Siding with Rushdie

Letters

Vol. 11 No. 22 · 23 November 1989

From Maqbool Aziz

Your reviewer’s faith in the justness of his cause (LRB, 26 October) is quite touching: so is his understandable eagerness to defend his hero at all costs. But naked enthusiasm is no substitute for truth and accuracy. Had Mr Christopher Hitchens been a little less enthusiastic, a little more scrupulous, just a little less mocking and jeering (the ‘Peace Be Upon Him’ of his opening paragraph is downright gratuitous and infantile) – in short, had he paid due attention to what he was supposed to be doing – reading the books carefully and reporting on them – he would not have exposed his credibility quite so disastrously. The following – just one of several similar instances – is offered to the innocent reader of the London Review:

Shift the scene to Karachi, where the Jamaat-Islami Party [sic] had just gone down to humiliating defeat in an election which, if the Jamaat Islami [sic] had had any say in the matter, would never have taken place. Casting about for a salve to emulsify the injury of defeat by a Jewish-backed female socialist (as they both thought and wrote of Ms Bhutto), the fundamentalists took their prompting from South Africa and England. Ungratefully marching on the very US Embassy that had until recently been the prop and stay of their patron General Zia, they managed to draw the first blood. It was the day after the deaths in Karachi that the Ayatollah, several months after the publication of the novel, decided to remind people that nobody – nobody – could trump him when it came to defending the faith.

Every segment of this whole paragraph, every insinuation, every bit of information, every turn of phrase, reeks of intellectual arrogance and irresponsibility. No, Mr Hitchens, please, I beg you, don’t ‘shift’ your wretched ‘scene to Karachi’, for you won’t find any ‘US Embassy’ there in 1988-1989: Karachi ceased to be the capital of Pakistan two decades before the publication of The Satanic Verses. The day of ‘the deaths’ was 12 February 1989: this information about the date as well as the location was right under your nose, on page ix of the principal work you were supposed to be reviewing, The Rushdie File. Armed with the date, you could have gone to the Times for 13 February 1989. The account there would have revealed the following to you: 1. the tragic deaths did not take place in Karachi, but 1100 miles south of that city, in Islamabad; 2. there was no march on the US Embassy anywhere; 3. the Islamabad rally of protest went out of control in front of the United States Information Centre and the American Express offices; 4. the rally was not organised by the electorally defeated Jamaat-i-Islami (not Jamaat-Islami Party – the word jamaat means ‘party’), but by the duly elected opposition parties in the parliament under the banner of the Islami Jamhoori Ittehaad; 5. far from being friends of the late little-lamented General, several leaders of the ill-fated rally had opposed him for years, and had fought with the present prime minister under the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy. At least one keynote speaker at the rally was a former, senior minister in the socialist cabinet of Z.A. Bhutto. So many grotesque errors of fact in a single paragraph! Like Ms Fay Weldon, who has produced a little booklet with only monumental ignorance to support her views, you took it for granted that you knew it all and couldn’t care less.

Maqbool Aziz
Hertford College, Oxford

Vol. 11 No. 23 · 7 December 1989

From David Griffiths

Thanks for the incredibly good essay by Christopher Hitchens (LRB, 26 October). The book was not banned in Japan, but timidity here is a national principle and after the ukase the bookstores refused to stock it. Perhaps the most disgusting non-Muslim attacks were by P. Johnson and A. Waugh in the Spectator. Some of the critics did not even read the book and all ignored simple form-criticism. The Satanic Verses is imaginative fiction, not a text in history or theology.

David Griffiths
Fukuoka, Japan

Vol. 11 No. 24 · 21 December 1989

From Christopher Hitchens

Maqbool Aziz (Letters, 23 November) already believes that I am invincibly smug and complacent in the rightness of my defence of Salman Rushdie. So I fear that I may only seem to taunt and madden him afresh if I say that I take comfort and confirmation from his attack upon me. Yet it seems that I would have satisfied him, as far as points of fact go, if I had written of a demonstration outside the United States Information Centre in Islamabad instead of, as I thoughtlessly did, the United States Embassy in Karachi. (The unpardonable slips, I find, afflict one more when they are secondary or tertiary to the purpose of the argument. I am sure that Mr Aziz is smiting himself on the backside even now for locating Islamabad ‘1100 miles to the south’ of Karachi, which would put it deep into the Indian Ocean. He has my sympathy.) His remaining points of fact are really matters of interpretation – I would not describe Z.A. Bhutto’s cabinet as socialist, and the former senior member of it cited by Mr Aziz was actually a member for a matter of weeks. I know that jamaat means party but the repetition seemed to me more clarifying than the omission. And so on. If this is to be the extent of his objection, in other words, I believe I can meet it. Hence my feeling of confirmation. Yet there is a definite hostility beneath the quibbling, which finds no outlet in argument. I offered a fairly lengthy defence of Rushdie’s right to publish. Mr Aziz does not choose to say what he thinks about this, or about the murder-with-bounty threat levelled in the name of Islam. Does he want us to guess his opinion? And would he want us to do so on the evidence of his triumphant, pedantic, inaccurate letter?

Christopher Hitchens
Washington DC