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Ethnography, Literature, and Politics: Some Readings and Uses of Salman Rushdie's TheSatanic VersesAuthor(s): Talal AsadSource: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), pp. 239-269Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656508Accessed: 05/05/2009 18:56

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Ethnography, Literature, and Politics:Some Readings and Uses of

Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

Talal AsadNew Schoolfor Social Research

It is commonly accepted within anthropology hat the discipline emerged aspart of the Enlightenment project of writing a Universal History, yet not all an-thropologists would agree that that nscription presupposes a Western perspectiveon non-European eoples. Such a disagreement draws its force, I would suggest,from an understanding f the project as essentially representational. However, theproject consists not simply of looking-and-recording ut of recording-and-remak-ing, and as such its discourses have sought to inscribe on the world a unity in itsown image.

Ethnographies nd protoethnographies ave, of course, often pitched them-selves against that powerful current, producing a valuable understanding f sin-gular worlds, but inevitably only with minor social effect. We know that ethno-graphic modes of representation volved as an integral part of the great colonialexpansion of Europe (and especially of England), as part of the desire to under-stand-and manage-the peoples subordinated o it. The implications of that factseem to me inadequately worked out in contemporary discussions about ethnog-raphy. I do not mean to say that ethnography can be reduced to the politics ofimperial domination, but that t is, in various ways, inserted nto (and occasionally

against) imperializing projects. Yet having said this, it is necessary to add thatimperializing power has made itself felt in and through many other kinds of writ-ing, not least the kind we call "fiction."

In this essay I want to consider a work of fiction, Salman Rushdie's TheSatanic Verses (1988a), for several reasons. First, because it is a textual repre-sentation of some of the things anthropologists tudy: religion, migration, genderand cultural dentity. Second, because it is itself a political act, having politicalconsequences far beyond any that ethnography has ever had. And third, becauseit is generated by the classic encounter between Western modernity-in which

anthropology s situated-and a non-Western Other, which anthropologists yp-ically seek to understand, o analyze, to translate, o represent.In all the recent concern with writing ethnographies we have, I think, tended

to pay insufficient attention o the problem of reading and using them, to the mo-tives we bring to bear in our readings, as well as to the seductions of text and

239



240 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

context we all experience. In reading social texts we inevitably reproduce aspectsof ourselves, although his is not simply a matter of arbitrary reference or prej-udice. We are all already-constituted ubjects, placed in networks of power, andin reproducing urselves it is also the latter we reproduce. To do otherwise is torisk confronting he powers that give us the sense of who we are, and to embarkon the dangerous ask of reconstructing ourselves along unfamiliar ines. It is,understandably, asier to use our readings to confirm hose powers.

In what follows I want to distinguish between a number of readings of thebook, and to relate them briefly to a complex political field in contemporary Eu-rope. That is, of course, my own strategy for reading, because I am persuadedthat this text is generated by and is a reflection upon one very specific political-cultural ncounter-and that it is so read and used in postcolonial Britain. I shallthen try to reconstruct ome authorial ntentions, and place them within the polit-ical field, and follow that with a political reading of some parts of the novel. Thiswill involve a consideration f the modem category of "Literature" as it operateswithin the text of the novel as well as outside it. It is necessary to stress that Imake no claim to have captured he total meaning of The Satanic Verses (whateverthat may be), still less to describe "the Rushdie affair" in all its internationalramifications. My aim is to intervene n the political debate surrounding he pub-lication of the book by raising some questions about the ambiguous heritage of

liberalism as it affects non-Western mmigrants n the modem European state,particularly n Britain.2

A Political SettingLast December, the prominent British parliamentarian Enoch Powell re-

ferred to his notorious 1968 "rivers of blood" speech in which he had warned

against the presence of non-European mmigrants n Britain: "I am talking," henow declares, "about violence on a scale which can only be described as civilwar. I cannot see there can be any other outcome" (P. Roberts 1989:29). Twenty

years ago Powell had advocated a two-pronged policy: a complete stop to anyfurther mmigration of nonwhites, and government-assisted epatriation f thosein Britain. The first of these has been officially accepted by both major parties,the second hasn't yet. But for Powell and others who think like him the situationis now almost irretrievable, he alien presence too large and too entrenched, andtoo many of them British-born.

A year before the publication of The Satanic Verses, the former Belgian In-terior Minister, Joseph Michel, said that n Europe "We run the risk of becominglike the Roman people, invaded by barbarian eoples such as Arabs, Moroccans,

Yugoslavs and Turks, people who come from far afield and have nothing n com-mon with our civilization" (Palmer 1988). Such sentiments are neither very rarenor confined to right-wing parties in Western Europe. There is generalized hos-

tility toward immigrants of Asian and African origin that finds expression in a

variety of forms ranging from racial murder see Gordon 1989) to discriminatorylegislation (Dummett 1978; Moore and Wallace 1976). But particular develop-ments in recent years have made that hostility especially sharp oward Muslims.3



ETHNOGRAPHY, LITERATURE, AND POLITICS 241

To begin with, the overwhelming majority of non-European mmigrants ncontinental countries are Muslims, proletarians of rural origin imported o meetthe needs of postwar ndustrial xpansion. In Britain hey form a majority of thosewho have come from the Indian subcontinent-that is, that part of the immigrantpopulation hat is seen and referred o as being most alien. The salience of theMuslim presence in Europe s due not merely to numbers, but to political condi-tions both foreign and domestic.

The emergence of radical Islamic movements n the Middle East-and mostnotably the Islamic Republic of Iran-who openly declare the West as their en-emy, has fueled long-standing European antipathies. But the domestic circum-stances are, in my view, more interesting. For increasingly, Muslim immigrantshave begun to organize themselves into mosque institutions, and to assert them-selves not as victims but as the heirs of an equal civilization who now live per-manently n the West. They do not simply ask to be included n the wider politicalsociety, they make detailed demands of the state to enable them to live out theirlives in a culturally distinctive manner. They want to bury their dead in their ownway, to have special times and places set aside for worship, to slaughter animalsaccording o proper ritual rules, to educate their children n their own schools-or at least in prescribed onditions.4 Although Muslim groups n Western Europeare far from united (differences of language, sect, and local origin contribute otheir organizational disunity) their demands increasingly evoke a unified re-sponse. What the European majority inds so provocative is the immigrant's ex-pectation that institutional changes will be made by the state to accommodatethem in their religious specificity.

The European ense that these demands constitute a kind of perverse behav-ior is largely a reflection of two things: (1) the ideological structure of moderEuropean nation-states, and (2) the altered site of the European ncounter with itsOther.

The liberal nation-state consists of an aggregate of citizens, each with the

same legal personality, equal members of and equally entitled to represent thebody politic. Religious communities belong, strictly speaking, to civil and not topolitical society-that is, to the "private" domain where difference s permitted.In Britain, of course, an exception s made for the Church of England which, sincethe 17th century, has had a central nstitutional and deological position within thestate. The notion (common certainly in Britain) that the population of a modernation-state must be committed to "core values," an essential culture that mustbe shared by all if society is to hold together, belongs to a discourse about thelimits of political society. It is easier to deploy in discourses that exclude partic-

ular differences han n those which plausibly describe what the "core values" ofBritish culture are-especially when Anglicanism s said to be a major part of thatculture.5 The core values of nonwhite mmigrants are not-so the hegemonic dis-course goes-part of British culture, and therefore o live permanently n Britainthey must-as political minorities-assimilate into that culture.

However, it is not the case that minorities have always had to make this kindof adjustment. When Europeans went to Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as set-




tiers, administrators, missionaries, they did not need to adopt the "core-values"of the majority populations among whom they lived. On the contrary, hey soughtwith great success to change them. But that immigrants rom those populationsshould not presume o act as though they had a right to something that power didnot accord them-that is quite another tory. And a story in which it is their pre-sumptuous behavior that needs explaining and correcting, not the posturesadopted by the English.

