IMSD calls upon Muslims to recall the views expressed by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan well over a century ago. In his time, he staunchly opposed Muslims who made a bonfire of books they did not like, or demanded its ban by the authorities. His advice was simple. Fight words with words if the book in question is worthy of a reasoned critique. Burning or banning such books implies that Muslims are incapable of an intellectual and moral defense of their faith. If the book (cartoon, play, film) is nothing but a gratuitous, salacious or malicious attack on Islam or its Prophet, his suggestion was: ignore it.

In 1861, an English writer William Muir had written a book in which he had made disparaging remarks against Prophet Mohammad. In response, Sir Syed travelled to London to study the books and journals that Muir had relied on and eight years later published a reasoned critique debunking Muir’s work.

Sir Syed’s advice to his fellow Muslims long ago is all the more relevant in today’s ‘new India’ where minorities are daily targets of Hindutva’s hate politics. Any ill-advised or hotheaded response to the publication of Satanic Verses – a book not Many Muslims are likely to have read earlier or will read now — will only provide more fodder to the Muslim-baiters. Besides, it will only give free publicity to the very book they want banished.

IMSD does draw the line between Free Speech, which it fully supports, and Hate Speech, which it staunchly opposes. While, the Constitution of India guarantees the right to freedom of speech, the law of the land also provides for penal action against hate speech.

Muslims, or anyone else for that matter, have the right to be offended by a book, cartoon, play or film and they have the right to protest in peaceful manner. They are also within their right to invoke existing provisions of criminal law to seek redressal of their grievance. But they do not have the right to silence the offender. A fatwa, firman or call to kill Salman Rushdie, as also the demand for a ban on Satanic Verses amounts to just that: silencing the offender.

Signatories:

1. Aarefa Johari, Gender rights activist, journalist, Mumbai
2. Akbar Shaikh, IMSD, Bhartiya Muslim Yuva Andolan, Solapur
3. Ahmad Rashid Shervani, Educationist, Hyderabad
4. A. J. Jawad, IMSD, Co-convener, Advocate, Chennai
5. Amir Rizvi, IMSD, Designer, Mumbai
6. Anwar Hussain, Corporate Executive
7. Anwar Rajan, IMSD, Pune
8. Arshad Alam, IMSD, Columnist, New Age Islam, Delhi
9. Askari Zaidi, IMSD, Senior Journalist, Delhi
10. Bilal Khan, IMSD, Activist, Mumbai
11. Farhan Rahman, Asst. Prof., Ranchi University, Ranchi
12. Feroz Abbas Khan, theatre and film director, playwright and screenwriter, Mumbai
13. Feroze Mithiborwala, IMSD, Co-convener, Bharat Bachao Andolan, Mumbai
14. Gauhar Raza, Anhad, Delhi
15. Hasan Ibrahim Pasha, Writer, Allahabad
16. A. J. Jawad, IMSD, Co-convener, Advocate, Chennai
17. Irfan Engineer, IMSD Co-convener, CSSS, Mumbai
18. Javed Anand, IMSD Convener, CJP, SabrangIndia Online, Mumbai
19. Kasim Sait, Businessman, Philanthropist, Chennai
20. Khadija Farouqui, IMSD, Gender rights activist, Delhi
21. Lara Jesani, IMSD, PUCL, Mumbai
22. Mansoor Sardar, IMSD, Bhiwandi
23. Masooma Ranalvi, IMSD, We Speak Out, Delhi
24. Mohammed Imran, PIO, USA
25. Muniza Khan, IMSD, CJP, Varanasi
26. Nasreen Fazelbhoy, IMSD, Mumbai
27. Qaisar Sultana, Home Maker, Allahabad
28. Qutub Jahan, IMSD, NEEDA, Mumbai
29. (Dr) Ram Puniyani, IMSD, Author, Activist, Mumbai
30. Sabah Khan, IMSD, Parcham, Mumbra/Mumbai
31. Shabana Mashraki, IMSD, Consultant, Mumbai
32. Shabnam Hashmi, Anhad, Delhi
33. (Dr) Shahnawaz Alam, IMSD
34. Shalini Dhawan, Designer, Mumbai
35. Shama Zaidi, Documentary Film Maker, Mumbai
36. Shamsul Islam, Author, Delhi
37. Sohail Hashmi, IMSD, Sahmat, Delhi
38. Sultan Shahin, Editor-in chief and publisher, New Age Islam, Delhi
39. Teesta Setalvad, Secretary, CJP, IMSD, Mumbai
40. Yousuf Saeed, Documentary Film Maker, Delhi
41. Zakia Soman, Co-convener BMMA, Delhi
42. Zeenat Shaukat Ali, IMSD, Wisdom Foundation, Mumbai

