Salman Rushdie and the “war on terror”

Abstract

My aim here is to explain the topicality of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in the midst and aftermath of the so‐called “war on terror”. The principal merit of the novel is that it sees fundamentalism not only in militant Islamism but also in the West’s unselfconscious belief in its own social and economic practices. It engenders a kind of migrant sensibility that moves between and casts doubt on fixed cultural and ideological positions. Alas, the extraordinary torrent of literary writing and punditry about 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror” has often failed to combine a vehement critique of Islamism with an equally penetrating appraisal of other forms of fundamentalist belief. Indeed, the enduring significance and salutariness of The Satanic Verses has not been matched by the tendentiousness of Rushdie’s own media‐based analyses of Islam, terrorism and western power. The article is also therefore a defence of literature as an efficacious form of political engagement.

Keywords:

• fundamentalism
• migration
• Islam
• authority
• literature

Notes

1. Gray explores this thesis further, in his characteristically confrontational and stimulating style, in Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007).

2. On the vicissitudes of the concept of modernity, particularly the way in which the term has been hijacked by social democratic politicians whose faith in neo‐liberalism is well‐nigh fundamentalist, see Fredric Jameson’s A Singular Modernity (8–10). Interestingly, the same point was made many years ago by Raymond Williams in a short meditation on “the meaning of modernization”. “Modernization is, indeed, the ‘theology’ of a new capitalism” (Williams 45).

3. This comparison has now been made many times, though I suspect that Edward Said was the first to identify it (Said, From Oslo to Iraq 110).

4. In “In Good Faith” and “Is Nothing Sacred?” (Imaginary Homelands 393–429) Rushdie argues that the irony and inventiveness of literature place it at odds with the thought‐stopping certainties of religion. “I do not believe that novels are trivial matters. The ones I care most about are those which attempt radical reformulations of language, form and ideas, those that attempt to do what the word novel seems to insist upon: to see the world anew” (393).

5. Elsewhere I have given a lengthier account of Said’s argument in his unjustly neglected study of origins and originality (Spencer, “‘Contented Homeland Peace’”). Abdirahman A. Hussein provides an exhaustive analysis (53–146).

6. The essays contained in Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby’s Modernism and Empire (2000) explore the connections between modernism and a new sense of the relativity of human cultures.

7. See also John McLeod’s instructive analysis of The Satanic Verses’ London setting (147–57).

8. Timothy Brennan’s chapter on Rushdie in his trenchant Wars of Position bemoans what he sees as the deleterious effect that the so‐called Satanic Verses affair had on Rushdie’s fiction (65–92).