Offensive defenders

...We have made it easy for religious establishments to ignore their continuing need to evan-gelize, to make it clear to people that what we claim to believe really is good news, and not a condition for being seen as respectable...

...Thatcher's...

...This goes beyond a defense of free speech...

...Auster City of Glass It can be said that the Ayatollah Khomeini lacks the light touch...

...this is an apparent attempt to distinguish between an act of state and a religious obligation...

...death threats in the name of Allah will not make people want to under-stand Islam, but will further a distance in understanding which is already too great...

...Now secular intellectuals can join in what was, before, low-brow fun, and do it just as ignorantly, with the sanction of the de-fense of liberty...

...It occurred to me then that this is as blasphemous an image as the manufac-turer was able to find in our common culture, and that is a shame...

...For the proof is that we still read the book...

...The response to Islamic anger has been almost entirely secular...

...So far we must agree with those who would insist on Rushdie's right even to blaspheme, if the alternative is to give religion a coercive power it does better without...

...Forgive someone of Irish descentfor this conjecture: British government outrage would have come sooner, I think, had Mr...

...To say that windmills were knights, that a barber's basin was a helmet, that puppets were real people...

...Nevertheless, there are reasons for worry about this lack of understanding, quite beyond the obvious good of understand-ing the teachings of the world's great religions for their own sake or for com-parative reasons...

...At the same time, believers have al-lowed religion to be marginalized...

...It is one thing to defend Rushdie's rights and to repudiate the ayatollah's murder threat...

...Some things cause us outrage, and should...

...It may be an| expansion of the sense of the sacrad that we do see the possibility of a kind of blasphemy in areas which are not, strictly speaking, religious...

...Would it be possible, he wondered, to stand up before the world and with the utmost conviction spew out lies and nonsense...

...The response of the Western world has been interesting...

...Many of Rushdie's fellow writers were quicker to act...

...It was not native Western genius, as we now know, but what the Christian world brought back from the Crusades that gave the late medieval West its knowledge of everything from Aristotle to algebra and the teaching of the great Greek philosophers...

...The French made the first somewhat bold move, and brought the Common Market nations into com-mon accord against the Iranian death threats...

...To any extent...

...And that's finally all any-one wants out of a book-to be amused...

...Western science, theology, and philosophy owe a great debt to Islam...

...it is another to choose to make a public proclamation of passages which Muslims find offensive...

...Rushdie's skin color been closer to Mrs...

...Rushdie does not...

...The controversy is not just one more news story...

...At the public reading of his work some of the passages most offensive to Muslims were chosen...

...It is, I am afraid, the beginning of something significant-a deepening alienation between the secular West, which itself has a growing Muslim population, and the Islamic world...

...After the ayatollah's death threat he had an understandable attack of sympathy for the dead and for pious Muslims, and made an apology of sorts, but that wasn't good enough for the ayatollah...

...Rushdie's response was somewhat inconsistent...

...I hope the day comes soon when he can walk the streets without fear, but I doubt it...

...I believe that all of these are important, and believe that the crisis in the West which began with the Enlightenment was an essential thing: religion had grown used to an intertwined relationship with power...

...This unsettling demonstration of Islamic fervor is hardly likely to change the situation...

...No one is amused at jokes about the Holo-caust, nor would mocking the death of Martin Luther King be considered accept-able...

...Most readers are probably tired of the controversy by now-The Satanic Verses has been mentioned prominently on al-most every newscast since the contro-versy started, something a book's author would ordinarily welcome, though I am sure the beleaguered Mr...

...Let me list three of them...

...It is not a strength of ours that we do not understand why others feel such reverence, for the Koran and for the prophet Mohammed, that they are willing to be outraged at what appears to be a mockery...

...It led to myths which still prevail-for example, the idea that we have fallen from a more faithful era, rather than a more conforming one...

...King, or to the murder df millions...

...Would it be possible to persuade others to agree with what he said, even though they did not believe him ? In other words, to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement...

...It is such an attack on what we regard as important in secular terms-freedom of speech, the liberty of an author to use his imagination in the exploration of anything which seems a worthy area of exploration, the right to pursue that explo-ration wherever it leads...

