Chapter 3: The late-Victorian period
Moving in to the late-Victorian period between eighteen-eighty and nineteen hundred and one, we begin to find scholars who could look at Islam on its own terms. Whilst nineteenth century writers are largely tarnished with the issue of imperialism, one or two of them like Rudyard Kipling, and his friend Rider Haggard, were largely able to escape a full-blown, imperialistic world view.
For Shamsul Islam, a Professor of Panjab University, Rudyard Kipling’s imperialism is only one aspect of his principles of law that challenges the “Dark Powers” that he encounters everywhere in his world. His life in India gave him access to “diverse religious and philosophic traditions”,[96] and these two traditions were experienced at first hand rather than in the abstract. Shamsul Islam looks at how Kipling reacted to these traditions and formulated them into his own world outlook that he called ’the law’. In Professor Islam’s opinion, Kipling sees “Islam and Muslims in a very positive light:”
Kipling was a real internationalist and his work or ideas are quite relevant to our post 9/11 world. This is particularly shown by his views on Islam and Muslims. Today when Islam and the Islamic world are under fierce Western attack and a new crusade or the so-called ‘clash of civilizations’ rages on, it is heartening to see how Kipling views Islam and Muslims in a very positive light. Perhaps it is high time that the West should listen to what Kipling has to say on the subject.[97]
In English writers’ attitudes to Indian religious traditions there remained much of a reprehensible nature. Oriental religion was a subject for study by "Orientalists", but typical of the early scholars in their attitude of degradation of Indian religion in ‘A Christian’ was the statement that:
The most enormous and strange impurities; the most villainous frauds and impostures; the most detestable cruelty and injustice; the most filthy and abominable conceits; every corruption and indulgence, are presented to us in their histories, varied in a thousand forms.[98]
Let us consider the lines that appear to ascribe pagan ideas to the East:
My brother kneels, so says Kabir
To stone and brass in heathen-wise. [99]
It suggests that the East was idolatrous and that only Christians were in the right while, in their obeisance to pagan gods, Hindus were beyond the pale.
Kipling, on the strength of the word of Kabir, an Indian himself, holds similar views on religion in India. He takes the attitude that idolatry is the basis of religious practice for his fellow man and: "His God is as his fates assign..." And yet he goes on to modify this by: "His prayer is all the world’s and mine,"[100] thereby endorsing a common divinity in all received religion. It is a common theme in Kipling to resort to primitive beliefs in times of stress. For in India, "most folk come back to simpler theories" he held in "The Conversion of Aurelian Mc Goggin".[101] Kipling had a leaning towards the philosophies of the East, while Kim goes in search of the truth with the Lama, and it is suggested that:
All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed by the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers and visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end. [102]
And also:
''...he is holy and thinks upon matters hidden from thee," says Kim in the Lama’s defence travelling in a crowded carriage to Umballa.[103]
What Kim owes to his guru, the Lama "the yellow-headed buck-Brahmin priest", is "wisdom from the Lama’s lips". The spiritual guidance as he followed "the traces of the Blessed Feet throughout all India", was received from out of the mouth of the Lama. And, the knowledge he obtained on the road perfected Kim's education, while his future vocation as a "chain man" was prepared for by his accompanying the Brahmin priest.
In the Indian Mutiny, 1857, it is not so much a case of the shortcomings of the British or the legitimacy of the Indians’ grievances, but rather that Anglo-Indian fiction shows it as a popular revolt and a large political movement. Importance is placed by the late-Victorian author Meadows Taylor in ‘Seeta’,[104] on the justification of ‘native’ soldiers in taking action against measures which were counter to their culture and religion. He was supportive of the Indian soldiers on the threat to class or caste which was represented by the new ammunition which was issued to them, which was lubricated with pig and cow grease. It contravened both Hindu and Muslim people’s religious duty to touch such items, and Meadows Taylor acknowledged that the new army regulations introduced in the 1850s were intrinsically hostile to fundamental Indian social beliefs. These meant that the requirement for Hindu soldiers to use such tainted ammunition threatened the orthodox Hindu with the complete loss of caste and the Muslim soldier with social disgrace.
