Notes and References
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Notes and References Introduction 1. Simon Lee, The Cost of Free Speech (London: Faber, 1990) p. ix. 2. The wonderfully judicious and precise phrase ‘adequate to the predicament’ is one of the gifts bequeathed by the late Seamus Heaney, in his collection North. 3. An example is Peter Jones’s otherwise brilliant essay ‘Respecting Beliefs and Rebuking Rushdie’, British Journal of Political Science, 20:4, 1990, pp. 415–37. 4. Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (London: Routledge, 1999). 5. The phrase ‘civilization-speak’ is Heiko Henkel’s. See his essay, ‘“The journalists of Jyllands-Posten are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs”: The Danish Cartoon Controversy and the Self-Image of Europe,’ Radical Philosophy, 137, 2006, p. 2. 6. Glen Newey, ‘Unlike a Scotch Egg’, London Review of Books, 35:23, 5 December 2013, p. 22. 1 From Blasphemy to Offensiveness: the Politics of Controversy 1. In using the term ‘the Rushdie affair’ as a shorthand for the controversy over The Satanic Verses, I concur with Paul Weller who notes the Muslim objections to it on the grounds that it seemingly trivialized what was, in fact, an event of momentous significance. It does retain, however, a certain currency even now and was the dominant marker at the time, used in many documents and sources that I will have occasion to quote. I will therefore use it alongside other descriptive terminol- ogy such as ‘The Satanic Verses controversy’. 2. Paul Weller, A Mirror for Our Times: ‘The Rushdie Affair’ and the Future of Multiculturalism (London: Continuum, 2009). 3. Rana Kabbani, Letter to Christendom (London: Virago, 1989) p. ix. 4. Ibid. pp. 11–12. 5. Salman Rushdie, ‘In Good Faith’ in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991) p. 406. ‘The Courter’ can be found in Salman Rushdie East, West (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994). 6. Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009 [1960]); R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); Richard Fletcher, The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to the Reformation (London: Allen Lane, 2003). 7. Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs, 72.3, 1993, pp. 22–49; The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 8. The first attack on the World Trade Centre in New York took place in February 1993, some months prior to the publication of Huntington’s article in the autumn of that year. It may have been grist to its mill but it is unlikely that it prompted its composition. 212 Notes and References 213 9. Bernard Lewis, ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, The Atlantic Monthly, 266, September 1990, p. 60; Time, 15 June 1992, pp. 24–8. 10. See Inayat Bunglawala’s articles on Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ website: ‘I used to be a book-burner’, 19 June 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/ jun/19/notsurprisinglytheawarding; and ‘Words can never hurt us’, 26 September 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/26/islam.religion 11. Andrew Anthony, ‘How one book ignited a culture war’, Observer, 11 January 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/11/salman-rushdie-satanic-verses 12. Lisa Appignanesi, ‘No surrender’, Guardian: Comment is Free, 14 February 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/12/religion-islam; Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy (London: Atlantic Books, 2009); Nick Cohen, You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (London: Fourth Estate, 2012). 13. Salman Rushdie, ‘In Good Faith’ p. 396; ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’ in Imaginary Homelands, p. 429; p. 416. 14. Salman Rushdie, Step Across this Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002 (London: Vintage, 2003). On the liberal ‘backlash’ against Islam, articulated through a dis- satisfaction with multiculturalism, see Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad; Andrew Anthony, The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost his Innocence (London: Vintage, 2008); on the ‘new atheism’ see Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11 (London: Continuum, 2010). 15. ‘David Cameron tells Muslim Britain: stop tolerating extremists’, Guardian, 5 February 2011. See also Anshuman A. Mondal, ‘The Coalition Government and Muslims: Same Old, Same Old’ http://anshumanmondal.wordpress. com/2011/02/05/the-coalition-government-and-muslims-same-old-same-old/ 16. Appignanesi, ‘No Surrender’. See also Jo Glanville, ‘Respect for religion now makes censorship the norm’ Guardian, 30 September 2008. http://www.guardian. co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/30/pressandpublishing.religion 17. Anthony, ‘How one book ignited a culture war’. 