Confronting Terror
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Salman Rushdie
Chair: Jonathan Freedland
George Webber Memorial Evening
[Recording
starts in middle of sentence: first half is poorly recorded, then improves
intermittently.]
Anne
Webber: … . Also tomorrow, our own Sex and
the City with authors Claire Calman, Anna Maxted and Freya North discussing
the intimate dilemmas of contemporary life with Kathy Lette. And on Thursday, the dazzling and brilliant
Daniel Boyarin, one of the great scholars of Judaism and sexuality, will be
exploring the changing identity of the Jewish male.
There
are a number of other innovations this year.
Possibly the only thing that has remained unchanged is this rather
unglamorous venue. But we are very open
to suggestions and offers of alternatives.
For
children, we have this year multiplied the number and range of sessions for
children of all ages and tomorrow we will be launching our first Jewish Book
Council publication. Called Winning
Words, it is an anthology of the winning entries in our primary schools’
poetry competition over the ten years since it began. It is available for sale in the Book Fair and
includes illustrations and a wonderful range of some quite remarkable
poems.
The
Book Fair is another of our changes. We
are very pleased to welcome Daunt Books as our booksellers. As you came in tonight, some of you will
already have seen the fresh style and approach they have brought to the display
of books for sale. We have also expanded
the space for the Book Fair and it now runs through two large rooms and we hope
you will enjoy browsing in this new book shop environment.
Another
first is our exhibition in the Book Fair, the photographs by the acclaimed
Frédéric Brenner, taken from his book Diaspora: Homelands in
Exile and depicting Jewish life in every continent. Brenner will be talking about the photographs
and his travels at 6.15 on Monday. We
are delighted to be launching this fascinating book and holding the first
exhibition of these photographs in the UK in association with the Ben Uri
Gallery and its director Richard Aronowitz-Mercer
with whom it has been a great pleasure to collaborate.
We are very pleased this year to have greatly expanded the range
of cultural organisations with who we work.
The ICA, the South
Bank, Intelligence Squared and Prospect Magazine are just some of our new
partners, reflecting the wider reach and new audiences that we are attracting.
As many of you know, the Book Council is a charity, very modestly
run and we are very grateful for as well as dependent upon the support we
receive from our sponsors and benefactors.
The Jewish Chronicle is as ever our media sponsor and I
should like to thank them very warmly for their continuing support and
encouragement.
We are very proud this year to have been generously supported by
the Arts Council and we very much appreciate their recognition of our
contribution to this country’s cultural calendar.
The Book Council is not only a charity. It is also run mainly by volunteers like
myself and I would like to thank the Executive and all the members of the
Council for all they have contributed to creating Jewish Book Week 2004. We are very fortunate to have a wonderful and
unflappable part-time administrator in Pam Lewis and I would like to thank her
for her always unstinting efforts. Jack
Gilbert is our marketing and PR director and as design head responsible for the
marvellous look of the printed programme as well as of the children’s poetry
anthology.
Another of our innovations this year was the creation of a new
online archive of Jewish writing on the web at www.jewishbookweek.com. It is a unique site internationally and
includes audio files so you can listen to authors talking about their
writing. There are transcripts of their
talks, bibliographies, photographs, themed resources and links to articles and
other materials. I would like to thank
Jack for creating the look and devising the style of it and for all the work he
put into making it happen.
Last summer we took on Simon Eder as our first part-time assistant
director and he has unfailingly shown imagination, energy and flair in equal
quantities and I would like to thank him for all the efforts and ideas he has
contributed to Book Week.
Ladies and gentlemen, these changes at Book Week, changes in our
own individual lives, are dwarfed in scale by the dramatic shifts that we have
all experienced in the world around us.
Apart, perhaps, from Salman, we live today in a world that few of us
could have imagined just a few years ago and few of us dare imagine what the
future may hold.
I am very proud that we will be hearing tonight from two writers
who in their own lives have confronted the terror that now stalks the
world. Bernard-Henri Lévy,
through his investigation of the murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl, and
Salman Rushdie who, uniquely, because of an imaginative act, because of the
very act of writing, was for many years forced to experience terror in his
everyday life. We are extremely grateful
to Jonathan Freedland for chairing tonight’s session and I would now like to
hand over to him to open the session.
Chair: Thank
you to Anne Webber and let me join her in welcoming all of you to Jewish Book
Week. And what a stellar opening night
this is! Jewish Book Week has brought
together two of the world’s most influential and acclaimed public intellectuals
who tackle what is perhaps the central question of our time, and I don’t mean
the changing identity of the Jewish male!
On my left is the Booker Prize winning novelist whose every book
is a publishing event. Born in India,
raised in Britain but now spending most of his time in New York city, he is a
true citizen of the world and, as Anne implied, if our subject tonight is
terror and confronting terror, he had unwanted and early experience of that
phenomenon. As a phenomenon of radical
Islam, he won’t like the word, but he was an early very … [?inaudible] victim of
Islamism and perhaps his experience was a kind of early warning to the rest of
the world of what was to come.
On my right, a man always described as one of France’s most
famous men. ‘Flamboyant’ is also the
word always used. But he has been
listened to and respected in his own country and beyond. The author of thirty books: philosopher,
essayist, reporter, screenwriter and diplomat. Jacques Chirac sent him to be his personal
envoy to Afghanistan. His experience of Islamism was sought. He directly sent himself to the front line,
if you like, of the war on terror, describing himself not as a war
correspondent but as ‘a war philosopher’.
He encountered the new face of Islamism, up close and directly, in
Bosnia, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for his book Who Killed Daniel Pearl.
Our topic tonight is ‘Confronting Terror’ and our speakers are,
and please join me in welcoming them, Salman Rushdie and Bernard-Henri
Lévy.
Let me just say a word or two about the format. The way I am going to do this is a conversation
initially, hearing both of our distinguished speakers setting out some of their
opening thoughts, a discussion here between the three of us and one that will
then open out to include as many contributions as we can make and hear from all
of you. I am going to kick off with some
questions to Salman Rushdie.
If we are talking about confronting terror, we probably need to be
clear on hard terms and to define our terms.
For you, what is the phenomenon of terror that we are talking
about? Who, if you like, is the enemy
that needs to be confronted? And what do
you think of the thesis which became very current straight after 9/11 which was
that we were now in the midst of a clash of civilisations: essentially, the
conflict with Islam against the rest of the world?
Salman Rushdie: Let me
just say by way of preface that in the small matter of me and the Ayatollah
Khoumeini, I just invite people to notice which one of us is dead.
The pen is mightier etc.
I think I guess that what happened to me was a way of waking up to
the fact that radical Islam had become a very new thing and a thing that had
not previously existed in the western world until relatively recently. It was a new phenomenon. It was not an ancient phenomenon. There is some evidence to suggest that it is
a kind of disease that goes through Muslim societies rather fast.
If you look, for example, at Iran where they first gained control
of a state, that is also the place where it is extremely disliked. If you look at Afghanistan, where they next
gained control of a state, it was also a phenomenon which very rapidly came to
be heartily disliked by the Muslims upon whom it was foisted. There does seem to be evidence that there is
an appeal in radical Islam initially, but that the more people see of it, the
less they like it. And when I say
‘people’, I mean people in Muslim countries.
Having said that, I think that particularly recently, because
there is widespread criticism of and dislike of the way in which the United
States, assisted by this country, has pursued the so-called war upon
terror. Because of that, I think there
is problematic downgrading of the reality of the threat. I think it is quite possible to say that we
don’t approve of the way in which the battle against terror has been pursued,
without saying that therefore there’s no such thing. And there clearly is, within the Muslim
world, a highly motivated group or series of groups which do mean harm to the
rest of the world.