Another work, Mrs Steel’s ‘On the Face of the Waters’ accepted, comprehendingly, that the ammunition was contaminated in that way. She rejected, as well, the weak contention of the British authorities that they were ignorant of the religious scruples of the Indian people, complaining as she did of "the inconceivable folly and tyranny of initial responses to the soldiers’ disaffection".[105] The result was that "85 of the best Indian soldiers at Meerut, for example, were set to toil for ten years in shackles because they refused to be so defiled".
It might be argued that no one needed what Islam could provide as much as Kipling did; with the pain and suffering he endured in the early years at “the house of desolation” in Southsea - the brutal cruelty of that boarding place - his lonely life in India and with his treatment at the hands of “the hated wife, Carrie Kipling” we can observe it.[106] He experienced a decade of hating, pre 1914; and in later life, after the loss of his son, John, at the Battle of Loos during World War I, he suffered from depression. Had he felt the consolation that religion can bring, arguably his redemption could have been procured and he may have escaped the anxiety and neurosis that he continually experienced.
Of the late-Victorian romance writers, Rider Haggard is the most sympathetic towards the Islamic world outlook. In ‘She’, the character, Ayesha, possesses the supposed traditional qualities of super womanhood: permanent youth, perennial prettiness, supernatural strength; and she is white! Ayesha, whose name is the same as the daughter of the prophet of Islam, is of the Arab nation for which Haggard felt a strong affiinity, regarding it as pure, and culturally in accord with his values, its people being strong, virile and attractive to westerners, a model for Haggard's heroes and protagonists. She appears in historical costume and is very wise. The American critic Morton Cohen[107] sees her as Sagacity itself: Wisdom's Daughter he calls her, referring to another Haggard title. She becomes in one (Jungian) theory, the projection of Haggard's unconscious ideal of the perfect love, an image varying only in small details that man has inherited in part as a legacy of his race's past history - what Jung terms "the race memory".
In ‘The Brethren’ his character, Rosamund, a young heiress who has half Moorish blood descended from Saladin, is abducted and made hostage in Beirut. Two of her suitors, Wulf and Godwin, the Brethren, travel to Lebanon to rescue her. Masouda, a beautiful widow, arranges to meet the brothers when they arrive. She is a spy for the Saracen, Sinan, but soon falls in love with Godwin. She takes the brothers into Sinan’s territory to try to rescue Rosamund who is imprisoned by Sinan there. A Christian in Muslim land, Masouda is portrayed as a sympathetic character, and glimpses of Saladin show him to be a great man with a profound sense of chivalry and honour, as we saw in Chapter 1. Haggard conveys a balanced view of Saladin who displays a generosity of spirit and a valorous character compared to the bloodthirsty Christians, Lozelle and Palmer. As with Haggard’s views of African characters which are often complimentary, he finds the Muslim characters attractive, especially since Haggard elevates Rosamund to sainthood and allows Saladin to spare the beleaguered Jerusalem, mirroring facts from the Crusades.
A writer who spent a great deal of energy and time in public works, completing pamphlets on Church and State, and a supportive book on the Salvation Army, ‘Regeneration’, with a long section dictated by its founder, General Booth, was one whose spirit and morality were close to the religious ideals of Islam.[108]
To segue from the previous discussion of William Muir [Chapter 1] to the 1980s is challenging, but his theme of the revelations supposedly from Satan takes me to the Indo-English novel, “The Satanic Verses”. When Salman Rushdie startled the English literary world on the publication of his novel[109] he immediately faced a Muslim backlash by extremists and others who considered his novel to be disrespectful not only to the then Prime Minister, the late Margaret Thatcher, but to Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam and revered holy prophet of tens of billions of Muslims, present and past. Not only was it disrespectful, but it called into question the honour and dignity of a beloved and revered man who had united a movement, fought wars in the name of the religion and founded what was to be a major world denomination of believers in the one God. The term ‘Satanic Verses’, or what Arabic scholars called the ’gharāniq’ verses, was drawn from a supposed reciting of a few verses of the Qur’an that were later withdrawn and discarded by prophet Muhammad as being from the devil, sent to deceive him as if coming from the word of God. The words do not appear in the Qur’an in the original form, but refer to the pagan goddesses: Al-lāt, Uzza, and Manah according to the first biography of Muhammad by Ibn Ishaq. The lines move from disallowance to approvedness, in their amended form:
Have ye thought upon Al-Lat and Al-'Uzza
And Manat, the third, the other?
