Letters
Vol. 16 No. 6 · 24 March 1994
From Gerald Moore
The sprightly defence of Salman Rushdie in Christopher Hitchens’s Diary (LRB, 24 February) is admirable, but it contains one puzzling statement. He refers to Rushdie’s father having chosen a family surname ‘in what is now Pakistan’. Now, everyone knows that Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay – all his work is shot through with love of that city’s vibrant secular culture. It was after his birth that the family, in his view misguidedly, moved to Pakistan. Is Hitchens right in his location of that momentous choice?
Gerald Moore
Udine, Italy
Vol. 16 No. 7 · 7 April 1994
From Salman Rushdie
I hadn’t been intending to mention it, but since Gerald Moore (Letters, 24 March) is kind enough to ask, my father, a Delhi man born and bred, chose our family name there in his youth, not in ‘what is now Pakistan’.
For the record, while I’m at it, Christopher Hitchens’s tough-minded and heartening Diary (LRB, 24 February) contained a couple of other small, but not insignificant, inaccuracies. The volume Pour Rushdie (now published as For Rushdie by the US house Braziller but still, as far as I know, without a British publisher) contains articles by 100, not ‘almost two dozen’, of the ‘leading novelists, poets and essayists of the Arab and Muslim world’. The writers’ attitude to my work ranges from favourable to dismissive, but all of them express complete solidarity with the principle of freedom of expression. The declaration of Iranian intellectuals to which he refers has 162 signatories, not 57.
Both these corrections serve to emphasise his argument that the ‘Rushdie case’ is one manifestation of ‘a contest, bitter and subtle, within Islam’. Since many multiculturalists (with whom, as he rightly says, ‘it is impossible to be sufficiently irritated’) have been acting as the fundamentalists’ fellow-travellers by peddling the notion that this is an East-West quarrel, I’m grateful to the Hitch for pointing out that many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.
Salman Rushdie
Vol. 16 No. 8 · 28 April 1994
From Robert Creamer
If Christopher Hitchens is quoting Sadik Al-Azm correctly, the Syrian critic is stretching things more than a little, even metaphorically, when he says James Joyce ‘was writing about Ireland in a language other than his own’ (LRB, 24 February). Irish may be the language of Ireland’s past and of today’s traditionalists, but it was not Joyce’s language. English was his native tongue and while he was at home in several other languages, Irish was not among them. In time he understood enough of it to compare it favourably to Breton, another Gaelic language, but he was not facile in it. Richard Ellmann says in his biography of Joyce that when Joyce was at University College another student, George Clancy, ‘persuaded his friends, including even Joyce for a time, to take lessons in Irish. Joyce gave them up because … the instructor found it necessary to exalt Irish by denigrating English.’
Ellmann also mentions that in 1932 Joyce translated a poem by James Stephens called ‘Stephen’s Green’ into French, German, Latin, Norwegian and Italian, and that he wanted Stephens to translate it into Irish. But Stephens did not know the language well enough and one must assume that Joyce did not either, or surely he would have translated it himself.
Robert Creamer
Tuckahoe, New York
From Maqbool Aziz
Contrary to Christopher Hitchens’s fond belief, offered to the reader with much flourish and drama, the ‘full name’ of the great medieval Muslim jurist/scientist/philosopher, from al-Andalus, is not ‘Averroes Ibn Rush’d’. That would amount to giving him the same name twice over. For ‘Averroes’ is a misheard corruption of ‘Ibn Rushd’ (without the apostrophe, of course): ‘Ibn’ misheard = ‘Ave’; ‘Rushd’ misheard = ‘rroes’. Thus also ‘Ibn Sina’ = ‘Avecenna’. The medieval encounter between Arabic, medieval Latin and Romance languages is littered with corruptions of this kind, some quite fascinating. (The decimal system of counting, called ‘algorism’, derives from al-Khwarazm – modem Khiva – from where came the man, Abu Jaafar Mohammad Ibn Musa al-Khwarazmi, the father of the decimal system. The book in which the theory appeared, Kitab al-Gebar wal Muqabila, is the source of the word ‘algebra’.) The ‘full name’ of Averroes is rather a mouthful: Abu’l-Walid Muhammad B. Ahmed B. Muhammad B. Rushd. He played no part in the wonder that was Cordoba in the tenth century – he happened to be born some two centuries later, in 1126. His happiest years were spent in Marrakush and Seville; he died in the former city in 1198 – a lonely and much neglected man. His impact on medieval Islamic and European thought came after his death; in Europe, he was often mistaken for Aristotle.
Mr Hitchens’s confident assertion that, in Pakistan, ‘the more customary’ practice is to use a ‘patronymic’, rather than a ‘surname’ (as bravely adopted by ‘a certain enlightened Muslim father’, i.e. Mr Rushdie’s), has caused me much confusion. I have a family tree that goes back to the 16th century: I don’t see any ‘patronymic’ on it. Nor do I see any trace of it in the name of the Bhutto family. It is nice to know there have been at least three ‘enlightened’ families in Pakistan.
The easy authority and familiarity demonstrated in ‘the more customary’ reappears in a different form in Mr Hitchens’s reference to ‘every Arab, Muslim and Persian author worthy of the name’ (italics added). At issue now is a volume of essays in support of Mr Rushdie by ‘almost two dozen of the leading’ writers from the Muslim world. To be sure, the step taken by the Muslim writers is admirable. The so-called ‘fatwah’ against the novelist has no moral or intellectual, or even theological, justification; and one can only hope that Mr Rushdie’s terrible ordeal will soon come to an end. To suggest, however, that only ‘two dozen’ authors, from some forty countries and more than forty languages, are ‘worthy of the name’ – supposedly because they have met the demanding literary criterion of supporting a writer admired in the West – is to engage in a casual critical arrogance.
From the volume of essays by the Muslim authors ‘worthy of the name’, Mr Hitchens selects one essay – by a Syrian critic, Mr Sadik Al-Azm – for ecstatic praise and endorsement. We are told that the essay is ‘the most tough-minded and skilfully written defence of [Mr Rushdie] to have flowed from any pen’. Mr Hitchens then proceeds to quote from the essay a passage in which Mr Sadik Al-Azm speaks of the ‘universal consent’ by which Naguib Mahfouz now is seen as ‘the Arab Balzac’, before going on to predict that Mr Rushdie will ‘turn out to be the Muslim James Joyce’. This is all very unfortunate. The talk about this is our Dante, that your Hopkins; this a Chinese Bigaretti, that a Latvian Hafiz, is essentially tabloid gossip of the kind that is best ignored and forgiven. Many ancient societies, cultures, languages, literatures and systems of thought, for millennia, managed to get by without a Balzac to prop them up: the likelihood that they might perish without their own Joyces is also very small.
In fact, Joyce is rather the wrong man to be invoked for conferring reflected glory on the writings of Mr Rushdie. The latter claims to have a political agenda in his novels; Joyce was the least political of the Anglo-Irish writers of this century. Mr Rushdie is excruciatingly monotonous: once you have read a section of a fiction by him, you have read all of them. Joyce’s voice, form, mode, even language change with every new book. Joyce clearly understood the fundamental difference between the aesthetic and the ideological dimensions of faith: it was not for no reason that he chose a loaded theological term, ‘epiphany’, to define the significant fictional moments in his works. It was this maturity of vision that enables him to write, in Dubliners, a lament for old pieties, which he closes, in the last tale, with a vision of almost phenomenal mercy. He wouldn’t dream of doing dirt to any central icons of faith. All three of Mr Rushdie’s novels are sadly devoid of any such maturity. Above all, Joyce can throw up a living character in a single sentence. In the three novels of Mr Rushdie, there is only one recognisable character – Mr Rushdie himself. No appeals to ‘magic realism’ will ever cover up this deficiency.
Perhaps the single most pertinent remark on the (to date, much neglected) literary and aesthetic aspect of the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses, in particular, and the drift of Rushdie’s other two novels in general, comes from T.S. Eliot. Reviewing Murray’s biography of Lawrence, Son of Man, in the Criterion for July 1931, Eliot said, in autobiographical vein, that Murray speaks of
a peculiarity which to me is both objectionable and unintelligible. It is using the terminology of Christian Faith to set forth some philosophy … which is fundamentally non-Christian or anti-Christian … The variety of costumes into which these three talented artists [Lawrence, Huxley and Murray] have huddled the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, in their various charades, is curious and to me offensive. Perhaps, if I had been brought up in the shadowy Protestant underworld within which they all seem gracefully to move, I might have more sympathy and understanding; I was brought up outside the Christian fold, in Unitarianism; and in the form of Unitarianism in which I was instructed, things were either black or white. The Son and the Holy Ghost were not believed in, certainly; but they were entitled to respect as entities in which many other people believed, and they were not to be employed as convenient phrases to embody any private religion. I mention this autobiographical detail simply to indicate that it is possible for unbelievers as well as believers to consider this sort of loose talk to be, at the best, in bad taste.
It pre-eminently is a question of taste, then – taste, as Henry James would have said, as a measure of both moral, but more importantly, aesthetic maturity. Viewed thus – and there is no other way of looking at the question – it indeed does appear that there is something fundamentally wrong with the voice (in the sense in which the Italian novelist, Moravia, speaks of the voice behind every tale) that controls and determines the texture and course of Mr Rushdie’s fictions. This voice has far too much in it of the naughty schoolboy. The famous masturbation scene in Midnight’s Children should illustrate the point.
I admire Mr Hitchens’s loyal support of Mr Rushdie. That is as it should be. Mr Rushdie’s talent has yet to realise its potential: there is no doubt one day he’ll write a really good novel. Meanwhile, however, Mr Rushdie’s supporters would do well if they could stay away from comparative criticism of the kind which claims that Mr Rushdie’s art is about to change the course of literary creation in Islamic languages. They might, instead, spare some time and educate themselves in some other hujw and tanz – ‘satire’ in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu.
Maqbool Aziz
Hamilton, Ontario
Vol. 16 No. 10 · 26 May 1994
From Boris Ford
Towards the end of his excellent Diary on anti-Rushdie pathology (LRB, 24 February), Christopher Hitchens stated that on matters of blasphemy the Vatican, the See of Canterbury and the Rabbinate identify with the Ayatollah. This struck me as improbable, not least because identifying with the Ayatollah would imply sharing his view that blasphemy should be punished by death. I therefore wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and the Chief Rabbi, sending them a copy of the article and inviting their comments. Here are their replies:
The Chief Rabbi writes: It goes without saying that I would not identify with the Ayatollah on the issue of blasphemy. In Judaism, blasphemy is very narrowly defined, more so than in the laws of this country. In Jewish law, The Satanic Verses would not have been regarded as blasphemous. The differences, of course, go deeper than that. I myself am opposed to the extension of the blasphemy laws to cover other faiths (as I made clear on television recently). Moreover, even a fully fledged case of blasphemy is only punishable in Jewish law by excommunication (that is to say, exclusion from the Jewish community). Excommunication is in any case not practised by the Anglo-Jewish community.
The Archbishop of Canterbury writes: It may be helpful to you to have the attached copy of a lecture I gave about toleration in which I mentioned the Rushdie affair. You will see that I talked about it in the context of that demanding kind of true tolerance which requires us to enter the pain and feelings of other groups, however strange they may seem, and contrasted this with the more limited and passive kind of tolerance based on mere indifference. It goes without saying that passing a fatwah on someone who wrote a novel, however offensive to many people, is completely contrary to the tolerance for which I have consistently argued on this and many other occasions. You might, for instance, like to consider quoting the last couple of sentences of the address which sum up my strong convictions on this matter:
It is my passionate conviction that when we are prepared to die for another’s right to belief, in just the way we might be prepared to die for the right to our own, we might then have begun to explore the toleration of God. For it is His tolerating us which will make us all ultimately free as citizens of this world and of the world to come.
Charles Wookey, Assistant to the Archbishop of Westminster for Public Affairs, writes: I can certainly confirm that it would be inaccurate to say, in the context of an article about Salman Rushdie, that the Vatican ‘identifies with the Ayatollah’ on matters of blasphemy. The Catholic Church clearly does believe there is such a thing as blasphemy, but I expect there would be little agreement with the Ayatollah Khomeini about what constitutes blasphemy, and certainly none at all over the grotesque penalty which this religious authority has sought to impose on Mr Rushdie. The Second Vatican Council, in its document on religious liberty, made it quite clear that the Catholic Church would not connive with any attitude or system which aims to coerce people in the exercise of religious freedom and personal responsibility by force or fear or any other means.
Boris Ford
Bristol
Vol. 16 No. 11 · 9 June 1994
From Nicolas Walter
It is good to know from Boris Ford’s letter (26 May) that the Chief Rabbi, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a representative of the Archbishop of Westminster do not identify with the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s position on matters of blasphemy; though surely no one imagined that they did just because Christopher Hitchens said so.
The Chief Rabbi says that ‘even a fully fledged case of blasphemy is only punished in Jewish law by excommunication’; according to Biblical law, blasphemy is punished by stoning (Leviticus 24.16), even if rabbinical law moderated this to flogging and then to excommunication, and in the state of Israel material which offends religious sensibilities is suppressed by unofficial if not by official sanctions. He says that excommunication – ‘exclusion from the Jewish community’ – is ‘not practised by the Anglo-Jewish community’; according to reports in the Jewish Chronicle, exclusion from synagogues and communities is practised, though not for blasphemy. He says that he is ‘opposed to the extension of the blasphemy laws to cover other faiths’, so he is in the curious position of supporting legal protection for Christianity but not for Judaism.