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Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is famous for his forthright statements to other world leaders. In March 1989, Mahathir wrote a letter to then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that was blunt even by his standards. Unlike a lot of his angry letters, this one wasn’t published.

Mahathir’s letter was about Salman Rushdie’s controversial book, The Satanic Verses. He wrote:

I do not think I am a Muslim fanatic. Yet I find I cannot condone the writings of Salman Rushdie in his book […] And I find the attitude of the “Western Democracies” most patronising, arrogant and insensitive.

In 2019, the UK government declassified many of its Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) files on the diplomatic upheaval over the novel. Mahathir’s letter to Thatcher is one of hundreds of unpublished diplomatic documents I have seen in visits to the UK National Archives since then.

My full analysis of this letter, and Thatcher’s response to it, has just been published in the Review of International Studies. It is part of a larger project I am working on about The Satanic Verses crisis and what it tells us about the place of religion in international relations.

Interested in understandings of religion in global order?

David T Smith has a new article in @RISjnl ‘Religion and responsibility in international relations: Thatcher, Mahathir, and The Satanic Verses’

Watch a video summary and read the article here: https://t.co/ZuIVlBEyA6 pic.twitter.com/wK0MJ0ciNV

— BISA – British International Studies Association (@MYBISA) October 31, 2024

‘The strangest and rarest crisis in history’

The Satanic Verses, published in late 1988, was met with protests throughout the Muslim world, beginning in South Asian communities in Britain. Many Muslims felt Rushdie had insulted the Prophet Muhammad for the entertainment of Western audiences.

In early 1989, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued an extraordinary fatwa (or religious edict) calling for the death of Rushdie, a British citizen living in London. This led to a diplomatic standoff that the speaker of Iran’s legislature called “the strangest and rarest crisis in history”.

Khomeini, who was seeking to strengthen Islamic hardliners in Iran, urged “all zealous Muslims” to carry out his fatwa.

No other leader of a majority Muslim country supported the death sentence, which blatantly violated Britain’s sovereignty and international law. But Mahathir and others felt Western powers should ban The Satanic Verses to maintain good relations with the Muslim world.

The British government saw no reason to ban it. Rushdie and his publishers had broken no British law, as the country’s centuries-old blasphemy laws applied only to the defamation of Christianity.

Defending Rushdie’s life was, as Thatcher put it, “a simple matter”. Her government would not tolerate an Iranian incitement to murder a British citizen on British soil.

Defending his book, however, was more complicated. The British government would not ban it, but also wanted nothing to do with it.

An unusually strong and personal letter

On March 15 1989, Thatcher and Mahathir met in London to discuss matters such as arms deals and airport privatisation. The Satanic Verses issue came up only briefly, when Thatcher thanked Mahathir for his government’s “moderate” stance on the book. She explained that while she could understand the offence the book had caused, the “great religions” could withstand such attacks.

Mahathir reassured Thatcher his government would take no action beyond banning the book. He said he had set out his personal views on the affair in a letter, which he handed to Thatcher.

