Facile Devji is not as crazy as Shruti Kapila but he is putting a lot of effort into getting the silver medal for being the stupidest Asian origin Professor at Oxbridge.
He has an article titled 'Rushdie and the Neoliberal Culture Wars' in the Boston Review. He asserts- 'Far from a metaphysical battle between fanaticism and tolerance, the Rushdie affair exemplifies the marketization of hurt sentiments.'
This is nonsense. The Rushdie affair had to do with either laws relating to blasphemy and apostacy of the sort that existed in Iran- which is what led to the death sentence- or else offending the sentiments of a particular religious group as was the case in India. In Europe and America neither type of law protected Islam. It was the illegal, extra-territorial, manner in which the Iranian regime sought to have Rushdie killed, in conformity with their own law, which created a diplomatic crisis. Later, the Iranians agreed not to actively pursue the matter and most people thought that Rushdie would remain safe. Sadly, a socially isolated young man of Lebanese Shia heritage attacked Rushdie, who did not have a bodyguard, and severely wounded him. All this had nothing to do with 'marketization' or 'hurt sentiments' or 'neoliberalism' or even the 'Culture Wars'. The only reason there was a 'Rushdie affair' was because Iran was claiming leadership of Islam. Because of the failed War on Terror, it now has a lot of influence and power in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza strip. It may be that the Rushdie's attacker will explicitly mention the Hezbollah- an ally of Iran- as motivating his actions. On the other hand, the fellow may be a Sirhan Sirhan type- i.e. mentally unbalanced. Still, there is a geopolitical significance to the action. Had Hezbollah or some other outfit claimed credit for the attack then a particular type of signal would have been sent. Maybe, if nothing comes of ongoing negotiations with Iran, this will indeed be the outcome.
Devji takes a different view. He thinks the Rushdie affair is really about some internal squabble between Western liberals.
The brutal attack on novelist Salman Rushdie at a public lecture in Chautauqua, New York, last month has prompted a flood of revealing responses from liberals in the West.
This is false. There is nothing revealing about turgid shite of the sort Devji himself produces.
In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik decried the enduring “terrorist” threat to “liberal civilization” in rhetoric that might well have been issued by the administration of George W. Bush. (Even law enforcement has declined to link the assault to terrorism.) Meanwhile, Graeme Wood, writing in the Atlantic, likens criticism of texts to complicity in assassination, while Bernard-Henri Lévy’s predictable diatribe against fanaticism calls for a “campaign” to “ensure” that Rushdie wins this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature—a cause New Yorker editor David Remnick has now joined, too.
Actually, the Nobel thing might well happen. Sweden has turned to the Right.
If it shocks us that the novelist was attacked after so long, it should also shock us that this commentary looks much the same as it did when his life was first threatened more than thirty years ago.
Why? These cretins just vomit up the same shite anytime they can get paid to do so.
The defining feature of liberal exasperation over free speech is a dogmatic repudiation of history.
No it isn't. The defining feature is a dogmatic appeal to liberal principles regardless of historical context. Should Bertrand Russell have been locked up during the First War? The dogmatic liberal will say no. The actual Liberals ruling the country said 'this pacifist nutter can say what he likes but if he shits on the Americans just because they are joining the war then we will lock him up for the duration.'
In place of careful analysis of particular (and therefore changing) circumstances, it relies on stereotype and anecdote to depict a metaphysical conflict between religious fanaticism and liberal tolerance—one that is always and everywhere the same.
Facile won't give any 'careful analysis'. He will just say White liberals be all dogmatic and shite and that is like totes the same as SLAVERY and White coppers shooting down us righteous niggers and why can't all you White peeps just stop being so fucking white?
The erasure of context is striking. You will search these pieces in vain for any distinction between the original protests following the September 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses and Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for Rushdie’s death months later, in February 1989. The effect is to obscure perhaps the central historical question: how, exactly, the publication of Rushdie’s novel became a global geopolitical phenomenon that resulted in the threat to his life.
But the same can be said for this shite Facile is dashing off. The plain fact is, in 1988, the Iranian Govt. offered money for the killing of Rushdie. If the killer was Iranian the reward was doubled. The aim was clear. Iran was laying claim to the leadership of Islam. This represented an existential threat to certain Sunni regimes in the region. That is why the current attack is seen through the same lens. Iran may be using its proxy, Hezbollah, to further its own hegemonic ambitions.
