The Salman Rushdie of Salman Rushdies...

[Theophylact]

...has an Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times (free, but you have to register, et patati et patata) on the subject of Muslim fanaticism.

[ClubMed]

This guy is an idiot. And so is his following. The media focus rests only on 'Muslim fanatics'. The liberal, modern and normal Muslims don't make it to the news, because it doesn't sell. Shocking stories of uneducated, violent, aggressive and intolerant Muslims are so much nicer.

Rushdie should read a book called 'Covering Islam' by Edward Said available at Amazon to understand why he can't hear the Muslims complain about the bad seeds.

A sorry man.

[Theophylact]

Bad news, of course, always sells. But the point he makes is valid; these are Governments behaving badly (Egypt, Iran, Northern Nigeria), not just "uneducated, violent, aggressive and intolerant Muslims".

Edward Said also has valid things to say. But he didn't serve his own cause whan he was photographed throwing a "symbolic" rock across the Israel-Lebanon border.

[ClubMed]

not just "uneducated, violent, aggressive and intolerant Muslims".

These governments are uneducated, violent, aggressive and intolerant. After all you are talking about dictatorships.

Edward Said is a great writer, throwing a symbolic rock is perfectly fine, it's a symbol of resistance. Often it's the people who have nothing to say that would make a story of this (not refering to you Theo).

[J-Excel]

And he had a good point by saying that the peaceful Muslim majority isn’t speaking up against the violence of the radical Muslim minority. Why is that? I can see why they wouldn't in radical Muslim controlled countries because they would be in danger, but what about the peaceful minded Muslims in the free world? Some (a lot maybe) say the victims of the violence had it coming.

I refuse to register.

oh well I guess I just miss it.

[Epidemic]

J-Excel,

That is not only a good point. It is the keystone of the problems.

[Epidemic]

Here you go surreal

No More Fanaticism as Usual
By SALMAN RUSHDIE


t's been quite a week in the wonderful world of Islam.

Nigerian Islam's encounter with that powerhouse of subversion, the Miss World contest, has been unedifying, to put it mildly. First some of the contestants had the nerve to object to a Shariah court's sentence that a Nigerian woman convicted of adultery be stoned to death and threatened to boycott the contest — which forced the Nigerian authorities to promise that the woman in question would not be subjected to the lethal hail of rocks. And then Isioma Daniel, a Christian Nigerian journalist, had the effrontery to suggest that if the prophet Muhammad were around today, he might have wanted to marry one of these swimsuit hussies himself.

Well, obviously, that was going too far. True-believing Nigerian Muslims then set about the holy task of killing, looting and burning while calling for Ms. Daniel to be beheaded, and who could blame them? Not the president of Nigeria, who put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the hapless journalist. (Germaine Greer and other British-based feminists, unhappy about Miss World's decision to move the event to London, preferred to grouse about the beauty contest. The notion that the killers, looters and burners should be held accountable seems to have escaped notice.)

Meanwhile, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hashem Aghajari, a person with impeccable Islamist credentials — a leg lost in battle and a résumé that includes being part of the occupying force that seized the Great Satan's Tehran embassy back in the revolution's salad days — languishes under a sentence of death imposed because he criticized the mullahs who run the country. In Iran, you don't even have to have cheeky thoughts about the prophet to be worthy of being killed. The hearts of true believers are maddened a lot more easily than that. Thousands of young people across the country were immature enough to protest against Mr. Aghajari's sentence, for which the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, duly rebuked them. (More than 10,000 true believers marched through Tehran in support of hard-line Islam.)

Meanwhile, in Egypt, a hit television series, "Horseman Without a Horse," has been offering up antiSemitic programming to a huge, eager audience. That old forgery, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" — a document purporting to prove that there really is a secret Jewish plot to take over the world, and which was proved long ago to have been faked by Czar Nicholas II's secret police — is treated in this drama series as historical fact.

Yes, this is the same Egypt in which the media are rigorously censored to prevent anything that offends the authorities from seeing the light of day. But hold on just a moment. Here's the series' star and co-writer, Mohammed Sobhi, telling us that what is at stake is nothing less than free speech itself, and if his lying show "terrified Zionists," well, tough. He'll make more programs in the same vein. Now there's a gutsy guy.

Finally, let's not forget the horrifying story of the Dutch Muslim woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has had to flee the Netherlands because she said that Muslim men oppressed Muslim women, a vile idea that so outraged Muslim men that they issued death threats against her.

Is it unfair to bunch all these different uglinesses together? Perhaps. But they do have something in common. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was accused of being "the Dutch Salman Rushdie," Mr. Aghajari of being the Iranian version, Isioma Daniel of being the Nigerian incarnation of the same demon.

A couple of months ago I said that I detested the sloganization of my name by Islamists around the world. I'm beginning to rethink that position. Maybe it's not so bad to be a Rushdie among other "Rushdies." For the most part I'm comfortable with, and often even proud of, the company I'm in.

Where, after all, is the Muslim outrage at these events? As their ancient, deeply civilized culture of love, art and philosophical reflection is hijacked by paranoiacs, racists, liars, male supremacists, tyrants, fanatics and violence junkies, why are they not screaming?

At least in Iran the students are demonstrating. But where else in the Muslim world can one hear the voices of the fair-minded, tolerant Muslim majority deploring what Nigerian, Egyptian, Arab and Dutch Muslims are doing? Muslims in the West, too, seem unnaturally silent on these topics. If you're yelling, we can't hear you.

If the moderate voices of Islam cannot or will not insist on the modernization of their culture — and of their faith as well — then it may be these so-called "Rushdies" who have to do it for them. For every such individual who is vilified and oppressed, two more, ten more, a thousand more will spring up. They will spring up because you can't keep people's minds, feelings and needs in jail forever, no matter how brutal your inquisitions. The Islamic world today is being held prisoner, not by Western but by Islamic captors, who are fighting to keep closed a world that a badly outnumbered few are trying to open. As long as the majority remains silent, this will be a tough war to win. But in the end, or so we must hope, someone will kick down that prison door.


Salman Rushdie is author, most recently, of "Step Across This Line."

[Theophylact]

After all you are talking about dictatorships.

ClubMed, I'd love to use as a good example a Muslim-majority country that isn't a dictatorship (I include kingdoms). Would you point me in the right direction? True, Turkey and Lebanon have elections, but Turkey is subject to periodic Governmental overthrow whenever the military doesn't like the outcome, and Lebanon is a Syrian puppet. I'm not too sure how to rate Bangladesh.

I'm not saying this is a consequence of their being Muslim-majority -- there are LOTS of bad, ignorant, violent governments in the world, most of which are not Muslim. But if you're going to discount what they do because they're dictatorships, we're not going to have a lot of leeway for discussion.

[ClubMed]

Thats not what I meant.

I felt that you were implying that governments are not uneducated, violent, ignorant etc..

So I was trying to tell you that these governments, and the ignorant people are alike.

I hope it's clear now.

In other words:

these are Governments behaving badly (Egypt, Iran, Northern Nigeria), not just "uneducated, violent, aggressive and intolerant Muslims".

Yes of course they are behaving badly, because they dictatorships, they can't behave in a good manner because they are evil in nature.