A feeble defence of our freedoms

“Who do we think we are?” is a question often posed about western meddling in the Muslim world. In the furore over the British decision to knight Salman Rushdie, it has been clear that similar questions need to be posed when Muslim powers meddle in western matters. Unfortunately nobody quite knows how to pose them. Since the late Iranian leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called for his murder in 1988, Mr Rushdie has lived a hunted existence. Now he is at the centre of what looks like a repeat of the Danish cartoon affair of 2006.

In the days after the knighthood was announced, protests were held in Malaysia and mobs burnt the Queen in effigy in Lahore. The Pakistani minister of religion, Ijaz ul-Haq, said on the floor of parliament: “If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the ‘sir’ title.” An adviser to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedi-Nejad (the director of his notorious “Holocaust Foundation” in fact) blamed the “satanic triangle of Britain, America and Israel” for the honour and wrote: “Because of the British Queen’s tribute to Salman Rushdie, people who had lost their motivation for punishing him will realise the need for carrying out Imam Khomeini’s edict.”

That actual representatives of foreign governments would endorse or urge violence against a western intellectual is a grave matter. Jörg Lau, a seasoned European observer of Muslim intellectual life, suggested this week in Die Zeit that it be met with an official response, whether at the British or European level, and stressed the duty not to give aid and comfort to those issuing such threats. This complicates the position of many British opponents of Mr Rushdie: Lord Ahmed, who preposterously accused Mr Rushdie of having “blood on his hands”; Mohammed Abdul Bari, secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, who called the honour an “insult”; or Stewart Jackson, the Tory MP, who described it as “gratuitously offensive”.  

A more defensible case against knighting Mr Rushdie – made, among others, by former home secretary David Blunkett – is that he does not seem too attached to Britain. The honours system does not belong to what Bagehot called the “efficient” part of the English constitution; it is rather one of the “dignified” or “theatrical” parts. It concerns the nation as a kind of family, and those who take honours would ideally exude an unambiguous attachment to it. But Mr Rushdie’s is an unusual case. On one hand, he lives in New York. On the other, special consideration must be given to a Briton who, through no fault of his own, cannot live as safely in Britain as he can elsewhere. And Mr Rushdie’s foreign domicile reflects his era as much as his inclinations: a similar controversy arose in France recently over the citizenship application of the American-born bestselling novelist Jonathan Littell. His defenders noted that he was an ornament to French literature. His detractors noted that he lived in Barcelona.

Geography, it seems, is getting ever less – and ideology ever more – important. The barrier between national and international affairs is eroding. This erosion brings new strength to radicals and new vulnerabilities to the west. As the French scholar of Islamism, Olivier Carré, has written, a key precursor to the hardening intellectual climate in the Muslim world was a redrawing of the lines between holy and unholy by such intellectuals as Sayyid Qutb of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. For Qutb, the geographical distinction between a “house of Islam” and a “house of war” was replaced by an ideological one – between what was genuinely Islamic and what was jahil (pre- or anti-Islamic). The frontier now runs through the middle of every Muslim’s head, wherever he may live, so the whole world becomes a battlefield. Riots in Islamabad can intimidate Britons – and are meant to.

The closest thing the west has to such universal values is its campaigns against prejudice. The problem with enforcing such values is that the stakes become very high very quickly. When internet-surfing bigots join in solidarity against a single individual and receive aid and comfort from a few authoritarian governments, the west faces the choice of either escalating or appearing cowardly. It frequently faces ideological blackmail. In the course of his tirade against Mr Rushdie, for instance, Mr ul-Haq boasted that Pakistan had cracked down on the makers of anti-Christian CDs. But anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain is nowhere near as grave a problem as anti-Christian sentiment in Pakistan, where Christians have in recent years been gunned down by the churchful. Pakistan may indeed be making progress in this area, but it should not be contingent on Britain’s willingness to snub its leading writers.

Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, pronounced herself “sorry if there are people who have taken very much to heart this honour, which is after all for a lifelong body of literary work”. This is an attempt to save face on both sides: English people can console themselves that no one has apologised exactly, while Muslim radicals hear only the word “sorry”. This is the tack that Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, took in the cartoon affair and it was a terrible mistake. It invited further meddling. This latest Rushdie Affair is its consequence.  

In an interview with Die Tageszeitung, Navid Kermani, a German novelist of Iranian background, drew the necessary distinctions between defensible protests and unacceptable threats. “We should have learnt from the cartoon affair that one needs to be both firm in the defence of freedom of expression and calm in tone,” he said.

But we did not learn the lessons of the cartoon affair. Now we are condemned to repeat it. 

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard