You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (4 page)

He had nowhere to run. If he had left Britain, no other country could have promised him safety. The global scale of the malice directed against him made him a refugee without the hope of asylum. Iranian or Pakistani writers who saw the violence in the West realised that if clerics issued fatwas against them in Tehran or Lahore, they could no longer expect to flee to a safe haven. If the controversy was raucous, if the media amplified the death threats, there would be nowhere on the planet to hide.

To justify their death threats and make the shocking seem reasonable, Rushdie’s enemies aped the European fascists and communists of the twentieth century. Just as the Nazis said that the Germans were the victims of supernatural Jewish plots or the communists said that the proletariat was the target of the machinations of the treacherous bourgeoisie, so the Islamists told the faithful that they were being persecuted by a conspiracy of global reach and occult power. Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, declared that the West had been engaged in a cultural war from colonialism on to ‘undermine the people’s genuine Islamic morals’. Rushdie was at its forefront. He was the ideal undercover agent for Western intelligence, Rafsanjani announced – ‘a person who seemingly comes from India and who apparently is separate from the Western world and who has a misleading name’. Rushdie was a white colonialist, hiding beneath a brown skin; a traitor hiding behind a Muslim name. The British secret service had paid him to betray the faithful, the Iranian theocracy explained as it added corruption to the list of charges against him. It gave him bribes, disguised as book advances, as it organised the assault on Islam by the cunning if curious means of a magical realist novel.

As with Nazism, the conspiracy theory needed Jews. The Iranian interior minister said that Zionists had ‘direct involvement’ in publishing the book. The Iranian president said that ‘Zionist-controlled news agencies’ had made Rushdie famous. In Syria, the Ba’athist dictatorship said that the novel was part of a plot to distract the world’s attention from Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. In Pakistan, religious leaders talked of an ‘American Jewish conspiracy’. Across the planet, the drums shuddered to the same beat: ‘It’s the Jews, it’s the Jews, it’s the Jews.’

The demonstrations against Rushdie were not confined to the poor world. The faithful marched in Bradford and London as well as Tehran and Lahore. They inspired a fear in the West that went almost unnoticed during the elation the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe produced.

Fear was a novel emotion for Western liberals, and I understand why they wanted to push it to the back of their minds. However much they talked about the bravery of the stands they were making, those in the West who campaigned against apartheid in southern Africa, and those, much fewer in number, who wanted to help the opponents of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, had not had to put their lives on the line. They had not had to come to terms with the knowledge that the publication of a book or a cartoon, or the vigorous condemnation of an oppressive ideology, would place families, colleagues and themselves in danger. They had never felt the need to glance twice at dark doorways or listen for quickening footsteps coming up behind them in the street.

By the early 1990s, events seemed to have taught liberals that they could win without pain, in bloodless revolutions. After the fall of white South Africa and the break-up of the Soviet Union, fear appeared to be an unnecessary emotion. History’s lesson was that dictatorships would collapse of their own accord without the usual wars and revolutionary terrors. Party hacks and secret policemen, who had never uttered a dissenting word in their lives, had of their own accord given up serving worthless ideologies and embraced the ideals of Western liberalism. ‘The heroes of retreat’, the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, called them – Kadar, Suarez, Jaruzelski, Botha and above all Gorbachev: apparent ‘yes men’ who decided to say ‘no’ to the regimes they had promised to protect. Just like that, without anyone invading their countries or storming their palaces and holding guns to their heads. One day apartheid was there, the next Nelson Mandela was president of South Africa, and the world was granting him a status dangerously close to sainthood. For forty years the Iron Curtain had divided Europe, and then as if a magician had waved his wand, it vanished and tourists could gawp at what was left of the Berlin Wall, before going on to holiday in what had once been the forbidden territory of Eastern Europe.

Humanity had seen nothing on the scale of the bloodless revolutions of 1989 to 1991 before. Former enemies acknowledged their mistakes. They came to agree with our way of thinking without us having to risk our personal safety. The world lived through an age of miracles; but the trouble with witnessing miracles is that you come to expect more of them.

The tactless Rushdie spoilt the ecstatic mood. The reaction to his novel showed that history was not over. One enemy of liberalism was not coming round to our way of thinking, holding up its hands and admitting that we had been right all along. It asked questions of liberals that were close to home. Would they be able to defend their values, when their opponents were not Russian communists sending dissidents to Siberia, or right-wing dictators in faraway lands ordering the torture and murders of Latin American leftists, but fellow citizens who were threatening to kill novelists and bombing bookshops in the cities of the West? Would they defend free speech in murderous times? Or would they hold their tongues and accept that they must ‘respect’ views they knew to be false?

Do you believe in freedom of speech?

Are you sure?

Far be it from me to accuse you of living with illusions, but unless you are a tyrant or a lunatic – and the line between the two is thin – you will rarely speak your mind without a thought for the consequences. You would be friendless within a day if you put a belief in absolute freedom of speech into practice. If you propositioned complete strangers, or told them that they were fools, if you sat down at a meeting and announced that the woman next to you was ugly and the man next to her stank, you would run out of people willing to spend time in your company.

