Then came 'Satanic Verses'. An Indian MP- Syed Shahabuddin- demanded that the book be banned. Khushwant Singh had already warned that the book could not be published in India. It was like 'Rangila Rasool' (the colourful Prophet) which had led Indian legislators to change the law so that books that attacked a particular religion could not be published or imported into the country. A Hindu official at the Home Ministry read the book. He decided the book broke the law. An order was issued banning its import into India. Other countries- Pakistan, South Africa, etc.- followed the Indian example. Imam Khomeini was asked for and gave a 'fatwa' (legal opinion) that if an apostate had indeed written a book defamatory of the Prophet, then capital punishment could be applied. Then something unexpected occurred. Ayatollah Montazeri criticized Khomeini's fatwa. But it was Rafsanjani, not Montazeri, who proved the defter political operator. Iran doubled down on the fatwa. People associated with the book were killed in different countries. The British police foiled one such plot against Rushdie himself on British soil.
Could Rushdie have saved himself? Yes. He should have played the Kashmir card. That way, the the Mirpuris of Bradford would have praised him and attacked the Indian High Commission.
What Rushdie should have said was- 'Because I started speaking out on Indian atrocities in Kashmir, a former Indian diplomat and stooge of Atal Behari Vajpayee has attacked me. Those bastards have stolen my motherland! Now they are stealing even my religion from me by branding me an apostate! Allah knows I am 'gunahgar' (sinner) but not munafiq (hypocrite) or kaffir (apostate). I call on Muslims to demand justice for people of Kashmir! No doubt, the Indians- or the Americans, whose Imperialist designs in Nicaragua I denounced in my last book- will send their secret agents to kill me. They will put the blame on Iran! But Iran gave me a prize for my book denouncing the dictator Zia! As for Rajiv Gandhi, he hates me because I denounced his mother as an evil tyrant. I will be killed. I accept it. Will British police protect me? No! I denounced Mrs. Thatcher! They will conspire with my assassins. My death does not matter. But their plots will fail! "Allahu waAllahu khayru almakireen". Allah is the best of plotters!'
Why did Rushdie not take this course? The answer is that he wasn't really Indian. He was a Public School educated, Oxbridge, prancing ninny. Sadly, it turned out, so was Akeel Bilgrami who first came to my attention with an extraordinarily deracinated essay on the Rushdie affair in the London Review of Books published in 1990.
Let me say a word about the most well argued and thoughtful of these criticisms: a recent letter to the Independent from the philosopher Michael Dummett. Few English men or women have given so much of their time and energy to defending the rights of Muslims and other immigrants in Britain than Ann and Michael Dummett. Here Michael Dummett scolds Rushdie for exciting anxiety among Muslims and generating, in turn, a conservative racialist backlash.
Dummett wasn't Indian. Bilgrami was. It was fucking obvious how Rushdie could have 'spun' the whole thing to his own advantage. He would have become the Edward Said of the Kashmir issue. Anything objectionable in his book could be dismissed as a critique of 'Orientalism' or, as 'majazi' or ' malamati' from the Islamic or Sufi point of view. Why did Rushdie not take the obvious course? The answer is that Cambridge had turned him into a prancing ninny.
He also argues that Rushdie shows no understanding of the concept of the holy
Nonsense! Rushdie was a bit Jungian and his first two books were inspired by the Mantiq ut Tayr. Sooner or later he was bound to discover Akhbari mysticism and the concept of 'barzakh'. He would have become unreadable without first becoming a great hyphenated-American celebrity novelist. True, he'd have made less money. But he wouldn't have got stabbed.
and of its importance in the lives of religious people. The first argument betrays a remarkably provincial attitude toward certain questions which emerge from Rushdie’s novel and occupy the minds of moderate Muslims.
A provincial attitude would demand Pakis fuck off to Pakistan.
There is the question of Islamic tyrannies which have killed and imprisoned thousands.
Secular, Socialist, Ba'athist, tyrannies were worse.
