From Fatwa to Jihad

by Kenan Malik

On the eve of the 20th anniversary of the Rushdie fatwa, this title tells the story of this defining episode and explores its repercussions and resonance through to contemporary debates about Islam, terror, free speech and Western values. It examines how the Rushdie affair transformed the nature of the debate on tolerance and free speech.

Genres: Politics, Religion, Nonfiction, History, Islam, Sociology, Philosophy

266 pages

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Indian-born British writer, lecturer and broadcaster, trained in neurobiology and the history of science. As an academic author, his focus is on the philosophy of biology, and contemporary theories of multiculturalism, pluralism and race. These topics are core concerns in The Meaning of Race (1996), Man, Beast and Zombie (2000) and Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate (2008).

Malik's work contains a forthright defence of the values of the 18th-century Enlightenment, which he sees as having been distorted and misunderstood in more recent political and scientific thought. He was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2010

Reviews

[Stephen Welch · Rating 4 out of 5]

In From Fatwa to Jihad Malik offers an incisive accounting of the relationship between "multiculturalism" and the social balkanization that helped engender Islamic extremism, and in so doing grounds the infamous fatwa in a fascinating, and revealing, context. Malik dismantles the myths of both the "Islamophobia" and "Islamophilia" camps, providing along the way many cogent (and quotable) passages in defense of the right to write, publish, read, and offend. What is more, with his deft marshaling of many passages from The Satanic Verses, From Fatwa to Jihad serves double-duty as an excellent critical analysis of Rushdie's novel.

I highly recommend this book.

SRW

[Dmitry · Rating 3 out of 5]

(The English review is placed beneath Russian one)

Довольно интересная книга не о том, как мультикультурализм не сработал, а как сами европейцы прогнулись, забыв все свои собственные ценности. Однако если быть более точным, то речь главным образом будет идти об англичанах, т.к. вся книга посвящена проблеме мультикультурализма в Великобритании, т.к. как на британской земле проявилось это непонятное для меня толерантность к радикализму и радикалам.
Автор начинает с истории появления книги, которая, как я понимаю, станет поворотным моментом в истории Великобритании и радикальных мусульман, что живут в Европе. Мы практически можем наблюдать, как растёт волна и как она ударяет по европейцам в виде терактов. А начинается, опять же, как я это понял, всё с расистских действий в отношении азиатов и мусульман, что прибыли в страну. Далее, как это можно предсказать, мы получили множество активистов левой направленности. И ещё дальше, как левые активисты трансформировались в радикальных сторонников. Правда тут нужно учесть, что речь идёт не о тех, кто приехал, а кто либо родился уже на территории Великобритании либо кто прибыл в очень раннем возрасте. Именно эти люди станут ядром радикализма. Ну а дальше – раскол. Радикализация и отсекание всех, кто не свой. Так это называется.
Это была первая фаза становления. Ну а дальше в игру включается Иран с его духовным лидером и фетвой. Что интересно, это настолько сильное орудие, что возникает ощущение, что европейцы просто не могут с этим справиться. Что, в прямом смысле, заказ на убийство, это новая реальность, с которой невозможно справится, но только отсрочить (в плане постоянных переездов с места на место, сокрытием себя и так далее). Что же касается тех, кто не ударился в бега, то, как пишет автор, многие поплатились за это жизнью. Что это, если не ассасины XIII века в Европе XXI? Компьютерная игра, превратившаяся в реальность. И никто не может с этим ничего поделать. Кому-то не понравилась книга и вот уже появляются люди с требованием запретить печатать эту книгу и вот уже появляются угрозы в адрес издателя, который делает лишь свою работу, пытаясь объяснить людям, что практически любая книга может задеть чьи-то чувства и, следовательно, если руководствоваться этим принципом, то никаких книг не будет в принципе.
И третья, это та самая уступка радикалам. Мы уже видим, что английские епископы на полном серьёзе говорят, что законы шариата можно и принять, если они не будут противоречить английским законам. Даже король соглашается с таким взглядом. Поможет ли это? Как мы знаем, потом были теракты в Великобритании и вся эта миролюбивая политика и мультикультурализм, не показали никакого положительного результата. Наоборот, она как будто подстегнула радикальные силы, показав, что элита прогнулась. И ведь что интересно, книга-то была написана в 2009 году, т.е. когда стали возникать очертания мультикультурализма. Т.е. ещё не произошли самые страшные и самые многочисленные теракты по всей Европе. Другими словами, уже тогда было ясно к чему всё идёт.
Конечно, книга на любителя, т.к. по большей части автор пишет о ситуации в Англии, пишет довольно детально, что обычному читателю не очень-то и интересно. Поэтому уже ближе к концу я выдохся. Да, интересно, но ничего нового я для себя не открыл и, увы, очень всё локально у автора получилось.