This is a phenomenon which does require new thinking. It just does.
Take, for example, Pakistan which Bernard talks about. Until, say, 15 or 20 years ago, there really
was not a great deal of support in Pakistan for radical Muslim policy. I mean Pakistan is not a country blessed with
regular general elections. When it has
been, they haven’t always been general!
But when it has happened, one of the things that has been
noticeable is that the radical parties, parties like the Jama`at-e Islami which
is the oldest-established Islamist party in Pakistan, would get almost none of
the votes. They would get like one or
two per cent of the vote and I always found that encouraging. But in a country ostensibly set up as a religious
state, although set up by a leader with almost no religion himself, ... , the
population at large did not find appealing the rhetoric of radical Islam.
That clearly changed and one of the reasons it has changed is the
policy followed by successive leaders, including Musharraf, supporting the
president. For example, the encouragement
of the so-called madrasas school system funded mostly by Saudi Arabia
and creating on the Afghan border a line of schools which preach the extremely
conservative, not to say reactionary, Wahhabi brand of Islam where all the
Taliban were educated.
One of the extraordinary things is that the word ‘taliban’
means ‘students’ and ‘talin’ is ‘learning’. Somebody who is talin is
learning. Taliban is the plural,
students. Here is the most illiterate,
ignorant, philistine political movement in history which calls itself
‘Scholars’. It’s one of the jokes of
history.
But all these people learned their trade, so to speak, in the madrasas
schools funded by the Saudis and tolerated by the … And now, in the aftermath of the Taliban
fall and the flood that came into Pakistan, we have as you know a
radicalisation of the border area and of the north-west frontier at least.
So the situation in Pakistan is now dangerous and I think Bernard
has written very well about this and I leave it to him to say more, but it is
clearly a highly unfavourable state.
Musharraf, oddly, it seems very strange to me, and I’ll say this
last and then stop for now, it seems very strange to have this support of a
military dictator, especially for me who has spent a lot of my life doing the
other thing to military dictators and they, of course – the first people who
banned my books were military dictators.
Shame, in 1983, which had a go at military dictators at the time,
they of course ...
One of the great things that happened with Shame was that
the way in which the book got into the country was through the diplomatic
pouch.
Chair: This
is your novel about a fictionalised Pakistan?
SR: Yes. Suddenly the diplomatic community in Pakistan
decided it was really important to read it and thousands of copies came in
through the diplomatic pouch. A
wonderful, radical piece of diplomacy.
Anyway, the problem is having to accept that Musharraf at the
moment is the least bad alternative.
Because what stands behind him is very alarming indeed.
Chair: We are
going to the man who I’m going to call BHL tonight. It’s partly an acronym but it makes the
French pronunciation easier for me but it’s also a brand name that you accept. But before we get to that, I just want to …
question … The Clash of
Civilisations because it was seen to be very crude. The point you are making about Islam is that
it is unpopular even for others, especially for Muslims. Does that expose the flaw in ‘clash of
civilisations’ thesis?
SR: Well, I’ve met
Huntingdon and had this argument with him.
I mean, of course when he has an hour or two to expand his ideas, they
are more nuanced and subtle than they at first seem. But the fact is that the way in which the
Huntingdon thesis is generally understood is that there is a clash of
civilisations taking place, with over here a monolithic block called ‘the West’
and over here a monolithic block called ‘Islam’. And I think it is easy to disprove the thesis
by looking at the monolithic block called ‘the West’, which clearly doesn’t
exist.
One of the things I’ve had to do in America recently is to explain
to people why they shouldn’t hate the French.
Chair: You
could do some of that here as well.
SR: Yes, well I had to point out that the
Statue of Liberty was French and that not only the Statue of Liberty but many
of the ideas of the American Revolution were French and came through the person
of Tom Paine … United States, and that it’s ok and that the wine is nice, you
know, and that it doesn’t mean that Chirac is not an arsehole but, you know,
there is a function for arseholes! …
Anyway, the point is that one of the things we have seen in the
last couple of years is the incredible stresses placed on the Western Alliance
and really in many ways the fracturing of that Alliance. So the idea that there is such a thing as a
monolithic entity called the West is not tenable.
Well, the same is true on the other side of the fence. There is no monolithic entity called
Islam. For a start, the Shias and Sunnis,
as we see in Iraq, have certain tensions.
But even leaving aside that kind of communalist description, because
there are great intellectual divisions and enormous dislike of radical Islam
amongst very large proportions of the population. I think there is a problem which maybe we
could go on to discuss later, if you like, about the failure of the Moslem
world to put its house in order. The
failure of this very large non-fundamentalist majority to confront fundamentalism. I think that is not discussed enough.
Chair: You
are absolutely right and we are going to get to that … I turn to you, BHL. You’ve heard … you could rise to the bait and the insults
… if you like. You could instead though tackle some of the
points there about the definition of terrorism.
… … as I have said in the introduction, … looked him in the eye. A couple of other thoughts that I’m
interested to hear from you. One is that
much attention in the war on terror has been put on the policing, the military
response towards terror … What
intellectual effort … change … may be required to confront terror? Effectively, because again … what different effort or response may be
required for the aftermath of the …
rival terror organisation, and the people down below, the foot soldiers
if you like …
Bernard-Henri Lévy: First of all I have to apologise for my
pitiful English. You have just heard
some marvellous English and you are going to have to sustain or to support the
terrible English and in advance I apologise.
Secondly, I want to preface with a foreword that I am very moved
to be here with Salman Rushdie in such circumstances. We have known each other for thirteen
years. We have attended a few meetings
together but I think that for me it is the first time that I shall speak to
Salman Rushdie as a free man and no longer as a … … [?] but an intellectual, a writer and so on.
We spent so many … when he came to the back door and when he went
back through the back door again. To
have him here as a free man is for me such a relief, such a joy. And I am very pleased that this happened, my
dear Salman, with this audience and in the house of this Jewish group who are …
[?winning]. I am very glad of that. For me, I was among the very numerous writers
and citizens, hundreds of thousands, who fought for you and for your
liberty. For me, as for all of us, it is
a great day.
SR: I like it too!
BHL: I’m sure of
that! Now, as for the question, I would
say again to begin that I will not answer as a philosopher or as a writer
because faced with such a difficult question, such a new situation, so complex,
in front of which all of us are blind in one sense or another, I will speak as
an observer of it. My only entitlement
to speak about all that is the two years I spent, as you said, in Bosnia,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, on the ground, observing the very phenomena.
What I will say will be very modestly my observation of ground
philosophy. I shall not speak about
Hegel and Kant but about concrete things.
A modern philosopher called Michel Foucault said that he did not know of
another philosophy other than the philosophy based on the ground and based on
the big anger of the facts.
So, for terrorism, my first remark would be to say that none of
us, none of the observers of today, really understand thoroughly what is
happening. Only one remark on that. The very name of what happened on September 11, the very fact
that it is named just after a date, September 11, 11 September, proves that
there is no concept of it. No definition
of it. Just a date. It is very rare, an event named after its
date. It is a sign or the proof that we
are blind. That we have a lot to
learn. That we know nearly nothing. This is the first point.
Second remark, second … remark …
I think that we did not see the works which are going to be seen. I remarked at the very beginning, a few days
after September 11, in one of the texts I wrote about that, that September 11
might belong to the old history of terrorism and that we might answer in a new
history, a new series of events, in front of which September 11 could appear as
an archaic, old-fashioned act of terrorism.
As we say in France, On a encore rien vu. ‘We have not yet seen anything.’
SR: ‘You ain’t seen
nothing yet!’
