Rehana Ahmed2013-06-20T06:52:44-04:00Rehana Ahmedhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=rehana-ahmedCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Rehana AhmedGood old fashioned elbow grease.Literary Controversies Since the Rushdie Affairtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18959542012-09-19T19:00:00-04:002012-11-19T05:12:02-05:00Rehana Ahmedhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rehana-ahmed/ current wave of protests against the derogatory and risible video Innocence of Muslims reminds us, the Rushdie affair has been succeeded at regular intervals by other cases of religious minorities protesting against creative works. We focus on Britain, where controversy surrounded Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane (2003) and its filming in 2006. On the publication of the novel, the Greater Sylhet Development and Welfare Council wrote an eighteen-page letter to the author protesting against its depiction of their community. Three years later, filming of the novel on Brick Lane itself provoked further dissent: around one hundred protesters marched through the streets, and the film company eventually withdrew to produce the final scenes of the film elsewhere.
In 2008 Sherry Jones's romantic novel The Jewel of Medina took up The Satanic Verses's fictionalisation of Aisha, the Prophet Muhammad's youngest and favourite wife. Aisha is revered by the majority Sunni sect as 'Mother of the Believers', but less popular among Shias, who hold her responsible for Islam's seventh-century schism. Fearing Muslim protests anticipated (or some say manufactured) by American academic Denise Spellberg, Random House pulled The Jewel of Medina's UK release, after which Jones was signed by Gibson Square, which found itself on the receiving end of a firebomb attack.
From outside the Muslim community, a production of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's play Behzti was cancelled in 2004 by the Birmingham Rep, because Sikh activists disputed its portrayals of gurdwara violence and use of religious icons. This last example indicates that artistic−religious controversies subsequent to the Rushdie affair have not just involved Muslims: in the Behzti case, the protests were initiated by largely working-class British-Punjabi Sikhs. Shortly afterwards, English PEN lobbied the government against the proposed incitement to religious hatred legislation, arguing that it would dangerously curtail freedom of expression and criticism and that it would only encourage protests such as those against Behzti.
The British protests against Rushdie's novel and these more recent protests are commonly understood in terms of the free speech versus religious offence argument. But it is important to think beyond this limiting binary to attain a greater degree of intercultural understanding in twenty-first century Britain. One way of doing so is to highlight the unequal access to cultural and economic capital that frequently marks such disputes. Discussing the Behzti controversy in an arts magazine, Sarita Malik describes the chasm that separates Britain's ethnic minority communities from artistic spaces from which they feel excluded. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the representation and perceived defilement of the gurdwara within an arts space might trigger a hostile response.
Similarly, the gulf between the novel Brick Lane and the literary domain it inhabits, and the area of Brick Lane which a large community of working-class Bangladeshis have settled, shaped and made their home, is deep. Their exclusion from the discussion space surrounding a novel that is, to quite some degree, engaged with their culture and their home, was for them provocative. While the gurdwara is a sacred space and Brick Lane a secular one, the gurdwara's significance extends beyond doctrinal religion to Sikh culture and community, just as Brick Lane encompasses the faith of the community who live and work there. In other words, religion and religious offence cannot be separated from race and class when considering these controversies.
To make this point is also to break down the assumed split between a censorious religion and freedom of speech. The sacralisation of freedom of expression since the Rushdie affair, and its post-9/11 resurgence led by New Atheists such as Martin Amis and the late Christopher Hitchens, has entrenched both liberal and conservative perception of religions, particularly Islam, as repressive, dogmatic and violent. It is less commonly recognised that the hard secularist position also has 'fundamentalist' tendencies, such as its near deification of art (especially literature and its avatar, The Writer) and of science and Enlightenment values, often partially understood or taken on 'faith value'.
In the post-9/11 climate and bolstered by contemporary disputes, some of the novelists who were loudest in their complaints about loss of freedom of speech have written about Islamist terrorism and Islam, often in two-dimensional ways. Far from being silenced, authors such as John Updike (Terrorist), Ian McEwan (Saturday) and Sebastian Faulks (A Week in December) have much readier and more unfettered access to the mainstream media, publishing and other means of cultural expression than the people the proposed incitement to religious hatred legislation had claimed to protect. Although a few 'community leaders' are often in the press, they cannot really be said to represent most men and women of faith, and those voices that do get heard are themselves confined within a narrow frame of offence and outrage.
Minority offence at creative works can be traced in part to social and cultural disenfranchisement, or the fact that some people have more freedom and opportunities to speak than others. If we are to live together with difference in a genuinely multicultural society, we need to challenge polarised understandings of such controversies that pit secularism against religion, majority against minority.
In his new memoir Joseph Anton, Rushdie describes the fatwa against him as
an intense light shining down on everyone's choices and deeds, creating a world without shadows, a stark unequivocal place of right and wrong action, good and bad choices, yes and no, strength and weakness.
In the light of the story he is telling, of marriages, relationships, and his own safety being damaged or destroyed by the deplorable fatwa's fallout, his black-and-white analysis is understandable. However, given the violence that has ensued from George W. Bush's similarly uncompromising rhetoric, 'You're either with us or you're with the terrorists', isn't it possible to find a more storied approach to what Tariq Ali describes as this 'clash of fundamentalisms'?
