The farce of the fatwa

Speaking Volumes

The fatwa we all remember best is the Valentine's Day edict passed on Salman Rushdie in 1989 after he wrote The Satanic Verses. Rushdie is a writer of tremendous power, who wields his imagination and his curiosity as twin swords.

The ban on Satanic Verses had worldwide repercussions: Rushdie's publishers were threatened, his translators attacked, he went into an exile from which he has not quite returned to a normal life.

The charge against Satanic Verses was that Rushdie had committed blasphemy by evoking the life of the Prophet in certain terms; the Indian government was one of the first to cravenly endorse the ban, citing the fear that it might spark off "communal tension".

Even those of us who violently opposed the ban, arguing in favour of the freedom of the author to write as he chose, knew that Satanic Verses was a potential flashpoint.

The question then, for many of us, was whether it was worth risking potential violence "" wrecked by people who certainly wouldn't rank among Rushdie's true audience in India "" in order to uphold freedom of speech.

In my view, the government caved in. It should have been protecting Rushdie's right to free expression and prosecuting those who chose to respond with acts of violence rather than reasoned argument, instead of ducking the issue.

Taslima Nasreen is not and will never be of the same calibre as the Rushdies of the world. But when Rushdie wrote these lines, he may have had in mind the rights of lesser authors as well as those of the truly great.

"I have grown determined to prove that the art of literature is more resilient than what menaces it," he wrote on the tenth anniversary of the fatwa.

"The best defence of literary freedoms lies in their exercise, in continuing to make untrammelled, uncowed books."

Few of us expected that the Bangladesh government would fail to ban Nasreen's autobiography "" published in that country as Ka ""-given its track record with her work.

But few of us expected the West Bengal state government to follow the lead provided by Dhaka. The book was already under attack: West Bengal's intellectuals have been taken aback by Nasreen's frankness about her sexual life.

Nasreen has pointed out that she has been just as frank about her childhood, about the growth of her political convictions, and she sees no reason to veil this one aspect of her life over, given the freedom with which she speaks of the rest.

Those who were dismayed at finding themselves written about with devastating openness have denounced Nasreen, or, like Syed Shamsul Haque and Syed Hasmat Jalal, have filed defamation suits against her.

The government's reasons for banning Dwikhandita concern not Nasreen's depiction of her love life, but her views on Islam.

It boils down to two pages "" 49 and 50 "" where Nasreen has made comments of this nature: "The history of Islam says that the Arabs used to...bury girl children and Mohammed put an end to all this misery. However, misery I think has increased..." Why is this considered offensive?

It's a critique of Islam and specifically of the position of women in a specific Islamic society; since when has any religion been beyond criticism? The state government's position is that the passages could "incite ill-feeling"; the band of Muslim intellectuals who wrote asking the chief minister to do something about the book felt that the passages in question could be used by "mischief-makers".

In an attempt to keep its options open, the state government has hinted that the ban might be raised if the publishers delete the offending sections.

Of course, what has happened is the exact opposite of what was intended. When the Satanic Verses was banned, it became something of a badge of honour to own a photostatted, samizdat copy of the book.

In Delhi's Bengali-dominated Chittaranjan Park, a bookseller told me he'd run out of copies of Dwikhandita because it was selling so fast; he also offered, as inducement if I returned later, photostatted pages of the more controversial sections of the book.

Many newspapers have printed the controversial sections on Islam and have paraphrased the incidents concerning Jalal and Haque that are now in dispute.

If the purpose of the ban is to prevent people from reading the book "" guess what? It's not working. Instead, even those who might have bypassed Nasreen's work on the grounds that she can be an exceptionally tedious writer have read at least an abridged version of what she has to say.

Nor do I understand why a work of literature must be held responsible for the bigoted or irresponsible reactions it evokes in the non-literary.

The issue when Habib Tanvir's theatre group was under fire for enacting Ponga Pundit shouldn't have been about the merits of the play.

It should have been about coming down hard on the behaviour of those members of the Sangh Parivar who disrupted performances, smashed furniture and menaced the actors.

Similarly, the issue with Dwikhandita shouldn't revolve around her critique of Islam, which as a writer and a thinking human being, she is entitled to do.

If the government isn't capable of reining in the few miscreants who would use this or any other suitable fodder to start riots, it's not doing its job.

What the West Bengal government should have done is to trust that the reading population of the state was mature enough to make up its own mind about the merits of Nasreen's work. We don't need the chief minister to nanny us, to decide what we are or aren't qualified to read.

nilroy@lycos.com