BHL: ‘You ain’t seen
nothing yet!’ We might see soon (God
willing that we don’t of course) but we might see soon some new acts of
terrorism which could be invisible, which could be silent, which could be based
on techno-science, on nanotechnologies, which could provoke some huge
destruction with very silent bugs on computers and so on and so on.
So the history of modern terrorism might be at its beginning. As for the Islamist terrorism (my third
remark), I would approve what Salman said.
Like at the beginning of Nazism there were very few in Europe who stood
up to it, there were very few who smelled ‘the whisper of the beast’, who
smelled the smell of the beast in the ’thirties, who went to fight in
Spain. I belong to a family where my
father paid tribute to that. He was one
of the few who went to fight in Spain against Fascism, but there were so
few.
At the beginning of Communism there were also few who understood
the danger and who knew that the Red totalitarianism had the face of liberty
but that behind it there was another despotism.
The same today: I think
that few people, intellectuals of course but also only a few of those
responsible, only a few politicians, in England, in America, in France, take
the real dimension of the phenomenon.
Most of them and most of us look at the phenomenon with hindsight [?
‘with eyes behind, with glasses behind’].
As with Communism. As with
Fascism. It is always the same
story. In front of the new phenomenon,
it is very hard to see the accurate means of understanding. This is my third preliminary remark.
Then, what can we do, us writers, experts, intellectuals or just
observers on the ground? What I did
myself after my investigation on Daniel Pearl, this long year which I spent
there in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, trying to follow the thread of the murderers
of this fine journalist who was Daniel Pearl.
First of all, I would say that, like in my youth when I was, I am still
a so-called ‘old Leninist’. I think that
in order to act, in order to have good practice, we have to have good theory, a
good analysis of the phenomenon. And I
think that when I hear all that is said about that, about this phenomenon, I
see wrong analysis.
For instance, the Iraqi target, the Iraqi war, was a big mistake
for that also. George Bush went to war
against terrorism, with George Bush Jnr
having the analysis of George Bush Snr.
When he spelled out the list of the rogue states, according to him it
was the same list as the rogue states according to his father: Iran, Libya and
Iraq, at the moment when the danger was coming from Yemen, Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan.
So we have to produce a sort of replacement of the emphasis to
understand the phenomenon. Maybe we have
also to replace, to change, to move the emphasis from the Arab world to the
ancient Muslim world. We have, all of
us, our eyes fixed on the Arab Muslim world and especially on the Palestinian
question, which is of course a very big question. And of course what is happening in the Arab
world is important but I think today that the epicentre, that the centre of
gravity of all that is happening today, is much more east, towards the
Philippines, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and so on.
If we want to understand the new phenomenon of terrorism, what is
coming, what might happen tomorrow, then perhaps for instance we have to think
that as important as the Palestinian case, as important or maybe more
important, is the case (the war) which is much less well-known and much less
looked at, which is the Kashmiri case. It
may be that the Kashmiri case, the war in Kashmir, is richer, is much more full
of danger, of threat and so on than the Palestinian one. When you look at all the story, as I did
during one year, from Karachi, or from Kabul, the real epicentre is in Shingar
and not Jerusalem.
So we have to proceed to a strong replacement of emphasis.
Chair: Could
you give us just a sentence or two on why it is, because that is the really one
of the very striking features of your book, that we are focusing on the wrong
place and that the big danger is Pakistan etc. rather than the Arab world? For people sitting here, I think that would
come as quite a surprise, why you think that.
Could you just say a sentence or two on why you think that is where it
has shifted to?
BHL: For many reasons. First, because al-Quaida is there. The groups linked to al-Quaida are
there. The nuclear weapons are
there. Not only the nuclear weapons, but
also the ideology which could fire the nuclear devices is there. You have in this area of the world a
confluence of phenomena which are like powder much more than in the Arab world.
The last point I would say, and again I would agree with what has
been said by Salman, is that in order to understand what is happening, in order
to identify the enemy, of course we have to get rid of the idea of ‘the Muslim
world’. There is no one Muslim world and
the Muslim world is not one. No Muslim
world, and the Muslim world is not one.
We have at least two Muslim worlds. We have at least, first of all, the Muslim world
of the killers of the Islamists, radical Islamists. And we have the Muslim world of the victims
and we must not forget that of course the fundamentalists killed 4,000 American
citizens of all nationalities on 9/11.
But the biggest number of victims of fundamentalism nowadays, as far as
… [inaudible] … in Algeria, in
Afghanistan, in Pakistan itself, the biggest number, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands, of victims of Islamism today are not Christian, are not
Jewish, are not atheist, but are Muslims.
So you have this division, this split between these two worlds. And you have the split between the moderate
Islam and the radical Islam, even if you don’t think about victims.
I met so many in my life, so many true Muslims, true believers of
Islam, who were anti-fundamentalist. I
remember my friends, my Bosnian friends during the war on Bosnia. The President is a … [?] The intellectuals of Sarajevo, they were
strong anti-Islamists. I remember
Commander Masud who was in such a bad way, who was abandoned by all the western
world –
Chair: This
is the commander in the north of Afghanistan?
BHL: The chief of the
northern alliance who resisted against the Taliban for years and years and who
was killed two days before September 11, as a sort of preface to September
11. Again, a moderate Muslim. And, in Pakistan again, a lot of moderate
Muslims. So, in order to understand we
have to make this point clear. There is
no Muslim world and the Muslim world is not ‘one’.
Chair:
Excellent. And in the book you
use this very ‘gentle Islam’. There is a
gentle Islam, a moderate Islam out there.
BHL: Islam of
enlightenment. Of course.
Chair: Let me
put two or three thoughts from that to Salman Rushdie. The first one is: if that is right, and both
of you have now said it, that there is a moderate Islam, for want of a better
word, how can it win the battle against this purist, fundamentalist, literal
Islam? How do those forces overwhelm the
other? That’s one thought.
The second is this thesis of BHL’s that it is actually the part of
the world that you are from, Asia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia
etc., that poses a bigger threat than the Arab world. Again, I stress, a thesis that will surprise
many.
And third, because very movingly Bernard mentioned your own
journey. To what extent do you see what
happened to you in February of 1989, the fatwa against you, as that
early warning of what was to come? Do
you trace a line from that experience to 9/11?
So it is a cluster of thoughts.
SR: Well just to
answer the last point first. It’s not a
straight line, but it is an echo. I
think that clearly what happens is that first of all I have a real problem
because there is such a difference of scale.
What happens to one person in a very specific circumstance, to compare
that to what is now a global problem runs the risk of being called
arrogance.
Chair: Was
BHL right to say that you are now a free man?
People will be interested to … without dwelling on this, the mechanics
of your life before you were rushed in through back exits and police guards.
SR: No, no. No, no.
None of that. None of that. All over.
Thank goodness. I am not free
though: I am very expensive!
Chair: But
has the fatwa against you been formally lifted in some way?
SR: No. I mean, what happened is a deal between the
governments which essentially withdrew the killers. It was never a very general thing. People thought of it as being this kind of large-scale
thing where anybody might want to take a potshot. The real danger came from very specific parts
of the Iranian state, very specific bits of the Iranian intelligence
services. You know, it was dangerous
because they were professional killers and indeed killed many people in that
same period. But it could also be
approached politically. You could
actually resolve the problem.
Chair: So the
British Government and the Iranian Government did a deal?
SR: Eventually. Well of course it’s five and a half years
ago. I mean it’s a long time ago. So really, I know that maybe I have to go
through life explaining this individually to every member of the human race,
but really it has been over for a long time.
Anyway, enough.