I don't want to be taken as saying that there s a single deep divide in Britaintoday that separates Muslims and non-Muslims in some simple way. Of coursethere are protagonists among both who are intent on creating a single divide, al-though that divide is not conceived in the same way by both. It is evident, how-ever, that for some years now a new dimension of politics has been emerging thatis resented n Europe. Nothing that is published there about Muslim beliefs and

practices can therefore be without political significance, not even in a work offiction. As Salman Rushdie nsisted in 1984, in a critical essay on recent Englishtelevision serials about India:

works of art, even works of entertainment, o not come into being n a social andpolitical acuum; nd .. the way hey operate n a society annot e separated rompolitics, rom history. For every ext, a context. .. What am saying s that politicsand

iterature,ike

sportand

politics,do mix, are

nextricablyixed, and that hat

mixture as consequences. Rushdie 984:130, 137; emphasis dded]

Unlike Rushdie I do not hold that all literature is essentially political, although itis true that any piece of literary writing can become politicized. But there can beno doubt that The Satanic Verses is a political book. It is political not merely be-cause it claims to speak of political matters, but because it intervenes n politicalconfrontations lready n place, and is consequently bound to be fought over inan asymmetrically tructured olitical terrain.

Some British Readings of a Postcolonial Novel

Salman Rushdie is not only the author of The Satanic Verses, he has alsovolunteered its authoritative reading. Thus, in his open letter to the Prime Ministerof India, published shortly after his book was banned in that country, he wrote:

The section of the book in question (and et's remember hat the book in question sn'tactually about Islam, but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love,death, London and Bombay) deals with a prophet-who is not called Mohammed-living in a highly fantastical city made of sand (it dissolves when water falls upon it).He is surrounded y fictional followers, one of whom happens to bear my own firstname. Moreover, this entire sequence happens in a dream, the fictional dream of afictional character, an Indian movie star, and one who is losing his mind, at that. Howmuchfurtherfrom history could one get? [Rushdie 1988b:A27; emphasis added]

This gloss is not without its difficulties, but it is quite unequivocal: history(or ethnography) produces a kind of writing whose rhetorical status is quite dis-



ETHNOGRAPHY, ITERATURE, ND POLITICS 243

tinct from that produced in a novel. Six months later Rushdie supplied another

reading. "Nowadays," he wrote,

a powerful ribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary ThoughtPolice. They have turned Muhammad nto a perfect being, his life into a perfect life,his revelation nto the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not.6 Powerful ta-boos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad s if he were human, withhuman virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a histor-ical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos againstwhich The Satanic Verses has transgressed. ... It is for this breach of taboo that thenovel is being anathematized, ulminated against, and set alight. [Rushdie 1989a:26;emphasis added]

Why these apparently contradictory readings? Instead of trying to establishthe right reading let's ask, "What is it that motivates the shift?" and seek theanswer not in speculations about the author's mind but in the wording of the textsin altered contexts. Thus the latter piece concludes as follows:

Inside my novel, its characters eek to become fully human by facing up to the greatfacts of love, death, and (with or without God) the life of the soul. Outside it, theforces of inhumanity re on the march. "Battle lines are being drawn n India oday,"one of my characters remarks. "Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark.

Better you choose which side you are on." Now that the battle has spread o Britain,I only hope it will not be lost by default. It is timefor us to choose. [Rushdie 1989a:26;emphasis added]

We can see that the shift is motivated by a sense of the overriding politicalpriority now being faced: an apocalyptic war between Good and Evil has spilt overinto Britain because The Satanic Verses has dared to challenge taboos set up bythe Forces of Inhumanity.7 This is no time for liberal tolerance. Contrary to whatreviewers8 have said about the book, Rushdie's latter reading insists that its mes-

sage is not doubt but conviction, not argument but war. True, there is a represen-tation of religious doubt, but that is a rhetorical tactic-after all, Rushdie hasoften told us that he lost his faith in religion a long time ago. Doubt is neither the

beginning nor the end of an exploration into new forms of moral and politicalexistence. Indeed I shall argue that for many people the book has largely had theeffect of weakening the possibility of a politics of difference in Britain today.

Thus Rushdie's friend, the distinguished English feminist writer Fay Wel-don, has responded to his second reading with a vigorous attack on the Qur'an,the central sacred text of Islam, in a pamphlet entitled Sacred Cows (1989), whichhas rapidly acquired a certain fame in its own right. She reads The Satanic Versesas bringing new certainty, a renewed sense of the divine. Not doubt, but an un-compromising insistence on liberal Truth is what she feels Rushdie's work callsfor. We must reject the call for radical cultural differences in our British society.Somewhat quaintly she writes:

The uni-culturalist olicy of the United States worked, welding its new peoples, fromevery race, every nation, every belief, into a whole: let the child do what it wants at




for Muslims? And what hurts so much is that one of our own, someone I really usedto admire, someone who stood up on television and told the White British how racist

they were, has let us down so badly. [Alibhai 1989]

Significantly, Zaheera employs liberal arguments, grounded in appeals to fairnessand equality before the law, against the unfriendly reactions of the British major-ity-such as those expressed in Fay Weldon's pamphlet. Her sense of "unfair-ness" doesn't connect with any demand for extending the law of blasphemy; it

points to an old and unresolved anxiety about minority vulnerabilities in the mod-em state. If the freedom of public criticism is in fact restricted by laws that protectthe sensibilities only of the rich, the famous, and the majority, what happens to

the rest, liberal society's "always Others"?It would be misleading to suggest that all Muslims in Britain hold a negative

view of the book. There are some-including some of the most Westernized-who have supported it unreservedly as a celebration of a more progressive cultural

identity. "One of the strengths of The Satanic Verses," observes Yasmin Ali,

what gives it its authenticity as a cultural product of cosmopolitan Britain, is that itreflects with love and sympathy, and an acute comic eye, the joyful diversity of oursubcontinental rigins and experiences. The moral and political uniformity hat someof our brothers nd sisters oday would have us accept as the norm, s a denial of our

experiences. Ali 1989:17]

For Yasmin Ali, the book's authenticity s confirmed by the seeming correspon-dence between its images and the individual reader's experience. The possessivepronoun n "our experiences" claims to speak representatively or a collectivity,but which collectivity? The beliefs, practices, and attachments of the many im-migrant Muslims who were hurt by the novel are clearly not included in "our"experiences. But the joyful resonance hat the book has evoked among its mostlyWestern readers s a pointer to the conditions in which "our experiences" are

normatively efined. Zaheera's experience doesn't qualify because it doesn't con-form to a secular iberal "literary" reading of the book.12A Hindu professor of political theory in England, Bhikhu Parekh, related to

me last summer how he first read the book with unreserved admiration. He wasdelighted with it, he said, for two main reasons: first, because it showed that afellow Indian could handle the English language more brilliantly han most En-glishmen, and second, because its treatment of religion seemed to advertise theloyalty of a secular Muslim to a nonsectarian, progressive India. But then he re-read the text with "the help"-as he put it-of two Muslim friends, and found

himself making very different sense of it, which he has now set out in a thoughtfulreview (1989). The Satanic Verses, in his opinion, is

An immensely daring and persistently probing exploration of the human condition,which only a rootless immigrant an undertake, but t] lies ill at ease with timid obei-sance to the latest iterary and political fashions; profound eriousness apses suddenlyand without warning into pointless playfulness. The sacred is interlaced with flip-pancy, the holy with the profane. Intensely delicate explorations of human relation-



246 CULTURAL NTHROPOLOGY

ships and emotions are overshadowed by an almost childlike urge to shock, hurt andoffend. [Parekh 1989:31]

Like Zaheera, Parekh stresses the liberal value of "fairness," as well as

"compassion and humanity" in the need to understand Muslim immigrant pro-test. But when he speaks, as others have done, of "the first generation of Muslimswho turned to religion to give some meaning and hope to their empty lives" (Pa-rekh 1989:31), one is made uncomfortably aware that in a moder state such un-

derstanding and tolerance is often based on the medicalization of its "problem"subjects, that is to say on the categorization of religiously based identity as a con-dition of individual or collective pathology requiring curative treatment. (Why

else would the notion of "empty lives" be applied to immigrants who havebrought their non-Christian religion with them? Which authority defines the

proper content of "full lives"?) There are of course well-intentioned and sinisterversions of this categorization.'3 But in either case the strategy of medicalizingreligious opposition, together with the centralized control of compulsory school-

ing, leads to the following paradox: on the one hand liberal political theory insistson the sanctity of individual experience, on the other it requires the state to con-struct and cure it.

Another, and more angry shift than the one undertaken by Parekh, is signaled

in this letter by the Hindu Marxist immigrant Gautam Sen (1989:6):

When the crisis over The Satanic Verses first broke, my reflex response, like that ofmany black radicals and anti-racists, was one of anger. I found myself cursing thebigots and signing a newspaper advertisement n Rushdie's support, hough I felt verydisturbed at the price paid subsequently with lives in India and Pakistan. But theevents of the past months have drawn me inexorably closer to the protesters againstThe Satanic Verses. All sorts of racists are crawling out of the woodwork to clarify amore important prior division between white societies and blacks, transcending anydisagreements within white society itself. The astonishing flight from elementarylogic in the face of satanic, black, masculine forces by the heavyweight feminist in-

telligensia [including Fay Weldon] has been pointed out by Homi Bhabha ("Downamong the writers," New Statesman and Society, 28 July). I was not born a Muslim,but I have to say that we blacks are all Muslims now. I feel a real sense of emotionaloneness with the "smelly, dark aliens" who made the utterly assimilated Asianwoman novelist Bharati Mukherji "feel physically and emotionally harassed" bytheir mere arrival n Canada Guardian, 19 July).

For Gautam Sen the revised rereading was occasioned by developments in theBritish political context that appeared more threatening to all immigrants, Mus-lims and non-Muslims alike. What obviously alarmed him most was the combi-

nation of paternalist and assimilationist attitudes displayed in all their self-righ-teous arrogance by the British middle class.

A concern with enforced assimilation is also a major concern of Shabbir

Akhtar, an articulate young Bradford Muslim, who has written a passionately ar-

gued book on the Rushdie affair. Akhtar finds The Satanic Verses inferior as awork of fiction, and the chapters recounting the story of Mahound deliberatelyinsulting to Muslims. The Prophet Muhammad, he points out, represents for be-




lievers the paradigm of virtue; an attack on him is therefore seen by Muslims asan attack on their highest moral and religious ideals. Rushdie has the right, hesays, to disbelieve in any of the sacred teachings of Islam, and even to criticizeMuslims for their erroneous beliefs, but not to do so in a provocative manner. Hewants the book banned, and supports he protests to that end. He is bitter at whathe, like Zaheera, calls the double standards f Western public opinion. Neverthe-less, he is not entirely pessimistic.

I believe hat he Rushdie ontroversy s not ntractable. o show hat t is incapableof rational esolution ould be effectively atal o the Muslim ase. It is clearly n theinterests f the iberal nd non-Muslim onstituency o pretend hat slamic demandsconcerning ushdie's ook are unacceptably oreign o the spirit f Western emoc-racy. But are these demands, properly ssessed, ncapable f being met? [Akhtar1989a:123]

His answer to this rhetorical question is that they can be met if only British poli-ticians and commentators were to recognize their "prejudice and unfair attitudes'(Akhtar 1989a:124). What he wants is not an extension of the blasphemy aw assuch, but an agreement hat the basic identity of Muslim immigrants-like thatof all British citizens-should be legally protected against wanton attacks.

While it is perhaps rue that such demands are not "unacceptably oreign to

the spirit of Western democracy," it is arguable that the assumption by whichthey are propelled s regarded as "outmoded" by bourgeois civil society. Insultto religious identity is, like insult to individual or group honor, a concept thatmodem law finds hard to deal with. This is not merely because religious belief isregarded s a private matter, but rather because of its peculiar notion of "injury.'"Thus the law of libel, to which reference has so often been made in this matter,revolves around the question of whether "material damage" can be proved-which is why the legal penalty, if applicable, takes the form of financial compen-sation to the injured party. Free speech can be restrained when it is shown that the

plaintiff suffers materially as a consequence. Bourgeois law can't cope with theidea of malicious statements eading to moral or spiritual njury because it can'tlocate and quantify the damage in money terms. All this should be quite under-standable n a capitalist society.

The real problem with the Muslim minority's demands, however, may notbe the formal legalistic incompatibilities Akhtar s surely right in insisting thatwhere there's a political will the legal means can be found). Nor is the problemsimply one of prejudice against Muslims (which certainly exists). The real diffi-culty consists in the British style of liberal politics, for in Britain, the politics ofrule

requiresits

immigrant subjectsto

strugglewith "the

bafflingidioms and

codes of the white chameleon, which is cunningly Christian yet secular, Con-servative yet liberal, repressive yet permissive" (Caute 1989:9).14

Postcolonial Literature and the Western Subject's Self-Recognition

Many commentators ave insisted that most protesting Muslims haven't readthe book. Clearly most of them haven't. However, as pastiche The Satanic Verses




draws on a wide variety of literary exts, reproduces words and phrases rom halfa dozen languages, and alludes to as many national and religious settings. In whatsense precisely can Western readers who have little familiarity with these multiplereferences be said to have read the book? To demand that the act of "reading"must always conform to an a priori norm of skills and knowledges is perhaps ar-bitrary. At any rate most people who have used it to commend or oppose particularpolicies in Britain haven't read it in any conventional literary sense either. Butthen the way this text has fed into very different kinds of political practice s itselfpart of the reading. The Satanic Verses is above all a deliberately provocativerhetorical erformance n an already charged political field; that context has inev-itably become integral to the text. Since the context is uncontrolled, he attemptto include more or less of it in the reading s itself part of the political struggle.

Oddly enough, the fundamentalist position-according to which the text isself-sufficient for arriving at its meaning-is being taken here not by religiousfanatics but by liberal critics. For example Penelope Lively, the novelist, refersto a recent essay of Rushdie's: "I think, sadly, it points up the basic confrontation:here is a novelist trying to explain his purpose o fundamentalists who cannot, orwill not, understand what fiction is or does" (Hinds and O'Sullivan 1990). In thatessay, Rushdie explains the classic literary doctrine that fiction (unlike fact) isessentially self-contained, and that if a novel's meaning has any external author-

ity, it can only be the imaginative ntention of its author, not the imaginative re-ception of its politically situated readers.

Fiction uses facts as a starting-place nd then spirals away to explore ts own concerns,which are only tangentially historical. Not to see this, to treat iction as if it were fact,is to make a serious mistake of categories. The case of The Satanic Verses may be oneof the biggest category mistakes n literary history. [Rushdie 1990a:20]

But Rushdie's argument here, shared by innumerable authors and literary criticswho have commented on The Affair, is less decisive than t appears. For once the

principle of the total self-sufficiency of the text is breached by reference to theimaginative ntention of the author, the concept of sharply differentiated cate-gories is subverted. That is why, in the real political world, the bourgeois aw oflibel insists on making that "category mistake."'5

Quite apart rom the question of relevant context, the technique of literarypastiche makes it possible for a wide range of readers o recognize and seize uponparts of an entire text. Those who have been offended by The Satanic Verses arethus responding o the fragmentary ature of the text. But by evoking recognitionof characters, actions, events, atmosphere, he text also produces a sense of de-

lighted confirmation.16 As in this confession by an anglicized woman of Bangla-deshi parents: "With each character squealed with recognition, as a face frommy past or present gazed at me from within the pages of the book" (Ali 1989:17).

Recognition n itself tends to be a conservative act, reproducing he imagesone possesses in memory. I don't imply by this that recognition can occur only ina conservative project. Of course t may be evoked as part of a strategy or invitingthe reader o think oneself into a new world. My argument s that in this book




recognition s used as a device to address the middle-class liberal reader and toconfirm her/his established predispositions.

The English journalist Malise Ruthven is undoubtedly correct in observingthat "The rage with which this . .. novel has been greeted by a number of Muslimorganisations proves that Rushdie has touched upon some extremely raw nerves"(Ruthven 1989:22-23). But can it not, in the same way, be argued that its ag-gressively enthusiastic reception by Western readers is proof that among themsome very different nerves have been touched by this book? That among themimages are joyfully recognized because they are already formed in the layereddiscourses of a commonly inhabited historical world?

It is partly to this phenomenon hat the Urdu Marxist poet Aijaz Ahmed re-ferred hree years ago when he observed that

the few writers who happen o write n English re valorized eyond measure. Wit-ness, for example, he characterization f Salman Rushdie's Midnight's hildren nthe New York Times s "a Continent inding ts voice"-as if one has no voice f onedoes not speak in English.17 . . . The retribution isited upon the head of an Asian,an African, nArab ntellectual ho s of any consequence ndwho writes n Englishis that he/she s immediately levated o the onely plendour f a "representative"-of a race, a continent, civilization, ven the "third world." Ahmed 986:5]

Or even, one might add, of those figures of modernity, "the homeless migrant,""the heroic inhabiter of a godless universe," "the self-fashioning author."

I refer to these familiar igures n order o suggest that the representative ta-tus of which Ahmed speaks is not simply accorded to a foreign writer seekingadmission; he writer's text is constructed rom the start within a field of moderreading-and-writing hat extends beyond the activities of literary igures o includethe scope of moder politics; the text acquires ts representative uthority by tap-ping the network of images and powers made available in that field and not an-other. Among these, of course, are the self-fashioning narratives of militantlyatheist readers who remember a repressive religious upbringing n Catholic or

Low-Church amilies.18 And the textualized memories-the metanarratives-ofa post-Enlightenment truggle against he institutional and moral hegemony of theChurch n Europe and the very recent acquisition here of secular iberties.19 Thus,my argument s not that European readers applaud The Satanic Verses becausethey are all filled with an irrational hatred of Islam, but because it brings nto playmetanarratives f Western modernity that conflict with Islamic textualities bywhich Muslim immigrants n Britain try to define themselves. For opposed toWestern stories of progress there stands the Qur'an, confounding the Westernreader's expectations of progressive narrative-an expectation that has become

(from Carlyle to Weldon) the indisputable measure of an alien text's sense.Aspects of the Bourgeois Rhetoric of "Literature"

"Dr. Aadam Aziz," writes Rushdie (1989a:26) in one of his many expla-nations,

the patriarch n my novel Midnight's hildren, oses his faith and s left with "a holeinside him, a vacancy n a vital nner hamber." , too, possess he same God-shaped




hole. Unable o accept he unarguable bsolutes f religion, have ried o fill up thehole with iterature.

Rushdie's narrative interlacing of characters from novel and autobiographyshould alert us to the fictional ways the self is so often constructed n a literature-producing and -consuming world.20 For the politically engaged reader his delib-erate merging nvites the reconstitution of authorial ntention.

Clearly the word "literature" in Rushdie's confession doesn't denote justany writing that addresses the world. Rushdie doesn't mean that he turned tobooks on political economy, philosophy, or theology, but that he read and wrote

"fiction," "literary criticism,"and

"poetry"for

spiritualsustenance. And not

just any "fiction," of course-not the innumerable paperbacks old by the mil-lion in supermarkets, irports, and railway stations by authors hat "cultivated"readers have never heard of. When Rushdie says "literature" he means a veryspecific body of writing. His statement, and others like it, obviously belong tomoder bourgeois culture-not because unbelief is either moder or bourgeoisbut because of something else: the assumption hat the discourse called Literaturecan fill the role previously performed by religious textuality.2' The idea that Lit-erature s the quintessential pace for producing he "highest" norms of moder

societyhas

become quite familiar to us,22 although the genealogyof

that idea,which includes higher biblical criticism and Lutheran undamentalism, s lesswidely appreciated han t should be.23 For that genealogy reveals a profound hiftfrom a hermeneutic method hat was essentially parasitic on a pregiven sacred extto one that produced Literature ut of an infinite variety of published texts. Theemergence of Literature as a moder category of edifying writing has made itpossible for a new discourse to simulate the normative unction of religious textsin an increasingly secular society.

The remarkable alue given to self-fashioning through a particular kind of

individualized reading and writing is entirely recognizable to Western middle-class readers of "literary' novels but not to most Muslims in Britain or the Indiansubcontinent. And since The Satanic Verses as a whole reproduces that post-Christian pproach o textuality, its seductiveness s likely to work on the formerand not the latter.

Thus it is not mere personal prejudice against Islam that leads Rushdie torepresent t as psychosis (Gibreel's experiences),24 uperstition the events in Tit-lipoor), and chicanery (the story of Mahound).25 What is more interestingly atwork here is the familiar post-Enlightenment onception of Literature s the le-

gitimate source of spirituality. There is a good reason for presenting AlleluiaCone's mystical experience on the snow-topped Himalayas with sympathy (seepages 108-109). Her overpowering sense of the sublime comes upon her at firstin the form of a temporary hallucination of communion with God. The Truthemerges when her experience s narrativized, n her account o the schoolchildren.It is thus the possibility of transmuting eligion into Literature hat makes Alle-luia's narrative about her mountain experience an acceptable form of substitute




religiosity for the author-as well as a recognizable one for many Western andWesternized eaders.

The strongly sympathetic characterization f Sufyan-"ex-schoolteacher,self-taught n the classical texts of many cultures" (p. 243)-belongs to the sameauthorial eason. For when we read that "secularist Sufyan swallowed the mul-tiple cultures of the subcontinent" p. 246), that he could "quote effortlessly fromRig-Veda as well as Quran-Sharif, rom the military accounts of Julius Caesar aswell as the Revelations of St. John the Divine" (p. 245), it is the devotion of thislife to Literature hat we are asked to admire. Not life itself, but The Great Booksof Civilization (by Tagore, Shakespeare, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, and many oth-ers) have fashioned the gentle, unworldly Sufyan, and taught him the wisdom oflife's sorrows.26 o, too, spoken language (his believing wife's bitter complaintsabout his religious laxity) teaches him the evil that issues from actual ritual prac-tice (his one-time pilgrimage o Mecca): "whereas for most Muslims a journey toMecca was the great blessing, in his case it had turned out to be the beginning ofa curse" (p. 290). The practice of religion is transmuted nto malign utterance,the truth of language stands against the antilife of ritual.

The bourgeois doctrine that Literature s the truth of life is repeated n a re-cent lecture by Rushdie (1990b: 18):

Literature s the one place n any society where, within he secrecy f our own heads,we can hear voices talking about everything n every possible way. The reason forensuring hat hat privileged rena s preserved s not that writers want he absolutefreedom o say and do whatever heyplease. t is that we, all of us, readers nd writersand citizens and generals ndgodmen, need hat ittle, unimportant-looking oom.27

This doctrine has gained such an ideological ascendancy that the anthropo-logical concept of culture is now beginning to be thought of once again in themode of Literature. To take a very recent example, James Clifford writes:

Twentieth-centurydentities o

longer presupposeontinuous ultures nd raditions.

Everywhere ndividuals nd groups mprovise ocal performances rom re)collectedpasts, drawing on foreign media, symbols and languages. [Clifford 1988:14]28

But everyday ife is not so easily invented, abandoned, reinhabited as this notionof culture, modeled on the postmodern dea of an imaginative work of art, sug-gests. Nor does everyone in the moder world have an equal power to invent, orto resist the imposition of someone else's invention. To say this is not merely toremind ourselves of the enormous injustices of class, race, and gender that stillexist. It is also to note that although the strictly privatized role of religion in the

moder Western state makes it easy for English believers and nonbelievers o as-similate it to the category of Literature, most Muslim immigrants n Britain findit difficult to assimilate their practical religious traditions o this category.

The bourgeois doctrine that Literature s, more than merely life itself, thevery truth of life, has had a close connection with imperial culture. One may recallhere the recommendation f Lord Macaulay, architect of British education n In-dia, on the benefits of propagating




that iterature efore he ight of which mpious ndcruel uperstitions re ast akingflight on the banks of the Ganges. . . . And, wherever British iterature preads, may

it be attended y British irtue nd British reedom! cited n Baldick 1983:197]

How successful this project was historically s not the point here; what needs tobe underlined s the fact that British literature was always an integral part of theBritish mission in India. Is it also an integral part of Salman Rushdie's mission?

The Politics of a Partial Text

I indicated earlier when I quoted from Rushdie's comments on his novel thatthe rhetorical tatus of the sections dealing with Islam was not entirely clear. Is it"historical exploration" or not? I want now to address myself briefly to authorialintention, to see whether this helps us understand how form and content in TheSatanic Verses articulate with the political terrain n postcolonial Britain. I muststress that t is not Rushdie's original motive in writing the novel that nterests mehere, but the authorial motive as constructed n the literary ext and its politicalcontext.

If the book is, after all, about the growth of Islam as a historical phenome-non, one might wonder whether his object is best pursued via the fictional dreamof a fictional character, an Indian movie star, and one who is losing his mind, at

that. On the other hand f the book's primary aim is to lampoon the sacred beliefsand practices of Muslim immigrants n Britain, then the literary devices employedin The Satanic Verses are entirely apt. Since these beliefs and practices are partof their contemporary ocial existence, their subversion requires a text that is a

weapon. And as the weapon is to be wielded in the presence of a post-Christianaudience-indeed with the seduction of that audience as a primary aim-it draws

astutely on the long tradition of Christian anti-Muslim polemics, central o whichis the Christian ascination with sex in the Prophet's life. As Norman Daniel(1960:102) noted: "it seemed very obvious to mediaeval Christians hat Muham-

mad's behaviour with women alone made it quite impossible that he should havebeen a prophet."