Quite an interesting book, but not about how multiculturalism did not work, but how the Europeans themselves gave in under the pressure of the radicals, forgetting all their own values. However, to be more precisely, it will mainly be about the British, because the whole book is devoted to the problem of multiculturalism in Great Britain, because on the British soil this incomprehensible tolerance to radicalism and radicals has been manifested.
The author begins with the story of the book, which, as I understand it, will be a turning point in the history of Britain and the radical Muslims who live in Europe. We can practically see how the wave is growing and how it is hitting Europeans in the form of terrorist attacks. And again, as I understand it, it all begins with the racist actions against Asians and Muslims that came to the country. Further, as we can predict, we have received many left-wing activists. And even further, as left-wing activists have transformed into radicals. However, here we should take into account that we are not talking about those who came here, but who were either born on the territory of Great Britain or who arrived at a very early age. It is these people who will become the core of radicalism. And then there would be a split. Radicalization and cutting off all those who are outsiders. That's what it's called.
It was the first phase of formation. Then in the game comes Iran with its religious leader and fatwa. What is interesting is that it is such a powerful tool that it feels like Europeans just can't handle it. That, literally, the order for murder is a new reality that cannot be defeated, but only delayed (in terms of constant movement from place to place, hiding oneself, etc.). As for those who did not to go into hiding, as the author writes, many have paid for it with their lives. What are these, if not the assassins of the XIII century in Europe XXI? A computer game that has become a reality. And no one can do anything about it. Someone did not like a book, and already there are people with a demand to prohibit printing this book, and already there are threats to the publisher, who does only his job, trying to explain to people that almost any book can hurt someone's feelings, and therefore, if guided by this principle, no books will be at all.
And thirdly, it is a concession to radicals. We can already see that the English bishops seriously say that the laws of Sharia can be accepted, if they do not contradict the English laws. Even the king agrees with this view. But will it help? As we know, then there were terrorist attacks in the UK and all this peaceful politics and multiculturalism did not show any positive result. On the contrary, such a policy seems to have stimulated radical forces, showing that the political elite has surrendered. And what is interesting is that the book was written in 2009, i.e. the most terrible and numerous terrorist attacks all over Europe have not yet taken place. In other words, it was already clear then where everything was going.
Of course, the book is for fans, because for the most part the author writes about the situation in England and writes in detail. That's why towards the end of the book I was bored. Yes, as a whole it is interesting, but I have not discovered anything new for myself and, alas, everything is very local.

[E.T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book presents the history of immigration into Britain and the problems with racism, the introduction of 'multiculturalism' by another name by Livingstone in d 80s to buy peace. Also it analyses how multiculturalism has now worsened the problem after the bought peace has expired and how the attitude of British politicians is also to blame.
In doing so, the book ignores the ideological angle and tries to downplay the illiberalism and violence. Also, he criticises Sam Harris, Mark Steyn, Malannie Philips wrongly and biasedly. But then the non-ideological angle was been explored wonderfully well.
Also, a more balanced book than all of the above is Bruce Bawer's While Europe slept. The author is a an American gay of Norwegian origin in love with Amsterdam and so presents an excellent analysis.

[Sudhir · Rating 4 out of 5]

A primer to understand the spread of Islamic Terrorism in the world. However, I don't think that the subject required such a big book. Islamic psyche is very simple to understand. They always target non-muslim democratic countries to migrate to, and the rest is predictable.

[Sajith Kumar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The publication of a post-Modernist novel in 1988 resulted in the eruption of a Muslim fundamentalist volcano. The fury and violence ejected by the inferno was unmatched and had irrevocably changed the landscape of liberal discourse everywhere in the world. Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ was a game changer for Western democracies. The Rushdie affair, closely followed by the fall of Communism resulted in a clash of civilizations, with ‘the West, with its liberal democratic traditions, a scientific worldview and a secular rationalist culture drawn from the Enlightenment on one side; and Islam, rooted in pre-medieval theology, with its disrespect for democracy, disdain for scientific rationalism and deeply illiberal attitudes on everything from crime to women’s rights on the other’. The Rushdie affair was hence the first major cultural conflict after the two great wars. Immediately after Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie, Islamism spread in the West and its pinnacle was reached on 9/11. Jihadi violence has stunned European cities ever since. This book is an endeavour to take stock of the legacy of the Rushdie affair and its aftermath with special emphasis on the change in fortunes for free speech. Kenan Malik is an Indian-born British writer, lecturer and broadcaster. Trained in neurobiology, his focus is on the philosophy of biology, contemporary theories of multiculturalism, pluralism and race. Malik is a trustee of the free-speech magazine ‘Index on Censorship’.