I think there is so much in what Bernard said: I mean
Kashmir. Well I’ll get to that.
First of all, I just wanted to say: I think the problem is in two
places. One is the question you asked
about how can the other face of Islam become … [inaudible]. A part of the answer to that has to do with
the new thinking inside the Muslim world. … When
the Bosnian crisis was at its height, almost no relief money came from Muslim
countries. Almost none. Almost all the money that was sent for the
relief of Bosnia came from the west. And
one of the reasons for this is that many people in the Muslim world thought
that Bosnians kind of weren’t Muslim enough.
Because they were kind of highly secularised and so on and so on.
There was a general view which you heard all the time: ‘Well,
they’re not really Muslims’. So, how
Muslim do you have to be before it’s not ok for you to starve to death? And so on.
So there is that kind of intellectual problem that has developed in the
Muslim world, which is that one could almost call it a kind of intellectual
bankruptcy. And I think it needs to be
reversed.
I have talked to a lot of Arab writers, a lot of Muslim
intellectuals and we remembered that in our lifetime, in my lifetime, cities
like Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, these were great cities. These were great open cities with a real
intellectual and cultural life. The
decline in Muslim culture, in my lifetime, into this narrow closed reactionary
condition, is a matter of great despair for many Arab intellectuals, for many
Muslim intellectuals and for many intellectuals who would not any longer call
themselves Muslims, from Muslim backgrounds.
Like myself.
It is a terrible decline.
And now, yes, to an extent you can blame that decline on superpower
diplomacy and on the kind of ‘being the patsy’ and so on and so on, and that’s
true. But you can’t blame everything on
that. And I think there is a great need
for Muslim societies to examine that loss of intellectual innovation and
fearlessness and enterprise.
I’ll just say one thing about it.
It seems to me that one of the things that happened in the decolonising
period in the Middle East is that politicians opposed to the colonial powers
took on much Islamic rhetoric as a way of having a language which was not a
western language with which to oppose the western colonial powers. Now most of the people doing this were
actually leftwing socialists or even communists. They were certainly not at all religious
people. And yet they were using the
language of religion as a hammer with which to beat the various colonial
powers. Very effective. You know, it was a kind of nationalist
project that worked.
Then what happens a generation later is that there emerge Islamic
groups which actually mean it. You
know? The Muslim Brotherhood and so on
and so on. And what happens is that the
left has no language left with which to speak because it has abandoned its own
language. It has already used Islamic
language. So if somebody uses it more
powerfully than them, they don’t have an answer.
I think that this is just one example of the way in which
intellectual discourse and political discourse have decayed inside the
walls. And I think it is one of the
things that writers and intellectuals can do, however unpopular it is, to name
the beast and to say: Here is the problem inside the Muslim world. The intellectual and cultural problem that,
until you address that, you will not create new kinds of politics. You will not create the institutions of a
free society. You will not … You will not get rid of the reflex
anti-Semitism that exists in your societies.
You will not generate powerful societies. Where are they? There are rotting states everywhere. Except where they are shored up by oil.
Chair: How easily
can you say that, if you like, from the outside, sitting in London or New
York? Or are you confident that there
are people like you inside those societies?
SR: Inside, outside,
doesn’t exist any more: the Muslim world is here; the West is there. I mean, these things are not divided any
more. I remember, when The Satanic
Verses came out, I remember vividly one of the reviews, one of the
not-very-favourable reviews, essentially said: “What’s all this stuff about
Islam doing in this novel about London?”
Well, now we know, right?
That’s what I’m saying. It
is not a question of inside and outside any more. Everywhere is the inside. Everywhere is the outside. The world is different now.
[Loud noise.] (We need to
look at the ideological position of the sound technician!)
I think the other big question is the way in which we helped to shape
what happened in the Soviet Union. One
of the ways was that we listened to the voices of the dissidents as if they
were the ones speaking the truth. And we
listened to the voices of the orthodox, the apparatchiks of the state as
if they were the ones lying.
Now this is not happening in our response to Islam where we have a
tendency to treat orthodoxy as authentic and unorthodoxy as westernised,
deracinated and to be discounted. This
is getting it exactly wrong because that is the way of handing power to the
ayatollahs. That is the way of handing
the Islamists everything they need. If
they are the true voice –
Chair: Do you
think we’ve done that with our handling of Iran, for instance?
SR: I think we’ve done
it with every single Muslim society. We
have looked at the worst but powerful and most lethal voices in that state and
said, Oh, well that’s the real Islam and these other people objecting, well,
you know, they’re just westernised.
I mean, I come from a Muslim family in which no woman would ever have
agreed to wear the veil, who did not see the veil as an icon of identity or as
a symbol of liberation but as a gaol. I
come from a Muslim family in which no woman would have agreed not to work; no
woman would have agreed to have a marriage arranged for her and saw all those
aspects of Muslim society as imprisoning and repressing and needing to be
destroyed.
Now there is very strong feeling: Muslim women are half the Muslim
world and, believe me, they know more than anyone else the kind of oppression that
there is in Islam. But we don’t listen
to that. We listen to patriarchy and we
say: ‘Gee, well if they want to have female circumcision, you know, in central
Africa, and the Imam …’
[Some words lost when tape turned over to side 2.]
This is cultural relativism gone mad and we have to not play the
mullahs’ game, which is what we are doing at the moment. So I think there is a need for the way in
which we respond to the struggle inside the Muslim world. It needs to be much more sophisticated. We are not listening to the
Solzhenitsyns. We are not listening to
the Zakharovs. We are not listening to
those voices which are in every Muslim country.
We are listening to Ayatollah Khomeini.
God help us.
And just on the subject of 9/11, I wanted to make just a small,
fairly light-hearted point. Many
important dates are recognised only as dates: you know, Cinco de Mayo. There is also, of course, the great thing
about 9/11, that it is also the date on which the Allende government was
overthrown in Chile. So there are two
great things that happened on September 11th.
Chair: By
‘great’ you mean significant.
SR: Significant.
Chair: I’m
just aware that there are people in here you might want to quote you.
SR: Big. Not virtuous and noble. That is important. 911, of course, also is the American
equivalent of 999. It is what you dial
when you want to dial the emergency services.
So that is another reason why the number became so easy for people to
say, because it is that number.
But it is true that what happened in America that day was
traumatic and it colours America’s, and therefore the world’s, response to what
I have just been saying: how do we respond to the Muslim world? At that point, looking at that terrible
thing, it was easy for people to begin to see every Muslim as a potential
terrorist and, to an extent, that has gone on.
Actually, I have to say, in America, amongst ordinary people, it has
gone on less than I thought it would.
But in the American State, it’s happening a lot. I mean, if you try to get into America with a
Muslim name, no. Try to get into America
with a passport that comes from the wrong country, and it is very, very
difficult. So there is a problem of our
response and how we are to favour those voices that we want to encourage. And not to be ashamed of doing it.
Chair: Let me
put that point directly to BHL, this point about the way to tackle Islamic
extremism. What is the way to empower
those enlightened voices? And pick up on
what Salman Rushdie has said about not recognising them as authentic. But also, because I think it will interest
people here, I want to pick up on something that Salman said there, which is
the reflex anti-Semitism. You, in your
Daniel Pearl investigation, say that the Daniel Pearl affair revealed the
modern heart of anti-Semitism. I am
curious to hear, from your point of view, how central you believe anti-Semitism
is to Islamism, that we are talking about?
And to this current wave, not necessarily just the terrorist
organisation, but this current wave of anti-American fervour, Islamic
extremism, etc. So there are two very
big topics there and I will come back to you anti-Semitism, but what do you
make of that?
