46. On Being on the Religious Front Line.

Dearly Beloved,

Sometimes one's life is affected by things that happen far away, and over which one has no control.

In 1988 I was in Oman working on the border with the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). I had up to that time had very good relationships with the people with whom I worked, mostly 'Ibadi Muslims but some Sunnis too. They would pray five times a day and I would sit behind them quietly in contemplative prayer. There were often religious discussions; my companions would have liked me to convert to Islam, there was a vague misconception about the Trinity, an anxiety that I might be worshiping three Gods. But my reply to these problem was that we all worshiped the same God.

Then like a thunderclap far away, Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses was published in London. Immediately everything changed. The problem was that the book contained an unpleasant and morbid insult to the Prophet Mohammed and his family. I shall not repeat it here because it is not fit for this letter. The book had the extraordinary effect of uniting all the factions of Islam in condemnation. The problem was that the passage in question, and indeed the whole tone of the book, was so insulting to my Muslim colleagues that they believed it must have been written by an enemy and that it was a conspiracy against Muslims. I tried to explain that Rushdie was using the tradition of western individualism to express a view peculiar to himself and his experience of Islam (he was reared a Muslim but was an apostate).

I had a very tough three days on the border being questioned and lectured by three of my Muslim colleagues who had all been to local universities. They had a detailed knowledge of Christianity especially the parts with which they disagreed. We stayed at the mess of an engineering regiment; and I can remember the Indian mess waiter smiling with a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment as the Englishman was confronted with the perfidy of his culture.

The British were up to that time popular in Oman because there had been a Communist insurgency over that border from PDRY, and it had taken five years up to 1975 to contain it and drive the insurgents back over the border into Yemen. The British military had played a major part. During their occupation the communists had, in their characteristic way, tried to destroy the structure of the society they had hoped to take over by killing and mistreating key Muslims, especially the 'alum who were the sources of knowledge of the meaning of the Quran and hadith (the sayings of the Prophet) and the Qadi, the experts in Islamic jurisprudence. So the “Englayzi”, as we were called, were most favoured. Yet Rushdie's book destroyed much of that trust and favour, instead suspicion, distance and disagreement had come in their place.

When I later returned to London I attended a literary party and was able to discuss the book and my experience with some senior people in the publishing business. I was quite surprised to find that these bright, Oxbridge educated creatures had no interest in Islam, in the problems that the book had caused in a Muslim country and the way it had, in a single move, profoundly alienated two cultures. Instead they were focused on the freedom to publish being at risk and a desire to defend books from bonfires. By that time an Iranian cleric had sentenced Rusdi to death by fatwa. I was forced to realise that I was operating in two cultures with implacably irreconcilable ideas. My harmonious working relationships with my Muslim colleagues never fully recovered and I had to accept that.

Rushdie had every imaginable honour piled upon him in the West and was knighted for services to literature. Almost the entirety of Western culture supported Rushdie's right to publish his books, those beautifully written scripts containing exquisitely disruptive and divisive ideas.

In 2006 one of the armed policemen who had, for a number of years, protected Rushdie from retribution, decided to write a book about that experience. Rushdie's immediate response was to call it “lies” and apply to the British courts for its suppression under our famously severe libel laws. In due time the author, his ghostwriter and the publisher all trooped into court to give unconditional apologies to Rushdie.

Western culture survives on the safety valves of disputation, which often helps us to avoid violence. This is a long tradition. Jesus himself was quick and able in disputation. He was entangled in borders and divisions between the Jewish people and the Roman occupiers of Judea, a relationship which, after His death, would explode in the first of the Jewish Revolts. There were also disputes between the different factions of the temple in Jerusalem. Those factional disputes were to become the proximal cause of Jesus's crucifixion.

We humans feel the need to dominate the argument. It is not for nothing that Christ emphasised humility and that the second part of Christ's golden rule is “love thy neighbour as thyself“ which (should) reduce our antagonism to interlocutors with whom we disagree. Jesus is also a prophet of Islam.

Peace

Paul.

Completed 16 October 2020

Photo: Paul Munton
Saint and Devil,  porch of the Abbaye St Pierre, Beaulieu Sur Dordogne, Lot, France



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