The event which escalated the issue with ‘Satanic Verses’ was the fatwa (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader on Feb 13, 1989, which directed the faithful to kill Rushdie. Days later, Hossein San’ei, leader of the 15 Khordad, a Teheran-based charitable foundation set up to uphold Islamic principles in Iran, offered a $ 3 million reward for the murder (or $ 1 million if the assassin happened to be a non-Muslim). The greatest uproar had occurred in Britain and the Indian subcontinent. The hatred the intimidating and violent protests spawned in Europe stoked anger, especially in Bosnia where the Muslims themselves were at the receiving end of ethnic cleansing. The unbridled growth of Muslim population had alarmed the Serbs as their numbers dwindled from 43 to 31 per cent in just three decades while that of the Muslims catapulted from 26 to 44 per cent. Men were forcibly castrated in the horrible communal violence that followed.

What makes this book a notch out of the ordinary is the analysis it provides on the reasons for the growth of jihadism. Like most liberal thinkers, religious fanaticism is not even mentioned as one of the reasons, but multiculturalism is arraigned as the culprit. In the 1980s, the emphasis on various nationalities residing in Britain asserted themselves and wanted recognition of their cultural differences rather than each group fusing into the British mainstream. It treated different communities differently to ensure equality. A kind of tribal mentality was born as a result. Each group was represented by its own leaders who were not democratically elected, with whom the government dealt with all aspects related to the group, akin to tribal elders. Malik also portrays the social skills of the terrorists and comes up with a surprising conclusion that they are not unlike others. In fact, most of them are professionals or semi-professionals hailing from caring, middle class families. The ghetto politics and the ideas of self-organization originated from strategy to combat racism mutated over time into cultural separation. The Asian communities began to live separately in the 1980s. The Council of Mosques was set up, so also the federation of Sikh and Hindu organizations in 1984. However, Malik’s reasoning does not spell out why suicide bombers appear only in Muslim societies and not in Hindu or Sikh communities which are also equally subject to racist abuse and marginalization.

Malik wrestles with novel ideas to explain the rise of extremism in second generation Muslim youths in Britain. He argues that it was not the piety of the first generation that led to the Islamization of many small towns such as Bradford. It was ascribed to the power, influence and money that accrued to religious leaders as a result of the government’s multicultural policies. In another twist, the author claims that radical Islam is a product of Western societies. He even quotes some naïve Western philosophers who genuinely believe that the spirit that animates a suicidal jihadi is the same that fires up the imagination of a radical in a Western country. It is true that Islamists were encouraged by the West to stem the tide of Left-wing revolutionaries. In Egypt, Palestine and Afghanistan, they let loose the demon to counter the Left. The jihadis waged America’s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. As things stand now, it is a global phenomenon that Islamic extremists operate under the guise of Leftist politics.

The Moderates in Muslim societies are an elusive lot. You don’t find them often; as they are silent most of the time and let the hardliners do all the talking. When atrocities come to light in which the extremists are to be blamed such as the assault on Malala Yusufzai in Pakistan or the acid attacks on girls who refuse to wear the hijab, the Moderates maintain a studious silence from which even the sharpest jibe won’t dislodge them. But their loquacity is regained when the slightest offence, actual or imagined, is made on their short-fused religious sentiments. They came up in arms against Rushdie’s novel and when a Danish journal published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005. Even in the so called ‘secular’ India, Haji Yaqub Quraishi, a minister in the Uttar Pradesh state government offered in February 2006 a reward of $ 11 million to anyone who beheaded the cartoonists of the Danish journal. In fact, the offered prize is even greater than Khomeini offered to the would-be assassins of Rushdie. The Moderates, unwittingly or not, have become the handmaidens of terrorists, when they raise false alarms of Islamophobia. Muslims are said to be subjected to police stop and search operations more often than others. This is quite logical, as almost all of the terrorists come from their ranks. But the Moderates make a hue and cry alleging discrimination and upset the law enforcement protocol. Thus, the very laws crafted to preserve the basic freedoms of democracy are prostituted to serve the interests of terrorists and their accomplices. Malik proves by statistical figures that the percentages of each group searched are indeed in proportion to their share of the total population. The most ridiculous part is that the BBC has stopped referring to ‘Islamic terrorists’ after protests from the Muslim Council of Britain. Somebody is genuinely reluctant to call a spade by its name!

The book ends with a grave reminder on the dwindling freedom of expression in democracies. The writers and publishing houses practice self-censorship out of fear of the backlash. The withdrawal of the novel ‘Jewel of Medina’ which is based on the life of Aisha, the Prophet’s wife, was a case in point. Controversial opinion no longer finds support from the administration. The author rues that preservation of diversity under multiculturalism requires us to leave less room for a diversity of views. It has come to the point that argument against offensive speech is the modern secularized version of the old idea of blasphemy, by reinventing the sacred for a godless age. Malik sums up the paranoia of European Muslim communities with a succinct remark that once you begin to hear the echo of jack boots in the high street, once you start believing that your neighbours are really SS guards in waiting, then it is but a small step to imagine that blowing them up on a bus might be a virtuous idea (p.141).