There is the question of a religion which is exploited to introduce and sustain policies and practices which moderate Muslims find detestable.
Bilgrami wasn't aware that those policies and practices were introduced at the same time that his religion was founded. On the other hand, there is mounting evidence that the Hanif of Mecca were prominent advocates of Queer Theory who, sadly, fought shy of making gender reassignment surgery for heterosexual men free and compulsory.
There is the question as to whether those policies and practices are separable from the context of dogma and hierarchy in which they are embedded.
That question was settled long ago. Islamic polities could have Tanzimat type reforms similar to European or Japanese or Chinese polities.
Perhaps there is even the question, relevant to the second of Dummett’s arguments, of whether the concept of the holy in Islam is itself obviously separable from this context.
Islam's subsequent trajectory showed it was. That's why Indian Muslims go on pilgrimage to places like Mashhad or Ajmer.
Can one attack the policies in their larger context without mounting an attack on the holy as it is found in Islam?
Sure. It had been done and it was being done and will continue to be done. Islam simply isn't, and never has been, some sort of fossil religion only practiced by backward people.
It is both unfair to Rushdie and beside the point for Muslims who are struggling to understand the future of a world religion to be told that they must not pursue these questions openly, assertively and with the full use of their talents, because that would undermine the status of a migrant community on an island in the North Sea.
Dummett was saying no such thing. The question was whether Rushdie was a prancing ninny or whether he was an Islamic scholar seeking political and socio-economic reform from which everybody would benefit. The answer was Rushdie was a fucking cretin. Why pretend that Salman Farsi, rather than a particular Arab scribe, became an apostate? What's next? Saying Hazrat Bilal was a pimp just because of his skin colour?
Ruthven’s main criticism of Rushdie is similarly unconvincing. It follows upon a detailed and wholly plausible indictment of the fundamentalist response, after which Rushdie is charged with bad judgment for having failed to see the extremity and magnitude of the feelings he was going to provoke.
Rushdie had in fact started writing about Kashmir- whose politics the boy, Rajiv, had fucked up- and thus his response should have been the one I gave. Suppose he was too grand to do it himself. Then he could have drunk a bottle of whiskey and drunk dialled a couple of Urdu journalists in London. The fact is, Syed Shahabuddin had made enemies. He wanted to get rid of the Hajj subsidy. Why not kick that former IFS officer (at that time all diasporic Indians hated Indian diplomats) in the goolies? Saying the guy was Atal's stooge may not have been true, but it was deeply satisfying. The other thing Rushdie had mentioned was that Shias are in position to issue fatwas against Hanafi Sunnis. Back then, the Sipah-e-Sahaban was active in Pakistan. Incidentally, some Iranian diplomats seem to have believed the Bhutto dynasty was Shia.
This reflects a pervasive shortcoming of Ruthven’s book: in the course of the often scrupulous attention he pays to the fundamentalist response, he does not sufficiently explore the questions which Rushdie’s novel and the aftermath of its publication pose for moderate Muslims, who are as opposed to the extremist element in their societies as they are hurt by the novel.
There were no such questions. A Leftist could write a book stressing Prophet Muhammad's childhood spent with an egalitarian nomadic clan. From there, you could build the case that Islam is inherently Socialistic and Humanistic. In Iran itself, some followers of Shariati tried to kill Khatami because they believed Islam could never have a priestly ruling class- i.e. they denied Khomeini's 'vilayat-e-faqih'.
The deep question is whether the answers that moderate Muslims will, on reflection, provide to these questions are compatible with a condemnation of the novel.
Was the novel any good? My impression was that Rushdie was moving in an Islamic direction. He appeared reconciled to his alcoholic father at the end of that novel. But for his foolish response to Syed Shahabuddin's open letter (he wrote an open letter to Rajiv Gandhi- a fellow Cambridge man) he might have developed into a sort of Jungian Sufi limning the vast continents of the collective unconsciousness or the yet greater mysteries which they are liminal to.