You will also search in vain for even the most basic awareness of Muslim legal history and culture, passing familiarity with which can’t help but revise one’s understanding of the Rushdie affair. It is no surprise that these commentators persist in using the wrong terminology by calling Khomeini’s pronouncement a fatwa;
which is what it was for non-Iranians. Khomeini was a jurist and as such his pronouncement could be seen as a legal opinion. But it could not be a command- or positive law. Why? Iran had no jurisdiction over Rushdie.
as the Washington Post explained two and a half decades ago, it was in fact a hukm. (A fatwa is issued by a religious authority in response to a hypothetical question and possesses no legal force, while a hukm, or decree by the head of state, represents the intervention of a government.)
But a law has no legal force outside the jurisdiction in which it was promulgated. It may have some value as a legal opinion but it is not binding. In any case, in traditional Usuli jurisprudence, hukms issued by mujtahids were not different from fatwas save in that the former were limited by jurisdiction. But Sultans or other Rulers also issue hukms. Fatwas are supposed to be universal.
In practice other jurists, especially in different jurisdictions, had to certify the mujhtahid status of the hukm issuing jurist and even then the thing was generally ignored by those who had actual power.
To conclude- there probably is a hukm to kill Rushdie which makes it legal to do so on Iranian soil. But Iran wasn't saying its hukms apply to Europe or America or Saudi Arabia etc. It called the thing a 'fatwa'. True, if the mujtahids of another Shia jurisdictions recognized the Ayatollah as a mujtahid, then the fatwa would be a hukm of that territory. But no such territory existed.
Facile is pretending that he has some emic knowledge. He doesn't. He is as stupid as shit. Also, the sect to which his ancestors belonged might suddenly find itself declared apostate in Hanafi areas. Don't play the Islamic card if bearded guys on Twitter might turn on you and denounce you as little better than a Qadiani.
It was the Western press, not Iran, that insisted on calling the declaration of fatwa—a tellingly ignorant but typical conflation of politics and religion (and exactly what liberals accuse Muslim fanatics of doing).
All this is nonsense. Iranian diplomats have used the word fatwa both for the Rushdie affair as well as the supposed forbidding of nuclear weapons by the Supreme Leader. Why? This gives them wriggle room. Obviously, all judgments- and a fatwa is a judgment if given by a mujtahid in a Shia jurisdiction- are defeasible by some process of appeal or clemency or whatever. So, Facile is babbling false and stupid shite.
Nor does the liberal conceit of an unchanging battle between fanaticism and tolerance illuminate the specific Muslim arguments against Rushdie, which were more about secular hurt than sin.
The specific Muslim argument against Rushdie is that he has totally misrepresented the beautiful religion of his own parents and ancestors so as to make money and gain fame. At least the cunt should have pretended to be a Commie like most other such deracinated cretins.
Rushdie’s American attacker, born in California and living in New Jersey, undoubtedly believed he was defending Islam, but his motivations share a great deal with his country’s more familiar culture of violence. By all accounts he was fixated by a marginal cause, one that has been of no interest to recent Sunni militancy and is not a live issue in Shia Iran, either.
This is crazy shit. The guy had visited his dad in Lebanon recently. Hezbollah is active there. It is directly linked to Iran. Currently, the Lebanese economy is in very dire straits. It is possible that some relatives of the attacker will get much needed hard currency or other benefits from Iran or its proxies in the region.
Apart from some official glee in Tehran and some scattered support on social media, the attack was more or less ignored by Muslims globally. In short, Rushdie was correct in thinking there was no longer a systematic threat against him.
But he should have spent a little money on a body-guard or at least got a concealed carry permit. The fact is 'blasphemy beheadings' had revived recently in the sub-continent.
Perhaps the most glaring context omitted from these accounts, given their banal propagandizing on behalf of free speech, are the threats to free expression with which this anti-Islamic rhetoric is linked—from the radical diminution of the civil liberties of all Americans (to say nothing of the human rights of non-Americans) in the West’s post–9/11 security states, carried out in the name of the War on Terror, to the U.S. government’s hunting down of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning.
This stupid cunt does not get that liberal nutters support crazy folk like Assange and Snowden an so forth. The rest of us don't. But we aint liberal. We think Religion is a good thing but we don't want foreigners killing people on our soil. That's perfectly reasonable.
These responses to the challenge of global Islam, inaugurated by the Rushdie affair at the end of the Cold War, represent threats to freedom wider and more profound than the easy contrast between fanaticism and tolerance can explain.
How would Facile know? He is too stupid to understand anything.
The first thing to note about the Rushdie affair is that it had little to do with theology.
