What emerged from my survey was taht just like Christianity, Islam has had its fanatical elements, as well as those which are liberal and civilized. The exclusivist tendencies of Judaism are replicated in Islam. The same monotheistic tirades against unbelievers and heathen are found in both Islam, and in Christianity. But as time went on, Islam produced rather high-quality civilizations in some places, such as Baghdad in the time of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid ("the just"). There are many remarkable and well-documented accounts of the advanced state of medicine, especially surgery, in Islamic societies, during the Middle Ages when by comparison Europe was scarcely more than barbarous; see the excerpt from the noted freethought scholar Joseph McCabe.
We must thank Islamic scholars for preserving the original texts of Aristotle and other Greek classics, when they had been entirely lost in Europe itself. When they were finally translated into Latin in the earrly 13th centtury, the effect on Europe was extraordinary. Episode two of James Burke's television series, "The Day the Universe Changed" relates that dramatic story; see the book of the same title, also by Burke.
There were currents of Freethought in Islam, represented for instance by the blind poet Abul'-Ala' al-Ma'arri, who wrote before the first Crusade: "The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains." As with Christianity, such writers often faced repression, prison, execution, and the rest of it, but they did exist.
Four years ago, many astute observers of the Islamic and Arabic world predictedc that the Gulf War would be seen as a new Crusade. While the war itself was short, the consequences continue to this day, notably in the revival of fundamentalist tendencies, which also have an "anti-Western" quality. Unfortunately, many "civilized" people in the Middle East are linked to "pro-Western" elements, which are often quite corrupt. For instance, in Egypt, Sayed al-Toukhi, of the country's Organization of Humna Rights, reports that "the government is slowly pushing three million farmers off their land and selling the land to 100,000 wealthy landowners." In such conditions, bitter hostility and outright resistance must be expected. Unfortunately, in the center of all this confict, quite a few progressive and creative intellectuals have come in for a very hard time of it indeed. It is their story I would like to relate here, drawing on a range of sources.
Undoubtedly the most famous "case" of censorship in the contemporary Islamic world is that of Salman Rushdie. Responding to Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeni sentenced its author to death for the crime of blasphemy against Islam. This fatwa, or edict, was to be carried out by any of the faithful. Immediately after the publication of this sentence in 1989, a storm of mingled fear, defiance and indignation swept the republic of letters all around the world. The repressive horrors of the mullahs in Iran had long been known, but this seemed monstrous, medieval in its fanaticism. As we shall see, this is not the story of just one wayward rebel, but of whole cultures under attack. And the roots of this attack run very deep indeed.
The Satanic Verses is a complicated, intricate book; for proper appreciation, the reader should understand that it probes various "sensitive" aspects of the Islamic heritage. The title derives from some verses of the Koran, presumably inspired by the angel Gabriel, and proclaimed by the Prophet; later, these were changed because, it seems, they originated not from Gabriel, but from Satan. I don't have space here to explore all the details of the actual verses, but the central problem the book wants to examine is, perhaps, central to all religious controversies: How do we know where the claims, visions, inspirations, and so on come from? Do they truly originate from God, or His (Her?) angels? Or devils? Or just from ourselves? In my own experience, probing that question was probably the beginning of atheism, for my conclusion was that all religions are just projections of our own fears, desires, authority structures, etc.
Ram Swarup, a scholar of Islamic history in India, wrote a fine long essay discussing the points of the religion's heritage and doctrine which Rushdie's novel explores.3 However, I believe that the real reason the novel and its author were condemned by Iran is because the book contains a biting satire of a character who can be none other than the Ayatollah Khomeni. This is a long section fo the novel, but a short passage will indicate the flafor: "The Imam is a massive stillness, an immobility. He is living stone. His great gnarled hands, granite-grey, rest heavily on the wings of his high-backed chair. His head, looking too large for the body beneath, lolls ponderously on the suprisingly scrawny neck that can be glimpsed through the grey-black wisps of beard." There are scores of sycophantic protectors who surround the Imam, carrying out his orders. I think it is important to note that it is exactly Iran where the death edict orriginated, though all the faithful around the world have been urged to execute the heretical novelist.