Are yours the males and His the females?
That indeed were an unfair division!
They are but names which ye have named, ye and your fathers, for which Allah hath revealed no warrant.
They follow but a guess and that which (they) themselves desire.
And now the guidance from their Lord hath come unto them. [110]
The phrase 'Satanic verses' was not known to Muslims, but was invented by Western scholars specialising in the work of Arabia and the Near East. For Muslims, the Indo-English Rushdie title remains sacrilegious, not being founded on Islamic jurisprudence or what is termed ‘fiqh’ in Mohammadan law.[111] And as the Muslim philosopher, Shabbir Akhtar, has pointed out: “the confusion of the sacred and the profane, the good and the evil, allegedly revealed truth and purely human truth supplies the central theme of the novel.”[112]
Indeed, Eliot Weinberger argued in 1989, that passages in the novel were an "all-out parodic assault on the basic tenets of Islam.”[113] As well as the characterisation of the prophet Muhammad in one chapter on Islam as ‘Mahound’, a pejorative term from the Crusades, allegedly meaning a conjurer, a magician or a false prophet, in another chapter it uses the names of the prophet’s wives, Ayesha, Khadiga and Hafsa taken on by prostitutes in a harem, thereby drawing an unpleasant inference by reason of their analogy, into the work. After initial attacks in India, Muslim groups in Britain and elsewhere in Europe joined protests and some rallies resulted in the burning of the novel on the streets of Bolton and Bradford, London and other cities.[114] The novel was subsequently banned in India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Malaysia and in the Sudan.
The account of the character ‘Mahound’, rather like Salman, is of one who, flirting with religion, even at a late stage attempts a return to the Islamic fold, and tries to attain a reprieve making the following statement which apologised profusely for:
the distress the publication has occasioned to the sincere followers of Islam. Living as we do in a world of many faiths, this experience has served to remind us that we must all be conscious of the sensibilities of others.[115]
The fictional character ‘Mahound’ is patently a reference to the prophet of Islam derived from apostate sources, and another character, Salman the Persian, refers to Mahound as a kind of false prophet who had “revelations of convenience.” Again he says, “Mahound himself had been a businessman and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom organisation and rules come naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should come up with such a very businesslike Archangel who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if not corporeal, God,”[116] The novel addresses aspects of Islam that Muslims take as sacrosanct and deliberately associates both biography and exegesis in a derogatory and mocking fashion.
According to Geoffrey Robertson, the barrister who defended a legal challenge against Rushdie, the novel’s protagonist, Gibreel, pulverised “by his spiritual need to believe in God and his intellectual inability to return to the faith, finally kills himself.” The plot, for Robertson in brief, is “not an advertisement for apostasy.”[117]
However, many Muslims, including the influential Kalim Siddiqui of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain [118] took the view that not only the character, Gibreel, but the author Salman, were apostates, and agreed with the Grand Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini who issued a fatwa - a religious edict, on 14 February 1989 - condemning Rushdie to death on account of the defamatory nature of the text and its one sided analysis of Islam in what Merryl Wyn Davies and Ziauddin Sardar refer to as taking “what is defensible but let[ting] the indefensible slide without remarks.”[119] The type of selective arguments that an apologist like Rushdie makes are the most puzzling aspects of Islamic intellectual theorisation, according to Wyn Davies and Sardar. Ziauddin Sardar confessed himself to be "transfixed with fear, anger and hatred" on his reading of the novel.[120] He sees it as part of the ‘’distorted imagination… a deliberate and calculated exercise that impedes mutual understanding between Islam and the West.”[121] Ziauddin Sardar thought “that every word, every jibe, every obscenity in the ‘Satanic Verses’ was directed at me - personally.” “Every Muslim would have felt the same”, he explained. “Just as people threatened with physical genocide react to defend themselves’‘, Sardar emphasised.[122]
His co-writer, Merryl Wyn Davies was reduced to tears for days as a result of the “hate-speech” she had encountered in reading the novel, and vowed to counteract it with a book in refutation.[123] As a Welsh convert to Islam, she was incensed that such an attack could be made against the very foundations of the beliefs of Muslims and particularly one who had studied the tenets of the holy Qur’an carefully and come to her informed decision to ‘revert’ to Islam, because all believers hold that one is born originally as a Muslim – one who submits to God. The philosopher, Shabbir Akhtar, in his admonitory work ‘Be Careful with Muhammad’ also warned: “If one handles precious things, one does well to handle them with care.”[124]