This would only be true if Rushdie did not have a theological motive in writing the book. My observation, at that time, was that Rushdie appeared to believe that the Archangelic faculty was like Iqbal's 'khuddi' which (for Iqbal was influenced by Nietzsche) was beyond or below Good and Evil. This linked up to some sort of Jungian esoteric psychology which could take on a Sufi tinge. By itself, this was not untypical. The American series 'Supernatural' features something similar- God turns out to be the bad guy!- and it was certainly part of the zeitgeist of the Sixties and Seventies. Iqbal seems to have influenced Khameni and there were similar cross-currents in Persian literature of the late Nineteenth Century which reappeared in the Sixties. I have zero interest in 'occult' shite or syncretic mysticism but there may be a good scholarly work on such tendencies under the Shah.
While Islamic tradition does proscribe abusing sacred figures,
by chopping off heads which, gotta say, is sometimes the best thing to do with heads stuffed with shit
its terms and debates have rarely featured in the controversy or since.
Only if you ignore debates in Urdu, Farsi, Arabic etc.
Occurring initially among Muslims of South Asian descent in Britain, and then moving back to India and Pakistan, the first protests against The Satanic Verses deployed a nineteenth-century colonial vocabulary that had been enshrined in the Indian Penal Code of 1860.
Nonsense! Only the 1927 Act could be invoked. But why would British Pakistani Muslims do so? Zia had brought in Sharia Law by then.
The 1860 act allowed Missionaries and British journalists to publish what they liked and distribute what they pleased so as to blackguard Islam and Hinduism to their heart's content. What was forbidden was Public Order offences like deliberately defiling a place of worship or disturbing worshippers or insulting such people by word or gesture. These obviously only applied to natives- that too of the meaner sort.
Itself a secular document meant to allow the British to govern a religiously diverse society, the code disavowed blasphemy and penalized hurting religious sentiments instead.
But not if it was done by publishing a book or pamphlet. There is no mention of 'hurt sentiments' in the 1860 Code. Had there been, there would have been little missionary activity and the English newspapers would have been tame affairs. British law in India was exactly like its law in Ireland at that time. Thus a guy who deliberately put on an Orange emblem to go pick a fight with Catholics could be sent to jail because he was clearly a ruffian. But a Protestant Minister was welcome to denounce the Pope as the Whore of Babylon.
It was this specifically South Asian terminology about the hurt sentiments of believers in all religions, not the true faith of one, that was globalized in the Rushdie affair.
No it wasn't. British Muslims demanded that the Prophet Muhammad pbuh be accorded the same legal protection as Lord Jesus Christ. In 1977, blasphemous libel was proved against a Gay magazine which had published a poem about post-crucifixion sodomy involving a centurion. Thankfully, even Rushdie didn't stoop that low. Still, the law might have been amended if the Saudis and so forth had got behind it. The Government could have debated the matter. The problem was that Rushdie had insulted Thatcher and the British police in the same book. Thus the taxpayer had to protect that loathsome fellow.
Indians may talk of hurt sentiments but by a Supreme Court judgment of 1961, it must be the hurt sentiment of a particular sect. It can't be that of all theists. This is because the Court decided that the utterances of an atheist are incapable of hurting or offending believers.
Facile is simply ignorant though, to be fair, he isn't Indian and is probably repeating some shite he read in a fellow academic's book.
Muslim protests and violence over insults to Muhammad first emerged in colonial India during the middle of the nineteenth century.
Hilarious! Thomas of Tolentino was martyred in Thane in 1321 for, very foolishly, saying to a Qadi presiding over a Muslim Law Court that the Prophet's father was the Devil. There was no need for him to make any such statement. He should have said 'we Christians believe there is no Prophet after Christ' which was true but not blasphemous or insulting to anybody.
They had to do with the creation of a market in publishing through mass circulation by way of the printing press.
To be fair, Urdu and other translations of the Quran Sharif and other sacred texts had wide circulation in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth century.
Rather than any traditional dispute between theologians, in other words, press stories about Muhammad not only lacked theological import but were addressed to an anonymous public.
They were addressed to an Indian public. Indians don't like to see venerable figures subjected to vulgar abuse. What is the harm in dwelling on the good qualities of those who dedicated themselves to God? Why pretend they were all fornicators or hooligans?