By 1990, Muslims- moderate or otherwise- recognised just as well as Christians or Confucians, that autarkic Command Economies were bound to become autocratic, dynastic, and as poor as fucking fuck. Bilgrami's posh education and Ivy League career kept him from this knowledge.
It is unlikely that the struggle of moderate against extremist in Muslim society will succeed until the moderates forge models of economic development and of political structure which enable them to avoid the dependency on foreign capital and aid, and ensure that large segments of the population are not left out of the economic and political life of their country.
Moderate Muslims should learn from Pol Pot. The Khalqis in Afghanistan had the right idea. Kill all the priests and the land-lords and then anybody who looks like they might have a brain. Sadly, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to get rid of those nutters and to restore the Parchami moderates.
One needs to build on a careful diagnosis of why attempts in the past to forge such models, as in Nasser’s Egypt, failed.
Nasser's land reform succeeded. The problem was that bureaucratic Socialism- though providing lots of clerical jobs to the newly educated- hobbled the economy. Still, Egyptians did well in the Gulf and elsewhere. US Aid, however, has worked in the same way as a 'resource curse'. Still, Egypt is bound to do very well out of 'clean energy' and the 'knowledge economy'.
Perhaps, with the passing of the Cold War, there is a better chance of these societies gaining the help of economically more advanced nations,
Aid budgets would fall because the competitive element had disappeared. The question was whether developing countries could gain foreign direct investment.
and integrating with more progressive nations, without the danger of being made into satellites.
Satellites are places where you can order the removal of the current Dictator. As the Americans discovered in Vietnam, and the Soviets would discover in Afghanistan, the game was not worth the candle.
(It is fascinating to see that these issues are being vigorously debated within the Iranian Government in an attempt to reconstruct a war-devastated economy.)
The regime felt more secure. It's battle hardened 'basijis' could crush the M-e-K or any remants of the Tudeh movement. The question was whether the 'bazaari' middle class would gain or whether there would be cronyism. With hindsight, it was a silly question.
Perhaps in the fullness of time such integration will restore the sense of equality that marked pre-colonial relations.
Then, as now, the rich and powerful were only equal to those as rich and powerful as themselves.
Until that day comes Islamic fundamentalism will continue to appeal to those demoralised by exclusion and dependence.
In Iran and Afghanistan, there was a choice between Communist craziness or Islamic fundamentalism. The latter was preferable.
An Islamic Reformation can only come on the coat-tails of these broader changes.
Which is why there was no such person as Ataturk. The Turks don't use the Roman script. They retain the Arabic script- right?
What is spooky about reading Bilgrami- who is only 13 years older than me and got his first degree in India- is the manner in which he displays naive faith in the shibboleths of bien pensant Analytical philosophy. Consider his notion of identity (which presumably includes his self-image as a 'moderate Muslim' rather than a stupid shithead)
subjective identity requires identification with one’s own tendencies.
This is clearly nonsense. One may subjectively identify oneself as a Christian precisely because one is aware that all one's own tendencies are horrible and deeply antithetical to Christianity.
What I find strange about Bilgrami is that he ignores Islam's own distinction between insha & khabar (alethic & imperative) and between the 'realm-of-command' (Alam-al-Amr) and 'realm-of-creation' (Alam-al-Khalq) such that STEM subjects and 'positive economics' can proceed on an empirical basis without coming into conflict with normative or theological imperatives. The great advantage in having faith in God is that you don't then have to believe in fairies at the bottom of your garden or some medieval paradise of equality and 'enchantment'. This is what happened to Bilgrami. He rejects the Creator but wants there to be a 'realm of command'- i.e. Magic.
This implies a distinction between first-order and second-order states of mind.
and thus should be rejected because it leads to an infinite regress of the 'third man' type. I suppose, you could say, 'goblins or fairies may intervene at the level of the fifth man or the sixth man. Once that happens Neo-Liberalism will disappear and everything will become very very nice.' If that is your view, Bilgrami is the philosopher for ou.
To be alienated from one’s desires is to have desires (such as in our example, the desire for cocaine) at the first-order level that one disapproves of at the second order.
Nope. It just means you currently have desires which you desire to check. I may continue to take a drug while paying money for treatment to end my dependence on it. This may involve 'tapering off' or gaining peer-support or undergoing psychoanalysis.
In contrast, to be identified with one’s desires means one approves of those desires.
Not necessarily. Identification is different from approval. I can imagine a Catholic Bishop revealing that he is homosexual. He never acted on those inclinations for the same reason that heterosexual Bishops did not act on their inclinations. I can imagine a Bishop of this type greatly helping many ordinary people, including those who became infected with 'homophobia' at some early stage in their life.
To put it differently, we need to have some kind of reflective endorsement of first-order states of mind before we can say we identify with them.
One could equally say the reverse. What you 'reflectively endorse' isn't you. It is some modish availability cascade.
It is not enough to like the idea of being a Muslim; one has to, in some sense, approve of liking the idea.
only in the sense that you should approve of approving approving of approving and so on. Why did a training in Analytical philosophy not guard Bilgrami against infinite regresses of a type mentioned in Plato's Parminides?
The plain fact is, 'approval' is a Tarskian primitive. It does not have an impredicative 'extension'. In other words, the term is undefined or understood by its use. It isn't dependent on the entire knowledge base.
If one disapproved of one’s Islamic tendencies, then one would be alienated from one’s mental, moral, and political tendencies and would lack identity in the subjective sense.
No. I can imagine a good Muslim who is put in charge of catering for the British Army. He disapproves of his own Islamic revulsion from pork. He keeps it in check. His job is to ensure that Tommy Atkins gets his bangers and mash and goes into battle in good spirits. After the war is won, and this Muslim officer is back in Civvy Street, he is welcome to expiate any sins he committed by going on pilgrimage or keeping fasts and giving money to the poor.
Politically relevant and intensely held desires that their possessors reflectively endorse–this looks like a good, initial working definition of ‘identity.’
Yet, it is no such thing. I firmly believe that cats should be given the vote. I reflectively endorse this view because no cat, to my knowledge, has started a war or caused the country to go off a fiscal cliff. Yet, unlike Chairman Miaow, my identity is not that of a cat- militant or otherwise.
According to this definition, we might say a Palestinian today, or an Indian in the 1940s, who has strong nationalist first order political tendencies and reflectively endorses them at the second order, has a Palestinian, or an Indian, identity.
Sadly, some such Indians ended up having a Pakistani identity while many Palestinians ended up with a Jordanian or Egyptian identity. Currently, those who gained 'Israeli Arab' identity seem to be doing very much better than those with a Palestinian Gazan identity.
However, those examples, though roughly right,
completely wrong
may give the impression that identities in politics are only instrumental,
what else could they be? Politics is an instrument. Moreover, it costs money. 'Identity classes' are potential markets from which resources can be raised or other types of support garnered.
needed only in order to mobilize yourself and others similar to you toward certain ends–national independence, racial equality, gender justice,
abolishing death?
and so on. And this, in turn, may give the impression that the agents in question think of these identities as intended to last only until they achieve the goals these identities serve.
This may be true of evanescent coalitions. It is not the case with political parties or ideological cliques.
But not all identities have this merely instrumental role in an agent’s psychological economy.
Only in the sense that none do. What is relevant with respect to 'Identity' is Mimetics- more particularly Tardean Mimetics where the superior or more successful is taken as the mimetic target. 'Psychological economy' is about reducing 'cognitive dissonance'. Sadly, Bilgrami's Anal-tickle training prevented him from grasping how psychology or economics or anything human actually works.
Their role in a psychological economy may be much more subtle than that. They may, for instance, be a source of dignity and self-respect when one is feeling especially vulnerable;
in which case the thing is still instrumental
they may be a source of solidarity and belonging when one is feeling alienated from one’s social environment; and so on.
