You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (8 page)

The courts and the police, who never seemed to be to hand when criminals attacked art galleries, besieged Husain for more than a decade. Censorship was not promoting harmony, let alone the interests of justice, but allowing sectarians to pick grievances out of thin air. It took until 2008 for the Delhi High Court to throw out all of the hundreds of criminal charges against Husain, and warn, ‘In India, a new puritanism is being carried out … and a host of ignorant people are vandalising art and pushing us towards the pre-renaissance era.’

By then Husain had had his fill. In 2010, at the age of ninety-four, and after years of exile, he renounced his Indian citizenship. Speaking with sadness but not bitterness, he said, ‘I have not intended to denigrate or hurt the beliefs of anyone through my art. I only give expression to the instincts from my soul. India is my motherland and I can never hate the country. But the political leadership, artists and intellectuals kept silent when Sangh Parivar [Hindu nationalist] forces attacked me. How can I live there in such a situation?’

India must carry the shame of being the first country to ban
The Satanic Verses
, the work of its greatest novelist, and of following up that miserable achievement by driving its greatest artist into exile.

Why pick on Husain for sketches no one found disturbing when he first released them? Read his accusers, and they cannot justify their charges of blasphemy or obscenity. How can they, when Husain’s paintings are not remotely pornographic, but part of a deliberate attempt by the artist and his contemporaries to continue Indian traditions? Husain’s real offences were to be born into a Muslim family almost a hundred years ago, and to defend the secular dream of Nehru. That was it. His enemies wanted to feed their supporters a diet of indignation, and needed to supply them with new targets for their rage. The identity of the target was irrelevant. If they had not gone after Husain, they would have gone after someone else.

In his study of the crisis in Indian secularism, Salil Tripathi emphasises how unIndian Indian nationalism has become. ‘Whenever Hindu nationalists attack an art gallery, or tear down posters they consider obscene, or demand bans on books they don’t want others to read, or vandalise a research institute, or destroy the home of an editor, or threaten an academic, or run a campaign against a historian they disagree with, or force film studios to change scripts, or extract apologies from artists, or hurl eggs at scholars, or destroy mosques, or rape Muslim women, or kill Muslim men and children, they take India into a deeper abyss [and] push Hinduism into a darker age. They look and act like the Nazis and the Taliban … [They] are untrue to the meaning of their faith and are disloyal to their nation’s constitution. They shame a great nation and belittle how Rushdie saw India: “The dream we all agreed to dream”.’

The self-satisfied might say how lucky we in Britain are that we do not suffer from India’s censorship laws, and how proud we should be that we could offer Husain a sanctuary. Before we become too smug, we should go back to the forced closure of the Husain exhibition in London in 2006. The reaction to the attack on intellectual freedom in the heart of a city that boasted of being a great cultural capital was instructive. There was no reaction. The artists and intellectuals who are usually so keen to write round-robin letters to the press denouncing this policy or that injustice stayed silent. Journalists and politicians bit their tongues too, as they tacitly accepted the tyrannical proposition that if a writer or artist failed to show ‘respect’, then he or she must suffer the consequences. The denial by fanatics of the right of the public to see the work of a major artist did not warrant one paragraph in even the news-in-brief columns of any of the daily papers.

I must enter one further caveat. For all the bad faith behind their concocted accusations, the religious thugs had one good question: Why couldn’t Husain paint Muhammad, or come to that, his favourite wife Aisha?

‘God is love’

Sherry Jones gave every appearance of being a warm-hearted American. She covered Montana and Idaho for a business news service, until in 2002 she decided like so many reporters before her to try to break into fiction. She learned Arabic. She read academic studies of the history of early Islam. Then, like no other reporter before her, she sat down to write a novel about the life of Aisha bint Abu Bakr, whose father, according to popular accounts, betrothed her to Muhammad when she was six, and gave her away to be his wife when she was nine.

The wars of 9/11 moved Jones to seek reconciliation between peoples. ‘We in the West know so little about Islam that we tend to demonise it,’ she told an interviewer. Muhammad was ‘fairly egalitarian in his attitudes to women’, and got a ‘bad rap’ from feminists. The sooner Muslims, Christians, Jews, atheists and Buddhists realised that ‘we are all human beings with needs, desires and fears … the closer we will be to achieving Paradise right here on Earth. Because Paradise means living continually in the presence of God, and, as the Bible says, God is love.’

Jones’s novel,
The Jewel of Medina
, continues in this vein – at some length. The opening lines set the tone for the rest of the book: ‘Join me on a journey to another time and place, to a harsh, exotic world of saffron and sword fights, of desert nomads living in camel-hair tents, of caravans laden with Persian carpets and frankincense, of flowing colourful robes and kohl-darkened eyes and perfumed arms filigreed with henna.’

As the above suggests, Ms Jones was writing a historical romance for the women’s market. The New York office of Random House was impressed, and paid her an advance of $100,000 in a two-novel deal.

I defy any reader to guess how a religious, racial or other interest group could find grounds for offence in her work. As with the paintings of M.F. Husain, it is impossible for those who do not know what happened next to understand why even the most twisted censor would want to hurl Jones’s book on the fire.