They were justified on the grounds of free speech,
Why justify hagiography on those grounds? It is a duty for good and pious people to promote the circulation of good and pious texts.
itself modeled on free trade in proposing the market as a site at which true value,
Economics has no concept of 'true value'. Either there are market clearing prices or the thing isn't really a free market.
whether economic or religious, emerged through the impersonal operation of an invisible hand—that is, through the marketplace of ideas.
This is wholly untrue. The British had strong laws against seditious libel. There was no free market for any such ideas. Nor was there a free market for land in many Provinces. Cultivators could not sell land to those classed as non-agriculturalists. There were Princes and Zamindars and Taluqdars who had the right to inflict corporal punishment and who were immune from arrest on their own Estates. Facile is simply ignorant.
Given the unavailability of political freedoms in colonial societies, Muslim protesters took the market as their arena of operations. Accepting its non-religious character, they invoked a protectionist argument, asking for their hurt sentiments to be recognized in the same way as libel and defamation laws did for other kinds of offensive speech under British law.
Baloney. Muslims killed those who insulted their religion or, if they couldn't, they were ignored or their status declined . Bleating about 'hurt sentiments' would have made that community as abject as the grass eating Banias who, for reputational purposes, were prepared to spend money on piteous petitions of that sort. After Muslims had been ethnically cleansed or otherwise rendered docile, some Indian politicians did pretend they were protecting 'the weaker community'. It was eye-wash. Muslims aint stupid. That's why India needs them. If they really were whiney little bitches, the Government would have taken over all their Waqfs and looted them long ago. The plain fact is that Indians consider Muslims to have martial spirit and esprit de corps. They do well in the Army and the Police and the Defence Research Establishment. On the other hand, some Muslim diplomats- Salman Haider, Hamid Ansari- were almost Mani Shankar Aiyar level anti-national.
It is true that there was a semi-Hinduized (or semi-Islamized) 'Khoja' community which did have barristers and entrepreneurs who were part of the Ranade-Gokhale tradition. But they didn't gas on about the invisible hand. They weren't Classical liberals. Dadhabhai Naoroji had seen to that.
The only theological category in these debates was the idea of an invisible hand.
But the 'invisible hand' is just the Biblical 'oikonomia mysterion'- or Katechon which keeps the Eschaton at bay. In India, it could not be a 'theological category' because either the administration does famine relief or revenues collapse. Laissez faire is off the table.
The title of Rushdie’s novel refers to a contested incident from the life of Muhammad, when he briefly agreed to compromise with his polytheist rivals by agreeing to accept their goddesses as intercessors with God.
No. The story is that he was deceived by 'Satanic' verses. The point of the story is to show that the Prophet wants to make things as easy as possible for his people. Moses, similarly, was depicted as pleading with God to reduce the number of commandments. This type of apocrypha has a good purpose. It shows the young seminarian that Religion is about helping ordinary people by making it easier to follow God's commandments.
No theist has ever suggested that any Prophet or Divine Personality went around striking deals with non-believers as to what should constitute orthodoxy. On the other hand, tyrants have tried to get themselves worshipped as Gods.
Soon, however, he declared the verses recognizing them in the Quran as a satanic interpolation. Whether Satan could interrupt God is a real theological question,
There was no 'interruption'. Just as Jesus was tempted by Satan in the desert so too, in this story, the Prophet was depicted as being made a tempting offer for a wicked purpose. I suppose Saints and Religious leaders have been cajoled or threatened by tyrants and maybe this still happens in some places. But that has nothing to do with theology. There is a separate 'imkan-e-kizb' controversy about whether God can lie or change his mind.
and Rushdie made brilliant use of this anecdote to reflect upon the meaning of literary creation and authorship.
But Quran Sharif is no more a 'literary creation' than the Bible or the Veda. All are uncreated. That is the theological position. (True, there was a Mutazilite movement a long time ago and some polemicists pretend their enemies are covert-Mutazilites but nobody bothers with the matter).
Tellingly, however, complaints against Rushdie never focused on this theological reference.
There was no 'theological reference'. The story is part of apocrypha of a type which Indian Islam had carefully distinguished centuries previously. Rushdie himself comes from a decent, pious, upper middle class, professional family where all this was well known. Indeed, even ignorant Hindus like me learn these things in the introductory texts we study in College while waiting to take the Civil Service exams.
His Muslim critics were only interested in a dream sequence where the women in a house of prostitution were given the names of the Prophet’s wives.
Ajamis didn't like him showing Salman Farsi as an apostate when actually it was an Arab. This is like depicting Bilal in a bad light because you hate Black people.
Why did theological debate suddenly give way in the nineteenth century to a focus on Muhammad as amenable to insult and offense?
