A Knife-Man Who Stabbed Salman Rushdie Puts Godliness of Religion on Test
One-time Wole Soyinka said that, ‘religion is the most brutal invention by man’. Soyinka made this statement when delivering the, ‘Slap in the Face of Public Taste,’ a title to Soyinka’s annual public lecture at the conference of the Society of Poets and Artists hosted by the Council of Development in social Science Research in Africa (CODSERIA) held at Dakar in Senegal. Soyinka said this statement a half a decade ago. When concluding, Soyinka rationalized away to forgive humanity for invention of religions because if man had not invented religion, still would have invented something else more diabolical than the bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Personally, I am not ready to forgive humanity for inventing religion which thrives on hatred, fueling of human misery, public fear and lack of respect for sanctity of human life. I am talking of religions in the class of that specific crude consciousness which propelled a man in New York to buy his way in to the hall in which Salman Rushdie was the chief speaker at art and literature festival, only for this heinous man to jump on to the podium to knife Salman Rushdie over nine times in the head and the neck.
This very bad incident happened on 12th Friday of August 2022. It left Rushdie collapsed in the pool of blood, verging on the brink of death. Anyway, thanks to good response by those that were present, they immediately airlifted Rushdie to a well-equipped hospital that responded with ventilation technology to succor Rushdie’s life. A day later, doctors predicted that it was possible to safe Rushdie out of medical danger but he may live without his left eye. It is so unfortunate, brutal and terrorizing.
This attempt to assassinate Salman Rushdie is just one of the events in the series of religious wars on the life of Salman Rushdie. The war on the life of Salman Rushdie began three decades ago when the fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie was declared by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. The word fatwa means ‘a decision by an Islamic ayatollah’. An ayatollah is a person who has read the Quran for over thirty-five years and hence has acquired spiritual rights to make infallible decisions among the Muslims. The institution of ayatollah is only limited to Islamic political civilization. That is why among Islamic states like Iran an Ayatollah enjoys substantial level of political influence. This is why Ayatollah Khomeini had significant political influence in Iran when he passed the fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie, the Islamic community around the world became bound by the decision in the fatwa by ayatollah.
The fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie was made because he had written Satanic Verses, a book in form of historical-fiction which discusses history of revelation of verses of the Quran to prophet Muhammed in the cave. When you read Step Across this Line, another book of collection of critical essays by Salman Rushdie, it is pointed out that the idea to write Satanic Verses came to Rushdie when he was a 23 years old student of history at Cambridge University.
Rushdie developed Satanic verses as a concept for an undergraduate term paper. A term paper which he was to write as a fourth-year student in order to qualify for a Cambridge degree in history. Thus, the idea of satanic verses is not a reserve of Salman Rushdie but it is an open-source idea which can be deciphered from the Quran by any keen reader. For example, when you read the ‘Noble Quran’ you encounter the Hadith told by Prophet Muhammed to his friend Abu Hurairah that when prophet Muhammed was in the Cave getting the revelation of the Quran from Allah through the Angel Jibril (Gabriel), sometimes Satan (the devil) also stole a chance to cunningly pass-off satanic revelations to prophet Muhammed. Also, the Noble Quran has some Hadith in relation to verse 255 ( Ayat ul Kursi) of Sura Al Baqarah (Second Chapter of the Quran) which narrates that Abu Hurairah who was a very close friend to Prophet Muhammed went to the Mosque to make prayers and then found a thief stealing items from the Mosque, but before Abu Hurairah could punish the thief, the thief began reciting verse 255 of the second chapter of the Quran to Abu Hurairah, this is also the most important verse in the Quran. Abu Hurairah was not able to know if that man was a thief or an angel, but when he went to report to Prophet Muhmmed, the prophet said that the man was not only a thief but it was Satan. So, the idea of communication between Satan and Muhammed, or Satan and early Muslims is not impious creation of Salman Rushdie. It is an idea which is very evident in the Quranic literatures. Thus, Salman Rushdie only gave a secular and philosophical dimension to the phenomenon of Satan’s disguised revelatory communication to prophet Muhammed, the communication he described as Satanic Verses. This was nothing near to intentions to perfect blasphemy, but only pudding intellectual overtures which under normal circumstances are to be appreciated as academic inquisitiveness of a promising student of history. A student of history who only wanted to use historical tools to make some scientific analysis to establish the percentage of satanic verses or satanic communication in the Quran.