The Jewel of Medina
is an anti-
Satanic Verses
. It replaces scepticism with reverence, and satire with solemnity. Jones’s Aisha is a feisty girl, as all modern heroines must be. Muhammad is wise and good. Jones does not suggest for a moment that his teachings are inferior to Christianity or Judaism. For those who do not like to see their prophets or gods cast in a bad light, Jones puts the best possible gloss on an event that shocks modern sensibilities: an old man taking sexual possession of a young girl. Jones avoids the obstacle by pretending it isn’t there. In the novel, they are married when Aisha is nine. Muhammad kisses the child and says goodbye. She reaches the age of fourteen. To her intense frustration, her marriage is still unconsummated. ‘Each day flowered with hope – would Muhammad visit me today? – then dropped its petals like tears. The weeks dragged by like a funeral procession.’ The waiting lasts for years, and the marriage is not consummated until after she reaches puberty.

This comforting view of Aisha’s life is popular with apologists for religion, most notably Karen Armstrong, a former nun who now soothes modern readers by assuring them that there is little or nothing to worry about in Catholicism or any other creed she comes across. Her biographies of Muhammad and her history of Islam guided Jones as she worked on the plot of
The Jewel of Medina
, and Jones seems to have been impressed by Armstrong’s bold assertion that the emancipation of women was a cause dear to the Prophet’s heart. To make it, Armstrong had to explain away the hadiths and verses in the Koran that support the beating and sexual exploitation of women, and the power the holy book gives husbands to divorce unwanted wives. On the question of men marrying little girls, Armstrong’s Muhammad, like Sherry Jones’s Muhammad, does the decent thing. He waits until Aisha reaches puberty before making love to her. As Armstrong explains:

Tabari, the ninth-century Koranic scholar, is not in fact such a comforting source. In his collection of stories about the Prophet, he quotes Aisha as saying, ‘the Messenger of God consummated his marriage with me in my house when I was nine years old’. In other traditions he cites, he puts her age at ten. The hadith collections of Bukhari, which Sunni Muslims consider to be the most authoritative, also say that Muhammad consummated the marriage when Aisha was nine. For most of the history of Islam, there was nothing controversial about her age at the time of the wedding. Because it confirmed her virginity, it reinforced Aisha’s status among the Prophet’s wives, and gave her wishes added force in the power struggles within Islam after Muhammad’s death.

Perhaps Jones, Armstrong and all those like them who avert their eyes from inconvenient evidence do so because they worry about Western racists, who use Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha to taunt ethnic minorities. But it is as important to worry about religious extremists who use the arguments for male supremacy, homophobia and the exploitation of women and children in holy books to justify oppression – and to notice that there is not a great deal of difference between the ideologies of the religious and the racial extremists.

In
Does God Hate Women?
, their scholarly study of the links between religion and misogyny, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom criticise Armstrong by making the essential point that when sacred texts are taken to be divine instructions, you cannot allow nervousness to inhibit criticism.

In Iran after the 1979 revolution, the Islamists reduced the minimum age of marriage for girls to nine. In 2000, under pressure from women’s rights activists, the Iranian parliament voted to raise it to fifteen. However, the Council of Guardians, an anti-democratic oversight body dominated by traditional clerics, vetoed the reform, saying that the new ruling was contrary to Islamic law. (They had the example of Ayatollah Khomeini on their side. He had availed himself of the law’s blessings and married a ten-year-old girl.) The case of Yemen is equally instructive. In 1998, the Yemeni parliament revised a law that had set the minimum age of marriage at fifteen. The new ruling allowed girls to be married much earlier, so long as they did not move in with their husbands until they had reached sexual maturity. Conservative clerics take this to mean that the consummation of a marriage can take place at the age of nine. Human-rights activists have fought to reverse this ruling, but to date they have been unsuccessful, because Islamic clerics can point to Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha to justify their views.

‘Although it would be a massive oversimplification to claim that Islam is the cause of these patterns,’ Benson and Stangroom conclude, ‘it is nevertheless the case that Islamic beliefs are sometimes a factor in child marriage.’ As the Iranian reformers found, religion makes the task of stopping girls becoming the possessions of older men – sometimes far older men – harder. The men can always say that religious authority is on their side. Unless religious authority is challenged, they will win.

There are three possible challenges. The first, and to my mind the simplest, is to give up on religion. To reject communism, you do not need to know why Marx’s beliefs in the inevitability of proletarian revolution were wrong, you just need to look at the vast crimes the communists committed, and resolve to have nothing to do with the ideology behind them. Similarly, to reject religion you do not need to understand the scientific and philosophical arguments about the extreme unlikelihood of God’s existence, or go through the archaeological and literary studies which tell us that the early years of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were strikingly different from the accounts presented to believers. Knowledge of the vast crimes committed in the name of religion is once again sufficient.

Religious reformers must try subtler strategies. They cannot abandon their faiths, therefore they take, say, the problematic lines in Leviticus, St Paul’s epistles and the Koran that license the persecution of homosexuals and try to reinterpret them.

Leviticus says:

The prohibition appears to leave no escape hatches, but liberal Jews and Christians must find a way out so they can continue to practise their religions without sacrificing their tolerant instincts. American Christian homosexuals made a dogged effort when they formed a group with the splendid title of the National Gay Pentecostal Alliance. (Sadly, they later changed its name.) They did their own translation of Leviticus, and came up with a new version of the prohibition:

They updated the language into contemporary English to produce: