What Happened?

by Hanif Kureishi

  Around the same time, Michel Foucault – more leather than winceyette – visited Ruhollah Khomeini outside Paris, and went to Tehran twice. Foucault, fascinated by the extreme gay lifestyle he found in San Francisco, had also written for the Corriere della Sera, defending the imams in the name of ‘spiritual revolution’. This inspiring revolt or holy war of the oppressed, he believed, would be an innovative resistance, an alternative to Marxism, creating a new society out of identities shattered by domination.

  It was new. But, as Naipaul discovered, there was very little spirituality in this power-grab by the Ayatollahs. Soon they were hanging homosexuals from cranes; women had to wear the chador. In Pakistan women now covered up before they went out, and no one in my family had been veiled before. One of my female cousins revered Ruhollah Khomeini – ‘the voice of God’ – as an example of purity and selfless devotion. He was everything a good man should be. But she took me aside and begged me to help her children escape to the West. Pakistan was impossible for the young; everyone who could was sending their money out of the country and, where possible, sending their kids out after it, preferably to the hated but also loved United States, and, failing that, to Canada. ‘We want to leave this country but all doors are shut for us, we do not know how to get out of here,’ she wrote to me. ‘Fundamentalism offered nothing,’ Naipaul states; he didn’t find much to idealise.

  The characters Naipaul is drawn to want more, but they don’t know what it is. Aware of their relative deprivation, they are gullible like Mr Biswas, a sign-painter, in Naipaul’s masterpiece A House for Mr Biswas. Biswas becomes a journalist; he is working on a story called ‘Escape’. But he is too intelligent for his surroundings. He becomes hysterical, endlessly dwelling on his wounds and victimhood. He is under a power, that of colonialism, which will always humiliate him, and he has internalised that contempt. However, there is one way out: the belief that at least your children will have better lives than you.

  Vidia Naipaul appears to be the clever boy Anand in that novel, the one who would escape to Oxford, work for the BBC and become a writer. Naipaul had done all that, but had also learned that you can’t escape the past. Now travelling in places like those he came from, in Among the Believers he finds a proliferation of anxious, wounded men like his father, whose sons would turn to a new machismo, a politicised Islam, ‘because all else had failed’.

  Among these sons was my cousin Nasrut Nasrullah, whom Naipaul ran into. Then a journalist for the Morning Star with a ‘fruity voice and walrus moustache’, Nasrut tells Naipaul, ‘We have to create an Islamic society. We can’t develop in the Western way. It is what they tell us.’

  Around the time of the Iranian revolution Bob Dylan released a single, ‘You Gotta Serve Somebody’, which elaborates on the impossibility of not being devoted to someone, or something. Similarly, seeking a space outside of the colonisers’ ideology, Naipaul’s subjects in Among the Believers could only repeat – only this time more harshly – what had already been done to them. That which began as an indigenous form of resistance, cheered on by some Parisian intellectuals, soon became a new, self-imposed slavery, a self-subjection, this time with an added masochistic element: Osama bin Laden’s devotion to death. Hence the helplessness and disillusionment that Naipaul found. If the coloniser had always believed the subaltern was incapable of independent thought or democracy, the new Muslims confirmed it with their submission to the Ayatollah. They had willingly brought a new tyrant into being, and he was terrible, worse than before. One of the oddest things about being in Karachi that first time was how often people said to me they wished the British would return and run things again. There were many shortages, but that of good ideas was the worst.

  A few months after the Bosporus boat trip, Naipaul was invited to Turkey again, to address the European Writers’ Parliament, an idea of José Saramago’s. This time there was uproar: Naipaul was said to have insulted Islam after saying in an interview, ‘To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history.’ Naipaul never returned to Turkey, where now, as we know, there are more than three hundred journalists and writers in jail.

  Legitimate anger turned bad; the desire for obedience and strong men; a terror of others; the promise of power, independence and sovereignty; the persecution of minorities and women; the return to an imagined purity: who, seeing the reality of those first years in Pakistan, would have thought this idea would have spread so far, and not only that, would continue to spread?