Fair and balanced religious scholarship would have found an intellectual counter-universe in terms of literature and philosophy properly positioned textually in contradististiction to Rushdie’s intellectual disposition. Similarly, dynamics of modern civilization obliges religious socialization to take both positive lessons and negative lessons from cerebral overtures of Salman Rushdie, and obviously negative lessons are milestones in the growth of social thought, not justification for unilateral declaration by the ayatollah to condemn Salman Rushdie the harmless suspect to death before even any kind of modern trial that appreciates religious norm of fairness and equity appreciated by all religions, including dadaism and shamanism.
Let me borrow some rhetoric in Shakespeare’s question that ‘the tempter and the tempted who is a sinner?’ to pose this question- Between Ayatollah and Allah who punishes the sinners? The answer is in the Quran, ‘Allah is the one to punish the sinners not the ayatollah.’ Technically, the Quran establishes that punishment is reserved for the sinners on the judgement day, it is Allah and only Allah to punish the sinners, Allah has not delegated any powers to punish to any human being. That is why Allah is identified in Sura Al Fatiha ( the opening chapter of the Quran as Al Malik Ya Mutini-meaning the only ruler of the judgement day’, and hence no any other man shares in rulership of judgement with Allah. This is the point at which both religious and secular thinking is to converge in an agreement that let the ayatollah leave the sins of Salman Rushdie ( if at all critical and open minded literature is a sin) to be judged by Allah on the judgement day.
I am aware of the narrations by Prophet Muhammed in the Sunnah (Islamic law) and Hadith (Islamic literature) about the Jihad (violence which makes non-believers to be converted to Islam out of fear) as the basis of institutional Justification of the ayatollah’s powers to declare and implement the fatwa. What I mean is that those who believe in Jihad as a source of strengths to Islamic territoriality will obviously challenge my rejection of ayatollah’s self-justified powers to pass death sentence by arguing for the Muslim obligation to Jihad as a pillar of Islam, a pillar which might be justified as the spiritual basis upon which ayatollahs stand to execute fatwa to murder any man or woman who has personal opinion un-bounded by qur’anic consciousness. An argument which suffers from all forms of anachronisms. Though, not only peculiar to Islamic religious thought but evidently observable among all forms of semitic religious thinking, as exemplified in the selective humanity observable in practice of Aliya by Judaist Jews to those running away from Russian war on Ukraine or the lurking poverty of legal logic in the modern sense on how to positively read the Bible scriptures extolling holiness in Abraham’s spiritual heroism in his malicious aforethought to perfect criminal act of child-sacrifice.
So, it is fact that Satan has been communicating with God’s prophets. The recurrent communication which let to Satan’s words also to be recorded as verses in the holy books. Comparatively, the Bible has many cases of Satanic Verses; ranging from the words of the snake to Eve that, ‘if you eat this fruit, you will be wise like God himself,’ to the words of Satan spoken unto Jesus that; ‘You are the son of God now convert this stone to bread and eat, then climb the pinnacle and jump down your father who is God in heaven will cushion you from any hurt.’ Similarly, there are many such like communications in the Quran, it was the history of such satanic communications that Rushdie wanted to study as a young Cambridge historian by using the Quran as the basic text so that he could scientifically establish the extent of Satanic Verses in Quranic Scriptures.