BHL: The question of
the date first. It is important. Look, for instance, at another big event
which was on the 9th of November, the fall of the Berlin wall. A big day, the fall of the wall. Then there is Night of Broken Glass [Kristallnacht],
9th November. The first Putsch
of Hitler, 9th November. It
is not named after the date because the three events are understandable. They are illegible. This 9th September, I think that
there is something inside it which is yet completely obscure, completely
opaque.
SR: No, no. Quatorze Juillet!
BHL: Quatorze
Juillet, it’s true. But also, what
happened really on quatorze juillet?
As you know, nothing happened on quatorze juillet. The taking of the Bastille, when there were
only three little guys inside, no.
Mystery …
Chair: Far be
it from me to break up a parlour game between intellectuals. Let’s move on to your bigger point. (He’s now trying to pick up another one,
that’s the problem.)
BHL: Yes. The question of the attitude of the western
world to this Islamism. This is very
strange. This is very mysterious again
and I would say that there are two ways of committing suicide. The kamikaze commits suicide and, in a
way, there is a second suicide which is the suicide of the western world
itself. When we supported the Taliban,
when we supported Saudi Arabia, when we supported the Islamic forces in
Algeria, the GIA, it was a way of committing suicide. It is more than blindness. There is a sort of a beginning of suicide of
democracies in front [?] that historians of the future will be completely
astonished, very stricken, by this bizarre continuous suicide for twenty years
in the face of Islamism.
What could be done and what should be done today to reinforce, to
support the forces which exist and which silently fight against Islamism in
their own countries? The first thing we
could do, the politicians, those who take responsibility, the writers and so
on, would be first of all to help these societies to stop lying, to stop the
lies. For instance, anti-Americanism. Anti-Americanism is a sort of alibi. It is a way to put a veil, to put a scarf
over all the real problems of these societies: corruption; intellectual
blockage; and so on. They put up the
flag of anti-Americanism and it is enough to hide all the real problems of
these societies.
To fight lies, or to help these people to fight lies: another
example. The Islamists, the people of
Al-Quaida and so on, pretend to fight in favour of a pure Islam. They pretend to be knights of purity. They know the real Muslim people and we know
as observers of the situation that it is the contrary. I discovered myself in my investigations that
there were Mafiosi, gangsters, that they did not care really about
Islam. That Bin Laden himself and his
followers used Islam as a tool to seize power and that this story of purity and
so on and so forth is a lie. So there is
a fight against lies which is undertaken by the moderate Muslims in their
societies and to which we could bring real support.
Anti-Semitism: I think obviously that it is in the centre, in the
heart of all these problems, in the Muslim world and beyond. In the Muslim world, I would say that it is
sort of the same situation as all proportions [?] being kept as happened in the
Nazi period. The core of the Nazi
anti-Semitism was the topic of the ‘double choice’. The position of Hitler and of the Nazis was
to say: We Germans are the chosen people.
We have been designated by God to build an empire for one thousand
years. We are designated to save
humanity and we hear that there is a little people there who pretend to be sort
of (‘sort of’ because, as you know, in the Bible it is much more complicated)
the chosen people. We Germans are chosen
people. There is another chosen people. There cannot be two chosen people so one
chosen people has to be suppressed.
This is the metaphysical ground of the Final Solution even if it
is a completely absurd conception of what is the chosen people in the Bible,
which has never meant chosen people in this way. But in the Nazi fantasy, this was the
mechanism.
Now, for the fundamentalists, in a way, all proportions being
kept, it is the same. What is Muslim
fundamentalism. It is a Muslim who
thinks that history begins with one text.
This text, given for all eternity and impossible to change, once and for
all time, one text. And these people,
these Muslim fundamentalists, hear that there is a little people again who
pretends to have been given the text also a few thousand years before with the
Bible and who pretends to be father of this third text.
Then there is the question of the depth. A fundamentalist Muslim is somebody who
pretends not to have any depth: to be the embodied beginning. And these people, this community who
‘pretend’ to have received the text which could have anticipated the holy text
of the Koran, must be again suppressed.
A lot of them are completely illiterate. That is true.
But some of them are not completely and they reason. And I met a few people in Pakistan who said
exactly that: “We hate Jews because they pretend to be our fathers. We hate them because they pretend to have a
text which pretends to have come before ours.
Nothing before the Koran. Nothing
after the Koran.”
SR: Which is
completely un-Islamic by the way because Islam recognises the so-called ‘people
of the Book’, the ahl al kitab which are the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims.
BHL: Un-Islamic.
That is why they are enemies of Islam.
Exactly. And this is the front
line. Inside the Islamic world, the
front line is between the ones who pay their debts, who are read to pay the
debts, in speech of course, and the ones who refuse to pay the debts. This is again the philosophical origin of
this Islamic anti-Semitism.
Chair: Can I ask you something? It will have to be brief because I am so keen
to bring everyone in, but just on non-Islamic anti-Semitism. That also, people perceive, is on the
rise. France is often cited as an
example although it is … young Muslims
who are behind some of these attacks.
But people will pick up on a line in your book where you suggest that
one of the things that has happened, in a new form of anti-Semitism: now, this
is not just speaking about Islamists but maybe beyond, hatred of Jews, you say,
has come to be equated with defence of the oppressed. Which is all around the issue of Israel. But the two have become linked. Could you just say, briefly if you can
because I want to bring people in, but a little bit about that new twist of
anti-Semitism where these two things, defence of the oppressed (presumably the
Palestinians) and hatred of Jews have come together. What do you mean by that?
BHL: Yes.
Defence of the oppressed. Not of
all the oppressed, and that is the question.
Only one name, where this appeared very clearly and which is for me one
of the biggest events of recent years: the Conference at Durban in South
Africa. It was a conference where you a
lot of NGOs which were supposed to speak about racism and slavery. It was a conference on slavery and
racism. A lot of people came there:
Rwanda; Burundi; Angola. African
‘damned’ people who are ignored by all the nations and who had a stage for the
first time on which they could hope to see their misery expressed. And on this stage at Durban, what happened
was that there was only one ‘slave state’, only one ‘oppressive people’, only
one ‘situation of racism’. It was the
State of Israel, the ‘oppression’ of the Palestinians by the Jews and the
Palestinian-Israeli situation.
In
this case, you could see how this Israeli-Palestinian story was a sort of murky
cloud which deprived of speech and which made invisible all the other damned of
the earth. It was also a stage where you
saw how the religion of the victim and the anti-racism was the new argument
according to which the Jewish people was stigmatised.
Durban
was a place where thousands of people walked in the streets shouting, “One Jew,
one bullet”. ‘Jew’ becoming the name for
the very oppression and the name for racism and so on. So, a date and a place: Durban 2001. Again, a few days before September 11.
Chair: It was the very same week. Just a brief comment, because you were the
person who brought it into the conversation.
You called it ‘the reflex of anti-Semitism’. Do you want to say something about, both in
the Islamic world but also in the sort of area that BHL has touched on, beyond
the Islamic world? And then we’re going
to open it.
SR: I think there is a lot of concealed
anti-Semitism right here, you know. In
fact, my first experience of anti-Semitism was in England when I was not at all
well-known as a writer and I was at a social event where somebody was extremely
rude to me and then came back a few minutes later to apologise for having been
rude and, by way of explanation for his rudeness, said, “You see, they told me
you were Jewish”. And that was a full
explanation! I was obviously supposed to
then understand it and I never so much wanted to be Jewish, but unfortunately
wasn’t. So that was my little
introduction to it.
But
I do think that Bernard’s point about ‘ahistoricism’, you know, the kind of
dislike of history in radical Islam, is very important. One of the main ideologues of the Khomeini
revolution, the philosopher Ali Shariati, used to actually describe the Iranian
revolution as a ‘revolt against history’.