Several commentators ave suggested that the sexual episodes in the novel'saccount of the Prophet serve to humanize him. This may indeed be so. But the

assumptions onstituting hat humanity are themselves the product of a particularhistory. Thus in the Christian radition, to sexualize a figure was to cut him offfrom divine Truth, o pronounce him merely human; n the post-Christian raditionof modernity, o "humanize" a figure s to insist on his sexual desire, to disclosein it, by a discursive stripping of its successive disguises, his essential human

Truth.29 ike any imperializing orthodoxy, this humanist doctrine demands of usa universal way of "being human"-which is really a singular way of articulatingdesire, discourse, and gesture in the body's economy.

(Although n this sense the hagiographical epresentation f Muhammad s"humanized" n Rushdie's novel, the very real contemporary Khomeini-"theImam"-is heavily mythicized. These two diametrically opposed rhetoricaltransformations ome together n the same polemical aim, however.)




structure f the people he is satirizing. Otherwise the writing degenerates nto asneer. Simply to represent another people's beliefs and customs as vices isn't initself satire-which is not to say that it is therefore without effect. Indeed derog-atory representations ave been, throughout Europe's 19th century, an integralpart of imperial propaganda, and an essential justification of its "civilizing mis-sion." But unlike accomplished satire, which is a mode of moral engagement,30such expressions of contempt or the beliefs and practices of Natives (Macaulay's"cruel superstitions") depend for their force on superior material power.

The item that is surely the most startling n Gibreel's dream about Islamicrules is the repulsive explanation offered for the way Muslims slaughter animalsfor food to make the meat halal (kosher). That the explanation s contained neitherin the Qur'an nor in any canonical hadith s of no concern to would-be satire ofcourse-though one might feel that as an invented explanation t's surely some-what feeble in suggesting that the Prophet's religious practice was directed at de-livering sheep and poultry rom philosophical error. More important, however, isthe fact that most British readers will immediately associate this item with thenotorious media campaign a few years ago against what was described as "thatcruel and barbarous" slamic practice. The pressure of public opinion resulted na government commission which recommended hat ritual slaughter be renderedillegal, but fortunately or the Muslims the Jewish religious authorities prevailedupon the government not to follow this recommendation. This seems to confirmthe suspicion that the sneer is directed particularly t Muslim immigrants n Brit-ain, a small and politically vulnerable community which is already n some dif-ficulty for its attachment o religious traditions. n a crusade here can be no schol-arly scruples, only the determination hat light shall triumph against darkness.31

Now of course Rushdie is under no obligation to engage seriously with be-liefs and practices that he rejects, but in choosing to laugh at them he situateshimself very clearly on the ground of quite another radition which is already pow-erfully in place-that of the liberal ruling class in a postcolonial Western state.

The reader of The Satanic Verses should not allow herself to be misled by theaccusations of British racism it contains: such accusations are entirely consonantwith a liberal distress at racist prejudice n contemporary Britain.32 More signifi-cant, I think, is this: in deriding the very idea of rules of conduct ("rules aboutevery damn thing. ... It was as if no aspect of existence was to be left unregu-lated, free") Rushdie invokes the assumptions of liberal individualism hat havereached heir apogee in Thatcher's Britain. Yet neither n politics nor in moralityis it an uncontested ruth o say that being unregulated s being really free.33

Political Traces on a Postcolonial Life

From what has been said so far, I do not want to give the impression hat Ithink The Satanic Verses is to be read entirely-or even mainly-in terms of theauthor's conscious intentions. The text of this novel is not in control of itself. Thetensions and contradictions t reveals are far more interesting han anything thattakes place on the surface of the narrative. And they allow us to make a political




reading of fragments of the novel, as opposed to its politics, which was the topicof my previous section. Let me illustrate briefly.

In the course of a hymn to the glories of Shakespeare, Rushdie's Chamchamakes a striking remark: "Pamela, of course, made incessant efforts to betray herrace and her class" (p. 398). Yet what is apparent o any careful reader is thatPamela betrays not "her race and her class" but her Indian husband-by goingslumming among immigrants nstead of helping to complete and confirm histransformation nto the authentic Englishman. Indeed, Pamela is aware of Cham-cha's desperate desire for the very thing she rejects (p. 180).

But why is her attitude to her class represented as betrayal? Anyone edu-cated, as Rushdie's Chamcha s, at an

English publicschool must know that

uppermiddle-class parents would not regard as betrayal a daughter's radical politics(mere "youthful idealism" is how they would view it) but her marriage to anIndian. It is inconceivable that Rushdie's Chamcha should be innocent of thisknowledge. Indeed he does know it but can't admit it to himself, so it must besuppressed and displaced.

Chamcha resents Pamela's unwillingness to confirm him as a real Englishgentlemen, and knows that this unwillingness is related directly to her rebelliouspolitics. He cringes as she repeatedly subverts his attempts at being English, and

despisesher for her

left-wing politics. However,this

doesn't quite explain hisresort o the bitter notion of "treachery," an accusation never leveled at Zeeny,the radical Indian who mocks him for aping English attitudes. Nor why he feelsit is "her race and her class" that are betrayed, not himself. Coming from Rush-die's Chamcha, this accusation s entirely apt, but only because it covers a com-plex play between desires for self-transformation nd ideas of genetic purity thatis not fully dissected in the novel.

To be an "authentic" English gentlemen is to live out a racist ideology-toengage in discourses of "generative essence," a discourse in which "Indians"have

a different place. As concept and practice that ideology acquired ts mostelaborate development n British India. In his desire to metamorphose imself intothat kind of Englishman, Rushdie's Chamcha struggles with an impossible ideo-logical dilemma: o become English he must reject his essential Indianness; mar-riage to an Englishwoman will surely bring the fulfillment of his desire nearer; yetPamela marries him because he is Indian and thereby adulterates her desired En-glishness (her adultery with Chamcha's ndian riend Joshi is merely a playing outof her marriage s racial adultery), and seeks to reproduce a half-English child. Itis thus Pamela's sexual history, not her politics, that constitutes real betrayal of

Chamcha recisely because it is a betrayal of an essential (i.e., racially pure) En-glishness. Yet in the final analysis, her betrayal s simply the motivated figure ofhis own impossible attempts o become that different species, an English gentle-man. There is a double displacement at work here: for Chamcha s at once theobject of betrayal and the ultimate betrayer-the self-hating colonial.34

The final resolution, you may recall, is that Chamcha returns o India, hisessential place, and to Zeeny, his essential kind:




Childhood as over, and the view from his window was no more han an old andsentimental cho. To the devil with t! Let the bulldozers ome. If the old refused o

die, the newcould not be born. "Come long," Zeenat Vakil's oicesaid at his shoul-der. It seemed hat n spite of all his wrong-doing, eakness, uilt-in spite of hishumanity-he was getting nother hance. There was no accounting or one's goodfortune, hat was plain. There t simply was, taking his elbow in its hand. "Myplace," Zeeny offered. "Let's get the hell out of here." I'm coming," he answeredher, and urned way rom he view. [p. 547; emphasis dded]35

But this optimistic resolution s only possible after his father's death bringshim a comfortable nheritance n India-an inheritance acquired, ironically, inaccordance with rules from the Divine Recitation.36 And also after his Englishwife, the incarnation f his self-betrayal, has been burned o death, an unnamedcorpse with her half-Indian hild unborn, whose death s recounted n the form ofa casual police report pp. 464-465).

If the old refused to die, the new could not be born. As an empirical gener-alization his is of course pretty silly. But as a justification or destroying he oldin the continuous pursuit of novelty, it is the classic morality of consumer capi-talism. Rushdie's Chamcha destroys his own past-his mother,37 is father, hiswife, his friends, his alter ego Gibreel, recognizable parts of London, even hisaffection for England38-and then forgives himselffor that destruction. In such a

morality there is no reason to suppose there can ever be an end to the cycle ofdestruction, self-forgiveness, and reconstitution of the subject. Where there areno obligations to the past every destruction s only a new beginning, and newbeginnings are all one can ever have.

Chamcha's solution to the problem of conflicting identities, a return o hisreal place, is scarcely open to many immigrants, although the idea of deportingcolored immigrants o their country of origin is one that right-wing opinion inBritain, ncluding Enoch Powell, has always favored. It is the social, economic,and cultural consequences of British rule in India, not the mythicized origins of

Islam in 7th-century Arabia, that constitute the source of political problems forIndian and Pakistani mmigrants n contemporary Britain. Indeed the book's ar-ticulation of time is self-consciously mythical-an admiring reviewer identifiedit as "cyclically Hindu and dualistically Muslim"39-while its central dilemmaand resolution are deeply rooted in historically specific class situations.

It may be argued that Chamcha's return o India is not the only solution tothe immigrant's difficulties. After all, there is Mishal, daughter of the Bangla-deshi caf6-owner Sufyan, who stays on to struggle for a nonracist England. ButMishal, born and bred n England s already n a crucial sense "English"-in her

manner of speaking, her attitude o her mother, her sexual behavior, her dress,and in her radical politics-even though it must be understood hat in a racistsociety she will not be seen as "English" by the English. (Her petit bourgeoisEnglishness s of course to be distinguished rom the gentleman's Englishness towhich Chamcha aspires.) Nevertheless, it is Mishal who lives while her immi-grant parents-again symptomatically-are burned o death. The stirring speechallegedly made n court by Sylvester Roberts, alias Dr. Uhuru Simba, reads oddly:




In a sense the most startling use of this book has been, of course, its publicburning n Bradford. This was done deliberately by the Muslims in that city toattract media attention-and that it got with a vengeance. Commentators f var-ious political persuasion denounced this act with horror, comparing t with thenotorious Nazi book-burnings f the '30s. That reaction should interest us as an-thropologists, suggest. When characters n a novel are burned o death (or vili-fied), we are reminded that it is, after all, "only a story." And yet a literalistresponse doesn't seem equally convincing to us when we are told that the bookburned s, after all, "only paper and ink." The liberal expressions of outrage atthis symbolic act-no less than the anger of South Asian Muslims at the publi-cation of the book-deserve to be explored more fully than they have been, so

that we can understand he sacred geography of modern secular culture better hanwe now do.

My point is that t is one thing for liberal opinion to reject the call for banninga publication, quite another o react with horror at the symbolic act of burning t.There was, indeed, no liberal outrage at the public burning of copies of immigra-tion laws by dissenting Members of Parliament ome years ago. More relevant,perhaps, s the case of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan who redefined classical Judaismin accordance with modern deas not as a religious faith but as a civilization thatincluded anguage and custom: "When Rabbi Kaplan published a prayer book in

1945 embodying these ideas, it was publicly burned before an assembly of theUnion of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada" (Goldman 1989).There was no secular outrage at this symbolic book-burning.

Perhaps he crucial difference in the case of the Bradford event (apart romthe fact that t was perpetrated y Muslims who must expect a generally unfavor-able press in the West) is that it was the burning of a novel by a famous literaryauthor. It was "Literature" hat was being burned, not just any printed commu-nication.40 And it was burned by people who did not understand he sacred roleperformed by Literature n modern bourgeois culture.

Whatever a full symbolic analysis of the book-burning may come to looklike,41 t needs to be stressed that the two expressions of outrage are not equallybalanced, in that Muslim immigrants like all South Asian immigrants) do notpossess anything ike the resources of power and violence available to the Britishstate. True, this double outrage has also become entangled with the issue ofKhomeini's shocking death threat against a British citizen. But it is also true thatprominent British Muslims have publicly dissociated themselves from the Iranianpronouncement, nd that they are trying to restrain he intemperate declarationsof some of their coreligionists.42 alman Rushdie's tragic predicament-his hav-

ing to be guarded by the British police against the possibility of murder-is cer-tainly part of the story. So too is this fact: the steady stream over the years ofmurders f black British citizens by white racists has never provoked a denuncia-tion, by government or liberal opinion, of the white British population. Nor doordinary black British citizens who are constantly threatened by white racists al-ways obtain the police protection hey need. Their security evidently cannot re-ceive the same practical and ideological attention that liberal bourgeois society




gives to an internationally amous author.43 t is quite understandable, herefore,that when ordinary British citizens are threatened with death by white racists, andmurdered, here should be no liberal outcry that the foundations of Western civ-ilization are being attacked-but merely liberal expressions of dismay at the vi-olent intolerance of their lower classes.44

It is as a consequence of the inequality n power between immigrants and thegoverning classes that the book is being used as a stick with which to beat theimmigrants n a variety of political arenas-in education, local government, andparliamentary onstituencies. The hitherto confused notion of multiculturalism snow vigorously attacked n the name of core cultural values right across the po-litical spectrum.

For Labourite Sean French the Bradford book-burning and the Muslim furyat Rushdie have brought about a change of heart regarding he virtues of multi-culturalism:

There has been ittle ime n Britain or the melting-pot ttitudes o immigrants-es-pecially n the left. Multi-cultural, other-tongue eaching as been considered l-most self-evidently ood. It would produce he riches of a many-cultured ociety.Well we now have t. [French 989:6]

French, ike many others on the left and the right,45 egards multiculturalism s adisruptive principle. But so too, surely, is the melting-pot policy. The unhappyhistory of race relations between English-speaking, Christian mmigrants rom theCaribbean who were eager at first to be assimilated) and the dominant white so-ciety is evidence enough of that. The clue, it seems to me, lies in the British anx-iety about who and what is to be disrupted. If anybody is to be radically trans-formed t must not be the British themselves.

Thus Hugo Young, the well-known British iberal columnist, writes:

one claim for which they can be allotted no scintilla of sympathy s the claim some

Muslim eaders now make o destroy British reedoms, r escape he restraints fEnglish nd Scottish aw. The aw protects s all, including hem. They do not seemto understand hat, nor yet had comprehension hrust pon hem. For hat, and hatalone, one is entitled o suggest o anyone who does not like it that he might indanother ountry hichmeets his demands. f not Gravesend, hynot Tehran? Young1989:3; mphasis dded]

The intimidating one of this piece, delivered in imperial cadences, is typical ofmuch media coverage of the Rushdie affair in Britain. Peaceful attempts by im-migrant eaders to petition for legal action banning the novel are not merely re-

jected but represented n hysterical erms as a bid "to destroy British freedoms."An Asian minority's wish to change the law, and its resort to means that havealways been lawful in modern democracies parliamentary etitions, public dem-onstrations-including the shouting of angry slogans46-and passionate argu-ment in the media) is virtually criminalized. But in fact such statements are notdirected at illegality in any strict sense, especially as it was common knowledgethat no arrests or breach of the law had actually occurred at the time. Their func-




tion is to convey a clear message to immigrants: f you don't like an arrangementwhich is a

partof core British

values,don't dare to

tryand

change it-justleave

our country.This seems eminently reasonable-essentially democratic, even. But it is

worth examining critically what the assumption amounts to. British "core val-ues" appear o mean the historical values of the British majority. But they caneasily be translated as hegemonic interests, so that the demand that immigrantminorities concede without question existing "core values" if they are to be ac-cepted as full members of the political community becomes revealed as a famousbourgeois ruse. If that principle were ever to be conceded, neither race nor gendercould become

legitimate politicsin modem states.

It is a well-known but often conveniently suppressed act that not only haveways of life in Britain changed radically over the last two centuries, the conceptof culture tself has emerged as the political product of a profound historical strug-gle. There was a time when the values and aspirations of the English workingclasses-as well as the beliefs and practices of Nonconformist Christians-werenot included n the secular, humanist concept of "culture."47 The singularity ofBritain was not defined n terms of an all-encompassing culture. It was only withsuch recent developments as adult male suffrage, a legalized Trade Union move-

ment, popular ducation, and a reformed ystem of city government, hat "Britishculture"-originally "English culture"-began to acquire the inclusive sense,and legitimacy, that it now possesses. This continuous work of historical contes-tation and reconstruction needs to be kept in mind when reading British liberalcommentaries bout the Rushdie affair. I want to stress that this point has nothingto do with whether British culture, ike all cultures, s "mixed" or "pure"; it hasto do with what gets included and what excluded (how and by whom) in the con-struction of a domain within which a legitimate politics can be practiced-a pol-itics to defend, develop, modify, or redefine given traditions and identities.

A Concluding Note

I began this essay by addressing he question of ethnography which has re-cently become the focus of much anthropological nterest, and I want to return oit finally.

My discussion of Rushdie's novel is motivated by the assumption hat thecrucial ssue for anthropological ractice s not whether ethnographies re fictionor fact-or how far realist forms of cultural representation an be replaced by

others. What matters more are the kinds of political project cultural nscriptionsare embedded n. Not experiments n ethnographic epresentation or their ownsake, but modalities of political intervention hould be our primary object of con-cern. More precisely, a major question for anthropologists concerned with theWest's Other n the West is this: How do discursive interventions by anthropol-ogists articulate he politics of difference in the spaces defined by the moderstate?