  Why Should We Do What God Says?

  It was the early months of 1989, and they were becoming strange days indeed. It’s not often you see two policemen on their knees looking under your bed, glancing into your wardrobe and dragging aside your shower curtain to make sure there’s no terrorist waiting to spring out and strangle a novelist who’s popped round for a drink. But in the north of England bearded Pakistanis were buying books in their local Waterstones before setting fire to them; and a foreign government had just pronounced a ‘fatwa’ – whatever that was – on a writer for a wild piece of post-modern prose concerning migration, the breakdown of belief, multiple subjectivities and the chaos and derangement of capitalistic acceleration.

  As if that wasn’t enough: with the cops sniffing around, you couldn’t even smoke a joint in your own living room. Luckily Salman assured me that the policeman wouldn’t leap up and handcuff me since he really had no sense of smell, even as he tucked into a large plate of my girlfriend’s lasagne.

  Then, one morning, the Labour MP for Leicester East, Keith Vaz, whom I knew a little – a polite man, he’d introduced me to his mother in the House of Commons – called to say we could rely on his support for Rushdie until the end. That night I glimpsed him on television leading a march in his constituency against the novel. You’d have to say that realism was getting very magical in a black sort of way; and one of the problems with reality, as The Satanic Verses points out, is that it is always being invaded by unreality: sleep and wakefulness can segue into one another, and that which we believe is solid can melt in a moment. And, of all things, the novel, a novel – probably the form which most lends itself to the exploration of human complexity – had become the site of a world-wide controversy.

  A few days later, I was sitting with Harold Pinter in a pub near Downing Street and we were trying to work out what to say to Thatcher if she happened to be in when we passed by with our statement about protecting novelists from intimidation by foreign governments. To our relief, Thatcher wouldn’t meet us, but creditably she did say, ‘There are no grounds on which the government would consider banning the book.’

  Unfortunately my father saw me on television wandering around outside Downing Street and nearly had another heart attack. He had worked in the Pakistan High Commission for most of his life and had warned me that Muslims could become more than agitated if provoked about the Prophet. During Ramadan he had to eat his sandwiches behind a tree in Hyde Park for fear a colleague would spot him breaking the fast. Now he rang me up yelling that I should keep out of ‘the fatwa business’.

  Dad had admired the way Jewish writers and artists had flourished in the West. Philip Roth had run into some community trouble with his great Portnoy, but once he became admired and famous everyone shut up and claimed him as a literary hero and truth-teller. Dad said Jewish children were part of Britain: they were westernised without forgetting their heritage. Why couldn’t we as a migrant community do that? Why were we going the other way?

  What, I wondered, was the ‘other way’ my father referred to? What exactly was going on? What was this ‘return’ and where had this new political and moral fervency come from?

  If my friends and I as a generation were surprised and even amused by the fatwa and the level of fury The Satanic Verses was provoking, perhaps we boomers had become inured to outrage, insult and provocation. A turd in a tin, a pile of bricks, copulation in an art gallery, dirty nappies, menstrual pads: not a flicker did they raise among the sophisticated. Outrage wa
s style; it was what we expected before we went out to supper. Soaked in drugs and exhausted by years of random copulation, maybe nothing much registered now and we were jaded after decades of hectic, nihilistic rock ’n’ roll and consumerism. The Berlin Wall had fallen; Soviet Marxism was over. Perhaps it was true, as some intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama suggested, that it had been the end times, and we’d really been living in the best of all political worlds.

  Not only that, hadn’t novels and their authors been pointlessly condemned before? D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov, among many others, had been pursued and prosecuted. And seriously, had anyone become morally worse after reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover or The Tropic of Cancer? There was nothing about banning and prohibition to suggest that it wasn’t a waste of time and money. As the years passed, these attempts at censorship looked even worse than they had at the time. More recently, for instance, the Sex Pistols – on the yellow press’s front pages for weeks – had been more pantomime and PR than subversion.