Humans are social primates, and socialising with the rest of our species requires a fair amount of routine self-censorship and outright lying, which we dignify with names such as ‘tact’, ‘courtesy’ and ‘politeness’.

The appeal of censorship becomes evident when you consider whether you would be happy for others to say what they thought about you. Even if what they said was true – particularly if what they said was true – you would want to stop them saying that you were ugly, boring or smelly. You would expect them to lie to you, just as they would expect you to lie to them. Humans have a bias in favour of information that bolsters their prejudices and validates their choices. Above all, our species has a confirmation bias in favour of information that upholds our good opinion of ourselves. We want our status confirmed. We want others to lie to us so that we can lie to ourselves. We want to be respected.

As well as a provision for freedom of speech, most guarantees of basic liberties have a right to privacy sitting uneasily alongside them. It recognises that the full truth about an individual’s life cannot be made public without crushing his or her autonomy. Under the pressure of exposure, his sense of who he was would change. He would become suspicious, fretful, harassed; he would be left exposed to gales of mockery and condemnation. In the interests of preventing a surveillance society, it is better that the state allows the citizen to live a lie. ‘If you’ve nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,’ say authoritarians. But everyone has something to hide, and if there isn’t a dirty secret, there is always something that your enemies can twist to make you look dirty.

Privacy was meant to offer the citizen protection against the over-mighty state. The emphasis on the right to a private life was an understandable and necessary reaction against the informers and spies the communist and fascist totalitarian regimes recruited to monitor daily life. But in the late twentieth century, at the same time as the
Satanic Verses
controversy began, judges began to adapt the law. Instead of stopping the secret service from tapping the phones or opening the mail of citizens, judges decided to stop the media revealing details of the private lives of wealthy celebrities and other public figures.

The privacy law they developed could not have been more different from traditional libel law. Libel is meant to protect the individual from the pain inflicted by malicious gossips who spread lies about him or her. Privacy protects against the pain that comes from hearing the truth broadcast. In libel, truth is an absolute defence. If writers and publishers can justify what they say, they may leave the court without punishment. In privacy cases, truth is not a defence but an irrelevance. The law intervenes not because the reports are false, but because they tell too much truth for the subject to cope with, and open him up to mockery, to pain … to disrespect. Privacy rights allowed the wealthy to suppress criticisms, even though the criticisms were true. They could demand respect, even though they were not respectable.

The persecution of Rushdie appeared to follow the old precedents. Contemporaries looking for a parallel to Khomeini’s gangsterish order for assassins to ‘hit’ him recalled the Vatican’s order to take out Elizabeth I in the 1570s. They talked about the re-emergence of the Inquisition, or quoted Voltaire’s pointed question, ‘What to say to a man who tells you he prefers to obey God than to obey men, and who is consequently sure of entering the gates of Heaven by slitting your throat?’

The comparison with the past fails, because there is an unbridgeable gulf between today’s religion and the religious ideas which persisted for most of history. Until the Enlightenment, maybe until the publication of
On the Origin of Species
, believers could reassure themselves that the wisest thinkers of their time believed that a divine order structured the universe. As late as the 1690s, a belief in science and magic could co-exist even in the great mind of Isaac Newton, who divided his days between trying to understand the laws of motion and trying to work out when the Book of Revelation foretold the ‘great tribulation and the end of the world’. (He thought that God would wind us up in 2060, readers expecting to make it through the mid-twenty-first century should note.)

Charges of blasphemy and heresy were once like accusations of libel. The wretched sinner had sought to spread falsehoods against the true religion, which the faithful exposed. The Protestant divines of Elizabethan England and the papacy that confronted them fought over what kind of supernatural power ordered the world. But they agreed on the fundamental question that a supernatural power must order the world. The Catholic believed that if the Protestant converted to Catholicism he would find the truth. The Protestant believed the opposite. Now you have to be a very isolated believer to imagine that your religion, or any religion, can provide a comprehensive explanation of the world. When they study beyond a certain level, all believers learn that the most reliable theories of the origins of life have no need for the God of the Torah, the New Testament or the Koran. The most brilliant modern scientists have little in common with Newton. They are atheists, or believers in a remote God who is nothing like the capricious, interventionist deity of the holy books. The best thought has moved beyond religion. It is for this reason that religion, which once inspired man’s most sublime creations, can no longer produce art, literature or philosophy of any worth; why it is impossible to imagine a new religious high culture.

If you go to the chapel at King’s College, Cambridge, you will see one response to the loss of religious authority. The inheritors of the priests and stonemasons who sent arches soaring heaven-wards to show their confidence in a divinely ordained universe are now modest people. Their information for visitors makes no pretence that the gospels are accurate accounts of Christ’s life and teaching. Cambridge Anglicans stress that unknown hands wrote them long after Christ’s death. They offer worshippers a celebration of tradition, symbolic truths and parables, not literal truths. Everywhere liberal Christians, Jews and Muslims follow the same example. They worship in a narrow religious sphere, which is cautious and a touch vapid, and do not try to force the rest of society to accept their views. For them there is a secular world informed by science, and there is their world of faith.