History was the problem. The
ideal state had allegedly come into being in the Arabian peninsula in the 7th
century of the Common Era, as it is now called.
And everything since then was a departure from perfection and therefore
needed to be eradicated.
This
attitude has led to a colossal intellectual deformation in the way in which
Koranic studies themselves are carried out in the Muslim world. If you cannot historicise the Koran, if you
cannot study the Koran as an event inside history which took the shape it took
because of the social, economic and political conditions in that place at that
time, which actually you can do and which reveals it in all kinds of
interesting ways.
For
example, the bible stories in the Koran are all exactly the stories that you
would have heard from Nestorian Christians on the caravan trails. And Mohammed, of course, long before he was a
prophet, was a very successful merchant.
He went on those caravan trails and in those oases would have heard the
Nestorian versions of Christianity and the Koran reproduces them exactly. The chapter about Jesus is called Maryam
and Christ is born in an oasis under a palm tree. In various other stories there, there are
these desert nomadic variations of bible stories which become the Koran
stories. Now, you cannot say this
because, to say this, is to historicise and therefore to blaspheme.
So
it means that the most basic scholarship about the history and nature of the
Koran is denied and this creates a crazy world.
You have the literality of a text, and think about that text. The prophet is on the mountain and he is
receiving a revelation and a mystical experience. He comes down from the mountain. It is not certain whether he could read or
write but very often he would recite (the word ‘koran’ means recitation)
and whoever was nearby would grab whatever piece of paper or palm leaf or
whatever and write it down and keep it in a chest and it was not placed in its
final form until after he died. None of
this is in dispute.
So
we have to assume first the one hundred per cent accuracy of the prophet’s
memory. Then we have to assume one
hundred per cent accuracy in transcription.
Then we have to assume one hundred per cent accuracy in preservation and
then, after he dies and the close friends put the Koran in what is now its
final form, we have to assume one hundred per cent accuracy in that
process. And if we even suggest a half
per cent inaccuracy in any of that, we are blaspheming and need to be put to
death. Right? This is the death of the mind. This kind of problem in that society has
created a kind of death of the mind.
My
namesake Ibn Rushd, the philosopher known in the west as Averroes, a great
scholar of Aristotle and so on, attempted way back then in the 12th
century to dispute the basis of Islamic literalism. He pointed out that the Islamic definition of
God is very unlike the Judeo-Christian definition of God in a very important
respect. The Judeo-Christian God, we are
told, made man in His own image.
Therefore, there is a relationship between the nature of man and the
nature of God. One is a reflection of
the other.
In
Islam, however, the Koran says that God has no human characteristics. That it is demeaning and belittling God to
suggest that God would have something as small as a human characteristic. So, the argument is made: language is a human
characteristic. How odd it would be to
believe that God speaks Arabic. If God
does not speak Arabic but communicates in His way, which is beyond human
nature, then the act of writing it down in Arabic is already an act of
interpretation and therefore further acts of interpretation should be
committed. Well that was the attempt of
a 12th century renaissance inside Islam and it failed.
Chair: That’s the kind of thing that you like.
SR: But what I am saying is that without the ability to
discuss these things openly, you find that the grand narrative inside which you
live stops being a creative environment within which you can renew yourself and
invigorate yourself. It becomes a
straitjacket and a gaol. And that is
what is happening inside the Muslim world and it leads to all these other
deformations. It leads to the way in
which other religions are viewed. It
leads to the way in which the project of modernity is viewed. It leads the way in which the project of
social change is viewed. It all follows
from putting yourself in a straitjacket.
Chair: Excellent.
Thank you both very much for that opening dialogue which I think has
illuminated a huge number of issues. I
also … pick up someone’s point about the
veil, which is all about secularism in the two countries. But I’m desperate to include and widen our
conversation. So let’s do that now. I’m going to take the liberty of going on
beyond our advertised time because we did start late. So I’m aiming to get in 25 minutes at least
of questions etc.
I’m
going to take them in groups because that way we’ll get more of you in. The briefer you can be the better: no
speeches. Contribution, questions etc. Let’s see some hands.
Questioner
1 [Female]: It strikes me, listening to what was a very
fascinating discussion, that in a way it is not just the Muslim world that has
to put its house in order. The so-called
western phenomenon, that bloc, has a lot of thinking to do as well and it seems
to me, as a total layperson but just following history, that the west and the
Muslim worlds, if one can use these very generalised formations, are not
speaking the same language. The reason
why they are not speaking the same language is that there are vested interests
that relate to the big business and to politics that perhaps are not easily
translatable. I just wonder what you
both think about that?
Questioner
2 [Female]: I feel very frightened, particularly because
early on we were told that the next terrorism is going to be the beginning of
the greatest terrorism we know about.
That’s very much with me and I don’t want to really go out of this room
without having asked a bit more about that.
My question is that all the discussion we are having is to do with
rational thinking people. Have we any
chance, or is the battle already lost because if you forecast that worse than
the last terrorism is ahead of us, what chance have we in any of our
discussions and thinking and philosophising in stopping something as
frightening as that?
Questioner
3 [Male]: If it were possible to sit round the
negotiating table with Islamic fundamentalists, are there any political
objectives that you feel that could be reached?
Is there some possibility of accommodation or possibly appeasement? What are their objectives?
Questioner
4 [Sharon Sadeh – of HaAretz]: On 9/11, the US was
targeted and Europe was spared. Do you
think that Europe may face this re-awakening only after a 9/11 inside Europe
that will make a different discussion?
Another related question: why do you think a terrorist attack did not
happen so far in Europe, especially in Britain?
Chair: I’m going to pause it there and I’m going to
divide up the four questions in this way, with no real pattern but let us pick
up on these straight away to you, BHL.
Why
has there not been one in Europe? Do you
think there almost needs to be an attack in Europe before Europe gets the
wake-up call, before it realises the scale of the problem?
And
also, the earlier question was: You have met and discussed with those Islamist
radicals: what compromise or possible negotiation across a table could there be
with those people, do you think?
BHL: As for terrorism in Europe, I know that after
September 11 there were some Europeans who thought that they could be
spared. There were some governments who
thought that if they were clever enough, if they were tricky enough, they could
be spared by terrorism.
They
are exactly like the people who, when the Chernobyl cloud went from the Soviet
Union, these governments and these people pretended that the Chernobyl cloud
had stopped just at the border with Belgium and France. There were some people who said that, who
said that the Chernobyl cloud had stopped just at the border. The same thing today: that terrorism has
stopped at the borders of Europe. Of
course they are wrong. Of course it is
an illusion. Of course if you take
things from Karachi events [?], from Bin Laden and his lieutenants, from this
literature of which I fed myself unfortunately a few words: There is no real
difference: the capital of America is Washington but is also London and is also
Paris. I think that from their point of
view, there is no real difference and despite the so-called subtleties of these
politics, they will not make a real difference.
Why they did not strike until now, this I don’t know.
What
is the possibility of negotiation with these people? I think it is zero for a simple reason. These people do not negotiate. They have nothing to negotiate. They have no war goals. This is the difference between this war, the
war against terrorism, and the other wars which we have known since the
beginning of history. The wars according
to Clausewitz; the wars according to Karl Schmidt. War between France and enemies on the front
line with a discussion on some states, with the possibility of
negotiation. For the first time, in the
modern age, this war has no front line.
It has no goal. It has no stake
and there is no possible negotiation for this reason.
These
people, the energy involved in this cause, which is the Islamist cause, is not
aimed at a target. So, in philosophical
words, we would say that they are nihilists.
