My friend, the sweet, vulgar, brilliant Theo Van Gogh was murdered simply for making a film with me. After I came out as an apostate, I was forced into a bubble of protection that still surrounds me to this day. I have lived those long years I know all too well the threat Islamism poses. If only more people could follow his example, instead of taking the path of appeasement in the name of cultural sensitivity, the long years of murder and mayhem wrought by the Islamists on the West might come to an end. But he is nevertheless an exemplar of them a champion of free speech, bravely standing up for Western ideals when so many shy away from the fight. Salman would not, I imagine, phrase it in such a way, nor would he place such an emphasis on the Westernness of these values. The sooner we realise this, the sooner we can recover our belief in Western civilisation, and stand up for it unflinchingly against its enemies, both foreign and domestic. Yes, there really are different ideas of civilisation - and yes, they are in conflict with each other. But the attack on Salman shows the truth in it. It is unfashionable these days to defend Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” thesis. Only by understanding these different conceptions of civilisation can we begin to undo the damage wrought by the Iranian regime and other Islamists across the world. We are faced with an enemy that never gives up, who thinks in terms of centuries rather than months or years, and who will wait patiently for an opportunity to strike. This is why, when it comes to fighting Islamism, the Western tools of diplomacy and reason are useless. More from this author The new war on Islamism Salman has blasphemed - he has insulted the honour of our precious beliefs - and so he, and many others, must die. Whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr.” This is the language of honour and of sensitivity. Just look at the wording of the fatwa itself: “I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. The sooner we realise that nothing will appease the fanatics of Tehran, the better able we will be to oppose them. The world of the West and the world of Islamism are totally irreconcilable. Then, as now, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the regime. The Western response to the fatwa, as to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, was to negotiate. In this, Salman understood so deeply the nature of the Iranian regime when so many then and now fail to grasp its fanatical, unbending nature. ”Īnd like Khomeini, the Imam succeeds in his quest and devours the very people who saw him as a messiah against the despot. History is a deviation from the Path, knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of knowledge was complete on the day Al-Lah finished his revelation to Mahound. “History the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies - progress, science, rights - against which the Imam has set his face. Like Khomeini, the Imam wants to turn back time: A character called only the Imam, he is also an exile seeking to return to his homeland to overthrow a despot and install his own tyranny. Almost prophetically, Salman included a Khomeini-like figure in The Satanic Verses. While Salman sought to capture the entire world in his novels, Khomeini couldn’t escape religion. Suggested reading How we gave up on Salman Rushdie Not for him the freely roaming imagination his interest in literature was constrained by Islam. He was also a writer, though his subject matter was the Qur’an and Islamic law. ![]() He was both deeply arrogant and fanatically fundamentalist: a very dangerous combination. Whenever I read about Khomeini, I get the impression that he fancied himself a successor to the Prophet. He did not set out to offend Muslims but simply assumed that supposedly holy events and texts were fair game for artists to play with, just as Western writers engaged freely, both positively and negatively, with Christianity.Īnd then there was the Ayatollah, a fundamentalist figure who had spent long years of exile in the West before returning to Iran to overthrow the despotic regime of the Shah in 1979. He was certainly not apolitical, but he resided in the world of books and the imagination, engaging with the real world through fantasy. When he wrote The Satanic Verses, he was more interested in the theme of migration than in satirising Islam. Salman is an intellectual, a lover of stories, and a teller of tales. On the one hand, a novelist, raised in what was once secular Bombay and living in the England of Monty Python’s Life of Brian a man in love with literature and language, who spent many years on a quest to become a published writer. I have always viewed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie as a strange conflict between two very different figures.
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