Nothing of the sort happened. Maratha, Sikhs, and later the Brits were not Muslim. Theological debate was otiose when power was passing to non-Muslim hands. True, some Missionaries might have insulted Muhammad but killing them just meant getting slaughtered and looted. On the other other hand, one could assert oneself against weaker communities more particularly if you were paying land revenue and they weren't.
Islam’s modernization in colonial times meant its rationalization, which involved
establishing Pakistan. That's it. Who gets to rule is important. Talking bollocks isn't. Similarly, the Hindus got their Hindu dominated India and the Ceylonese and Burmese got their own ethno-Buddhist states not by rationalizing anything but jut by agreeing to hang together rather than obsess over sectarian differences.
stripping the Prophet of many superhuman traits to make him a perfect, though fully mortal, figure.
Orthodox Islam has no problem with this. Jesus is the 'seal of the miracle-workers' as Muhammad is the 'seal of the Prophets'. King Solomon may have commanded genies but that age has past. People want to live decently and be reunited with their families in Heaven. Super-powers are for comic book heroes.
Muhammad came to be seen as a model father, husband, and statesman, allowing his followers to identify with him. While God, who retained his transcendence, could neither be identified with nor insulted,
Islamic law recognizes blasphemy against Allah.
the all-too human prophet had become vulnerable to any perceived abuse. Correspondingly, Muslims could take offense.
Stomping peeps wot call you a cunt or your Mum a whore or your God a Devil is a 'bourgeois strategy'. Sadly you can't indulge in it if you are too weak. In that case, you should think about relocating coz guys who insult you and get away with it are likely to beat you and rob you next time round. If you can't retaliate or run away, you will be a slave in all but name.
This was an issue in which theology could only play an indirect role, chiefly by way of Christianity in using the term blasphemy.
This is simply not true. If Muslims were able to punish insults to the Prophet, they did so. The problem was insults to the Companions. This remained a live issue in the formerly Shia ruled state of Oudh. The Sunnis launched the 'Madhe Sahaba Agitation'. The Brits tended to side with the Shias but the issue became envenomed and spread to Pakistan after Independence.
We should recall that one of the demands of British Muslim protesters in 1988 was that their sanctities be included in the UK’s since rescinded blasphemy laws that had hitherto protected only the Church of England.
I think the demand was for the book to be banned. Suggestions were made that all Religions receive equal protection. The problem was that firebrand preachers would be the first in the dock. Also, all sorts or innocuous people might be prosecuted. Consider Ireland's foolish decision to define an offense of blasphemy. Stephen Fry came under it and so a referendum had to be held to get rid of the thing.
The Muslim protesters, then and now, offer no alternatives to liberalism but ask only for what they see as inclusion into it.
Hilarious!
Such demands take the form of protectionist measures in the marketplace of ideas modeled on libel and defamation law or invoking Christian notions of blasphemy.
A demand can't take the form of a measure. There can be a demand for a measure of some sort- e.g. the banning of a book and some criminal penalty for the author and publisher. There is no separate Christian notion of blasphemy. The word is Greek and was used in pagan, Jewish, Christian and other contexts. Currently, the majority of countries with such laws are Muslim.
It is liberalism’s hypocrisy and betrayal at failing to accommodate them, not liberalism as such, that fuels their rage which in addition is meant to exemplify the violent consequences of an unregulated market.
This is wholly false. Thatcher's Britain wasn't prosecuting anybody for blasphemy. It was backing the Mujahidin in Afghanistan. It was for unregulated markets. However, it would not ban a silly book by a guy from Pakistan. That was why other Pakistani origin Muslims ran riot.
The loss of self-control that that is said to define Muslim rage, in other words, mirrors the lack of control in the marketplace of ideas.
Facile thinks Muslim mobs running amok are the mirror image of controversies in theoretical physics. No doubt, he thinks that Peter Woit and Lee Smolin regularly chop off the hands of Super-string theorists.
This is hardly the great metaphysical battle between fanaticism and tolerance that commentators have conjured since 1989, and it must be understood as a conflict within liberalism itself.
Very true. Al Qaeda should be considered the Muslim equivalent of the Brookings Institute.
In the absence of a theological register, the violence of Muhammad’s defenders might even be described as a failure of language itself.
Only if Facile believes that cursing a dude to die horribly actually causes the dude to die horribly. In that case, violence need only arise if there is a failure of language such that a curse is ineffective.