Read the second part in this pair of posts, Muslims Protest Against H.G. Wells book in 1930s Britain, here.]]>Muslims Protest Against H. G. Wells Book in 1930s Britaintag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18959422012-09-19T05:27:09-04:002012-11-19T05:12:02-05:00Rehana Ahmedhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rehana-ahmed/Joseph Anton will inevitably give rise to reappraisal of the Satanic Verses affair. In this pair of articles, we look backwards and then forwards in time from this dispute to other controversies involving religious protests against creative works to add historical depth and complexity to the debate.
A little known historical precedent which dates back to August 1938 unsettles the perception that the Rushdie affair was the starting point of a series of challenges to creative freedom in the UK. Members of the Jamiat-ul-Muslimin, a British Muslim organisation whose members were predominantly working-class South Asians, gathered at one of their regular meetings in King's Hall on Commercial Road, east London. Here, according to the Guardian of 13 August 1938, they 'ceremoniously committed to the flames' a copy of H. G. Wells's A Short History of the World because of references to the Prophet Muhammad which they considered offensive. This was followed by a protest march by members of the organisation to India House, Aldwych, which accommodated the Indian High Commission in London's West End. Contrary to the public perception that Britain's Muslim minority began to find a voice of dissent only as recently as the 1980s, here we have evidence of a group of working-class East End Muslims marching west into the heart of London to assert their rights as Muslims and plead their cause with government officials.
A Short History of the World, first published in 1922, promised to be a concise form of world history for the general reader. In a chapter entitled 'Muhammad and Islam', Wells makes several disparaging remarks about the Prophet Muhammad, pronouncing him a man of 'very considerable vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception and quite sincere religious passion'. Although he states that Islam was an empowering and inspirational religion, he makes sweeping generalisations about the religion. Wells's view of the Qur'an was no less damning: for him it was 'unworthy of its alleged Divine authorship'.
The London-based demonstrations were triggered by protests in Calcutta, which themselves had been sparked by articles in the Indian press about the offensive passages in Wells's book, recently translated into Hindustani. Later, they spread further afield, to east Africa and Sindh province in what is now Pakistan. In 1989 the Satanic Verses controversy mirrored this geographical trajectory: articles and excerpts in Indian newspapers triggered protests in Bradford before going global. Rumours surrounding the Wells protests circulated widely at the time: the press claimed that protesters planned to march on Wells's house, and to burn effigies of him in front of a London mosque in Putney. Yet, these proved unfounded. In fact, the Jamiat organised a petition, signed by 136 local Muslims, most of whom worked in London's docks. They delivered the document to the High Commissioner for India, Feroz Khan Noon, at the end of their highly publicised demonstration. The march, from Bank through Fleet Street and on to India House, took the protestors past iconic landmarks including St Paul's Cathedral, the Royal Courts of Justice and several newspaper offices - British symbols of faith, justice and freedom of expression.
Feroz Khan Noon agreed to act as an intermediary and intervene on their behalf, despite his awareness that their chances were slim. And indeed, both publishers, Heinemann and Penguin Books, refused to make any changes to the text. Yet, as a fellow Muslim, Khan Noon expressed his sympathy with the protesters, and the Jamiat did receive a relatively fair hearing from British officials. While the India Office considered the Jamiat to be of little importance, the Secretary of State for India expressed in a letter to Khan Noon 'regret ... that offence should have been given to members of the deputation and those whom they represent, on a matter concerning their Faith'.
The India Office's response should also be viewed in a wider context of official awareness of and sensitivity to cultural products that could further inflame an already volatile situation among Indian communities in Britain as well as in India. For the Jamiat-ul-Muslimin's protest against H. G. Wells's book was not the only faith-based protest against a cultural work enacted by South Asian Muslims in Britain. Another contemporaneous example is worth a brief mention. Between 1935 and 1948 there was a series of objections by South Asian Muslims to pictorial representations of the Prophet Muhammad in a range of British magazines including Every Woman's Magazine, Parade, Britannia and Eve and the Mirror magazine. These objections resonate with the 2005 protests across Europe against the publications of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
The 1930s Wells protest raises important questions about freedom of expression and offence which have gained prominence in public discourse in recent years. As the debates have grown increasingly polarised, it has become imperative to consider these questions in a complex and evolving social and cultural context. Class, race and faith are central to such disputes. Why was it such a disadvantaged group of Muslims who mobilised against Wells's book? Why not their elite or middle-class counterparts who had a more powerful voice in Britain? The class status and local identity of Wells's dissenters as working-class Muslim East Enders surely played a role in their grievance and protest, as did the social position of Rushdie's Bradford-based dissenters a half century later. Lacking access to a public forum, the protestors found alternative means to make their voices heard and have their cultural and religious sensibilities recognised in the public sphere.
The protest against H. G. Wells's A Short History also demonstrates the cultural assertiveness of working-class Muslim South Asians during the period of empire. By marching from the industrial East End to the privileged West End they laid claim to public space and made their voices heard in the very heart of the imperial metropolis.