Convinced of its apostasy, Kalim Siddiqui and others at the Muslim Parliament including Ghayasuddin Siddiqui [no relative] continued to support the ‘fatwa’ claiming that he had no authority to revoke the Islamic proclamation and that Rushdie‘s work was derogatory and defaming of Islam. Ghayasuddin Siddiqui added: “We support the fatwa but at the same time we have always said that Muslims in this country should abide by the law and not carry out the killing." He continued: "It has always been the situation that the fatwa remains in operation and valid."[125]
It was not, despite Siddiqui, until 2000 that the Islamic edict was allowed to be quietly dropped, but not until after the deaths of Hitoshi Igarashi and Ettore Capriolo, Rushdie’s Japanese and Italian translators, and the shooting and serious wounding of William Nygaard, his publisher in Norway, as well as countless other individuals in India and elsewhere.[126]
Of course, Rushdie’s was not the first racist attack in Britain, for the seventies had seen the era of ‘Paki bashing’, there had been the death in Handsworth of a West Indian youth, the stabbing of Tausir Ali in Bromley and the events around the Notting Hill carnival, as well as the later attacks in 1985 at Broadwater Farm and the Stephen Lawrence affair, leaving a fraught and difficult time in Black – British relationships.[127]
The whole issue that became so contentious revolves around the cultural requirement for freedom of speech in the West versus the belief by many Muslims throughout the world that there exists a law in all countries that “prohibits any publications or utterances that tend to ridicule or defame Islam". The United Kingdom had laws that protected blasphemy against the Christian religion, but the blasphemy laws in England did not provide enough cover for a defence against the novel’s supposed sacrilegious nature to provide redress to Muslims. The Attorney General did not allow a case to be put for blasphemy, even though Muslim jurists had applied for a case to be heard.
Its publishers, Penguin, were always adamant for its publication to stand and would brook no revocation. There appeared to be a determination to publish at any cost. Its chief executive officer, Peter Mayer, stated: “Any climb down now will only encourage future terrorist attacks by individuals or groups offended for whatever reason by other books that we or any other publisher might publish.” He claimed that if “we capitulate there will be no publishing as we know it.”
He admitted that “Muslims needed protection from discrimination and hatred”,[128] but it is just strange that he did not take such a consistent position over publications concerned with right wing terrorism, or, indeed, over revisionism of the Holocaust. It is also bizarre that the insistence on publishing at all costs, despite the need for caution and due diligence, went against every faith calling for forbearance, charity and humility. The contention that only secular humanism was an acceptable justification for all publishing meant that social accountability was minimal. The fundamental insistence on total freedom of expression became a similarly fundamentalist, extremist position, like the one it was supposed to be attacking.[129]
So, in other words, Peter Mayer was arguing for total freedom without any responsibility. Muslims today have not permitted further insults to go unaccounted for, however. To contend that, thereby, they undermine values of tolerance and forgiveness is neither to understand the depth of hurt experienced by the Muslim community, nor to recognise the deep passion and love that they hold for their spiritual leader.[130] They have, to follow Ziauddin Sardar, drawn a line under secularism as to how far it may go in its reaction to Islam and no further. For “Islam is not Christianity”, they will no longer allow the mistreatment and “violence of the history, tradition and the sacred territory of Islam.”[131]
The novel, despite some artistic merit, shows the cultural neuroses and insecurities of a post-colonial writer deracinated from his Muslim religious roots, and through the English public school route shunted into a hybrid condition where he is of neither East nor West, and floundering to explain his predicament. Gibreel Farishta, “the tuneless soloist” and “buttony, pursed Mr Saladin Chamcha” on board a fictionally doomed plane are oddly the precursors of that other airplane disaster of 11 September 2001 in which Mohammad Atta and Hani Hanjour, the erstwhile passengers on hijacked aeroplanes that fly into the ground, and who, as a coda to the story threaten: “Here we come! Those bastards down there won’t know what hit them. Meteor or lightening or threat of God.”[132] It remains a metaphor for the coming attacks on the Twin Towers that were to devastate Muslim - Christian relations up to now and led, contrarily, to the backlash against Islamic fundamentalism in US attacks on Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in May 2003: metaphor and simile as predictors of a future Islamic/Christian tragedy.
His fictional character Bilal X, might be taken to be metaphor for, or at least an allusion to, Cat Stevens, or Yusuf Islam as he is now known, the convert to Islam. He is portrayed as a famous former pop singer who has converted to Islam, and is described by Salman as the "favored lieutenant" of "the Imam", a character modeled on the Shi’ite Ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini. His "well-nourished, highly trained" voice might appear to be "a weapon of the West turned against its makers.”[133] This caricature may have been responsible for Stevens’s reaction to the ‘fatwa’ which was allegedly supportive, but hotly denied by Yusuf Islam[134] at the time. Cat Stevens was the author of the seventies’ ballad that expressed the directionlessness, the rootlessness and the search for a spiritual element that characterised the decade, and led to his discovery of the Qur’an:
… and I'm on the road to find out
Then I found my head one day when I wasn't even trying
And here I have to say, 'cause there is no use in lying, lying
Yes the answer lies within, so why not take a look now?
Kick out the devil's sin, pick up, pick up a good book now
Yes the - answer - lies - within, so why not take a look now?
Kick out the devil's sin, pick up, pick up The Good Book now! [135]
The lines suggest that a transition from international pop star to Islamic champion and educationalist were possible if one looked for redemption in the pages of the holy Qur’an. In fact, Yusuf’s brother, David Gordon, brought him a copy of the Qur'anfor his birthday after a visit to Jerusalem; he took to it immediately, and began his journey to Islam and his ongoing work for the Muslim community.
Salman Rushdie’s novel brings home tensions in the emigrant community between himself and the ‘Other’ or between ’us’ and ‘them’. He/she can either identify with and integrate into an England (nevertheless of multicultural pluralism), or remain within his/her own cultural mindset. Whilst Gibreel Farishta tries to take the latter position of holding on to his cultural identity and not adapting to English culture, Saladin Chamcha takes the former route of abandoning his identity and going with the flow. Saladin grows horns and a hoof[136] whilst Gibreel is awarded a halo for his non-adaptation. The narrator resumes:
Should we say that these are two fundamentally different types of self? Might we not agree that Gibreel,…- is joined to and arises from his past;..- so that his is still a self, which for our present purposes, we may describe as true…whereas Saladin Chamcha is a creature of selected discontinuities, a willing re-invention; his preferred revolt against history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, false,…- While Gibreel, to follow the logic of our established terminology, is to be considered ‘good’ by wishing to remain, for all his vicissitudes, at bottom an untranslated man. – But, and again but; this sounds dangerously like an intentionalist fallacy? Such distinctions resting as they must on an idea of the self as being (ideally) his vicissitudes, at bottom an untranslated man – non-hybrid, ‘pure’, —an utterly fantastic notion! —cannot, must not, suffice.[137]
So, perhaps after twenty-five years the time has come to forgive Salman Rushdie; but Shabbir Akhtar has said that “any Muslim who fails to be offended by Rushdie’s book ceases on account of that fact” [that the Qur’an is the source and inspiration of Muslim teaching and that Muslims must interpret its ‘imperatives’ as they may] “to be a Muslim”: disinheritance by literary fatwa, and therefore an unconditional pardon can still not be issued by the fundamentalists.
