Salman Rushdie on Sir Iqbal Sacranie
Salman Rushdie is less than enamoured with Sir Iqbal whose features frequently grace our television screens these days.
While giving him credit for admitting that the bombings were his community’s responsibility Rushdie points out that
this is the same Sacranie who, in 1989, said that “Death is perhaps too easy” for the author of The Satanic Verses. Tony Blair’s decision to knight him and treat him as the acceptable face of “moderate”, “traditional” Islam is either a sign of his Government’s penchant for religious appeasement or a demonstration of how limited Mr Blair’s options really are.
(I understand Sacranie’s full quote as being “Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him… his mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for forgiveness to Almighty Allah.” The Guardian, February 15, 1989).
Sacranie is a strong advocate of Mr Blair’s much-criticised new religious hatred Bill that will make it harder to criticise religion, and actually expects the new law to outlaw references to Islamic terrorism. He said as recently as January 13: “There is no such thing as an Islamic terrorist. This is deeply offensive. Saying Muslims are terrorists would be covered [ie, banned] by this provision.”
Two weeks later his organisation boycotted a Holocaust remembrance ceremony in London, commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago.
If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Mr Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.
Rushdie might also have added that Sir Iqbal was part of the delegation that met with Home Office Minister Paul Goggins recently in a bid to have the Qu’ran and the hadiths exempted from the religious hatred law.
And this is one of the central problems with Islam. It’s a religion with something for everyone. If you wake up one morning in a good mood you can find all sorts of stuff that are peaceable, loving, kind. On the other hand, if you wake up in a foul temper then there’s plenty of hateful stuff to help you vent your spleen. In reality, if you believe the Qu’ran is the word of god then you have to take both on board. You can’t pick and choose.
Which is, it seems, what Rushdie then goes on to suggest in the rest of his piece. He wants Muslims to engage in a ‘reformation’ of their religion and to see their holy text as something that came from within history - ie it was a product of it - and the Prophet Muhammad’s - time - rather than as something supernaturally outside of history.
Impossible. No religious person will demote hs texts to the status of historical schoolbook. They might very well acknowledge the history contained within it but accepting it as a sign of its times comes perilously close to admitting that it was written by men of those times. Rushdie himself seems to acknowledge that - and so he demolishes his own argument:
The insistence within Islam that the Koranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical scholarly discourse all but impossible. Why would God be influenced by the socioeconomics of 7th-century Arabia, after all? Why would the Messenger’s personal circumstances have anything to do with the Message?
Exactly. He wouldn’t be. Which is why Muslims take their religion literally and why, if interpreted in a particular way, a minority can kill themselves in its name. And Salman Rushdie should know better than most others that to ask Muslims to reinvent their religion as a historical narrative rather than the express commands of god is the equivalent of whistling in the wind. Pointless.
Due to the Human Rights Act we have to be careful where we send these people. We must keep dangerous people in our own country to possibly threaten and murder us if the country we want to send them to - usually their own homeland - might be beastly to them.