If Salman Rushdie’s intellectual ventures in researching about Satanic Verses in the Quran were harmless academic inquiry, then what has been the problem? Why is the idea of Satanic Verses connected to religious violence? The problem is intolerant and illiberal religious thinking, this thinking is the cause of all problems of violent religious citizenship. However, this problem is basically social abstract constructed by those people who keep on inventing religions that react with violence whenever humanity of prophets is mentioned or whenever science proves that religion has been wrong. Such irrational violence by religion has been recorded by gifted scholars like Dava Sobel, especially in her book Galileo’s Daughter, a creative non-fiction which exposes how the Catholic church brutalized and persecuted Galileo Galilei with long jail terms for crafting a telescope which helped him to scientifically prove that the, ‘earth moves around the sun, but not the sun moving around the earth.’ Galileo was persecuted for this astrophysics discovery because it proved the Bible story about Joshua praying to God to make the sun to stop moving contrary to the natural facts.
Personally, I narrowly escaped physical violence that I would have earned from a born-again Christian who believes that Jesus Christ is God. My born again Christian friend also a PhD holder in Nano-chemistry was very violent on me when I pointed out to him that Jesus was Son of Mary; he had brothers and sisters, he suckled, ate, urinated, visited toilet, used to put on clothes, used to read, visited India, fought with his young brother Jude over food and Jude won the fight, that Jesus lost his father Joseph at age of twenty-six hence lost is mother Mary to bombazine( compulsory six years of self-isolation by new widows in old Israel ) , and that Jesus was a victim of poverty growing up in country that was a colony of Roman empire. My irascible PhD friend went wild with ire and violence when I also mentioned to him that Jesus was not God but a prophet of God, that Jesus also worshipped God. My PhD friend was in a murderous fit when I mentioned to him Berber Thiering’s research in Christ the Man and Christ of Apocalypse, the two books in which Thiering worked towards establishing that Jesus might have had romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene. My PhD friend went amok over me when I also mentioned to him that the letter of Paul to Galatians in which he wrote that, ‘You foolish Galatians who bewitched you…?’ are not the words of God revealed to Paul but the words of Plato written in Apologia a book by Plato accusing the foolish city state of Athenians for persecuting Socrates. Hence Paul used these words in his letter without doing proper citation, attribution and referencing.
Maybe a young Kenyan girl reading this article will ask me that who is this old man called Salman Rushdie you are talking about and we have never been taught about him in literature and history at our college? Dear daughter, this is the answer; Salman Rushdie is a novelist and book writer. He was born in India in the mid of the last century. He was born in an Indian Muslim family. His father was a successful business man, Salman Rushdie was brought in Islamic environment. Salman went to Cambridge University to study history. That is where he conceived the idea of Satanic Verses.
However, Satanic Verses was not his first novel to write nor his best novel. The best book ever written by Salman Rushdie is Midnight’s Children it is intellectually controversial and informative. But so far it has not caused any unrest. Other books by Salman Rushdie are; Two years Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights (reviewed by Alexander Opicho in the Awaaz Magazine), The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Imaginary Homelands, Victory City, Chalimar the Clown, Harun and the Sea of Stories, Quichotte, Shame , Fury, Luka and the Fire of Life, Language of Truth, Enchantress and the Moor’s last Sigh. He has also written Cinema’s like the Wizard of OZ. He is Pen America’s man of the year and Booker Prize winner.
In Satanic Verses, Rushdie goes beyond archival themes of the Iqra (revelation of the Quran) to explore fictive life of character known as a Mahound. Mahound, a fictional character is presented as a religious man, spiritual leader with all human challenges, Mahound is seen to be falling in love severally. Sometimes his lovers cheat on him with other men. In fact, Salman Rushdie uses Mahound to portray a clear picture of humanity of the spiritual leaders and prophets, a topic which is mostly treated as untouchable by almost all religious institutions. That is why selfish and parochial reading of Satanic Verses, can easily misdirect one to think that Mahound is an innuendo used against Prophet Muhammed, but extensive analysis of the text proves otherwise, Mahound the main character in Satanic Verses, is only a microcosm of the humanity of the prophethood for all religions but not only Islam.