ETHNOGRAPHY, ITERATURE, NDPOLITICS 261

In the West there is now an increasing awareness of the ambiguous legacyof the Enlightenment. Two decades ago Arthur Hertzberg assembled a powerfulcase to argue that the modem roots of anti-Semitism lay in the homogenizingthrust of post-Enlightenment "emancipation." Complete assimilation48 or thestatus of despised difference-not to mention other, more terrible,alternatives49-is the only option that the modem nation-state has been able to

provide for its "minorities." Must our critical ethnographies of Other traditionsin modem nation-states follow the options offered by liberal theory? Or can theycontribute to the formulation of very different political futures?

Notes

Acknowledgments. Parts of this article were delivered at the New York Academy of Sci-ences, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Chicago. I have benefited romcomments made by all three audiences. I am grateful also to the following individuals whomade helpful suggestions: James Faris, U. Kalpagam, Keith Nield, Rayna Rapp, and NurYalman. To Tanya Baker I owe a special debt for her invaluable advice and criticism andfor her perceptive reading of Salman Rushdie's novel which she shared with me. This ar-ticle is almost as much hers as mine.

'For acourageous

nterventionby

twoanthropologists

at the height of the Rushdie furorsee the interesting "Editors' Comments" in Public Culture, vol. 1, no. 2, Spring 1989.

2I shall deal with the politics of cultural conflict in Britain n another essay.

3Useful nformation on Muslims in Europe is contained in Gerholm and Lithman (1988)and Kepel (1988).

4A valuable discussion of English law as it affects Muslims in Britain, particularly as itaffects their demands regarding ducation, is contained n Poulter (1989).

5Thus Eliot, who argued, from a conservative viewpoint, for the inseparability f religion

and culture had to concede that the Church of England ncludes "wider varieties of beliefand cult than a foreign observer would believe it possible for one institution to containwithout bursting" (Eliot 1961:73). Its cultural role was not the consequence of divinegrace, but of the constitutional privilege given to a religious institution n the British state.However minor that influence may now be said to be, it is the case that even nonconser-vatives do not contest the essentially Christian character of "British national culture" inany significant measure.

6Would t be unjust o describe this reference o a monolithic "Islam" directed by a "pow-erful tribe" as an opportunistic bid for support n the West? Rushdie himself might havedescribed t so before the publication of The Satanic Verses: "it needs to be said repeatedlyin the West that Islam s no more monolithically cruel, no more an 'evil empire' than Chris-tianity, capitalism or communism" (Rushdie 1988c: 188). It is incorrect and irresponsibleto imply that there s a unity of doctrine among even so-called fundamentalist egimes andmovements n the Muslim world today. It is monumentally absurd o suggest that belief inMuhammad's niqueness and in the unambiguity of the Qur'an as revelation s the productof a recent clerical coup; both principles have always been cardinal o Islamic popular aithand theological discourse.




7Consistency s not exactly Rushdie's strong point. "Most of our problems begin," heobserved n a prepublication nterview, "when people try to define the world in terms of a

stark opposition between good and evil" (originally published n the autumn/winter 988Waterston's Selection Catalogue, a shorter version was reprinted n Rushdie 1989b: 1156).Is inconsistency he privilege of a writer of fiction-or only of a writer of fantasy?

8For example Bhabha (1989:35): "The book is written in a spirit of questioning, doubt,interrogation nd puzzlement which articulates he dilemma of the migrant, the emigre,the minority."

9This udgment, incidentally, has a long lineage in the Christian West. Thus Carlyle(1897:64-65): "I must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisomeconfused

umble,crude, incondite; endless iterations,

ong-windedness, entanglement;n-

supportable tupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any Europeanthrough he Koran. We read n it, as we might n the State-Paper Office, unreadable massesof lumber, that we may perhaps get glimpses of a remarkable man." There is a character-istic imperial assumption here that a cultivated European has no need to learn to read thetexts of non-European ultures.

'?After all, it was only as recently as 1988 that Parliament egislated that obligatory col-lective worship in schools had to be of "a broadly Christian character" (see EducationReform Act 1988, ss. 6, 7). Any parent who objects to Christian ndoctrination must makea specific application o have his or her child exempted from that activity (Education Re-form Act 1988, s.9 [3]).

'The imperious demand that all good men and true must now come forward o join thecrusade ("Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. .... It is time for us tochoose") is surely based on an implicit rule of conduct?

'2The difficulties of constructing a coherent politics in the modem state on the basis of"experience" alone has long been recognized on the left: see, for example, Williams(1979:168-172). While Williams's primary concern here is to rehabilitate he notion ofexperience n the face of Althusserian assaults, he emphasizes its limitations for politicalunderstanding n modem societies. Nevertheless, he does not supply the necessary dis-tinction between experience and its expression. For since there is often a hiatus betweenexperience that can't be adequately expressed and what can be expressed but isn't quiteadequate o experience, there's always a danger n making hasty equations (as Yasmin Alidoes) between "cultural products" and "authentic experiences."

'3The inister versions include those used in Soviet political psychiatry. But also in suchstatements as the following by the eminent liberal ournalist O'Brien (1989) that in effectrecommend pecific political and administrative measures: "Arab and Muslim society issick and has been sick for a long time."

"4In his article, Caute provides a useful account of dissatisfactions within the Bradfordimmigrant ommunity with the political record of the Labour party.

'5As ndeed do Salman Rushdie and his legal advisers. Thus when the English playwrightBrian Clark wrote a play alluding o Rushdie's tragic predicament, he was confronted witha veiled threat of legal action: "Mr. Rushdie responded by leaving a message on my an-swer-phone aying he was appalled hat I would think the play which postulated his deathcould in any way be acceptable o him, that he would resist its being performed. As Mr.




Rushdie s nowhere portrayed or even named in the play it was easy to change the title toWho Killed the Writer? though t would be disingenuous o pretend he play was not pred-icated on his position). But I was shocked to be in receipt of a letter from Mr. Rushdie'sagent saying that if we intended production we should send him a formal note so that hecould 'establish Salman's legal rights.' The irony of Mr. Rushdie's wishing to suppress aplay because it offended him was so obvious that it became clear to me he could not bethinking well" (Clark 1990:21).

'6The ecognitions are highly seductive, for through hem the reader delivers his/her assent.Thus Peter Fuller in his review of George Steiner's Real Presences in the Guardian: "Iwas drawn on through page after page by the sheer oy of corroboration."' n such a readingthere can scarcely be any room for the joy of discovering new things-let alone undergoing

the uncomfortable rocess of questioning one's complacency.7It now appears hat Salman Rushdie agrees with The New York Times: his life's work is"to create a literary anguage and literary orms in which the experience of formerly-col-onized, still-disadvantaged eoples might find full expression" (Rushdie 1990a: 18). UntilRushdie, the divine creator, fashions and gifts an appropriate English literary language,an entire world of formerly colonized peoples remains unable to express fully their mani-fold experiences.

"'Since Freud we have learned o ask whether modem autobiographical arratives reservea pure truth or present the truth of interested subjects (see Spence 1982). To what extent

are such memories (as opposed to the experiences they recount) he consequence of directreligious repression-and to what extent the integrative principle of antireligious ubjects?This question does not presuppose hat the memories must be false, but that in translatinga remembered hildhood experience of repressive-parents-using-religious-rules nto "re-ligious repression" the adult subject has entered a discourse that already has high value inliberal secular culture.

'9This metanarrative ften takes the history of post-Revolutionary nticlericalism n Franceas paradigmatic, hereby suppressing he much more complicated role played by religionin England. The religious struggle of Nonconformists against the Established Church wasan

extremely mportantource of social and

political rights in that country.20For n interesting analysis of this modem phenomenon see Gutman 1988).

2'In the Islamic tradition he Qur'an is not regarded as literature-adab-in the criticalmodem sense of the term. Although some recent specialists of Arabic iterature have triedto approach t as a "literary ext" (see, for example, 'Abdurrahman 969:13-19), the pur-pose of the exercise has been to enrich its status as a divine-and therefore miraculous-discourse.

22It s nicely reproduced n Foucault's (1984) well-known presentation f Baudelaire as theparadigmatic igure of modernity a literary man, you will note-not a bureaucrat, not anentrepreneur, ot an engineer, not even a journalist).

230n the emergence of "literary criticism" in late 18th-century Germany via biblical her-meneutics, see J. Roberts (1979).