When her private secretary opened the letter later that day, he found it was “cast in exceptionally strong language that was not reflected in Dr Mahathir’s demeanour at the meeting itself”, according to another archival letter.

Mahathir was having none of the argument that Muslims should behave more like Christians when it came to tolerating insults to their faith. He wrote:

It is well to remember that Islam has been around only 1,400 years. The faith and fervour of the Muslims are as strong as the faith and fanaticism of the Christians of the 15th century.

Of course, our behaviour is also influenced by the mores of the time. We are more tolerant than the 15th century Christians. We do not have inquisitions, we do not burn heretics at the stake, we do not torture those who blaspheme, we do not hound the new Muslim sects as you did the Protestants, and we do not indulge in pogroms. Our behaviour is more civilised than Christians when Christianity was 1,400 years old.

Mahathir’s letter was very unusual for a diplomatic correspondence in that it did not mention either Malaysia or Britain. The “we” of his letter referred to Muslims, while the “you” referred to the West.

And the West, for Mahathir, was a Christian world, though he believed Christianity was enfeebled and decaying within it. He did not want Islam to suffer the same fate.

The West controls the world media and denies others access to it. The power is, of course, abused. […] The Muslims are a particular target. They are made out to be cruel brutes given to all kinds of savagery.

While the West claimed to believe in freedom of expression, according to Mahathir, it did not allow Muslims to defend themselves against what they considered “scurrilous misrepresentation”. Rushdie’s book was the final straw.

Your belief in this so-called ‘freedom of expression’ for one disillusioned and misguided man is stronger than your belief in the value of good relations with 1 billion souls.

In that case, he reasoned, the West could hardly blame Muslims for defending their own principles.

“Prime Minister,” he concluded, “I am much saddened.”

A disconnect between two world views

In another archival letter, Thatcher’s private secretary noted that British officials were “rather rocked by the severity” of Mahathir’s letter.

Thatcher instructed FCO officers to draft a “reasoned response” on her behalf. David Gillmore, former high commissioner to Malaysia, warned they must try to address Mahathir’s points or the reply would sound “condescending and supercilious”.

Written in Thatcher’s voice, the letter said she was “well aware of the distress” the book had caused Mahathir and many in the Islamic world. The reply avoided creating a perception the government was responsible for it.

I must emphasise that the British Government do not in any way condone or endorse Mr Rushdie or the content of this book.

Although freedom of speech was a principle of major importance, Thatcher insisted Britain was not seeking to impose its values on the Muslim world. The issue had “nothing to do with relations between Christians and Muslims”. Rather, it was one of national sovereignty and international law.

When it came to the heart of Mahathir’s complaint, Thatcher’s response resorted to language that was polite, firm and vague:

I was especially saddened to hear you suggest that the Western-controlled media made a particular target of the Muslim world. I cannot agree that this is the case. I believe that this century has seen a growing understanding between the nations, cultures and religions of the world. We must continue to work to improve that understanding.

The British government’s view was that states in the modern age could overcome differences once caused by religion. As such, Thatcher’s response would only represent Britain, not Christendom, despite the many symbolic and even legal ways the British state was still tied to Christianity.

This was one of the reasons Thatcher and Mahathir were doomed to talk past each other. For Western leaders, political authority had superseded religious authority in the 17th century. In diplomacy today, the things that mattered were sovereign states.

The leaders of Muslim countries also viewed sovereign states as important –they were the basis of their own legitimacy. And they had to defend the state against religious radicals who wanted to remake the world along classical Islamic lines.

But for leaders like Mahathir, who grew up in a British colony, religion was still a vital force in diplomatic relations. He viewed the Western insistence on a secular world order as a continuation of colonial dominance over the Muslim world.

The legacy of The Satanic Verses

We can see from this exchange how the British government wanted to distance itself from The Satanic Verses, even as it sought to protect Rushdie.