The above-mentioned kind of misunderstanding led the world to witness some un-wavering series of religious wars perpetrated by the Ayatollah of Iran on to the simple life of Salman Rushdie. This war went on throughout the last two decades of the last century. Some good luck was seen towards the end of the last century at a time when the Ayatollah declared that he had called for universal withdrawal of fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie. However objective study of religious diplomacy reveals that this withdrawal of the fatwa by the ayatollah was closely connected with good players in the religious globalization, in the likes of Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabbin. Some scholars have also associated the détente in the fatwa to the fall of the Soviet Union. But all in all, the world believed the word of Ayatollah, the Ayatollah also lived in peace until he died a decade and some years later from the date of withdrawal of the fatwa.
Shift sands of fortune has changed with the current resurgence of Islamic State extremism , coming back of the strong military institutions in Russia, the rise of economic and military mighty in China, the waning economic and intellectual power of America, the persistent British economic as well as political convalescence during the Brexit, and the finally the unfettered takeover of Afghanistan by Taliban military rulers, the world witnessed again another fresh Ayatollah coming to power in Iran to reinstate the fatwa on Rushdie, a decision which must have culminated into the stabbing of Rushdie in New York on 12th August 2022.
The above event must be condemned as it deserves by directing its perpetrators to the position of the media in America and Europe, which has reacted to Knife-man’s attempt to assassinate Rushdie by pointing out that Rushdie is voice of reason that cannot be silenced by a religious maniac’s knife. I also, acknowledge Salman Rushdie as a global- class intellectual Machine that is so avuncular to Africa. Rushdie is an Indian who respects and recognizes dignity of black people. Unlike V. S. Naipaul who admonished everything African to an extent of dismissing Soyinka’s Nobel recognition as urinating on literature, Rushdie is contrastingly a friend of African literature, who has evidently been reading objectively and appreciating African literature. He has been writing and speaking against racist violation of the black people in America and all other parts of the world. His latest book the Golden House argues for the rights of the migrant workers. In a nutshell, Rushdie is a full-time crusader of intellectual freedom and rights of those living in the counter-universe.
Saddening enough, the free-floating current history of persecution of writers openly shows that Rushdie is not the only victim of persecution by religious irrationality, very many other good writers and scholars are suffering from this kind of social brutality. If we take an African example, Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Novelist, Nobel prize winner and author of Children of Gebalawi was fatally stabbed by a religious extremist. Another Egyptian Novelist, author of Woman at Point Zero, Sadawi El Naawal also had to spent her entire life in fear and poverty, she was on a fatwa list. This is also the same kind of troubled life the Indian poet and feminist writer, Taslim Nasreen has been going through. This is why it is timely for the right-thinking global citizens to stand arm in arm with Salman Rushdie by asking the government of America and other governments around the world to give him protection. Not just capstone protection, but also for the world governments to work collectively on establishing effective inter-governmental institutional infrastructures that can facilitate responsive physical and legal protection to persecuted writers in the likes of Tsitsi Dangarembga.
Just the same way Rushdie has been persecuted by religion that is not tolerant to intellectual otherness, Tsitsi Dangarembga, the Zimbabwean writer, author of Nervous Conditions and This Mournable Body is also undergoing series of persecutions, the current government of her home country, Zimbabwe is terrorizing her by instituting far-fetched criminal charges against her. The charges that threaten her with very long jail terms. For no other reason but for saying that in ‘Zimbabwe there is freedom of expression, but no freedom after expression’. In the real sense, it is evident that Dangarembga is not perpetrating fiction but she is only pointing out political excesses in current Zimbabwe. What she is doing is not bad, but a democratic virtue that must be appreciated for the sake of achieving good governance. Good governance which cannot be achieved without seismographic input of open-minded writers giving warning about potential volcanoes and earth-quakes in the earth of our social systems as once observed by Ben Okri. An observation which gives us a lesson that politics that forces writers into silence puts its democracy on test, just the same way religion that rewards a knife-man who wanted to Kill Salman Rushdie on the podium at Art Festival in New York puts Godliness of its faith on test.
Alexander Opicho writes from Nairobi, Kenya)