Bilgrami says identity can be non-instrumental but can't give any example of this being the case. The plain fact is that an identity has an extension as a class of objects with the same property. Such classes can always be used in an instrumental way. I suppose a mad man may like assembling identity classes without any utility or instrumental value but, if accurately constructed, they are still data-sets which somebody could find useful.
When they serve much more subtle functions of this kind, it is too crude to describe them by saying that the agents hold these identities instrumentally or temporarily.
Bilgrami is wrong. What he has written isn't crude or rude. It is simply wrong and stupid.
They may seem to the agents to have an intrinsic and not instrumental value. Others may analyze them by saying, “These identities, even if not explicitly instrumental, as in the case of the Palestinian today or the Indian in the 1940s, are nevertheless serving the function of providing a source of dignity and comfort in a situation of vulnerability and humiliation . . . . ”
Bilgrami doesn't seem to understand that being an Indian in the 1940's- provided you weren't living in a place where a Bengali Muslim was Premier- was preferable to being a Dutchman living in Holland, or a Pole living in Poland. Still, it's good to know that people dying in Gaza are gaining lots of dignity and comfort. The plain fact is, some Palestinians gain from the on-going war. Most don't. But, if Jews run away from Israel, they may well dream of taking over the nice houses they leave behind. Similarly, in India in the 1940's, some Indians did get to move into the mansions the British had constructed for themselves. Sadly, millions lost their homes or even their lives.
But from their own subjective points of view, the agents will simply think of these identities in intrinsic terms rather than as serving such functions, and so they will not see them as temporary, lasting only while those functions need to be served.
This is certainly true of Muslims who firmly believe in the after-life. But it is equally true of Christians or Hindus.
If others are right in their analysis, these identities may well be overturned and revised by the agents in question when these functions cease to be served.
That is the Hindu view. In my next life I will be a cockroach. Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, has a doctrine of bodily resurrection at the end of days.
But that makes no difference to the fact that, from the agents’ own points of view, the identities are quite intrinsic;
not if you believe in reincarnation rather than bodily resurrection
therefore, in their own minds the identities are conceived as something they ought to hold permanently and without being vulnerable to revision.
This is not the Sufi view. Your identity, like your ego, is a delusion and an idolatry. Follow the path of Love till there is no alterity and thus no separable identity.
Bilgrami thinks that
Some reflective endorsements take the following form, which we may call the ‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ model.
Sirens don't exist. This is a model which has no application to our world.
It is best to approach the idea with an example. Someone with Islamic commitments might think (and some Muslims, in fact, do): “Sooner or later, the spread of pernicious forms of modernity will affect us, too;
No. They think this has already happened. Bilgrami may not have noticed that every Muslim country had Radio and TV stations and books and magazines and record players and cinema-halls.
and it may weaken us from our Islamic commitments, so we must protect ourselves from the possibility of such weakening and entrench in our society certain Islamic ways of life that we will live by even if our commitments to Islam were to weaken.”
Saudi Arabia became stricter applying Islamic law after the Grand Mosque seizure in 1979.
Such endorsement of one’s Islamic commitments at the first order is distinctive.
No. It is strategic. Bilgrami is as stupid as shit. He simply didn't understand why Saudi Arabia and Iran and, later on, Afghanistan, became more strict in the application of Islamic law. In each and every case, there was an element of political calculation. However, another factor was at play. In some countries, Religion has a high Income elasticity of demand. As income rises people can afford to be more religious. Things like observance of hijab, or learning the Quran, are 'positional goods'. People climbing out of absolute poverty could afford more of such things.
It doesn’t just approve of those commitments; it entrenches them and guards them against a time when there might well be a weakening or a loss of the commitments.
It has no power to do so. Suppose, Bilgrami jumps up into the air. He backs up his 'first order' commitment to staying aloft with a second order commitment to tell the Law of Gravity to go fuck itself. For this reason he remains floating in the air for all time.
Still, it is at this point that we begin to understand why Bilgrami took up Anal-tickle philosophy. He could levitate without having to pay Mahesh Yogi for training in 'Yogic flying'.