The Archbishop of Canterbury doesn’t say what he thinks about blasphemy law, but the Church of England has always supported and often employed the common law under which many people have been prosecuted and punished for publishing material about the Anglican version of Christianity which other people find offensive.
The representative of the Archbishop of Westminster says that ‘the Catholic Church would not connive with any attitude or system which aims to coerce people in the exercise of religious freedom and personal responsibility by force or fear or any other means.’ The Roman Catholic Church has notoriously held such attitudes and run such systems for most of its existence, even if it has moderated its position as it has lost its power, and it too supports the blasphemy laws of this and other countries with Christian traditions.
The question is not whether people agree with the Ayatollah – most people are against killing people when they no longer have the power to do so – but whether they are in favour of law against offensive material about religion remaining stricter than that about politics, race, sex, sport and so on.
Nicolas Walter
Committee Against Blasphemy Law
Vol. 16 No. 12 · 23 June 1994
From Liam Mac Cóil
Robert Creamer complains that Sadik Al-Azm is ‘stretching things more than a little, even metaphorically, when he says James Joyce was writing about Ireland in a language other than his own’ (Letters, 28 April). We can only quote Joyce himself, from A Portrait of the Artist:
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
Thus Stephen Dedalus, while in conversation with the English dean at his university in Dublin. It is in the spirit of this much quoted passage that I read Christopher Hitchens’s report of Sadik Al-Azm’s original article and its attention ‘to the language’ (LRB, 24 February).
The question of (the) language is crucial to the writing of Salman Rushdie, Edward Said and Amin Maalouf, as it is to writers (Arab, African, Indian, Irish or whatever) whose people have had to deal with an ‘imperial’ tongue imposed on them from outside. Squarely and without whingeing, James Joyce faced the issue; and made his choice. Though other choices were, and are, possible, his stand can be regarded as paradigmatic. No less so because his home language was English.
Sadik Al-Azm has Joycean authority for his metaphorical stretchings. Robert Creamer has none. To call Irish the language of Ireland’s ‘traditionalists’ is as disparaging as it is meaningless – all speakers of all languages are perforce traditionalists. To say that Breton is a Gaelic language is simply wrong. Like Welsh, Breton belongs to the Brythonic group of Celtic languages. In linguistics, as in literary criticism, we must watch our ps and qs.
Liam Mac Cóil
Baile Atha Buí, Co. na Mí
Vol. 16 No. 14 · 21 July 1994
From Robert Creamer
In refuting me on the matter of James Joyce’s first language, Liam Mac Coíl (Letters, 23 June) falls into the old trap of confusing an author with one of his characters. Stephen Dedalus may resemble the youthful Joyce in many ways but he is still fictional. Despite his (Stephen’s) emotional statement – English ‘will always be for me an acquired speech’ – the fact remains that Joyce was born to an English-speaking family in an English-speaking society, and when he wrote he wrote in his native tongue, not in an acquired one. Mr Mac Coíl’s melodramatic vision of Joyce ‘squarely and without whingeing’ facing the issue of whether to write in English or another language (presumably Irish) is simply nonsense.
I make no criticism of Salman Rushdie and his impressive work, but it is wrong to claim, as Mr Mac Coíl and Sadik Al-Azm apparently do, that Rushdie’s writing in English about Islam and Islamic society parallels Joyce’s writing in English about Dublin and the Ireland he grew up in. The equation does not exist. Rushdie’s Islam was not couched in English. Joyce’s Dublin was.
Mr Mac Coíl also says it was disparaging for me to call Irish the language of Ireland’s traditionalists, but what else is it? Traditionalists say Ireland is a bilingual country, and they have the road signs to prove it. But while Irish-speaking pockets may still exist in the western counties, in my visits to Ireland I have never come across anyone (except an immigrant from Spain) who did not speak English as a first language.
Like a flag or an anthem, Irish may be a revered symbol of an independent Ireland, but it is not the language of the country. I went to Mass in Bray, near Dublin. The Mass was in Irish, which made me chagrined, for I felt my assumption that Irish was not really spoken in Ireland was, after all, wrong. But when the priest paused to make parish announcements to the congregation, he spoke in English. Afterwards I asked a woman on the steps outside if all Masses in that church were Irish.
‘No,’ she said. ‘This is the only one.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I understood every word.’
‘Did you?’ she said, unamused. ‘Well, I didn’t, and I was born and raised here.’
Obviously not a traditionalist.
Robert Creamer
Tuckahoe, New York
