Rushdie's poser to Muslims

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, OCT. 6. In remarks which are likely to infuriate his Muslim critics, the controversial novelist, Mr. Salman Rushdie, who lives in New York, has called upon Muslims to ask themselves why Islam breeds ``so many violent mutant strains''. ``If the West needs to understand its Una bombers and McVeighs, Islam needs to face up to its bin Ladens,'' he says in an article in today's Guardian on the September 11 terrorist attacks in America.

Mr. Rushdie, who has barely emerged from the late Ayotallah Khomeini's fatwa against him for writing Satanic Verses, prefaces his remarks with the comment that those responsible for the September 11 outrage in New York and Washington were ``tyrants, not Muslims'' but says that ``there needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.'' His remarks come amid a raging controversy here over the former British Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher's criticism of the Muslim ``clerics'' for not having sufficiently condemned the events in America.

Mr. Rushdie denounces as ``appalling rubbish'' attempts, mostly in the Muslim world incidentally, to explain the September 11 tragedy in terms of the U.S. foreign policy towards West Asia. ``To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. Government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions,'' he says echoing the British Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair's insistence that there can be ``no moral ambiguity'' about what happened in America four weeks ago and that nothing can justify it.

Describing the ``savaging'' of America as a lot of ``sanctimonious'' humbug, he says:` `A country which has just suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in history, a country in a state of deep mourning and horrible grief, is being told heartlessly, that it is to blame for its own citizens' deaths.'' Mr. Rushdie's comments contrast sharply with the Indian novelist, Ms Arundhati Roy's stinging attack on U.S. foreign policy in the same newspaper. In a Guardian article last week, she called the September 11 atrocities as a ``monstrous calling card'' from the victims of American policies. ``The message may have been written by bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars,'' she wrote.

Mr. Rushdie, however, does call for a restrained response and in a reference to indiscriminate U.S. military actions in the past, he cautions: ``No more Sudanese aspirin factories to be bombed, please. And now that wise American heads appear to have to understood that it would be wrong to bomb the impoverished, oppressed Afghan people in retaliation for their tyrannous masters' misdeeds, they might apply that wisdom, retrospectively, to what was done to the impoverished, oppressed people of Iraq. It's time to stop making enemies and start making friends.''

The most effective response to the fundamentalists, he says, is to confront their warped worldview and agree on ``what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity... movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty love... Not by making war, but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.''

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Section  : International
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