  Despite this, who doesn’t recall that at the time of the fatwa a lot of the media noise concerned Western liberals, intellectuals and even novelists calling for the book to be withdrawn or not published in paperback to protect the feelings of ‘insulted’ Muslims, though it was doubtful that these people had ever met a Muslim, let alone one who was insulted. Richard Webster, for instance, in A Brief History of Blasphemy (1990) writes about The Satanic Verses, saying: ‘… its reception and defence by liberal intellectuals had seemed to give a kind of moral licence to racism which had always been latent.’ John le Carré said: ‘My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.’ Roald Dahl wrote to The Times: ‘In a civilised world we all have a moral obligation to apply a modicum of censorship to our own work in order to reinforce this principle of free speech.’

  What made them think that this heterogeneous ‘community’ had only one idea of this? And you could only wonder: if they wanted to give way on Rushdie, what other censorships would they end up favouring? This group were not unlike Soviet fellow-travellers – useful idiots – with little idea that their naivety and wish to side with the underdog was protecting a murderous and authoritarian ideology which they wouldn’t want to live under for a moment. According to this elite form of colonial patronisation, free speech was only for the select few; the poor and benighted – as they were seen – couldn’t deal with, or ever require, satire, criticism or scabrous story-telling. The book-burners and censor-mongers weren’t adult enough to think about simple but essential questions: why should we do what God says? And when is obedience a good idea, and when is it not?

  More importantly, it didn’t occur to these so-called liberals that the insulted book-burners and putative writer-killers whose feelings they were keen to protect might end up inflicting immeasurable harm on their own communities, eventually promoting a Salafi version of Islam which was not only a betrayal of religion, but of women, minorities and most Muslims who had come to the West to make a better future for their children. If my father had been surprised by how English, as he put it, we, his children, had become, that was the price he knew he had to pay for the opportunities he’d got on the boat for.

  If these weak and guilty liberals didn’t like the idea of people being insulted – though one always chooses to be insulted – it might have been advisable for them to fight the ubiquitous racism their society generated rather than shutting down a fellow artist who was asking important questions about migration, identity and the sort of world being created by the market economy. Rushdie had touched on the untouchable, and was saying the unsayable. That, after all, was the point of serious writing, though not the sort of writing his literary detractors – thriller writers and children’s entertainers, mostly – were capable of.

  One more thing: what exactly had Rushdie touched on with his critique of Islam? What was the unsayable? The fury he had aroused guaranteed, it occurred to me, that he had spoken aloud the deeply forbidden thing: the doubts of many believers. Surely the people who most infuriate us, the ones we most hate, are those who create the most conflict in us? Doubt, disbelief and transformation were intolerable to those who’d moved to a new land. To be a migrant was to have your implicit beliefs tested every day against another paradigm, and doubt could bring with it a total loss of one’s bearings. Some of those who suffered this wanted to kill the messenger.

  The time of the fatwa certainly politicised me; many of us from Muslim, immigrant backgrounds had to rethink our identity and politics. Who exactly were we in the new country and what did we want to be? Why was it so difficult for us to get on? And, importantly, what were we even called?

  For most of my life immigrants and their children were mostly known as Asian, a term vague and inaccurate enough not to be as offensive as some of the other words used about us. Now, organised around the fatwa, the religious designation Muslim began to emerge. It had barely been used in the West before; now it became common. Looking back, I can see that this was a fatal identification and misstep, giving rise to the false idea that we were a unified religious community who all believed the same thing and, not only that, were separate from other minority groups who were in a similar position in Britain. Even in Pakistan recently a gay friend said to me, ‘They call us Muslims and we’re not even religious! They think we all believe the same thing! We’ve been boxed in.’