The person with first-order nationalist tendencies under colonial subjugation, for example, may endorse her nationalism at the second order– but she may also know full well that it would not survive the success of her people’s anti-imperialist struggles.
Nonsense! Being independent means having to fight to retain independence and territorial integrity.
In other words, once independence is won, she may have no particular second-order rationale to preserve her first-order nationalist commitments.
On the contrary. Once you are independent you need an army to regain territory you feel rightfully belongs to you or else to defend territory your neighbouring country thinks rightfully belongs to it. Nationalism increases because it is a desiderata for employment in the Army and Civil Service, not to mention success in Politics.
And she may actually desire a future in which she lives in a state of independence without a particularly strong Palestinian (or Indian) identity.
Sonia Gandhi may have been Italian but she dressed in a Sari and spoke Hindi. Indeed, she embodied the 'pativrata' Hindu widow better than her sister-in-law which is why Rahul not Varun owns the INC.
This is even true of many non-instrumental desires. I may intrinsically value the pursuit of philosophy now but not in a way that makes me want to ensure I will be doing it at a time when I don’t value it as much.
To intrinsically value a profession doesn't mean you'd want to go in for it if you were utterly shit at it.
But the Muslim in the example is quite different. In his case, he does not limit his second-order approval of his first-order Islamic tendencies to the time when he feels a strong commitment to Islam, but reaches out to when he thinks he might not.
This is a fantasy. The Muslim believes God is all-powerful and all merciful. If He has given you the gift of Faith, spread out your hands and ask for that gift in more abundant, indeed everlasting, form. Few people in the world are as well educated as Bilgrami. But even fewer of the sub-continent's Muslims hold such a false and foolish view. There is 'supplication' in Islam (Du'a) not some bogus type of commitment.
Such a person now values and desires an Islamic future for himself, even if he now thinks that when the future comes he may not have the desire to be in an Islamic society.
He can emigrate. However, the reason Islam is a living religion whereas Magic has all but disappeared is because Human dignity is enhanced by submission to, and supplication of, the all-powerful, all-merciful, Creator. It is diminished by pushing pins into Voodoo dolls or imploring the assistance of fairies or goblins.
It is tempting to think that this kind of reflective endorsement is irrational. But before we dismiss this form of subjective identity, we should pause because, to a large extent, it characterizes liberal identity as well.
Islam is a path to Heaven. Liberalism, of Bilgrami's type, is a recipe for Economic and Political disaster.
Let’s ask: why do we entrench some of our commitments and values in the Constitution by calling them ‘fundamental rights’?
Because such rights are 'imprescriptible' and don't derive from prescriptive rights.
Take free speech. We gave it special status as the First Amendment of the Constitution because we didn’t want to allow ourselves to put it aside too easily, in the event that our commitment to it weakened.
Nonsense! The First Amendment was put in to protect 'dual sovereignty' and reduce the power of the Federal Government. It was only after 1925 that SCOTUS applied it to the States, through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
On the other hand, it is true that the people who wrote the First Amendment believed they were immortal. What if, once they reached the age of 300, they suddenly wanted Catholicism to become the State Religion? The problem here is that even if the Founding Fathers were immortal, they had no power to bind themselves for all time. Constitutions can be amended, abrogated or placed in suspension.
Still, Bilgrami is correct in one respect. If only Newton had listened to the local Witch and amended his laws of motions to permit flying broomsticks, 'Scientific Reason' would not have taken hold in Seventeenth Century Europe. This would have prevented Imperialism, Capitalism and Neo-Liberalism from taking hold. Everybody could get married to a nice fairy or goblin and live happily for ever and ever. The true purpose of Analytical Philosophy is to say 'boo!' to 'Scientific Reason' and the soi disant Enlightenment till 'Moderate Muslims' can fly around the world on broomsticks. What is vitally important is that they make a second-order commitment not to play quidditch. JK Rowling is an Evil TERF. Fuck you Harry Potter! Fuck you very much!
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