24The dea that the Prophet's religious experience was due to mental disturbance s a themein more than one 19th-century iscussion of Muhammad. But then rationalist accounts ofChristian eligiosity took a similar view. Freud's account of religion as a form of neurosis




in his essay "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" belongs to this 19th-centuryrationalist radition.

25Note he author's dentification with the fictional poet Baal (" 'Whores and writers, Ma-hound. We are the people you can't forgive.' Mahound eplied, 'Writers and whores. I seeno difference here,' "p. 392). The suggestion that the Prophet was hostile to all poets is

historically naccurate: here were poets among his followers, notably Hassan bin Thabit.More curious, however, is the romantic dea presented here that writers are necessarilysubversive of all authority.

26"Sunt lacrimae rerum, as the ex-teacher Sufyan would have said .. ." (p. 404). It is acurious eature of Sufyan's catholic taste in literature hat he seems always to quote fromWestern Great Books (including Virgil's Aenead) and never from Islamic texts-except,if we are to credit the narrator's ssurance and why should we?), from the Qur'an.

27Rushdie's retentious laim that literature s the privileged stage for every possible rep-resentation-in itself incorrect because that claims too much and too littlefor literature asliterature-is still a claim about representing ife, not about iving it.

28Rushdie's wn conceit of literature as life has recently acquired an astonishing ormula-tion: "I want to say to the great mass of ordinary, decent, fair-minded Muslims, of the sortI have known all my life, and who have provided much of the inspiration or my work: tobe rejected and reviled by, so to speak, one's own characters is a shocking and painful

experience or any writer" (Rushdie 1990a:53; emphasis added).Thus Muslims in the

world are not what his novel is about, they are his novel-characters turning ungratefullyagainst heir creator. Can it be that this author doesn't understand is own characters?

29Rodinson 1971) contains a "humanist" portrait of the Prophet, with its mixture ofstrengths and weaknesses, remarkably imilar to the one presented n Rushdie's novel-and the role of sex in establishing his "human" (and therefore morally flawed) status iscomparable.

30Walzer as written well on the ancient theme of internal criticism (1987), and one won-ders why he avoids it later (1989). The questions addressed n the latter (blasphemy and

free speech) are dealt with in a predictable manner-and therefore are, no doubt, predict-ably welcomed by most sensible readers. What t does not discuss is how that novel relatesto the idea of internal criticism.

3In one of her more successful chapters, Douglas (1966) offers a fascinating explanationof the dietary rules in Leviticus which persuades he reader hat they are coherent; but thenher aim, contrary o Salman Rushdie's, is not mockery.

32Besides, ccording o a comment made by Rushdie to his English nterviewer n London,such things are much worse in India: "It isn't a question of making a sociological exampleof London. If you go to India these days, you see things happening which are 10 times

worse than any of the things happening here, and there t's Indians doing it to Indians, andoften for racial reasons" (1989b:1155). This comment is consistent with my argumentabout the book's critical site. It must be conceded that from a liberal point of view thingsare indeed always ten times worse in India.

33Taylor oints out that n contrast o liberal theories of negative freedom-where freedomconsists of the absence of obstacles-doctrines of positive freedom are concerned with "aview of freedom which involves essentially the exercise of control over one's life. On this




view one is free only to the extent that one has effectively determined oneself and the shapeof one's life. The concept of freedom here is an exercise-concept." Rules of behavior, Iwould suggest, are typically integral to what Taylor has called "freedom as an exercise-concept." From the viewpoint of "freedom as an opportunity-concept" negative free-dom) rules define what may not be done and are therefore no more than obstacles (Taylor1979:177).

34TheCanadian writer Mukherji om-es lose to making this point (1989) but doesn't noticethe class character f this sense of betrayal. In this context one cannot usefully speak of ageneralized "colonial subject''-or for that matter, of a universalized "immigrant."

35AsSpivak (1989) has pointed out, The Satanic Verses ends with a sexual offer to the malehero Saladin. There

s,in

fact,a

disturbing ncongruitybetween the book's

overtlyfeminist

gestures (what Spivak describes as "his anxiety to write woman into the narrative of his-tory," p. 82) and its frequently brutal or dismissive treatment of women (which is not thesame point as the one signposted by Spivak's "Here again we have to record a failure,"p. 82). Perhaps one of Rushdie's most startling nscriptions of women occurs in the namegiven to a female character n Shame (1983), "Virgin Iron-Pants," which, surprisingly,none of his feminist admirers has objected to. Even Spivak, perceptive critic that she is,observes only that "In Shame, the women seem powerful only as monsters, of one sort oranother" (p. 83). It's not his inability to portray women as impressively as he does menthat I am worried by (as in Spivak's "Ayesha, the female prophet, lacks the existential

depth of 'the businessman prophet,'"

p. 83), but the text's curious ambivalence whichlinks progressive views about women's oppression with narrative iolence toward them.

36In ndia and Pakistan, personal aw is administered n accordance with religious affilia-tion.

37Hismother's end, oddly enough, isn't at all like his father's-it verges on the comic. Awoman who chokes to death on a fishbone while her affluent party guests dive under thedining table in fear of a Pakistani air raid is not likely to provide the male hero with adignified model for a secular death. What-one is prompted o wonder-are the gendereddeterminants f dying?

38"Chamcha, who loved England n the form of his lost English wife" (p. 425).

39Mukherji 989:9. And yet it is "the Imam" figure (Khomeini) who is accused-no doubtplayfully-of wanting to stop "History" (p. 210).

4That this event has become a key symbol of the entire "Rushdie affair" is evident in theway iconic reproductions f the burning are used-as for example on the cover of Appig-nanesi and Maitland 1989), and of Ruthven (1990), not to mention innumerable articlesin newspapers and periodicals commenting n general terms on the affair.

41And ny adequate analysis would, I suggest, have to begin with Bachelard 1964).42Pallister, Morris, and Dunn 1989. And the statement by John Patten 1989), Home OfficeMinister or race relations: "I am glad to be able to say that the particular oncerns raisedby The Satanic Verses, have been, for the most part, handled n a responsible way by thegreat majority of the Muslims in this country. ... I am grateful, too, that Muslim leadershave made public their regret or the behaviour of a very small minority who use the peace-ful demonstrations s an excuse for violent disorder."




43This bservation applies equally to the condition of the wretched hostages in Lebanon:innocent persons held by ruthless men in appalling conditions and under daily threat of

murder. How often have we seen paid newspaper advertisements n which long lists ofdistinguished writers ake a principled tand against the inhuman predicament f these vic-tims?

44This s nicely brought out in a recent piece by the liberal columnist Ian Aitken. Referringto the 1958 Notting Hill Gate Riot, in which a gang of white youths terrorized blacks andwere eventually sentenced to four years each, he writes: "But the event caused particularanguish to liberal-minded, eftish sort of people, and not just because of what had hap-pened. The trouble was that the 'riot' and its aftermath brought wo cherished iberal atti-tudes-opposition to racial harassment nd the belief that underprivileged oung offenders

[in this case white racists] should be treated with compassion-into direct and embarassingcollision." Nowhere in this article does Aitken speak of the terror of black immigrantshunted by murderous whites in a white society, but only of the embarrassmentfelt by lib-erals at the conflict between two "attitudes." As for the Rushdie Affair: "what needs tobe demonstrated, and quickly, is that our secular Western democracies are not going toyield to militant slam the very liberties our ancestors wrenched so recently from Christiantheocrats" Aitken 1990).

45See he enthusiastic discussion of the document titled "On Being British" by John Pat-ten, the Tory government's Home Office minister for race relations, in an article by thepolitical editor of The Sunday Times (Jones 1989).

4In one famous demonstration ecently, an effigy of Nicholas Ridley, the Environment

Secretary, was publicly burned by irate middle-class residents of an attractive rural areascheduled by the government for housing development. And of course these protesterswon.

47SeeWilliams 1961. Still an indispensable ext for thinking about this question, it is, wecan now see, marked by a surprising absence: t contains no discussion of imperialism.

480f the completely assimilated Jews during the 19th and 20th centuries, Hertzberg(1968:365-366) writes: "a certain discomfort was inherent n their situation; t caused painin the souls of

many.This 'new Jew' had been born nto a

societywhich asked him to

keepproving that he was worthy of belonging to it. Unfortunately, his 'new Jew' was never

quite told exactly what he had to prove and before which tribunal."

49Which xplains Akhtar's 1989b) fearful remark, made at the height of the Rushdie crisisin Britain: "the next time there are gas chambers n Europe, there is no doubt concerningwho'll be inside them."

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