The author makes a frontal attack on orthodoxy by quoting passages from the ‘Satanic Verses’ at the beginning of each chapter. The book is a first-hand experience of the author who lived through the whole episode. His definition of fundamentalism as a thing that even the fundamentalists can’t agree upon is thought-provoking. Many of them are pawns in the game for the leadership of the Muslim world played out between Iran and Saudi Arabia, who are said to be like two dogs fighting over a single piece of bone.

The book is highly recommended.

[Mrtfalls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. With some very elucidating points. I think he minimises anti-Muslim racism too much but I think in the last 10 years Malik might have revised that opinion a bit.

A more extensive review to come.
Comment

[s · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book makes great points about multiculturalism, censorship, and radicalism. But it does not delve into the ideology from which the radicalism originate.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Muslims mature in numbers, and as Islam's function in world affairs becomes larger, we've begun to see the collapse of unity among believers. The misconstructions and abrasion between Islamic civilization and the modern West continue, but even within Islam, Iran's clerics are split, militant fundamentalists conflict with students from Islamic universities, and moderate Muslims think nothing like Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia.

Islam seems to be at confrontation with itself.

Extremist factions whose angry rhetoric at present shapes our frights and chauvinisms have attempted to co-opt the Islamic faith.

In this book, the author takes a look at the Rushdie affair. This book delves deep into the hot-button issues of concern to the West: holy wars, fatwas, the lack of broadmindedness in Islam, the rise of fundamentalism, the future of Shi‘ism et al.

The book comprises of six chapters:

1. Satanic Delusions
2. From Street-fighters to Book-burners
3. The Rage of Islam
4. Bargains, Resentments, and Hatreds
5. God’s Word and Human Freedom
6. Monsters and Myths

‘It would be absurd to think that a book can cause riots,’ Salman Rushdie told the Indian journalist Shrabani Basu brusquely prior to publication of The Satanic Verses.

‘That’s a bizarre sort of view of the world.’

It is retrospectively a comment either unusually immature or pungently sarcastic.

It was in India that the crusade against The Satanic Verses began. Even before it was published in Britain, Kushwant Sing, who acted as an editorial advisor for Penguin Books India, had raised apprehensions. He had read the book in typescript and ‘was positive it would cause a lot of trouble’.

‘There are,’ he told Chitrita Banerji of Sunday magazine, ‘several disparaging references to the Prophet and the Qur’an. Muhammad is made out to be a smalltime impostor.’

Penguin decided to publish the novel in India – but not under its own imprint.

On 5 October, hardly a week after it had been published in Britain, the Indian ministry of finance placed The Satanic Verses on its list of proscribed books.

The ban, the ministry proclaimed, ‘did not detract from the literary and artistic merit of Rushdie’s work’.

To which Rushdie scathingly replied, ‘Thanks for the good review’ – while also wondering what the world might make of the fact ‘that it is the finance ministry that gets to decide what Indian readers may or may not read’.

Take a look at the plot (delineated pointwise, for an easier understanding):

1) The Satanic Verses opens with a hijacked jumbo jet exploding above the Sussex coast.

2) There are only two survivors. Gibreel Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who depicts gods and is revered as one by his fans. Saladin Chamcha is an Anglophile – ‘more-loyal-than-the-Queen’ – so fanatically British that he wears a bowler hat even when tumbling from 29,002 feet (the height of Mount Everest and the very height at which the aircraft was blown up).

3) As they fall, Saladin and Gibreel transform. Saladin becomes hairy and goat-like, his feet turn to hoofs and he sprouts horns. Gibreel acquires a halo that he has to hide under a hat. The two men become the unwitting, and unwilling, protagonists in an eternal battle between good and evil, the divine and the satanic.

4) The progress of Saladin and Gibreel through the dark, surreal landscape of Vilayet (the Hindi word for ‘foreign place’, which Rushdie uses as a label for Britain) acts as the holding frame for the novel. Into this outline Rushdie inserts a number of novellas, each arising out of Gibreel’s dreams, and each of which tackles the nature of religion.

5) The first tells the story of God’s revelation to the Prophet Mahound and how the new religion of Submission swept through Jahilia, a city built completely of sand. This is a fictionalized, sardonic account of the creation of Islam.

6) Mahound is an ancient Christian offensive name for Muhammad, Submission is the literal translation of ‘Islam’, and jahiliyyah is an Arabic word for ‘ignorance’, used by Muslims to describe the condition in which Arabs found themselves before the revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad.

7) The second novella concerns an imam in London (who, as Rushdie would put it, both is and is not Ayatollah Khomeini exiled in Paris) and his inflexible struggle against the ruler of contemporary Jahilia.