Only very recently
Zia introduced tough blasphemy laws in 1980. This was Sharia based. It had no foundation in British or other Liberal juristic practice.
in Pakistan has this liberal vocabulary been supplemented by Islamic theological categories like apostasy and martyrdom to justify violence against those allegedly insulting Muhammad—a result of competition between rival Muslim groups to take control of the market in which the Prophet has become a commodity.
Is Facile justifying Pakistani laws forbidding Qadianis from claiming or implying they are Muslim? Does he think they were turning the Prophet into a commodity? I doubt it. The silly man is just virtue signaling. He does not understand the true import of what he has written. That's what makes him mischievous.
Rushdie and his novel became incidental to Muslim debate after Khomeini stepped into the controversy and made it a geopolitical issue in February 1989. The year is significant. The Rushdie affair emerged at the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the grand narrative of bipolar conflict.
It emerged nine months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nobody then knew that the Cold War was about to end.
Issues of culture and identity came to the fore in new forms of nationalism and religion
where? In Iran? But the Shia Sunni split and the reconfiguration of Iranian identity as Twelver Shia occurred under the Safavids.
and in renewed political and cultural contests around race, gender, and sexuality.
when had they stopped? Does this cretin really think there was no 'contest' around 'race, gender and sexuality' during the Cold War?
The globalization of protests about Muhammad, in other words, unfolded against the backdrop of America’s emerging culture wars in the late 1980s as well as the return of the antagonisms so clearly articulated in Samuel Huntington’s influential 1993 essay, “The Clash of Civilizations,” which later became a best-selling book.
What is this shit? There had always been Pan-Islamic movements against crusaders, colonialists, commie bastards etc. Civilizations had been clashing for millennia. This had nothing to do with Rushdie or blasphemy or whatever maggots are crawling in Devji's facile brain.
Leaving behind the state-centered parties and ideologies of the Cold War for a politics in and of the social,
this did not happen in the West. Political parties and ideologies had evolved from the eighteenth and nineteenth century without regard to the Bolsheviks or Maoists.
the culture wars became premised upon the neoliberal erasure of any distinction between state and society.
No. Culture wars are about abortion, homosexuality, transgender rights, pornography, multiculturalism, racism, guns, immigration, loving or loathing Trump and so forth. Nobody cares about some supposed 'neoliberal erasure' or 'neoconservative foreclosure' or other such stupid shite.
Submitting both domains to the logic of the market
Fuck would this cretin know about logic or the market?
had the effect of dispersing conflict among individuals and groups.
as opposed to what? dispersing sweeties among collectives and entelechies?
In one case, an impossible theology gave rise to violence,
only in the sense that an impossible biology gave rise to Facile raping himself anally with his tongue
and in another an impossible politics produced new forms of social discipline outside the state.
What does this Foucauldian jibber-jabber actually mean? Nothing at all. Islamist politics aint impossible. Islamic States do exist. The threat of being beaten or killed creates social discipline outside the state across the globe and in all historic epochs.
The “cult of offense” that writers like Wood rail against is not a symptom of any particular political orientation, left or right. It is the product of neoliberalism.
How can it be? It existed and exists in every type of polity. I suppose a 'market based' solution of a purely libertarian kind would feature boycotts or 'Coasian' solutions- i.e. payoffs or equal and opposite threat points. The plain fact is that there are reputational benefits and costs in taking or giving offense. One reason for this is that before violence occurs there is a signaling game during which there is 'discovery' of the other's threat point and credibility. Thus 'offense' exists wherever there is either scarcity or 'positionality'- i.e. where an 'excludable' or 'rival' good or service is under consideration. This is independent of economic or political regime.
The Rushdie affair thus signaled the coming together of a post-colonial narrative with a neoliberal one, both dominated by the focus on marketized social relations and hurt sentiments.
But such narratives were wholly inconsequential. No great wealth or power flowed from them. One or two professors of shite subjects and one or two notoriety craving authors might have played this game but the stakes were low.
In a bitter irony, Rushdie’s attempt to give voice to immigrant lives and experience in The Satanic Verses was fulfilled by protests against it in Britain that for the first time gave Muslims a public platform.
But it was not worth having. Sajid Javid had a job worth having. Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has a job worth having. Public platforms which enable this type of achievement are associated with narratives which actually matter. They prevail, while paranoid narratives fail.
It marked a shift from race and nationality to religion as defining immigrant identity.
