There’s a crying need for civil society members and writers in India, and everywhere else, to sharply condemn the forces of religious bigotry
The utterly condemnable attack on author Salman Rushdie on August 12, 2022, at Chautauqua, New York state, raises several issues. The first is the deafening public silence of most political personalities, civil society figures and writers in India. Do they not regard the attack, which was clearly aimed at killing Rushdie, as sufficiently horrific to deserve condemnation? Or is that the attack, which occurred in faraway United States, is only a blip in the periphery of their consciousness? Something they are aware of but which causes only a passing feeling of concern and not burning anger?
A debate over possible answers is likely to stretch over hours without leading anywhere. That notwithstanding, it needs to be stressed that their silence is conspicuous given the issues the attack raises. The basic one concerns freedom of speech and a writer’s ability to speak what is on his/her mind. Rushdie’s son, Zafar, wrote on Twitter on August 20, “Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” That it is, indeed, so becomes clear when the attack is viewed in the context of the storm Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, first published in September 1988, had unleashed, triggering public protests in many countries, including India, where most Muslims held that some of its contents insulted Prophet Mohammad and were blasphemous. It was banned in many countries, including India. On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had become Iran’s supreme leader in 1979 following the defenestration of the regime of Shahanshah (King of Kings) Mohammad Reza Shah, issued a fatwa or a religious edict calling upon Muslims to kill Rushdie.
A religious organisation, 15 Khordad Foundation, which announced a bounty of $2.7million on Rushdie’s head following the fatwa, raised it to $3.3million in 2012. On the 27th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s edict in February 2016, 40 news outlets in Iran added another $600,000 to the bounty, taking the total to $3.9million. The fatwa and the bounty stand though the former was declared inoperative by Iran’s then President, Sayyid Mohammad Khatami, in 1998.
It is wrong to hurt people’s religious sentiments, particularly in the form of blasphemy. It is equally wrong to shut out legitimate questioning by dubbing it blasphemous. Besides, who decides what is blasphemous? It should not be the cleric who has proclaimed something as blasphemous. Even if someone has said or done something that is blasphemous beyond doubt, the answer lies in condemning it and rebutting it by reason and information and not murdering the perpetrator. Murder in such cases is meant not merely to punish the perpetrator but spread terror so that no one else dares to do or say the same thing or something similar. Once murder is accepted as a permissible punishment for blasphemy, it can also be prescribed in cases — like allegations of corruption against the clergy — where blasphemy is alleged not on genuine grounds but to squelch legitimate criticism. Along with the doctrinal issues it raised, one of the main planks of the Reformation, which began in 16th century in Europe, was widespread corruption in the Roman Catholic Church reaching right to the top. The Reformation progressed through debates, which led to the emergence of Protestantism as a vibrant stream of Christianity.
Religions exist not in vacuums but in communities whose cultures have evolved through history following changes in social and economic relations and the spread of knowledge. Religions are not just doctrinal and metaphysical phenomena but sources of sets of spiritual and moral coordinates that enable people to cope with the many challenges and setbacks confronting them in their quotidian existence. To be able to play this role, they themselves must be open to change in response to new situations emerging over time.
An example from the history of Christianity will be instructive. RH Tawney writes in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), which remains a classic despite the decades, “When the age of Reformation begins, economics is still a branch of ethics, and ethics of theology…the legitimacy of economic transactions is tried by reference, less to the movements of the market, than to moral standards derived from the traditional teachings of the Christian Church; the church itself is a society wielding theoretical, and sometimes practical, authority in social affairs.”
All this changed drastically by the middle of the 17th century. The conflict between the new social and economic forces clamouring for recognition of their legitimacy and the traditional doctrines of the church whose moral authority had been undermined by the Reformation, was suspended by a truce, under which politics, business and spiritual exercises, each assumed “a separate and independent vitality”.
Debates and criticism are essential for the creative evolution of religions, making for their continued relevance to society. Criticism is almost always initially condemned as heresy but is often subsequently accepted, leading to changes in doctrine and praxis. Murder and its sanctioning have no place in the world’s moral, spiritual and theological universe. The attempt on Rushdie’s life has to be condemned unequivocally. Silence is not an option when religious bigotries of all variety — Muslim, Christian and Hindu, for example — are globally on the rise.
(The author is Consulting Editor, The Pioneer. The views expressed are personal.)