It is a nihilist terrorism. With
nihilism, you cannot negotiate.
Chair: Thank you.
We are going to have to be briefer up here because we want to get in
more questions. There was a question
which said: This is all sort of very
rational talk, but we are dealing essentially with irrational people. How do we bridge that?
SR: We have to defeat them. This is not a question of making a peace
treaty. This comes back to the battle
inside the Muslim world. This is really
a battle for the future of those countries.
[Continuation
on new tape: apparently some words missing]
BHL: … … of the compromise of the political
solution. It is maybe my biggest hope of
my political life, the Palestinian state.
I think that the Palestinian people has the right to it and I think it
is the deep interest of Israel and that the biggest chance for the security of
Israel would be to have a Palestinian state instead of this situation where
there is no borderline again, no frontline, and this situation where each
Israeli soldier, and also each Israeli citizen, becomes the frontline as himself. Each Israeli is a frontline today and I know
enough wars, I saw enough wars in my life, to know that this sort of war is the
most terrible. Whatever be the power of
an army, and the Israeli army is powerful, no army can win such a war with no
border, no frontline and so on.
So,
for all these reasons, I am deeply and solidly in favour of the compromise
since my youth. But, I fear to think and
to say that it would not solve so much and maybe not at all the thing on which
we are sticking since the moment. First,
because of what I said before, the epicentre, centre of gravity, is in the
Asian-Muslim world much more than in the Arab one. Most of the terrorists, most of the people of
al-Qaida, they have Kashmirian hearts, as I said, and not Palestinian. In Pakistan I did not hear so much about the
Palestinian drama. It is not the real
core of the problem. The main argument,
unfortunately, is that September 11 was, as you know, was committed, was
prepared, was planned at the moment of the last thirty years where it was on
the brink of peace. It was about to be
done. It was the Barak period. It was Camp David and Taba. The two people were very close to peace and
it is at this moment when you had this huge terrorist act. So, unfortunately, I think that the two
phenomena are disconnected.
And,
last point, Bin Laden himself, when you look at the text of Bin Laden, before
September 11 he made a lot of fatwas.
He never mentioned it.
SR: He never mentioned it.
BHL: The Palestinian problem was not mentioned by Bin
Laden. He did it after September 11
because he understood that it was a good argument and good propaganda also for
Europe.
Chair: Excellent.
You’re going to want to respond to those, and if you can keep them
brief, well done. One of them was: What
happened to this period that people do know about, 700-odd years ago when
Muslim-Jewish relations were very benign, a golden period many people
think? What went wrong? The relations of Muslims in east and west: do
they parallel relations of another diaspora perhaps, even the Jewish
diaspora? And the other question was:
How can we speak to and reinforce in power those moderate voices, given that
some of those countries are fairly closed?
As brief as you can be because I’m then going to take a whole range of
voices and then we’re going to conclude.
SR: Right, very quickly. First of all, I absolutely agree that the
radical project of Islam isn’t that interested in the Palestinian cause. It just isn’t. It sees it as a rhetorical tool and as a
recruiting ploy. Bin Laden doesn’t give
a damn about Palestine: even Arafat said so.
Nor do the Iranian ayatollahs.
Nor do the Taliban. Nor do
the Kashmiri radicals. It’s not a
subject. So nothing changes. Yes, it brings the temperature down in a
certain way. But in these other
discourses, nothing fundamental changes.
I
haven’t said nearly as much about Kashmir as I wanted to because I think that
Bernard is quite right, that Kashmir is a huge subject and it’s kind of the
elephant in the room that we haven’t discussed.
What
happened to damage relations between Muslims and Jews? I mean, are we talking about Andalusia here?
Chair: You’ve got 30 seconds on 700 years of
Islamic-Jewish relations! See how you
get on.
SR: Well, the interesting thing about southern Spain in
the Muslim period is that yes, it is a moment at which the cultures leak into
each other. It is a moment at which a
kind of composite culture is created.
All that, and many people celebrate that. But remember that it is also a period of
absolute rule: that communities do not live there equally. The non-Muslim communities have less rights
and are subjugated. There is an
experience of forcible conversion and so on and so on. So it’s not multi-cultural heaven, Andalusia.
There are serious problems there. But yes, there was a kind of conviviality
that faded.
Chair: Do people often see that period through
rose-coloured spectacles?
SR: I think so.
Chair: I’m just going to abuse my privilege
here. Just on this point about the Taliban
and the al-Qaida not caring about Palestine: there is a story told that Mullah
Omar, the head of the Taliban, was shown a picture of Yasser Arafat and
asked somebody, “Who’s that man? I don’t
recognise that man.”
We’re
going to take half-a-dozen questions and then we are going to conclude. I am not going to be able to get direct
answers to these questions: it will just be reactions to the general
thrust.
1st
Questioner: [Inaudible] …
Chair: Do you fear a backlash from the Muslims of France
against the secularism of the state? I
think the questioner is probably thinking of the new law passed to ban the veil
and the Jewish kipah and the turban for Sikhs etc.
2nd
Questioner: I think that Rushdie is quite
right as far as the Jews in Spain. There
is no golden era for a minority. But I
would like to ask you on the recuperation of a new breed of Islamism from
corrupt stage, be it Arabic or Middle Eastern or Far Eastern. Let’s take the two examples vivid today: one
is the recuperation of the population after the earthquake in Algeria where the
fundamentalists were ready with Red Crescent and what is happening today in
Morocco after the earthquake where the local authority are bypassed?
3rd
Questioner: … Bernard said that
perhaps the approach we need to give to the kind of fundamental Islam is
perhaps quite dissimilar to the approach we gave to Nazism and Communism in
terms of that we cannot appease: we have to take quite a tactile and harsh
approach. Isn’t the problem with this
comparison that what fundamental Islam is based on is so different to what
Communism and Fascism were based on, especially in their origins?
Chair: He’s questioning the parallel of
fundamentalist Islam with Nazism and Communism: just too different in their origins
to be compared.
4th
Questioner: …
[Inaudible]
Chair: Very good.
Nice direct question.
5th
Questioner: I think everybody in this room has an idea of
a just solution in Palestine and Israel.
If it is correct that the real epicentre is in Kashmir, do you have any
conception of a way for settling that problem?
Chair: What a marvellous parting thought! We’re already in extra time.
6th
Questioner: I wondered if the two speakers could see a
link between Salman Rushdie’s point which has just been picked up on addressing
moderate Islamic opinion, and the other point made about the Geneva
proposals? Because I think in the world
the powers-that-be always address themselves to other powers and when we have something
like the Geneva proposals they rather neglect it. And that surely is moderate Arab opinion.
Chair: So now that it’s happened we support those
initiatives: that’s what you’re asking.
I’ll go through them all.
That
one was: How can we support, if you like, moderate initiatives, things like the
Geneva accords? What can people outside
do to support those?
You
were asked as well: What is your solution to the Kashmir problem? I mean, there have been some reports that it
is approaching solution.
SR: I’d like to really offer that solution, if
I’m the person who has it!
Chair: Oh good.
That’s excellent.
In
a similar spirit: Who are the dissident voices?
Names, telephone numbers, email addresses are requested from you.
Corruption
of Islamist regimes.
The
problem of the parallel with Nazism. I
have a feeling that will take you too long if you go down that route.
The
other question which I had thought we might talk about more, but it would be
useful to hear what you say about that.
Secularism,
the ban on the veil, and other religious expressions.
Salman,
in his earlier comments, seemed to suggest that was something that was perhaps
the only solution to a kind of cultural relativism: that you needed to say
there are certain norms. What do you
think about that?
