The collision between liberalism and Islam continues, and it will go on. A piece in Saturday’s Torygraph quotes author Salman Rushdie’s words from his lecture given on the occasion of receiving the PEN/Pinter prize,
In his PEN/Pinter Prize Lecture, the author said all religions have their extremists but “the overwhelming weight of the problem lies in the world of Islam”.
. . . Rushdie defined “jihadi-cool” as “the deformed medievalist language of fanaticism, backed up by modern weaponry”, saying: “It’s hard not to conclude that this hate-filled religious rhetoric, pouring from the mouths of ruthless fanatics into the ears of angry young men, has become the most dangerous new weapon in the world today”.
He said: “A word I dislike greatly, ‘Islamophobia’, has been coined to discredit those who point at these excesses, by labelling them as bigots. But in the first place, if I don’t like your ideas, it must be acceptable for me to say so, just as it is acceptable for you to say that you don’t like mine. Ideas cannot be ring-fenced just because they claim to have this or that fictional sky god on their side.
“And in the second place, it’s important to remember that most of those who suffer under the yoke of the new Islamic fanaticism are other Muslims…
“It is right to feel phobia towards such matters. As several commentators have said, what is being killed in Iraq is not just human beings, but a whole culture. To feel aversion towards such a force is not bigotry. It is the only possible response to the horror of events.
“I can’t, as a citizen, avoid speaking of the horror of the world in this new age of religious mayhem, and of the language that conjures it up and justifies it, so that young men, including young Britons, led towards acts of extreme bestiality, believe themselves to be fighting a just war.”
And if you say that Reza Aslan represents one strain of Islam, so Rushdie respresents the views of someone who is an apostate, subject to assassination attempts and the infamous fatwa about Satanic Verses. Aslan can whitewash his faith till the cows come home, but there is now only one religion that issues official calls for death to those who write books they don’t like.
I wonder what Aslan would say about that fatwa: that it’s is purely cultural and not religious to sanction murder towards someone who writes about apocryphal verses in a holy book?
Rushdie had a few choice words for other religionists as well:
“It’s fair to say that more than one religion deserves scrutiny. Christian extremists in the United States today attack women’s
liberties and gay rights in language they claim comes from God. Hindu extremists in India today are launching an assault on free expression and trying, literally, to rewrite history, proposing the alteration of school textbooks to serve their narrow saffron dogmatism.
“But the overwhelming weight of the problem lies in the world of Islam, and much of it has its roots in the ideological language of blood and war emanating from the Salafist movement within Islam, globally backed by Saudi Arabia.”
For these ideologues, “modernity itself is the enemy, modernity with its language of liberty, for women as well as men, with its insistence of legitimacy in government rather than tyranny, and with its stroninclination towards secularism and away from religion.”




