Religious fanatics appear to be opposed to the liberal modernists. They would never accept that their holy books could be anything other than the word of God. The philosopher Ernest Gellner wrote just after the fatwa that Westerners ought to rethink the assumption that industrialisation undermined religious belief. The post-Khomeini world was showing that the forward march of secularism was not inevitable. Islam ‘demonstrates that it is possible to run a modern, or at any rate a modernising economy, reasonably permeated by the appropriate technological, educational and organisational principles
and
combine it with a strong, pervasive, powerfully internalised Muslim conviction and identification’.

The differences between religious fundamentalists and religious modernists are not as great as either imagine. Both want to keep religion in a separate sphere; it is just that the religious sphere of the fundamentalist is wider and the means used to protect it from scrutiny more neurotic and brutal. Trying to maintain a ‘strong, pervasive, powerfully internalised’ religious conviction in a world that can manage without religious explanations creates perpetual tensions, however. The effort required to resolve them is harder than Gellner believed. At some level, even murderous fanatics know that their ideologies are redundant. They are not the vanguard for a new age of piety, but reactionaries, who hope that if they indoctrinate and intimidate they can block out modernity. Their desires mock their hopes. The rifles they fire, the nuclear weapons they crave come from a technology that has no connection to their sacred texts.

To prevent defeat, religious extremists stop the sceptical, evidence-based approach of science moving into the religious sphere and asking hard questions about the validity of their holy books. Rushdie crossed the boundary, and asked modern questions about the evidence behind the story of the founding of Islam. His persecution was just as modern. Rather than representing a continuation of the persecutions of medieval inquisitors, who thought they were protecting the truth from its enemies, his tormentors were closer to celebrities’ lawyers, who claim that their client’s feelings would be hurt and their image tarnished by the discussion of unwelcome facts. Rushdie’s critics were more concerned about the effect of his writings on the psyche of believers than whether what he had said was true. The charge they threw at him was that he had ‘offended’ the faithful by ‘insulting’ their religion. It was as if he had invaded their privacy.

I accept that the individual needs protection from the surveillance of an over-mighty state. I accept too that the judges will have to tackle the explosion of character assassination on the Net directed at private citizens. I find the use of privacy law to restrict the media’s reporting of public figures far harder to justify. The English judiciary does not put the public interest first, as its willingness to censor on behalf of bankers who had affairs at work shows. But if a new generation of judges could be trusted with the power to prohibit, then I would accept too that people in the public eye need not be exposed to the scrutiny they receive in the United States. All of these acts of censorship, however, are protections for
individuals
. No honest jurisdiction can defend using censorship to protect ideological systems from the harm or offence of criticism. You must treat ideologies which mandate wars, and govern the sexual behaviour of men and women and, in their extreme forms, every aspect of life for hundreds of millions of people, with the utmost candour. For they are ideas that seek to dominate.

Politics is as much a part of the identity of the committed leftist, green or conservative as religion is a part of the identity of the committed Christian, Jew, Muslim or Hindu. When the political partisan’s beliefs are insulted or ridiculed, he feels the ‘offence’ as deeply as any believer who has heard his god or prophet questioned. We do not, however, prohibit or restrict arguments about politics out of ‘respect’ for political ideologies, because we are a free society. We call societies that prohibit political arguments ‘dictatorships’, and know without needing to be told that the prohibiting is done to protect the ruling elite. If political or religious believers are offended to the core of their being by criticism, free countries must reply, ‘Tough. Learn to live with it. We know that we tell white lies about many things. We accept that the truth can be suppressed on some occasions. But religion and politics are too important and too dangerous to risk handling with kid gloves.’

Respect for religion is the opposite of religious tolerance, because it allows the intolerant to impose their will on others. The Virginia Statute for Religious Tolerance, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776, highlighted the distinction in flowing prose:

Salman Rushdie was not free to abandon and criticise the religion of his childhood. The Islamists said that if he – and by extension all other Muslims – changed his religion or decided that he was an atheist, he would face assassination for the ‘crime’ of apostasy. They wanted to make Rushdie ‘suffer on account of his religious opinions’; to restrain, molest and burthen his body for his blasphemy, and to do the same to anyone, Muslim or not, who echoed his ideas. In his most compelling line, Jefferson concluded that ‘all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion’.

‘Argument’ was his key word. Religious toleration did not limit argument, but removed the sanctions of the state and the established Church that had stood in argument’s way. It did not rule out appeals to logic, reason, imagination and sympathy – but gave them the space to breathe without the threat of punishment. Argument involves the true respect that comes from treating others as adults who can cope with challenging ideas and expecting them to treat you with a similar courtesy. Looking back on his life in 2011, Rushdie echoed Jefferson: ‘The question is who has power over the story. The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.’

The ‘respect’ demanded by Rushdie’s enemies infantilised both the giver and the receiver, and suited religious reactionaries well. They had every interest in keeping their subject populations in a state of infantile ignorance, and in spreading the fear that all who thought about arguing with them would know that they risked becoming the next target.