So,
I’ve given you a long list. You can
respond to any of those that you like.
In fact, because you [Salman Rushdie] started second, I’m going to give
you this chance first.
SR: Well, very quickly. The question about the Muslim liberals: there
are such voices in every Muslim country.
I think, to give you an indication of the problem, the most
distinguished Palestinian intellectual for many years, Edward Said, could
essentially not publish his work in the New York Times because of that
paper’s ideological position about the Israel-Palestine issue. They did not wish to hear his voice. What it suggests to me, that is the kind of
problem I am talking about.
There
are great writers and intellectuals and physicists and dissidents all over the
Muslim world. Mahmoud Darwish, the great
voice of Palestine. I wouldn’t know how
many of you have ever read a poem by him but I encourage you to do so,
etc. One can’t list all: this becomes a
phone book.
But
I wanted to solve the Kashmir issue. For
a long time my view was that the way to solve the Kashmir issue was essentially
for both sides to demilitarise the area.
That is to say: Kashmir is a divided state. Pakistan occupies a part of it which it
refers to as ‘Free Kashmir’, Azad Kashmir.
India calls that same place ‘Pakistan Occupied Kashmir’, or POK, or
Pok. Anyway, Kashmiris have never really
recognised that division. I mean, to
declare an interest. I am ethnically
mostly Kashmiri so it is a matter of some concern to me. I always believed that to recognise the
international cease-fire line, the ‘line of control’ so-called, as an
international frontier, doesn’t work.
This is a frontier, by the way, which has a million Indian troops on one
side and 750,000 Pakistani troops on the other, almost 2 million people facing
each other across a very mountainous cease-fire line and both of them being
nuclear powers. And this is a subject
which has never been discussed in the United Nations because both the Americans
and the Soviet Union veto it whenever the discussion is necessary. Even when these two countries came close to
nuclear conflict, the Security Council did not discuss the subject.
Anyway,
if you just recognise that line as a de facto partition line, neither side
moves back because both sides believe that if the other one moves back, their
enemy will immediately make a land grab.
They are quite possibly correct about that. So you need third party. You need international force to guarantee
frontiers. You need a degree of autonomy
for the Kashmiri people and then you need heavy economic investment to create
what’s called the peace dividend.
Now
that is what I always thought and sort of fundamentally I still think. That’s what may have to be the solution. But, there is a very strange opportunity that
has arisen to solve the Kashmir issue because of the political circumstances of
India and Pakistan. Musharaf, right now,
having been the architect or the great supporter of Kashmiri terrorist groups
crossing into Indian Kashmir, has now understood that terrorism is an
enemy. They have tried to kill him twice
in the last couple of months and only narrowly failed. So Musharaf suddenly understands that he
cannot afford a confrontation with India in Kashmir because he’s got a gigantic
confrontation inside his own country with fundamentalism. So it’s very much in Pakistan’s national
interest to demilitarise the Kashmiri situation.
Meanwhile,
in India, you have a Hindu Nationalist government presiding over the biggest
economic book there has been in India since independence, creating a very large
conservative BJP-voting middle class.
Now, what does a very large conservative Hindu Nationalist middle class,
in the middle of an economic boom not want?
It doesn’t want a war. So you
have a situation where conservative politics in India and fundamentalism in
Pakistan, the growth of those two things, is pushing the self-interest of both
those countries to solve the Kashmir problem.
And if that isn’t black comedy, I don’t know what is. But it may in fact mean that there is a
better chance to get somewhere on that subject than there has been in a
generation. So, there you are. A little optimistic note at the end.
Chair: Wonderful.
It’s a bonus. We didn’t advertise
that: a solution to the Kashmir problem.
You heard that final round of questions, Bernard. What thoughts do you have on that last issue,
or some closing thought?
BHL: About the Kashmir question: I said that the
Palestinian question was not at the centre; that Kashmir was more
important. But I would also say that this
war declared by terrorism on democracy, being what it is, which means without a
frontline, without a battlefield, the nihilist war and so on and so on, I would
even say that the solution of the Kashmir question would not be either the
solution of the terrorism. There would
be something else. The war declared by
terrorism is a war declared against women, against intelligence, against free
spirit, against democracy, and Kashmir is again an alibi of this war. This is the thing which has to be really
understood. They declared war on
democracy all over the world: in the United States and in the Muslim world and
all over the world.
This
is one of reasons why there are common points (the question has been put
before) with Nazism and Communism. This
is true. We have to stress on the
peculiarity of Islamism. Of course. We have to stress on the points which are
very specific, but also we have to re-put them, these Islamist people, in the
common ground of the whole history of totalitarianism. There is a family style; there is a
brotherhood; there is a family album of the Nazi ideology, Communist and
Islamist. This point, this hate of
history, don’t forget that the Cambodian Communists said that memory was an
illness. Don’t forget that this idea of
an absolute text, this cult, this religion of the letter, was also a point of
the Stalinist period and so on and so on.
You have also in common what I would call, what could be called, the
‘wheel of purity’. The wheel of
purity.
Nazism
was a wheel of purity, which means a world which could get rid of the evil, in
a sort of delirium of course. Stalinism,
Cambodian Communism especially, was also animated by your wheel of purity, a
world débarrassé, rid of evil. And Islamism shares this strange passion of
purity. This strange idea of an
immaculate world, of an umah they say.
The umah is another name of the society without classes, of the
Cambodian or of the Chinese and of the right for one thousand years of the
Nazi. So there are some common points.
About
the backlash and about France and the story of the scarf.
Chair: This will have to be your last point, I’m
afraid.
BHL: Of course.
It was my chute as we say in French, my ‘fall’! It is an important point for one reason. Of course because of the freedom of the women
who live under the dictatorship of the fathers and brothers and so on. But also, because in this war in which we
have two political theologies in a way: one terrible, which is the Islamic one;
and another one which cannot be compared of course, which is a very slight one
but which is a political theology, of Mr Bush when he speaks about ‘axis of
evil’, when he speaks about ‘infinite justice’, when he speaks about ‘God bless
America’. This mixture of theology and
politics which take a terrible shape in the Islamic world and which has a very
slow shape, but something of familiarity in America. We need a third road. We need a third path, which means a
separation: clear, strong, radical if I dare say, between theology and
politics. We need a place in the world
where theology becomes only an intimate affair of the pure mind. This place can be Europe and one of the
circumstances in which this separation can be done, one of the examples, one of
the frontlines of this story, can be, and in France at least is, this affair of
the veil and of the interdiction of the scarf, not in all life, by the way, but
in school which means in the place where citizens are shaped, republican
citizens.
Chair: Wonderful.
Thank you both very much.
Ladies
and gentlemen, two more things left to do.
The first is to say that both of our very distinguished speakers are
going to stay and sign copies of their books which are available here at this
table. Secondly, to thank both of
them. To say that this has been a stimulating
evening, full of ideas, I think comes as no surprise. We knew we were in for that. But this has also been an open and I think
unusually enlightened and enlightening dialogue. And this fact we didn’t actually mention, and
I think it is a tribute to this evening and to the conversation that we didn’t
even mention it, but here have been two thinkers, one from a Jewish background,
one from a Muslim background, who are on opposite sides of the so-called ‘clash
of civilisations’, opposite sides of the line that was meant to separate the
two sides according to that thesis, and yet here engaging in an open and shared
dialogue and really a meeting of minds.
That has been very heartening and I would say that if there is to be
(perhaps too remote a possibility) some solution to this war on terror and this
clash, surely it will be in the meeting of minds like these two that we have
heard tonight.
Our
thanks to Salman Rushdie and to Bernard-Henri Lévy.
END