...They organized demon-strations in his support, and some writers agreed to withhold their books from dis-tribution in the large bookstore chains who had dropped Rushdie's book out of fear for the lives of their employees...

...And why not...

...But there is more to the controversy over The Satanic Verses than those two issues, and it is extremely important for us to be clear about what lies beneath the obvious and most easily an-swered questions...

...We must question what the death of blasphemy means...

...The Speaker of Iran's par-liament, Hojatolislam Hashemi Raf-sanjani, said on February 24 that the ayatol-lah's order should not be blamed on Iran or its government...

...Rushdie, a duty sweet-ened by offers of a place in paradise if the assassin were to die in the attempt, or a reward of millions in this world if martyr-dom should be denied...

...I think this controversy is an even more significant event than its current prominence suggests, and it has revealed a number of interesting things which are not yet receiving the attention they de-serve...

...Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, first provoked outrage throughout the Muslim world, as well as a continuing series of riots in which many have been killed...

...George Bush said nothing at all for as long as he possibly could...

...That dis-tinction has not always been made in Islamic countries, particularly not in Khomeini's Iran...

...Now the symbol of blasphemy has given it a coherence and a symbolic form it did not previously have...

...Take anotherexample: if a militant Jewish group insisted that anyone who published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion would be murdered, it would not therefore be ap-propriate to stage a reading of the work, to emphasize the freedom to publish...

...The alienation was there in a less coherent way before...

...We are most in the image of God when we are free...

...Thatcher's Britain, where Rushdie makes his home, was very careful at first to say as little as possible...

...They include the fact that Islam is a rapidly growing religion- not only in Africa, but in America (where many black Americans continue to join, not the eccentric version propagated by Elijah Muhammed and continued by Louis Farrakhan, but orthodox Sunni Islam), and in the Soviet Union...

...Of course it is an evil thing for the ayatollah to call for some-one's death, and of course the censorship . even of bad ideas is dangerous to any...

...In a New York Times piece on the Rushdie controversy, Peter Steinfels made the point that in order to find a topic which might be compared to the strong feeling the Islamic world has for the image of Mohammed, we must look outside of the strictly religious area...

...But many of the writers who came to Rushdie's defense argue that this is a clear case of religious benightedness versus enlightened free-thinking...

...If for us the most important function of a book is to amuse or provoke, and for them the presence of at least one book is a divine mercy, this is not neces-sarily to our credit...

...they do speak with a common sense of grievance when they say that the West has consistently refused to try to understand Islam...

...While people were dying in the riots he attacked Islamic censors, but showed rela-tively little compassion for the dead and their families, or understanding for the inflamed sensibilities of devout Muslims...

...The answer is obvious, isn't it...

...Even before Rushdie, it was interesting that the two groups it was possible to make fun of-say, on TV commercials or in cartoons-without dire consequences were Asians (who are beat-ing us economically) and Arabs...

...Most thoughtful believers understand that the theocratic possibility of enforcing what passed for belief harmed religion, maybe more than we can see even now, this many years after the Enlightenment disenfran-chised religion...

...Even if Rushdie should become the most pious man in the world, he said, he still deserves death for his blasphemy...

...The chains, perhaps as a consequence of this, fire carrying the book again...

...decent society...

...The West has almost no appreciation of Islam...

...then the ayatollah proclaimed it an Islamic duty to murder Mr...

...They would have called down fire from heaven if the threat had been made against the racist, and very white, Enoch Powell...

...Pau...

...But I'm not so sure that this is what is involved...

...Many of the English, who love to attack Americans for racism, have little understanding that there really are brown and black people who are British...

...Secularism forced us (by us I mean people with religious rather than secular approach to the world, and I think there is and should be such a separation) to know that religion should move by honest persuasion, not by force or even subtle social or family pressure...

...Its contribution is too important, even in our own history, to ignore...

...Muslim leaders have not spoken with a common voice about the death threat against Rushdie, which many have rejected...

...I remember during the sixties seeing a T-shirt which showed Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck smoking mari-juana...

...It remains highly amusing to us...

...We have lost something when we do not take the death of Christ and the importance of his teach-ing to the centers of our being, in the same profoundly heartfelt way we react to the death of Dr...

...But it is interesting that in the West we now need to look away from religion in order to find them...