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Unwarranted fury

There is an air of unreality about the protests that have consumed some countries against Britain’s decision to confer a knighthood on Salman Rushdie. In countries such as Pakistan and Iran, the matter has gone beyond street-level demonstrations and assumed the dimensions of a full-fledged diplomatic row. Iran’s foreign ministry, which described the decision to knight Rushdie as “insulting, suspicious and improper”, summoned the British envoy in Teh eran to condemn the “provocative” act. Pakistan has gone even further with the country’s National Assembly demanding that Britain “take back the title of Sir given to Rushdie.” To top this, in an outrageous reaction, Pakistan’s Religious Affairs Minister Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq said that honouring Rushdie would justify suicide attacks. Later, in an unconvincing clarification, he suggested what he really meant was that honouring Rushdie — whose 1988 novel The Satanic Verses had angered Muslims around the world — will give suicide bombers a handle to justify their acts. As one might expect in this over-heated atmosphere, extremists and religious fundamentalists have rushed in to fan the flames. In Iran, a self-styled NGO has raised the $100,000 bounty the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had offered for Rushdie’s head by an additional $ 50,000; back home, in Kashmir, sundry organisations have called for strikes and State-wide agitations.

It is apparent that extremist forces in different parts of the Muslim world are striving hard to rekindle the frenzy that followed the publication of The Satanic Verses. This novel is but one of nine written by the Booker Prize winn er, who has also published four works of non-fiction. To suggest that the knighthood has been conferred for one ‘anti-Islamic’ novel is to be blinkered and to close one’s eyes to the entire body of his work — in terms of political substance as well as literary quality. There has been a considerable amount of speculation about why the Tony Blair government conferred a knighthood on Rushdie. As atonement for the unhelpful official attitude during the writer’s days of suffering following Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa? A reward for the positions he adopted on Anglo-American foreign policy issues post-9/11? Whatever the truth, it is ludicrous to suggest — as those hell-bent on creating a furore have — that knighting Rushdie was an Islamophobic act, calculated to denigrate the religion and those who follow it. The British honours system, even as it symbolises state recognition of a person’s contribution, is a relic from a feudal and colonial past. A system with knights, dames, and other archaic decorations deserves to evoke nothing more than a wry smile. It is not worthy of such bitterness and fury.

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