From The Sunday Times
April 5, 2009
From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy by Kenan Malik
The Sunday Times review by Bryan Appleyard

Alarmed by race riots in the 1980s, local and national government in Britain embarked on a multicultural strategy. Respect was to be accorded to different ways of life and, fatally, these ways of life were to be classified as communities with their own “community leaders”.
In a way, it worked. Racism did, indeed, decline. But the price was high. The creation of “communities” replaced racism with tribalism and, in 2005, tribal riots between blacks and Asians broke out in Birmingham. These riots were caused by multiculturalism. Before the council told them they were members of a “community”, they were just people living together in the same place. “Hostility,” writes Kenan Malik, “is not in the blood of Asians or African-Caribbeans. It is in the DNA of multicultural policies.”
The creation of communities in the name of multiculturalism was an admission of government incompetence. When Tony Blair wanted to fight extremism in the “Muslim community”, he said it was not his job but that of “community leaders”. Britain had become a patchwork of non-white no-go areas.
From Fatwa to Jihad tells, for the most part brilliantly, this baleful tale. Malik is well-placed to do so. He was born in India and came to Britain at the age of five. His mother was Hindu and his father Muslim, but he did not have a religious upbringing. Racism, not religion, formed his early radicalism as it did that of many non-whites in this country.

Racism is a cause that unites all creeds and colours. It is a universal enemy that can be attacked with the universalist Enlightenment belief that there are values that can be rationally and justly applied to all human societies. Splitting the world into “communities”, celebrating difference at all costs, is a counterEnlightenment strategy.

Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa — death sentence — issued against Salman Rushdie because of his supposedly blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses in 1989 put a sword to the throat of universalism. Malik, rightly, sees the moment as critical. A British writer had to go into hiding and books were burnt. In the same year the Berlin Wall came down. We were putting the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism behind us, only to be confronted by an ostensibly religious absolutism that challenged our dreams of progress.

Writers found their previously marginal craft suddenly flung into the front line. Rushdie’s publisher, Penguin, passed this crucial test, keeping the book in print in spite of all the attendant dangers. But, otherwise, Khomeini won. In July last year, Random House in America pulled out of publishing Sherry Jones’s The Jewel of Medina for fear of Muslim reprisals; the book led to the firebombing of its London publishers, Gibson Square, two months later. And, meanwhile, writers, understandably, cowered. Malik quotes Hanif Kureishi: “Nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses, let alone publish it. Writing is now timid because writers are now terrified.”
To post-revolutionary Iranian zealots, western liberal values were just one more step along the anti-Islamic road that began with the crusades. Thus colonial guilt was effectively recruited to render western attitudes ambivalent. This, in spite of the fact that it was being recruited in the name of a brutal religious autocracy.

Read the full review at The Sunday Times.

From Fatwa to Jihad by Kenan Malik - Atlantic - £16.99 - pp288