But that turned out to be a road to nowhere- or 'hijrat' to a Caliphate which would be bombed into the dust. Why is Facile pretending that type of shite retains any currency in the UK? Kids want to be Mayor of London or Chancellor of the Exchequer. They don't want to be pawns in the hands of terrorists concerned with getting hold of the oil wealth under Arabian sands.
Khomeini dispensed with these culture wars
No. Khomeini's fatwa was associated with a succession battle in Iran featuring the supposedly liberal Ayatollah Montazeri and the 'pragmatists' who wanted to normalize relations with the West. There was very much a 'culture war' aspect to this. The liberals were metropolitan and more Westernized. Perhaps they were using Montazeri- who was from a humble background and no great scholar to be emulated (marja)- so as to reinstate the rule of an elite urban oligarchy. Alternatively, Montazeri could be viewed as a flatterer and schemer, allied with the maniacal Mehdi Hashemi, who would play the role of the proletarian champion of the people only so as to destroy the other great clerics and get complete control of all the power and money in the country.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact remained Montazeri had no real power base or mass support. By contrast, Khomeini commanded the uttermost devotion and loyalty of the (generally more rural or working class) 'basijis' who had fought in the war. In other words, those most devoted to the Iranian Revolution prevailed and, because Khomeini had totally embodied that Revolution, his successors- whatever other temptations they may have faced- were constrained to carry forward the spirit of that Revolution.
But no Revolution is a garden party. Many devour their own children. You can't make an omelette without smashing a few egg-heads.
and made the Rushdie affair into a political issue for the first time.
Syed Shahabuddin had already made it a political issue in India
He seems to have been aiming to consolidate his authority among Sunni Muslims in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war by defending the Prophet, who for the Shia plays the secondary role of announcing the Imam Ali.
That is 'ghullat'. Such allegations are made against Shias (including Alawis and Ismailis) by people most Hanafis consider extremists. Facile has some unusual views.
The Ayatollah had earlier dismissed Muslim complaints against Rushdie as a distraction, only to change his mind once a number of those protesting the novel were killed by police firing in Pakistan.
Because they fired on cops and attacked the American cultural center. Pakistan had already banned the book.
Far more numerous
Five died
than the unfortunate translators and publishers of The Satanic Verses killed or attacked by Rushdie’s enemies
35 were killed in Turkey alone.
, these men are rarely mentioned and never mourned in Western commentary.
because we don't have any great love for guys who shoot at Pakistani police men and who try to attack an American cultural center.
Presumed to be fanatics,
or just guys who like shooting policemen and relish the notion of slaughtering some nice American people
their deaths, for which nobody is held culpable,
the Pakistani police knew exactly who was culpable.
are collateral damage in the fight for free expression. In issuing his sentence against Rushdie, Khomeini not only took these deaths seriously but threatened for the first time
Iran had been killing and kidnapping Westerners for years. As Rafsanjani pointed out, killing Israelis wasn't profitable. Those bastards returned the favor with interest. Kill Europeans and Americans. Hold them hostage if that is profitable. Money is always welcome. Mossad hit-squads- not so much.
to reciprocate the impunity of Western countries in killing or tolerating the deaths of civilians elsewhere.
Very true. Denmark is constantly killing Muslims in the MENA- right? As for the fucking Norwegians- don't get me started.
The “cult of offense” is not a symptom of any particular political orientation, left or right. It is the product of neoliberalism.
Very true. Cain was reading Milton Friedman. Then, his brother, Abel tried to explain Kaldor's monetary theory to him. Cain took offense and slaughtered his brother. Thus all violence is indeed the product of neoliberalism.
Rushdie himself seemed to have changed places with his own characters.
Rushdie himself is a character in some of his novels. Facile doesn't seem to have read them.
Like the figures in his novel who are changed into animals as a result of racist perceptions, he became a demon in the eyes of many Muslims.
So, Rushdie, a Pakistani Muslim, depicts policemen as actual pigs and Thatcher as a demonic figure. Then other Pakistanis do the same to him. This is a story about Pakistani Islam. Facile doesn't get that this is no reflection on the West. Indeed, he himself is not of European heritage.
Conversely, Rushdie was made into an example of tolerance and even Western civilization by his liberal defenders
they should have called him a Paki- right?
—a symbolic role in a metaphysical battle
does Facile think non-symbolic roles exist in metaphysical battles?
that has likely endangered him further. Like Mahound in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie also sought a compromise with his enemies by briefly recanting his book and claiming to have become a good Muslim. As with the novel’s prophet, this has not shaken the faith of his admirers. In such ways Rushdie has been forced to live the life of a figure he is accused of insulting.