The reverse position to Saladin Chamcha, where an Englishman reverts to an alien culture, has been described by T E Lawrence as a chameleon philosophy in ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’[138]. It is an attempt to fully integrate with the ‘Other’, but, at the same time, it is a duplicitous scheme where the Englishman pretends to take on the aspects of the foreigner, while, all along, hoping that they will become like him:
A man who gives himself to be in possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been. Then he is exploiting his old environment to press them out of theirs. Or, after my model, he may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back. Then he is giving away his own environment: pretending to theirs; and pretences are hollow, worthless things. In neither case does he do a thing of himself, nor a thing so clean as to be his own (without thought of conversion), letting them take what action or reaction they please from the silent example.
An earlier work by Salmon Rushdie was entitled ‘Midnight’s Children’. Annoying Mrs Indira Ghandi, the Indian Premier, was Salman’s strategy with his rebarbative novel. Rushdie was sued successfully in London for this piece of libel, and, indeed, Rushdie recognised in a personal statement that “incorporating such momentarily ‘hot’ contemporary material in the novel was a risk – and by that I meant a literary risk, not a legal one.”[139] The general purport of “Midnight’s Children” is to show two parallel lives in the reborn India of 1947: Saleem Sinai and his future wife, Padma. It is an allegory of the rebirth of India before and after Partition and employs ‘magic realism’ as a plot device. Those children who were born at the hour of midnight on the day of Partition were endowed with special psychic powers. Saleem is riven by doubt: “He was caught in a strange middle ground, trapped between belief and disbelief, and this was only a charade after all.”[140] His novel steers away from any certainties, maintains doubt at all times, and is a paean to loss of faith, uncertainty, migration and discontinuity. An incoherent story, it has links, through Islamic allegory, to 'The Satanic Verses' and veers between two Indias, pre and post Independence.
The early part of the story sees Saleem Sinai (“Snomouse, Stainface, Baldy, Buddha or even Pieces of the Moon”) at prayer, and others mock his prostrations and his recitation of ‘Al Fatihah’ - the Opening, the first verses of the Quran which are basic principles of the religion: Bismillah rahmana rahim - Praise be to Allah Cherisher and Sustainer of the Worlds: Al hamdu lillahi rabbil 'alamin – Most Gracious Most Merciful: Maalik yawm al-deen - Master of the Day of Judgment.[141] The text makes an allegory of the holy Quran and turns it into a mockery: “here was Ingrid, her face scorning him for this Mecca – turned parroting; here their friends Oskar and Ilse Lubin the anarchists, mocking his prayer with their anti-ideologies.”
But it is not enough to say that this is a fiction; there is a direct connection between the holy text and its subsumption by his scathing friends – a situation that he does not defend or deny. Salman Rushdie’s literary ability is not doubted, but deference to people’s susceptibilities is not one of his strong areas, nor his political interface with religion. The effect of his book on the Muslim community, as worthy of burning for its insult on the prophet, remains just as US Pastor Terry Jones’s book “Islam is of the Devil” remains an unworthy symbolism for his burning of the Quran.[142] In a fictional response to an actual book burning, Samad Iqbal in Zadie Smith’s ‘White Teeth’ declares to his wife, Alsana Begum, ‘’It is not a matter of letting others live. It is a matter of protecting one’s culture, shielding one’s religion from abuse. Not that you’d know anything about that, naturally.’’[143]
‘Midnight’s Children’ is equally scathing of Mahatma Ghandi, the great Indian pacifist, and Rushdie comments that “even language obeys the instructions of Ghandiji”. He goes on to accuse Kashmiris of cowardice and the British of stifling political resistance [this last not an unfair criticism, actually]:
Aziz thought the Indians have fought for the British; so many of them have seen the world by now, and been tainted by Abroad. They will not easily go back to the old world. The British are wrong to try and turn back the clock. ‘It was a mistake to pass the Rowlatt Act,’ he murmurs. ‘What rowlatt?’ wails Naseem. ‘This is nonsense where I’m concerned!’ ‘Against political agitation,’ Aziz explains, and returns to his thoughts. Tai once said: ‘Kashmiris are