Reviewing the history of Islam, Ram Swarup notes that the prophet Muhammed also condoned assassination in his own lifetime. Poets in particular were often condemned; one tradition tells us that the Prophet exclaimed that "filling the belly of a person with pus is better than stuffing his head with poetry." (Greece's sage Plato, we might recall, also condemned the poets in the Republic.) If the Prophet came to detest someone, he would merely ask "who will rid me of this scoundrel" and he would soon be stabbed to death. This is important because it establishes a longstanding tradition of official assassinations, especially of dissident literary figures, going back to the origins of the religion.
Following on the uproar around Rushdie's novel, there was a mixture of fear and defiance in the literary community; after the sentence of death, various libraries here and elsewhere started to remove or hide his novel. But soon there emerged a form of resistance, with authors publicly declaring their solidarity. In France, in 1993, a volume of essays by Arab and Muslim writers in defense of free speech appeared. The next year, an English translation, For Rushdie, was published by George Braziller (60 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010). Rushdie himself responded: "It is a great delight to find in this volume...the most gifted, the most learned, the most important voices of the Muslim and Arab world, gathered together to subject my work and the furor surrounding it to so brilliant, so many sided, so judicious an examination."
The writers come from a great number of countries: Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Morocco, etc., even Iran. Perspectives range from appeals to universal human rights to certain concepts of legality and liberality in Islamic tradition. Most of the contributions are prose essays, but there are poems, and even a musical composition. Some of the essays notably emphasize the repressive aspects of the religion's history: "At Seville the works of the theologian Ibn Hazam were burned. The mystical poet Al-Hallaj was crucified. The writer Ibn Muquaffa was killed; the licentious poet Bashshar Ibn Burd was condemned for heresy. The philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the historian Ibn Khaldun, and the poets Ibn Sharaf and Al- Husri all had to go into exile" (Tahar Bekri, of Tunisia). Similarly, there is a very moving essay by Algeria's Latifa Ben Mansour in tribute to the poet Al-Hallaj, which includes the verses he recited before being led to the scaffold. These essays revealed to me an entire tradition of martyrdom on behalf of art and freedom.
Aziz Nesin of Turkey, a noted author in that country who defines himself as an atheist, relates how he repeatedly proposed the publication of Rushdie's novel to the Turkish Writers Union, only to meet silence. Therefore, he arranged for the publication of sections of the text in a newspaper, which in turn led to a fundamentalist attack on a hotel where Nesin was staying, with thirty-five deaths. Nesin claims that Rushdie's novel belongs to the world, no matter what the "risk." In summary, For Rushdie is a dramatic, inspiring and informative book, not only for Rushdie and his novel, but for insights on philosophical currents in the Islamic world today.
In a statement at the beginning of the book, George Braziller notes that "newspapers have been filled with stories about other Muslim and Arab writers who have lived and died under similar circumstances. One of Egypt's foremost intellectuals, Farag Fouda, to whom homage is paid several times in this volume, was murdered by fundamentalists in June 1992. In December, Algerian poet and teacher Youssef Sebti was found with his throat cut in his room at the National Institute for Agronomy. Saudi Arabian poet Sadiq Melallah was decapitated."
Women have been among the most ferociously oppressed. Fortunately, we now have some excellent anthologies of their literature, including one entitled Opening the Gates from Indiana University Press.4 This collects a wide range of material, starting around a hundred years ago, with protests against doctrines for seclusion of women which, it was pointed out, are not to be found in the Koran itself. Soon women began to publicly stop wearing veils, and so forth. It's interesting to see how most of the early writings appeal to human decency and justice, while retaining religious beliefs. In our own day, there is some tendency for women to become overtly anti-religious.
This transition may be seen in the work of Egypt's Nawal al-Saadawi, who was born in 1931, and today is one of the best-known women writers of the whole Islamic world. She received her medical degree from Cairo University in 1955, and has specialized in psychiatry. In this anthology, her story "Eyes" is about a young woman who slowly goes insane because of extreme sexual repression: "After she eats, she goes to sleep with God's book under her pillow. She wakes to the sound of her father's voice calling her to fix his food. After he eats, he prays and asks God to protect his daughter from the devil." In a future issue of this newsletter, I hope to do a long review article about al-Saadawi's work, which is remarkable for its fusion of sharp realism with passionate dream imagery. It is clear from just this one story, Dr. al-Saadawi's medical training and practice have provided her with a special perspective on the relationship between religion and psychological repression.
In Egypt, al-Saadawi became director of health education for the whole country, edited a popular magazine on health information, and achieved a reputation as a leader in this field. However, in 1972, she was dismissed from her position; in 1982, she actually went to prison where she had previously been a consulting physician. At the present time, she lives mostly in France, making only brief visits to her native country.
More recently, another woman physician, Taslima Nasrin, has gone into exile from Bangladesh, for similar reasons. After her novel Shame was published, fundamentalists sentenced her to death for blasphemy. So far as I know, this novel has not been published in the U.S. The plot deals with the suffering of a Hindu family in Bangladesh, facing retaliation for the destruction of a mosque in India in 1992. In August of 1994, fleeing murderous mobs, and after two months in hiding, Dr. Nasrin escaped and made her way to Sweden, which offered her a refuge.
According to reports, Nasrin "has said women should have the right to
marry four times in Islamic
societies, just as men do. She has also said that she was for 'freedom of the womb' and that women must
control whether they bear children or not." From exile,
Nasrin told the French newspaper Le Monde that
"they don't like what I write, because I try to show the extent to which people are oppressed by religion. In
my view religious laws should be scrapped, and the hold religion has on society should be brought to an
end. In response to the question, "Are you opposed to all
dogma?" she said: "It seems to me that all
religions contain the seeds of discrimination. If I'd been born in another country, I'd probably have
criticised the dominant religion too. I'm not sure I'm any more convinced by what I read in the Bible, for
example. To me, religion was necessary in the past, but perhaps isn't any more today. We can get along
perfectly well just with our conscience." At this writing, Taslima Nasrin says that she would return to
Bangladesh for face blasphemy charges, "if the government would guarantee her safety."7 That might be a
long wait indeed.
The best international newspapers are full of stories about appalling wars of fundamentalists vs.
secularists now underway in several countries of the Islamic world. In Egypt and Algeria, these are full-
scale civil conflicts, with tens of thousands of deaths. As secularists in the "West," I believe we should
inform ourselves as to the deeper historical perspective that such conflicts have gone on for a long, long
time; that there is a remarkable heritage of freedom-loving art and culture in these countries; and that we
need to express our solidarity with that heritage. Practical suggestions from our colleagues as to how to do
that would be most welcome. A traditional method of protest is to write the Embassies of various
countries, to try to save the lives of those imprisoned. Perhaps a committee could be formed (or already
exists?) to share information about violations of standards of international law and intellectual freedom.
There ought to be ways to arrange for tours of the U.S. by these writers and activists. We ought to have
television documentaries about the actual situations in these countries. Readers, give us your ideas for
action!
NOTES
1Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (N.Y.:
Schocken, 1984), p. 35.
2N.Y. Times, September 28, 1994.
3Undated, unidentified clipping in the author's
collection.
4Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gate: A
Century of
Arab Feminist Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
5N.Y. Times, June 8, 1994; see also Guardian Weekly, June
26, 1994.
6 Reprinted in Guardian Weekly, October 30, 1994.
7Kansas City Star, February 17, 1995.
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