Salman Rushdie and the Problem with Islam

Hadi Mattar is Doing the Islamaphobic West a Favour:

Salman Rushdie (right, the one with the glasses and beard) and his beautiful ex-wife Padma Lakshmi (left, the one without the glasses and beard)

The year 1988 Salman Rusdhie published The Satanic Versus which offended Muslims all over the world. In 1989 a death warrant was issued for the assassination of the author by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution (Iran) with a bounty of 3.3 million dollars for whoever did the deed. In the year the book was published, thousands of Muslims in India, Bangladesh, Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan took to the streets protesting to ban the book. 12 people died in the riots in Mumbai and 6 in Islamabad. None of them had really read the book.

Three decades later, the author is about to deliver a lecture along the lines of why America is a safe haven for writers in exile and got stabbed in his throat three times before he could say a word. I wonder what Julian Assange would have to say regarding the topic of that lecture.

Meanwhile, for all those peace-loving Muslims like myself (I am not really a Muslim, but I do not drink alcohol, I call to prayer five times a day, I say bismillah before I eat, say alhamdulillah whenever I get the chance, I believe in predeterminism, I fold my pants so my ankles are exposed at all times, I shave my mush and keep a beard, I get special treatment at international airports, and I think Bill Maher is an idiot) the wait to find out the attacker's identity was filled with anxiety; I was hoping it was an LGBTQ+ warrior or some husband whose wife had cheated on him with Sal (as Bill Maher refers to Mr. Rusdhie).

Everything you've ever wanted is sitting on the other side of fear. - George Addair

My fear was that the attacker was a brown man with a Muslim name. To no one's surprise, it was 24-year-old Haddi Mattar. As the news goes the motivation behind the attack is unknown. Well, he is not a white man with a Christian name so the motivation is irrelevant. So, this 24-year-old American kid from New Jersey, born in America, raised eating American food, educated in the American system, all in all, a young-blooded American (the only un-American thing the guy did was take a knife instead of a semi-automatic rifle), is being hailed as a hero in a few Iranian extremist newspapers. Now, the Islamaphobic west (a majority of whom have also never read a word of Salman Rushdie) are having a field day with this situation.

A picture of a few Iranian News Papers, I have no clue what it says here, but the writing looks cool

Like it or not, with or without the motive behind the attack, Hadi Mattar has become a representative of Islam. Like it or not, with or without ever having read The Satanic Versus, a prominent part of the Islamic community has been offended by the writer's words. Like it or not, with or without all the violence perpetrated in the name of Islam, the xenophobic west is going to look down on the followers of the religion as they have for eons. The problem here is that the west's interpretation of Islam as a "barbaric" religion has always been validated by the shockingly violent acts perpetrated by the fundamentalist followers of the religion. The strongest representatives of the Islamic world have unflinchingly obeyed, and/or behaved the way the west expects them to behave. What I find the most bizarre is that both the fundamentalist west and the xenophobic Muslims seem to be on the same side of the same coin.

Though the "first world" loves to take the holier than thou throne when it comes to condemning the "uncultured" non-western civilizations and ideologies, and dishing out free advice on how the human race needs to protect free speech and a right to expression, this hypocritical stance of theirs' looks nothing less than a joke badly delivered. We all know the west does not favor free speech, again look at what is happening to Julain Assange. We all know of the terrorism the west has perpetrated through the years in the name of imperialism, religion, World wars, democracy, and capitalism. We all know how insecure the west is about their ideas, yet they have the space and platform to voice out their opinions. They are like the little fat babies that the mother can't ignore because he screams their lungs out for milk. The harder the fat baby cries the more his annoyed fundamentalist Islamic brother keeps poking his soft belly (which doesn't do the fat kid any harm by any means, just helps him scream louder). The question to be asked here is who is the bitch that is the mother?

Paraphrasing philosopher Slavoj Zizek quoting the psychoanalyst Lacan, if a pathologically jealous husband is suspicious about his cheating wife, whether or not the wife is really sleeping with other men, the husband is still to be diagnosed with his pathological jealousy as a psychological condition. Similarly, whether or not Islam is a violent religion, their acts of violence do not justify the west's xenophobia; and whether or not Salman Rushdie's words insulted the Kuran, it does not justify the exaggerated reaction of the Muslims around the world. The west has no moral stance to take up when it comes to killing people in the name of the Lord (God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq - George Bush) and is the Islamic world that insecure about their teachings that a silly novel by an unknown writer offends them to this extent? Do you see how these two factions are on the same side of the same coin? You don't? Maybe I did not make a good connection between the two, but let's move on.

Nevertheless, this attack has enraged me, not only because Salman Rushdie, being an Indian writer myself, is an absolute hero of mine (to be honest I have not The Satanic Verse either, but have you seen the quality of the women he gets?), but also because look at what happened to the guy who attacked Dave Chapple on stage:

Dave Chapple's attacker

God, his arm is facing the wrong way around. Chapell's bodyguards make Sal's people seem like a makeup team from a movie set: Hadi Mattar getting arrested looked good enough to take on the 72 virgins that were probably promised to him. Why is that? Sal's crowd's hands too soft or minds too politically correct to whoop a brown man? Well, Mattar is probably not going to meet his 72 virgins anytime soon for sure, let's hope that the Iranians pay him at least a quarter of the 3.3 million they promised. They don't seem to have the best track record when it comes to following up on their rewards. Salman Rushdie's novel Shame (1983) was announced the winner of an award from an official jury appointed by a ministry of the Iranian Islamic government, poor Sal did not receive the prize money; well he did not even get a little gold-plated shield that he could put up in his showcase.

The attack would probably cause Salman Rushdie to lose an eye, but the man is able to speak now, so that is good news. When a writer gets done with a book, the first instinct is to move on from that book and on to the next. But, this book for the poor man has been dragging on for over three decades and has put him in the hospital at last. While these extremists try to intimidate people with such shocking shows of horror, all they are doing is giving their enemies free publicity. It seems like they have no understanding of how capitalism works. Rushdie was almost irrelevant this decade, and the present generation probably had never heard of the man and his works. But thanks to Hadi the jihadi the sales of The Satanic Verses have skyrocketed since the attack: everyone is going to be reading the book.

What a shit show!

By

Kahan J Sudev