their own identities and stereotypes. For readers outside that cultural mosaic (Muslim or not), SV and the Rushdie style offer a roller coaster ride into linguistic virtuosity and modern narrative. Rushdie writes of "his people" not unlike James Joyce's exposition of Dubliners. Both produce complex literary works accessible to sophisticated readers, but readers without depth of experience within either of those two cultures will miss many nuances that add depth to characters, plot, narrative and dialect. This second round of anti-Rushdie propaganda should open a window to condemn promoters of reactionary ignorance, that would seek to censure/ ban Rushdie's work, and threaten his person. Muslims with adequate literacy should neither avoid nor miss an opportunity to access SV's often profoundly double-edged cultural stereotypes. Anyone having contact with Indo-Muslim and/or Hindu cultures will benefit from Rushdie's stunningly brilliant use of both Indo-English and Anglo-Indian vernaculars. In a world much in need of critical intellect and artistic creativity, we should never allow bigots of whatever stripe to intimidate readers from access to any literature offering insights into human character, whatever the genre or particular cultural narratives. Three cheers for Sir Salman, with a hope that critically literate fellow Muslims will begin to address the dual challenge: to awaken some of the Muslim multitude, and to rebut ignorant, opportunistic propaganda. In particular, we must challenge institutionally embedded clerics who reproduce a millennium of intellectual censorship that has banned critical discourse so very central to the golden age of Islamic scholarship, and in so doing have distorted the founding principles of Islam.

Salman Rushdie's honour, Lisa Appignanesi

robert.cawston@opendemocracy.net — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 09:58:19 +0000

The award of a knighthood to the novelist Salman Rushdie, announced in Queen Elizabeth II's "birthday honours" list on 15 June 2007, has been followed by a media-fuelled flurry of formulaic controversy. There is something very familiar about the vehement denunciation from voices inside Britain as well as Iran and Pakistan that has followed, and not just to those who remember when his name and work first began to be seen through a political rather than literary lens.

Lisa Appignanesi is a novelist and writer. She is deputy president of English PEN and chair of its "Free Expression is No Offence" campaign

Among her books are the family memoir, Losing the Dead, and a biography of Simone de Beauvoir.

A slightly different version of this article was first published in the Guardian's books blog on 18 June 2007

Also by Lisa Appignanesi in openDemocracy:

"A law to close minds"
(28 February 2005)

"The heart of Simone de Beauvoir"
(13 July 2005)Perhaps then it is a good moment to reaffirm that, judged purely in cultural rather than in political terms, Rushdie is undeniably amongst the greats of British literature. He is the Dickens of our times - a visionary realist, whose superbly inventive, grandly comic stories chart the great social transitions of our globalising, post-colonial world, with its migrations, its teeming hybrid cities, its clash of unlikenesses, its extremes of love and violence. They do so with a richness of language and narrative which is unsurpassed.

When Midnight's Children, his novel of the partition of the Indian subcontinent, won the Booker Prize in 1981, it raised the prize itself to international prominence. Together with Shame, his delirious satire of Zia ul-Haq and Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan, and The Satanic Verses, in the first instance a hallucinatory portrait of Thatcher's Britain, Rushdie's work also gave birth to a major strand in British fiction. Zadie Smith, Kiran Desai, and a host of other young writers are Rushdie's children, liberated by Rushdie's fiction to find their own voices. His "services to literature", for which the knighthood is awarded, are in that sense exemplary, even without beginning to list Rushdie's labours on behalf of persecuted writers around the world.

The decision of Iran's foreign ministry to enter the fray by denouncing both Rushdie ("a hated apostate") and his award ("an orchestrated act of aggression directed against Islamic societies") is a repeat of the mistake which began with Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa on 14 February 1989. That killing review chose utterly to misunderstand the place fiction occupies in the west and subjected it to a fundamentalist jurisdiction which essentially recognises only one book and one truth. The journalists, writers and academics who languish in Iran's prisons - no less than the translators and publishers of Rushdie's novel who were murdered or attacked, from Norway to Japan - are a mark of the intolerance of any form of dissent which the fatwa represented.

Also in openDemocracy by and about Salman Rushdie:

Salman Rushdie, "Defend the right to be offended"
(7 February 2005)

Colin MacCabe, "Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie: writing for a new world"
(10 October 2005)

Amartya Sen & Salman Rushdie, "Argumentative Indians: in conversation"
(9 May 2006)This is hardly the Islam that most Muslims in Britain would wish to support, notwithstanding the statements of the Muslim Council of Britain ("yet another example of insensitivity to Muslim opinion that will only result in their further alienation"). Nor, one hopes, would they wish to echo the condemnation of the honour by Pakistan's national assembly and the demand for it to be withdrawn. Similar pressures from the subcontinent were instrumental in rousing Muslims in Britain to riots and book-burning at the end of 1988 when The Satanic Verses appeared. Few then involved paused to read Rushdie's books - which in fact exposed the very racism and intolerance from which minorities suffered. Indeed, labelling fiction as "blasphemous" is to surrender to those pressures on cultural life which have historically sought to gag all criticism of the status quo and constrain that dissent which is a necessary part of a mature and plural democracy.

It is surely a mark of the Queen's and her advisors' brave, good judgment that they are prepared to recognise Rushdie for what he is: a great writer of international repute who has long spoken truth to power - whether that power is political, religious or simply a prominent assembly of right-thinking voices.

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