While many fellow writers, including Muslims like Naguib Mahfouz, leapt to the defence of Rushdie and The Satanic Verses, the book had few defenders in the British government. (One exception was Rushdie’s local MP, the future Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.)

In his recent memoir, Knife, Rushdie notes that he got a far more sympathetic response when he was nearly murdered in 2022 than when the fatwa was issued in 1989.

Despite the British government’s notable lack of support for Rushdie’s book, Muslims in Britain and around the world felt the political and cultural power of the West was aligned against them.

This continues to be important for understanding controversies around derogatory images of the Prophet Muhammad in the West. They are never just about the images. They are also about a global imbalance of power that goes back to colonialism.

Mahathir and Thatcher were mutual admirers of each other – and both can claim to have been their countries’ most transformative leaders of the past 50 years. Mahathir, now 99, is still active in Malaysian politics despite recurring health issues.

Mahathir’s anger in this letter did not reflect personal animus against Thatcher. It foreshadowed his future emergence as a global advocate of Islamist causes. His modernist brand of Islamism may well outlast Khomeini’s, despite the violent legacy of Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie.

David Smith, Associate Professor in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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"The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence"

Adolf Hitler, in Mein Kampf.

The history of India over the past century unfolds like a chronicle of civil war. India was partitioned, the segment re-partitioned. "Internal enemies" were identified and massacres unleashed. No solutions were found. Today, communal myths possess nuclear bombs. There are lines of control everywhere – in villages, cities and in hearts. Barbed wire, iron gates and security guards abound. Flagpoles of religious places compete with each other for height. Society is awash with fear. Thanks to the guardians of "identity", outraged sentiment seems to be on the rampage – battling over cricket pitches, books, films and paintings.

Humanity possesses a natural tendency for remembrance and its transmission. For those interested in ideals of progress history is a laboratory of social theory. It is also the terrain of Identity, a category that sits uneasily with human equality, and has taken millions of lives. History as the maidservant of a cause undermines its own disciplinary procedures. No history is free of tendency, and historians’ convictions undoubtedly affect their output. However, just as the Euclidian point is essential to geometry, the search for truth has to remain an ideal, even if an unattainable one, for history.

This is a painful commitment, because historical materials defy dogma. None of us like our beliefs being challenged. Gandhians do not want to be reminded of the repercussions of the Khilafat movement or the Congress’ attitude to the 1946 naval mutiny. Communists are defensive about the stance of the CPI in 1942 and the Adhikari resolution supporting Partition. Admirers of Savarkar do not advertise the fact that he assisted the British war effort, was not averse to Mahasabha participation in the Muslim League ministry of NWFP in 1943, and was a main accused in the Gandhi murder trial. The Pakistan Ideology Act restrains Pakistani historians from questioning the two-nation theory or writing a non-tendentious account of Jinnah’s career. The RSS might not like to be reminded that in May 1947 the Akhil Rajya Hindu Sabha under J&K RSS chief Prem Nath Dogra, passed a resolution on Kashmir stating that "a Hindu state should not join secular India". Or that Sardar Patel accused RSS men of celebrating Gandhi’s assassination. Trotskyists don’t dwell on Bolshevik military action against the Kronstadt sailors in 1921, Stalinists don’t remember state terror and mock trials in the USSR. Nazi apologists don’t recall the Holocaust and Zionists suffer amnesia about the terror unleashed by the Haganah and Stern gangs in 1948. Japanese historians are defensive about the massacres in Nanking and Shanghai and some day Chinese historians will forget that China waged war on Vietnam in 1979 in tandem with the USA.