8) A third tells of Ayesha, a farsighted peasant girl shrouded in butterflies, who leads her entire Indian village on a pilgrimage to Mecca during which they all walk into the sea and drown, a narrative based on a real event. Rushdie weaves into this drapery the threads of other stories, of love and obsession, treachery and belief, resolution and bereavement.

9) The Satanic Verses is held together not by a conservative narrative structure but by a cat’s cradle of cross-referenced names, representations and suggestions. Mount Cone is the mountain on which Mahound receives his revelation; Allie Cone is the mountaineer whom Gibreel loves.

10) Allie Cone’s dream is a solo ascent of Everest; in Bombay, Gibreel lives at the very top of the Everest Apartments. Hind was the wife of the Grandee of Jahilia and Mahound’s mortal enemy; she is also the wife of Muhammed Sufyanin, in whose café Saladin finds refuge.

11) Ayesha is the prophet who leads the suicidal pilgrimage to Mecca; she is also the empress of present-day Jahilia, against whom the exiled imam wages war. The imam’s henchmen are avatars of those in the service of Mahound. And so it goes on. The result is a complex, chaotic novel, the sheer bravura of which sweeps the reader along.

A work as energetic, allusive and transgressive as ‘The Satanic Verses’, would never give itself up to a single reading. Yet it was also, as Rushdie’s previous novels had been, a politically engaged work which, through its imaginative reworkings of modern Vilayet and ancient Jahilia, confronted many of the most charged questions of our time, religious and secular.

Unavoidably, a lot of readers overlooked the disorderliness of the novel and took in its place a one-eyed view of Rushdie’s words.

Western critics hardly ever saw beyond a migrant’s tale. Many Muslims were blind to anything aside from what they perceived as a gratuitously blasphemous assault on their faith.

The Satanic Verses, the novelist Angela Carter observed in a review in the Guardian, was ‘an epic hung about with ragbag scraps of many different cultures’.

It was peopled ‘mostly by displaced persons of one kind or another. Expatriates, immigrants, refugees.’ Not once in her review did she mention Islam.

For the Muslim philosopher Shabbir Akhtar, on the other hand, Rushdie’s novel was an ‘inferior piece of hate literature’ which ‘falsified historical records’ in ‘a calculated attempt to vilify and slander Muhammad’. From the space between these two readings emerged the Rushdie affair.

Angels and devils. Myths and monsters………..These are at the heart of The Satanic Verses.

The fight of Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, with themselves and with each other, is a fight of the human imagination against the restraints placed upon it.

One is a devil, the other an angel, yet they repeatedly deceive their own natures.

When Saladin is arrested, Gibreel, the angel, refuses to help him. When the two meet up again in riot-torn east London, Gibreel appears as Azraeel, the most dreadful of angels, wreaking fire and destruction. But even as he is hunted down by Gibreel, the demonic Saladin risks his life to save a family trapped in a burning house.

What Rushdie wanted us to see was that the difference between devil and angel lies less in their inner selves than in the roles that humans ascribe to them.

If religion creates the divine and the Satanic in the image of man, secular society equally makes men in the image of devils and angels. Both religious faiths and secular societies deploy their angels and demons to validate their otherwise indefensible actions, to generate boundaries that cannot be transgressed.

The continued existence of traditional Islam in the modern world, the imposition of modernism into dār al-islām, and the recent resurgence of forces associated in either name or reality with Islam, including what has come to be known as Islamic “fundamentalism” puts Rushdie right smack in the middle of it all.

A wonderful book. Give it a try.

[Osman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This well written book is never less than engaging and includes many fascinating accounts of the development of Islamic violence against western lives and values. I did find it rather dense and it would repay another reading as the composition is somewhat confusing. Malik often digresses down one anecdotal path after another sometimes losing the thread somewhat. Indeed it is difficult not to be confused with the endless lists of Muslim organisations following one after another in a profusion of acronyms.

One of the main contentions in this book is that Islamic violence is politically inspired. It is not primarily religious as the ‘clash of civilisations’ faction maintain (e.g. Sam Harris) and it is not to do with the West’s past depredations against the Muslim world, as certain liberal commentators with a guilt complex have put forward (e.g. Mary Beard, Noam Chomsky).

I think this can only be maintained if one focuses on the cynically minded, hypocritical, venal and often self-appointed leaders in the Islamist world. No doubt there is some political dimension to Islamist violence but for the machinations of these leaders to be effective they need a ready mob of religious zealots to carry them out. The murderous protests organised against Rushdie would have no traction unless those anonymously and enthusiastically doing the killing actually believed that insulting a long dead man was a capital crime condemned by God.

As Sam Harris has pointed out you must ask why there are no Christian Palestinian suicide bombers; or why are there no Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers. You must also ask if the central Islamic doctrine of jihad, ceaselessly promoted in the Koran and the Hadith, might have any effect on the mind of one who truly believes it to be the inerrant word of God?

[Steven H · Rating 1 out of 5]

A HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL SURVEY OF THE EVOLUTION OF ISLAMIST MOVEMENTS

Author Kenan Malik wrote in the Introduction to this 2009 book, “The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal for identity politics---these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, anti-racist outlook and as the foundation stones of modern liberal democracies. Yet there is a much darker side to multiculturalism, as the Rushdie affair demonstrated. Multiculturalism has helped foster a more tribal nation and, within Muslim communities, has undermined progressive trends while strengthening the hand of conservative religious leaders. While it did not create militant Islam, it helped, as we shall see in this book, create for it a space within British Muslim communities that had not existed before… the wider changes that were taking place both in Britain and in other Western nations, changes that made possible not just the Rushdie affair but eventually 9/11 and 7/7 too. This book is the story of that metamorphosis. It is a guidebook to the road from fatwa to jihad.”

After the Ayatollah Khomeini issues his infamous February 13, 1989 fatwa demanding the death of Rushdie, “The fatwa helped transform the very geography of Islam. Under traditional Islamic law, a fatwa was only valid within those areas in which sharia law applied… the ayatollah had transcended the traditional frontiers of Islam and brought the whole world under his jurisdiction. At the same time, he helped relocate the confrontation between Islam and the West… For the West, Islam was now a domestic issue.” (Pg. 18-19)

He observes, “The ideas of radical Islam certainly challenge the basic tenets of Western liberal democracy, and the actions of Islamic terrorists are undoubtedly demonic. Yet the fault lines run not between civilizations but deep within Western societies themselves. Many of the ideas and arguments of Islamic radicals have, as we shall see, wide purchase within Western societies. And many of the individuals who espouse such ideas and arguments are ‘Westernized.’” (Pg. 24)

He notes that “Immediately after the fatwa, the British government withdrew all its personal from Tehran and demanded that Iranian representatives leave London. It did not, however, break off diplomatic relations… The British government’s intention was … to take a stand against the fatwa without seeming to be intransigent about it. In Tehran’s eyes it signaled only weakness. In the end it was … Tehran that… broke off all diplomatic ties, claiming that ‘in the past two centuries Britain has been in the front line of plots and treachery against Islam and Muslims.’” (Pg. 32)

He points out, “In the twenty years since the fatwa, Western politicians have continued to show greater willingness to lecture Muslims about the importance of liberty, freedom and democracy than to defend such values in practice. Indeed, the responses of Western nations first to the fatwa and subsequently to jihad have helped undermine civil liberties, erode freedom of speech and weaken democracy.” (Pg. 35)

He states, “Rather than appeal to Muslims as British citizens, and attempt to draw them into the mainstream political process, politicians and policy-makers came to see them as people whose primary loyalty was to their faith and who could be politically engaged only by Muslim ‘community leaders.’” (Pg. 76)

He recounts, “it was not the death toll that made 7/7 so chilling… It was the recognition that the bombers were not foreigners but British citizens, steeped in this country’s life and culture. Three of the four men involved… had been born and bred in the Yorkshire town of Leeds. The fourth… had lived in Britain since the age of five.” (Pg. 81)

He suggests, “There is something else that fits oddly with the attempt to pin all the blame on Western foreign policy. No Western nation draws more Islamist ire than America. Yet, since 9/11, the Great Satan had not had a hair singed. There have been devastating attacks in London, Madrid, Bali Casablanca and elsewhere. But not in the USA. More than that: American Muslims seem far less interested in Islamism than do their European counterparts… American Muslims are certainly more middle-class than those in Europe.” (Pg. 85)

He argues, “not only has Tehran failed to export its revolution, but Islamist parties have failed t win mass support… How can we explain this paradox? Terror is an expression of the impotence of Islamism; unable to win for themselves a mass following, jihadis have become impresarios of death, forced into spectacular displays of violence to gain the attention they cannot win through political means… And yet this weakness has been transformed into a strength by the political uncertainty and self-doubt that has seeped into Western societies.” (Pg. 94)

He asserts, “The multicultural bargain designed to keep the Muslim house in order helped to open the door to a new generation of Islamic radicals. Worse, the so-called community leaders were as clueless as national politicians about how to deal with such radicalism… Britain’s multicultural bargain created the space for radical Islamism, but not the means to reach it.” (Pg. 130)

He says, “Today, in liberal eyes, free speech is as likely to be seen as a threat to liberty as its shield. By its very nature, many argue, freedom of expression can damage basic freedoms. Hate speech undermines the freedom to live without fear. The giving of offence diminishes the freedom to have one’s beliefs and values recognized and respected. In a modern pluralistic society, therefore, the cost of free speech---truly free speech---is too great. One of the ironies of living in a plural society, it seems, is that the preservation of diversity requires us to leave less room for a diversity of views.” (Pg. 156)

He concludes, “Democracy, equality, the rule of law: these are not universal values but ‘ours’… in the sense that non-Westerners do not deserve, indeed would culturally resist, having these values extended to them… These two responses [the multiculturalist argument and the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis] appear as conjoined opposites… One celebrates a lack of faith in the Enlightenment by giving up on the idea of universal values… The other turns belief in the Enlightenment into a tribal affair… and we should militantly defend our values and lifestyles… An assertive, self-confident society that possessed moral clarity about its beliefs would have little trouble dealing with the claims of fundamentalists, and indeed with the acts of terrorists… But the uncertainties and insecurities of Western societies … have made Islamists appear more potent than they are.” (Pg. 207-208)

This book will be of great interest to those studying the development of Islamist movements in the West, and elsewhere.

[Kevan Voce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for anyone interested in multiculturalism

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

I definitely don't agree with a decent bit of what he has to say or with some of the conclusions he draws, but it's well-written and definitely well-considered and there IS plenty I DO agree with. Worth reading regardless of your views, I think, and I think it's nuanced enough that most people won't agree with everything, which is kind of ideal.

[Dan Sumption · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clearly written argument for how multiculturalism, and in particular the UK's treatment of its minorities as a community of communities, has contributed to islamism and terrorism. Starting with a description of racism in the 60s and 70s - when minorities rallied together under the label of "black", and were involved in broader left-wing struggles for social justice - Malik describes how successive governments and local authorities tackled social unrest by attending separately to different communities - Muslim, Afro-Carribean etc - leading to the emergence of de facto leaders within those communities, and to each community being treated as being broadly homogenous. He argues that this in turn helped to divorce those communities from broader campaigns for social justice, and encouraged the growth of seperatist and more radical factions within the Muslim community in particular.

I am still digesting some of the ideas in this book, it contained a great deal that I hadn't considered before. Despite being ten years old now, it still feels relatively up-to-date, and has a great deal to say about both the growth of radical Islam, and many of the responses to it (including the increased self-censorship between the Rushdie affair of 1989 and this book's publication in 2009). He also covers, of course, the 9/11 and 7/7 bombings, the controversy surrounding the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten (and how that controversy was manufactured), and other controversies surrounding the works of Monica Ali and Hanif Kureshi. A fascinating and very readable book.

[Shabbeer Hassan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quite well-researched history on how social attitudes to both race and religion has changed in UK around the decades before and after the rather infamous book burning and fatwa incident. Malik through detailed interviews, historical record, personal experiences and several anecdotes tries to answer this question: "What has happened that led people to burn a writer's book in streets and openly support the crafty Ayotallah's insane fatwa"?

Malik points to the faulty and highly lazy implementation of multiculturalist policies to smooth the racial tensions of 1960s-70s UK, as one of the main reasons which led to Huntington's clash of civilizations. He goes to summarise that this increasingly fraught interpretation of multiculturalism led to increased tribalism, reducing integration, creating nations within a nation and culminating in the road from fatwa to jihad!

An important read, in these highly charged times!

My Rating - 4/5

[Nadine Al lahham · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book explores the rise of Islam extremism in Europe, especially in the second migrant generation, while discussing the Rushdie Affair in 1988. The writer uses the argumentative writing style to discuss the matter of freedom of speech and how restricting it can cause harm to creativity and minorities themselves. It also discusses multiculturalism and identity crisis which both labelled Muslim migrants and pushed them into the direction of feeling defensive for themselves. In other words, the Western governments hold a big responsibility of that.

The writer is an atheist British citizen from a Muslim Indian migrant background, which makes this book more credible and deeper than other books written by white Christian people.
This is one of my top books this year, but I had to give it a four-star rating because I felt that the book needed more exploration of some ideas. Yet, this is an important book for tracking the reasons behind the rise of extremism in Europe.

[Prasad · Rating 4 out of 5]

From Fatwa to Jihad by Kenan Malik is not only an interesting read but also an important one. It maps the effects of the Rushdie affair post "The Satanic Verses", not only on the Islamic world but also on how Muslims around the world found themselves divided in principle and ideology. Ironically the events that followed the fatwa on Rushdie united the Muslims on a much deeper level than even religion. Malik underlines the relation between the Muslims and the West after what went down in history as one of the most popular rebellious movement based on politics, but firmly clawed into religion.

[Calvin Turton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is an important book for anyone who wants to understand the social climate today.

Ten years on from its publishing, the issues outlined have only gotten worse, society is more fractured, ignorance is celebrated and yet no one with power says or does anything to remedy it, western society has grown limp.

We're on a set of tracks, sliding gradually into a hellscape where we will end up being automatons following a government mandated, Student Union approved, script until we die or slip up.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Internalizing the fatwa has not just created a new culture of self-censorship, it has also helped generate the very problems to which self-censorship was supposedly a response. The fear of giving offence has simply made it easier to take offence."