18. Brian Winston, A Right to Offend (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). 19. Alana Lentin and Gavan Titwell, The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (London: Zed Books, 2011); see also Arun Kundnani, The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2009). 20. Cohen, You Can’t Read This Book, Kindle edition, ch. 1, p. 5 [loc 285]. 21. This, in a nutshell, is Kenan Malik’s argument in From Fatwa to Jihad, and rehearsed by Nick Cohen in You Can’t Read This Book. 22. The phrase ‘unthinking sheep’ is from Ed Husain’s The Islamist (London: Penguin, 2007) and he uses it in precisely this way. See Anshuman A. Mondal, ‘Bad Faith: The Construction of Muslim Extremism’ in Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, eds. Culture, Diaspora and Modernity in Muslim Writing (London: Routledge, 2012) p. 44. 23. In addition to Malik, Lisa Appignanesi, Andrew Anthony and Aziz al-Azmeh have all advanced similar arguments. Al-Azmeh’s position is more nuanced, but in focusing entirely on Islamist organizations’ role in the protests he gives the impression that this was the only significant dimension to the Muslim protests. His article is anthologized in Lisa Appignanesis and Sara Maitland, eds. The Rushdie File (London: ICA, 1989) pp. 69–74. 24. Malise Ruthven, A Satanic Affair (London: The Hogarth Press, 1990) p. 73. 25. Cited in Daniel Allington, ‘How to Do Things with Literature: Blasphemous Speech Acts, Satanic Intentions, and the Uncommunicativeness of Verses’, Poetics Today, 29.3, 2008, p. 507. 214 Notes and References 26. Talal Asad notes that the Arabic term used during the controversy over the Danish cartoons was isa’ah, which refers to ‘insult, harm, and offense’ rather than tajdif, which is the word that is usually translated as ‘blasphemy’. ‘Free Speech, Blasphemy and Secular Criticism’ in Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech (Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009) p. 38. 27. On Behzti see Weller, A Mirror for Our Times, pp. 155–6; and Sarita Malik, ‘Censorship – Life after Behzti,’ ArtsProfessional, 4 July 2005, http://www.artsprofessional. co.uk/magazine/article/censorship-life-after-behzti 28. Weller, A Mirror for Our Times, p. 157. 29. Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, p. 156. 30. Cited in ibid. p. 157. 31. Ibid. p. 158. 32. Ibid. p. 161. 33. Ibid. p. 183. 34. Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, p. 13. 35. Stanley Fish, ‘Jerry Falwell’s Mother, or, What’s the Harm?’ in There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech And It’s A Good Thing Too (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) p. 126. 36. Ally Fogg, ‘Political correctness gone bad’ Guardian: Comment is Free, 19 July 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/19/wordsandlanguage 37. J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) p. 3. 38. Saba Mahmood has argued that Sausurre’s model of language, which sev- ers the signifier and signified is part of a ‘semiotic ideology’ that is rooted in Protestantism and is not wholly adequate for analysing the offensiveness of visual images, in particular, such as the Danish cartoons. I shall return to Mahmood’s argument in more detail in Chapter 6. ‘Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?’ in Is Critique Secular? p. 72. 39. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, p. 52. 40. Ibid. pp. 4–11. 41. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 18. 42. Ibid. pp. 11–12. 43. Ibid. p. 15. 44. Broadly speaking, Austin suggests a distinction between ‘locutionary’, ‘illocution- ary’ and ‘perlocutionary’ speech acts. The first is involved when we say anything – the act of speaking itself; the second performs an action in the act of speaking; the last refers to the consequential effects that speech acts might have in the world, for example, on other people. 45. Cited in Bethan Benwell, James Procter and Gemma Robinson, ‘Not Reading Brick Lane’, New Formations, 73.2, 2011, p. 104. 46. This reading complements Benwell et al.’s interpretation of Newbie’s post: ‘s/he is isolating evidence which supports or even came to define a community consen- sus over the novel’s depiction of a particular ethnic group’ (p. 105). 47. Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 5, p. 27, p. 34, pp. 36–7. 48. Judith Butler’s elaboration of identity as performative contests this central liberal notion that at some level there is a singular ‘true’ identity. See Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1992). Similarly, Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘mimicry’ involves the ‘prodigious and strategic production of conflictual “identity effects” in the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no “itself”.’ ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Notes and References 215 Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October, 28, 1984, p.