Facile has a curious view of the Prophet of his ancestral Religion. What is even stranger is his claim that Rushdie, in New York, is living the life of a Holy Prophet.
Condemned either as liberal prophet or religious demon, Rushdie has become a larger-than-life figure known more for his ordeal than for his literary career. His ordeal has also pushed Rushdie to adopt some unfortunate views, including supporting the disastrous War on Terror. But then, like Muhammad, Rushdie is only human.
So, Facile- who considers Rushdie to be 'like' a Divine Prophet- will at least admit that the man is mortal. His parents must be so proud!
He has since returned to an earlier version of himself and speaks out against the persecution of minorities, including the Muslims of his native India
His family moved to Pakistan. Rushdie can hold dual Pakistani-British or American citizenship. But though natal to India he is not native to it. There was a period when there was a Visa ban on him. Atal lifted it.
who had been the first to ban his book.
because it clearly broke the law. Khushwant Singh explained why to Penguin.
This generosity of spirit can only be admired, and we must hope Rushdie makes a quick recovery—not least so that he continues to stand as a global representative for the freedom of conscience and expression. Making him the victim of a metaphysical battle between tolerance and fanaticism can only inhibit his work on this front,
Nonsense! That's the only thing which gives him salience.
however, because it entails a false reading both of the Rushdie affair as well as the modern history of threats to speech which need to be thought about more expansively and in connected ways.
Sadly Facile is incapable of connected thinking.
In the end, there are really two debates here: one about geopolitics and the behavior of liberal states,
that debate is over. Liberal states have to be pragmatic and transactional in geopolitical matters. The alternative is that they become too power or weak to remain liberal.
and one about social identity and the fight for cultural respect.
Fuck cultural respect. Money and Power matters. Soft power is a limp dick.
We would do well to resist the neoliberal pressure to conflate them, as Khomeini did in his own way.
So, that was Khomeini's major malfunction! He started reading Friedman and Hayek and abandoned his Religion and started conflating some shite with some other shite. How very naughty of him!
While both seem intractable, each is arguably capable of resolution if dealt with separately.
Nothing is tractable if you listen to Facile. Ignore him and any silly debates he might mention and you can get on with trying to solve genuine problems of a sort where STEM subject savants can give useful advise.
The political debate should be engaged not by invocations of Western values and civilization,
unless you are Western and have those values and civilization and don't want your country turning to shit because crazy immigrants want to cling to the noxious mores which turned their own homelands into shitholes.
which have long been seen as hypocritical in the world beyond,
which they may well be in relation to those countries. I only pretend that I want the Chinese to give up their ancient culture and embrace football hooliganism and fish and chips. But I'd genuinely be grieved if my own neck of the woods suddenly got gentrified.
but through tough diplomacy about the real issues involved.
Nuclear weapons. That's what's important.
Such engagement requires careful attention to the circumstances of history, rather than their ideological erasure.
by cretins. The thing does not matter in the least.
As for the social debate about offenses against religious, racial, sexual, and other identities, we must reject the neoliberal cultural wars—in which Islam is the chief among several offended as well as offending groups—for a vision of the social that rises above the marketized competition of hurt sentiments.
Fuck that. Just tell the nutters to fuck off or, if they look kind of stabby-stabby, ignore them and quietly vote for a Right wing Party.
As we know all too well from contemporary America, social relations in the liberal West need to be rebuilt. But doing so requires understanding the controversies that derange them in more complex terms than those supplied by the banal and historically inaccurate opposition between fanaticism and tolerance.
Not really. Fanatics either prevail in which case we suck up to them so they tolerate us, or else they aint tolerated and die or run away.
There is an opposition between rapists and those who hate crimes of that sort. What is wrong with letting those intolerant of rape prevail? Why go in to the matter in more complex terms? The way the Rushdie affair ended was by some countries saying they'd kill him on sight and others saying those who tried to kill him would be punished. That's it. That's the whole story. Why pretend that it is worth anybody's time to listen to Professors of shite subjects who write for the Boston Review about furriners and their funny little ways? Meanwhile worshippers in Mosques and Gurudwaras and Temples in the UK, probably for the first time, are singing 'God save the King'. This is because there were very few such places prior to the Queen's reign. Grievances may be imaginary and Grievance Studies is certainly mischievous. But grief is real. It has brought all faiths together in this green and pleasant land as we mourn the passing of a 'Defender of the Faith' of whose sincerity and cheerful dedication to duty no skepticism was possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment