Dispatches from the Culture Wars

What, then, is the argument against honoring him? It can only be this fuzzy idea that we must not dare offend those who were offended by Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. But what possible obligation are we under not to offend them? There surely is no principled argument to be made here. And if one is to make a practical argument against doing so, one may rightfully be accused of outright cowardice, of allowing the insane to intimidate us in to not doing what we are entirely justified in doing. And is that not exactly what the threat of terror hopes to accomplish? No, thank you, I see no point in that. Kamm has it exactly right:

The proper response to those who find themselves offended by the expression of ideas is: "That's tough. You'll live. Get over it." This would be true even if the ideas were stupid and their utterer crass. It would apply to Sir Salman Rushdie if he were a hack writer with the sensibilities of the late Bernard Manning. But he is in fact a writer of outstanding literary gifts and also a heroic (I don't use the term lightly) defender of freedom of expression. The resolution of the Pakistani legislature is an ignorant and inflammatory intrusion into our civic affairs. I am not impressed with the response to it to date.

The last thing we should do is accept the terms in which religious obscurantists seek to frame this issue. I was appalled to see on the News not only the bonehead Lord Ahmed's insults against Sir Salman and the government that rightly recommended the honour, but emollient remarks by the British High Commissioner in Pakistan, Robert Brinkley (who has this morning been summoned by Pakistan's government). The honour was not, the High Commissioner said, an insult to Islam, for we respect Islam.

The first part of that answer was correct but strictly irrelevant. The second was improper. I take fierce exception to (I am - if you will - offended by) a British diplomat's speaking on behalf of my country and my government in taking a position on matters of religion. I do not respect Islam (or any religious faith). All I will insist upon as a matter of right for Muslims (or Christians, Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists) is religious liberty. Beyond that, they have no claim. They are not entitled to my respect. As a mere lobby group, they have no right to be listened to, let alone taken seriously, on matters of public policy.

In the meantime, our side - those who defend the values of a free society - will make ourselves heard, and because our ideas are worthy of respect we won't be cowed by religious bigotry. A stiffer diplomatic response is called for. At a minimal and trivial level, it is also time for democratic political parties to take a stand. In the original Rushdie affair, the Labour Party - which I mention specifically because I am on the Left - failed as abjectly as Mrs Thatcher's government and the first President Bush. Some Labour MPs called for Sir Salman's novel The Satanic Verses to be banned (the ridiculous Keith Vaz, MP for Leicester East, was the most prominent). I suggest that Lord Ahmed - who had the audacity and stupidity to compare Sir Salman's knighthood to support for suicide terrorism, both responses being, in his phrase, "uncalled for" - be informed retrospectively of his unamicable divorce from the Labour whip. It's a small gesture, but even those were lacking when Sir Salman was threatened by a foreign tyrant. He merits our support and admiration.

Kamm references also an article he recently wrote in the Index on Censorship entitled The Tyranny of Moderation: Respect and Civility are the Enemies of Free Speech. He is writing about the controversy over the Danish cartoons as well as of the original Rushdie situation with the fatwa calling for his death, and of the mealy-mouthed response of many Western intellectuals and establishments, many of whom struck the "we defend his right to say it but wish he'd been more respectful" pose:

The notion that free speech was an ethnocentric imposition on other cultures, to which a properly egalitarian politics would extend respect, has, in a less crude and populist form, developed mightily since. The soft form of that principle is that a culture founded on the free play of ideas needs to exercise restraint in the face of the sensibilities of others. As the Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has put it: 'Instead of being obsessed with laws and rights - approaching a tyrannical right to say anything - would it not be more prudent to call upon citizens to exercise their right to freedom of expression responsibly and to take into account the diverse sensitivities that compose our pluralistic contemporary societies?'

Sentiments such as these became established with the Rushdie affair, and have proved an enduring component of our political culture. In 1990, a year after the fatwa, Rushdie wrote: 'I feel as if I have been plunged, like Alice, into a world beyond the looking glass, where nonsense is the only available sense. And I wonder if I'll ever be able to climb back through.'

Western political leaders were adept at speaking that form of sense. The first President Bush ventured boldly, a week after the fatwa was issued, that the threat of assassination was 'deeply offensive'. The Japanese government anguished and declared: 'Mentioning and encouraging murder is not something to be praised.' The Chief Rabbi in Great Britain, Dr Immanuel Jakobovits, remarked with ostensible balance but genuine callous stupidity: 'Both Mr Rushdie and the Ayatollah have abused freedom of speech.'

Surveying these judgements, the writer Jonathan Rauch, in his 1993 book Kindly Inquisitors (from which I have taken the quotations), identified a tendency among Western intellectuals that would repudiate the sentence but not the notion that Rushdie had committed a crime: 'If we follow this path, then we accept Khomeini's verdict, and we are merely haggling with him over the sentence. If we follow it, then we accept that in principle what is offensive should be suppressed, and we are fighting over what it is ... that is offensive.'

As usual, I find myself in agreement with Rauch. And I think Kamm's answer is exactly right:

The notion that free speech, while important, needs to be held in balance with the avoidance of offence is question-begging, because it assumes that offence is something to be avoided. Free speech does indeed cause hurt - but there is nothing wrong in this. Knowledge advances through the destruction of bad ideas. Mockery and derision are among the most powerful tools in that process. Consider Voltaire's Candide, or H L Mencken's reports - saturated in contempt for religious obscurantists who opposed the teaching of evolution in schools - on the Scopes 'Monkey' Trial.

It is inevitable that those who find their deepest convictions mocked will be offended, and it is possible (though not mandatory, and is incidentally not felt by me) to extend sympathy and compassion to them. But they are not entitled to protection, still less restitution, in the public sphere, even for crass and gross sentiments. A free society does not legislate in the realm of beliefs; by extension, it must not concern itself either with the state of its citizens' sensibilities. If it did, there would in principle be no limit to the powers of the state, even into the private realm of thought and feeling.

The debate has not been aided - it has indeed been severely clouded - by an imprecise use of the term 'respect'. If this is merely a metaphor for the free exercise of religious and political liberty, then it is an unexceptionable principle, but also an unclear and redundant usage. Respect for ideas and those who hold them is a different matter altogether. Ideas have no claim on our respect; they earn respect to the extent that they are able to withstand criticism. Even some vocal defenders of liberty stumble on this point. The human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell wrote recently, of a particularly slanted television debate: 'Even the supposed Muslim moderates on last night's programme exuded a whiff of hypocrisy. Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) claimed: 'We do not wish to impose our way of life on anybody. All we want is to live in respect with one another.' Fine sentiments. Shame about the reality.' It is not, in fact, a fine sentiment to require respect. Respect is not an entitlement. It is, at most, a quality that is earned by the intellectual resilience of one's ideas in the public square.

Precisely so.