  After the fatwa, in the early 1990s, when I began to research the novel which became The Black Album, I noticed that the young Muslims I met were not interested in Rushdie or literature at all; and we barely discussed free speech. Even worse, I realised, no one had thought to interest them in Britain, and certainly not in the Britain I’d loved, of the 1960s and 70s, of fashion, theatre and dance, of drugs, dissent and the fascinating counter-cultural churn of ideas: feminism, patriarchy, sexuality, class. Where had they been all their lives? Who had educated them?

  Those whom we once called ‘fundamentalists’ had become Islamists, and they didn’t require tools to think with because they knew already what they wanted. They weren’t superstitious, benighted former villagers, but scientists, professors and A-grade students. And what they were involved in seemed more like a cult than a religion. They had submitted to God, so they said, and were keen to have others submit to them. They’d moved beyond the usual rules of sociability, and weren’t people you could debate or engage with. They would sneer, harangue and intimidate. That, apparently, was their policy. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to colonise and impose their ideas on a heterogeneous and vulnerable community. Where, I wondered, were the more balanced, older people in the mosques, schools and colleges?

  Ultimately this group wanted to recruit believers to help them make a political return to the centuries after the Prophet had died. They even promised, as a vanguard, to create a state based on the strict, macho-fascist Salafi principles that Isis would later adopt. (I call it fascism because fascism always uses ideas of purity, sacrifice and return, alongside the promised elimination of a particular group, as fundamentals.) This notion was a perfect compromise for this relatively small group of paranoiac men bursting with revolutionary fervour. They would, as young people have to, betray their parents, but only in this particular way: by being morally more severe. It was a return, but it was a new form of political religion.

  I remember thinking of them on the day of the London ‘7/7’ bombings, in 2005, when fifty-two people were killed. Three out of four of the terrorists were under the age of twenty-two, and three of them were the sons of Pakistani immigrants. They had, apparently, been inspired by the lectures of the Yemeni-American imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who had also preached to three of the 9/11 hijackers, and was known to be charming and articulate.

  We know now that the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine was right: that those who begin by burning books end by burning people. Salman Rushdie wrote a good book and couldn’t have predicted the furious outcome. But we know that what the Bradfo
rd book-burners and Islamists should have seen was that Islamism was never going to be a theology of liberation. Their actions have been a disaster, contributing to the rise of an active, virulent, fascistic right in Europe, one that condemns minorities and wants to reaffirm a Judeo-Christian future. The creation of the phantasmic figure of the Muslim – to which religious fanatics have stupidly added much colour – is used to justify an increase in prejudice, racism and hate unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.

  Now the community has to fight on several fronts: to detoxify itself, get up off its knees and open itself to better ideas from a range of voices, particularly women and the young. It has to join with other groups to fight against racism. None of this is impossible. Fascism doesn’t evolve, it’s always the same, but immigrant communities and their children change every day. They should be horrified by the image of themselves which has been created. The part of multiculturalism which is essentialist – limiting groups to a parade of ‘authentic’ dances, exotic clothes and practices – has also to be fought. The message of the Enlightenment is that we have some choice over who we want to be, making our own destiny as individuals, without submitting to gods, revelation or ancestors. The basis of this is a liberal education and a democracy of ideas. These are not British values – over which Europeans have no monopoly – but universal ones.

  There’s no doubt that the fatwa was one of the strangest and most significant events in literary history. But what should it continue to remind us of? I can recall, at the end of the 1990s, seeing Rushdie being interviewed on television, where he said something like, ‘Fundamentalists lack a sense of humour.’ This remark struck me as important, encouraging us to notice that the greatest works of literature are often comedies, and that comedy is a vital value, particularly when it comes to mocking privilege, power and dogma. The fundamentalists of the time, and the Islamists who followed them – whether part of Al-Qaeda, Isis or one of the many other groups – have intimidation, humiliation and the desire to shut people up in common. We should not fail to notice that many of the Islamists’ attacks – on Rushdie himself, film-maker Theo Van Gogh, Charlie Hebdo and music venues and clubs – are attacks on cultural pleasure, playfulness and sexual freedom.