For some ideologues, the past is a saga of victory and defeat. The fear of ambivalence is characteristic of them and in their hands, history is pure polemic. Savarkar’s speech to the Hindu Mahasabha in 1942 described 17th century India as being "a veritable Pakistan", with "Hindustan being wiped out", and the 18th century witnessing the march of Hinduism. This anachronism is repeated in a Pakistani textbook of 1982, which teaches that in the 16th century, "`Hindustan’ disappeared and was absorbed in ‘Pakistan’". The distortions extend to contemporary analysis. Time summed up the history of the 20th century as a victory of "free minds and free markets over fascism and communism" (December 31, 1999). Along with Clinton’s essay it misrepresents the Allied victory in World War II as an American one, ignoring the role of the Red Army and the fact that the USSR lost over twenty million dead, compared to less than 3 lakh Americans. This is History as the paean of megalomania. I do not believe that all viewpoints are equally biased, or that history provides no lessons. From the welter of partiality, we may glean truths and hope – but only if our profession is motivated by respect for human experience, and not just "Hindu" or "Muslim" experience. The historian has to be an iconoclast or risk becoming a propagandist.

In an attempted refutation of Bharat Bhushan’s article The Other Italian Connection (HT Feb 18), K.R. Malkani (Feb 23) states that the RSS was founded before Moonje visited Italy, that its heroes were Indians, and that Gandhi also met Mussolini. Here is an example of history as polemic. It was the militaristic mind-set of fascism, not its specific heroes that inspired Moonje. All ultra-rightists had their own "national" heroes. Mussolini seized power in 1922, and his impact was evident by the time the RSS was founded in 1925. And whereas Moonje was greatly impressed by Mussolini, Gandhi told the latter that his state was "a house of cards", and took a dim view of the man – "his eyes are never still". Moonje’s trip was not an innocuous replica of Gandhi’s.

Defending the recent withdrawal of the ICHR volumes, government protagonists aver that the authors reduced Gandhi to a footnote. It is ironic that persons sympathetic to the politics of Gandhi’s assassin repeatedly take refuge behind Gandhi’s memory. Let us address the issue differently. Gandhi was a proponent of ahimsa. Hinduttva’s proponents believe that Hindus are too pacific – even cowardly, and need to become militant. Their heroes are those whom they identify as warriors. Their constant evocation of wounded sentiment as a justification for "direct action", prompt us to ask the government to clarify its position on violence. Should sentiment be elevated to a level superior to the needs of civic order and criminal justice? Is it surprising that a retired CBI director is so fond of the Bajrang Dal, an organisation known more for muscle than mind? That a former union minister encouraged the intimidation of a film unit? That the vandalisation of the BCCI office was condoned by a Chief Minister who saw no reason for a police case? Is it their case that Naxalite violence is wrong but violence unleashed by outraged sentiment is acceptable? Do they have the courage to say so explicitly?

The assault on the mind is the most dangerous feature of the current situation. Mushirul Hasan was attacked for suggesting that the ban on Satanic Verses be lifted. (A prominent Congressman incited that campaign). Asghar Engineer is beaten up for questioning the Syedna’s powers. Whatever happened to the rights of minorities within minorities? Demands are voiced – rather belatedly – for a ban on Dante’s Inferno. Film screenings are disrupted. Literary commentaries on the Granth Sahib result in threats of excommunication. (How brave our militants are!). And when we need a discussion on the rule of law, we indulge instead in literary criticism, film appreciation etc. Surely the point ought to be whether bad authors and filmmakers have a right to remain alive, with their bones intact. Whether the government can ensure a peaceful resolution of conflicts or if musclemen may run amuck because they have high connections. Gandhi rendered Hindus nirvirya and napunsak, said Godse. I beg to differ.

Gandhi had greater physical courage than most politicians in his time – and not many of today’s luminaries would venture forth without protection after three attempts at assassination. His ahimsa was a name for restraint, without which no society may survive and no institutions gather strength. Let us stop flaunting our boringly delicate sentiments, and address the deliberate inculcation of revenge and hatred. Those who care about human survival can see their future in the mirror of history.

(This article are fisrt publish in The Hindustan Times.)

Archived from Communalism Combat, April 2000. Year 7  No, 58, Editor's Choice

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