Beyond Politics of Blasphemy, We Still Need to Understand Islamic World

To many Americans, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death sentence on author Salman Rushdie seems to be a throwback to medieval times. In an age when there is no uniformity or agreement on what constitutes truth, how can there be an offense against God?

Yet it would be foolish to dismiss the worldwide Muslim reaction against “The Satanic Verses” as mere fanaticism; one needs to understand it as a critical instance of the collision between Western and non-Western cultures.

From the viewpoint of Islamic law, Khomeini’s ruling is problematic. Blasphemy presupposes a community that finds it offensive, and Rushdie, an Indian-born Muslim residing in England, would seem to fall outside the jurisdiction of the Shiite scholars of Iran (although Rushdie to my knowledge has not indicated his family’s religious leaning, I assume for the sake of argument that he is technically Sunni). In the Hanafi school of Islamic law, which is dominant in India and Pakistan, blasphemy as an insult against God and the prophets is largely construed as a religious offense. The punishment is also religious. It invalidates participation in religious rituals, annuls marriages and voids inheritances and property. The stringent Islamic rules of evidence require confession for conviction, and repentance restores all rights forfeited by blasphemy. Blasphemy is considered as a capital crime only when it goes beyond mockery to become apostasy from Islam or heresy, which historically were crimes treated as treason against the state.

The speed and vehemence with which Khomeini delivered the death sentence, and his refusal to accept the possibility of repentance, indicate that the offense of Rushdie’s book must be seen initially in political terms.

The Shiite branch that is dominant in Iran has stressed the primary authority of living religious scholars, rather than the written tradition of the past. After the 1979 revolution, the Iranian religious classes attained an unprecedented political status through Khomeini’s theory of the guardian-jurist. The ayatollah’s ruling in the Rushdie case is an assertion of his right to make an independent judgment regardless of legal precedents. By claiming jurisdiction over Rushdie, Khomeini also seems to be making the extraordinary claim that he has religious authority over all Muslims worldwide, not just the approximately 15% who are Shiite.

Khomeini describes Rushdie’s book as “an imperialist plot against Islam.” Yet his use of Islamic religious language should not disguise the primarily political intention of the death warrant. Khomeini is internationalizing the anti-imperialist focus of the Iranian revolution. The cynical offer of a multimillion-dollar bounty, as an inducement for those to whom heaven is not enough, is a very earthly piece of rhetoric. From the viewpoint of the revolution, merely making the threat is everything; actually accomplishing it would almost be anticlimax.

This political confrontation is the outcome of a long-simmering cultural conflict between the West and the Islamic countries, but Muslim reactions have been far from uniform. Arab spokesmen have largely deplored the Rushdie book as anti-religious, but have shrunk from approving Khomeini’s death threat. The responses against “The Satanic Verses” in Pakistan and India are determined by local politics as much as by the example of Iran: Opponents of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan see this as a golden opportunity to attack her with religious rhetoric, and Muslim leaders in New Delhi have tactical objectives of their own as well.

The novel is the supreme literary vehicle of the expressive individualism of the modern West, and its adoption by Muslim writers is in part a legacy of Europe’s 150 years of colonial domination over Islamic countries. Yet most Muslim novelists have used this form either for social and political ends, or to reveal the psychological dilemmas of post-colonial societies.

Rushdie has gone to an extreme in adopting the premises of the modern Western writer, and his writing is testimony to the psychological disintegration caused by alienation from one’s own culture. His sarcastic and cynical devaluation of the Prophet Mohammed, often using the most anti-Islamic concepts of European Orientalism, shows how far his alienation has proceeded. The Muslim horror at his blasphemy is an instinctive revulsion against the threat of losing one’s culture.

If the Western reaction is limited to a lofty condemnation of restrictions on free speech, then we will see nothing but more confrontation between irreconcilable worlds. Each side will fall into the stereotyped role expected by the other. The only positive step that can be taken at this point is to enlarge our concept of the “Western” world and to realize that Muslims are ultimately part of the same community. If non-Muslims can begin to understand why “The Satanic Verses” has outraged one-fourth of the world’s population, we shall be a little closer to getting beyond the politics of blasphemy.