A fantastic book.

[Elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really excellent book about the nature of free speech today. It needed a good editor, though. And it seems to concur with my hypothesis that if we can fix the issue of mass murder, we can fix the issue of similar acts of terrorism.

[Betty-Lou · Rating 3 out of 5]

Politics, religion, free speech, the written word. Informative.

[Shamik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Less of Rushdie, more of legacy. Pretty boring.

[Chris Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's nothing here that I haven't read elsewhere, but Malik does a pretty good job of getting his message across.

[Michael Anton · Rating 5 out of 5]

very good

[Vikas Datta · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging analysis of a seminal issue of our times..

[Mythili · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the opening pages of From Fatwa to Jihad, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is “tied to a stake before being set alight in front of the police station.” It's 1989, and Kenan Malik is a freelance journalist in northern England. “Why, I wondered, were people ... taking to the streets to burn books – especially the books of a writer celebrated for giving voice to the migrant experience?” he reflects more than two decades later.

A year after The Satanic Verses’ publication, a Japanese literature professor who had worked on translating the novel was stabbed to death and an Italian translator was beaten up in his Milan apartment. Two years later, thirty-seven people were killed when a mob of anti-Rushdie protesters in Turkey set fire to a hotel where the Turkish translator of The Satanic Verses was attending a literary conference; just months after that, Rushdie’s publisher in Norway was shot three times by an assailant hiding in the bushes outside his home. Malik notes that the fatwa against the novel, drastically changed the terms of international cultural conflict: “With his four-paragraph pronouncement, the ayatollah had transcended the traditional frontiers of Islam and brought the whole world under his jurisdiction."

Malik argues that the multicultural policies implemented to smooth the racial tensions of 1960s-70s Britain (“My main memory of growing up in the 1970s,” as the son of a immigrant Burmese Muslim/Indian Hindu parents, he writes, “was being involved almost daily in fights with racists”) instead “helped foster a more tribal nation” and in turn opened a kind of pathway for religious extremism, beginning with the Rushdie affair. In his view, the “collision of Western moral evasion and Islamist political intransigence became a characteristic not just of the Rushdie affair but of the whole road from fatwa to jihad” – a road in which all citizens, he argues, have seen the corrosion of civil liberties, freedom of speech and democracy itself.

“Restrictions on speech, the aims of which were supposedly to protect the culture and dignity of minority communities,” he notes, “are now exploited to undermine the civil liberties of those very same communities." At times, Malik repeats himself and overstates his case, but his overall analysis of the cultural forces that have fueled extremist Islam is nonetheless very thought-provoking.

[arafat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent, readable journalistic treatment of two decades of the politics of race and religion since the Rushdie affair, including the 7/7 London bombings and the Danish cartoons controversy, as well as more local publishing scandals around novelists like Hanif Kureshi and Monica Ali. Particularly insightful on minority politics in Britain and the social status of South Asian Muslim immigrants since the 60s. This is a consciously polemical work and an indictment of official liberal multiculturalism, generally fair but perhaps unforgiving at times. The author is a staunch advocate of free speech and may even count as a bit of an absolutist in this regard: while his thoughts on the relation between "words and deeds" may not quite stand up to philosophical scrutiny, he nonetheless makes a lot of good points, including a necessary critique of identity politics.

[Julia Lyon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Evocative, stunningly honest, and deeply personal, Malik's political history is powerful and apropos. Giving an increasingly rare cool-headed and comprehensive perspective, Malik has both a personal and political connection to the Rushdie affair and the incredible wake it left. This book is well-wrought, carefully researched, and blunt. I would recommend it to anyone (which is so many of us) who often struggle to comprehend the etiology of radical jihadism and feel ill-informed and ill-equipped to face it.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful and disturbing book about the fallout of the Fatwa (death order) put out on Salman Rushdie, which the author sees as being extremely important in the growth of radical Islam. He also explores the complexity of multiculturalism, the unintended consequences of policies and laws regarding hate speech, and the changing relations between people of different faiths and races.

The author is British, and the book has a definite English flavor, but the concepts apply as well here.

And just a word of warning. Prepare to have some of your basic tenets challenged.

[Arjun Mishra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has the advantage of being written 20 years after the Rushdie Affair, so it can take recent events that invoke the Rushdie Affair into account. Malik excellently dissects the liberal response to the Rushdie Affair and excoriates liberal responses to recent events. He demonstrates that liberals have made it unacceptable to be offended, giving "spurious legitimacy" to Islamist anger. This is a well-detailed account of the Affair, written by a South Asian Brit.

[E]

An interesting look at the rise of radical Islam through the lens of book publishing and freedom of speech. Malik takes an interesting position arguing against multicultural restrictions on saying things that may cause offense and arguing very strongly in favor of freedom of speech -- even in a plural world.