ANOTHER VOICE
The price Rushdie must pay for pilgering
AUBERON WAUGH
In the area of Hammersmith where I spend two nights a week, the Indian shop --- as middle-class families politely call the local Pakistani establishment — now opens at 9.30 in the morning and closes at 9.30 in the evening. By contrast, in Somerset, where I spend five nights a week, the Quantock stores in nearby Bishops Lydeard open at eight o'clock in the morning and close at ten o'clock at night, seven days a week. So far as I am able to tell, the Somerset shop is entirely staffed by autochthonous English of several gen- erations' residence — i.e. whites. Nothing could be less important than the colour of the person's skin who sells one groceries, of course. I mention it merely to show how well we all seemed to be integrating with each other — at any rate from the point of view of one observer — until this Salman Rushdie business blew up. In Birmingham on Friday night I met Mr Hazhir Teimourian, the distinguished spe- cial correspondent for the Times and BBC overseas service. His Persian Kurdish background, combined with the fact that he appears to be one of the very few people in Britain who have both read the book and studied Koranic theology, made him almost uniquely qualified to explain what was happening. It was his view that Rush- die had undoubtedly been concerned to stimulate religious debate, both on the authorship of the Koran and the rela- tionship between the Islamic God and that of the Christians and Jews. In his view, it would be the ultimate disgrace if Rushdie agreed to recant, but he thought that Rushdie would be killed, sooner or later.
Unfortunately it was almost impossible to debate the pros and cons of Rushdie's execution, as many of us would have liked to do, in the Central Television studio, owing to the presence of a noisy Muslim faction which kept interrupting and shout- ing speakers down. Next day, the Indepen- dent, which seemed to devote the greater Part of the newspaper to this burning question of the day, announced in one huge headline across an entire inside page: `Muslims in Britain divided on whether Rushdie should be killed'; while, a little way down the page we read: 'Poll finds majority of voices raised in favour of execution.'
So far as I know, there has been no Opinion poll held on this point among the non-Muslim population of Britain. It might be assumed that a majority would come out against execution, especially if the question were put to suggest that execution would involve acquiescence in Khomeini's instructions. But the British lower classes are traditionally well disposed towards capital punishment, and there is no evi- dence that Salman Rushdie enjoys any great personal following among them. At least there might be grounds for a national debate, and I would be interested to see the result.
One fears that it would be decided, one way or the other, on racial rather than religious or literary grounds. Rushdie him- self has much to say on the subject of the British attitude to race: 'But the members of the new colony [coloured folk in Britain] have only one real problem. That problem is white people. Racism, of course, is not our problem. It is yours,' he announced on a Channel Four Opinions programme in 1982, later reprinted in New Society.
The cultural differences revealed within our exciting new multi-cultural society, which have driven Rushdie to seek protec- tion from his own people in the arms of the British police, must clearly be disting- uished from racial differences. But there seems to be a racial element lurking underneath.
I wonder what Rushdie makes of the fact that whereas $3 million were offered for any Iranian who murdered him, a white murderer would receive only $1 million. Does he approve, on the grounds that reverse discrimination is vaguely thought progressive, or does he fear for the effect of such flagrant defiance of the Equal Pay Act on Britain's blacks? It would not be very nice if we decided that the Booker Prize, for instance, was worth only £5,000 for British writers of Indian extraction, £20,000 for autochthonous whites. Yet one learns of exactly such discrimination in such interestingly non-white countries as Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps, in the light of Rushdie's very sincere but apparently unsuccessful apolo- gy we should keep quiet and listen to his sermon on the dangers of racism in Britain, as he cowers under the protection of the British police:
Britain is not South Africa, I am reliably informed. Nor is it Nazi Germany. I have that on the best authority as well. . . . If you want to understand British racism . . . you [must] accept its historical roots; you [must] see that 400 years of conquest and looting, centuries of being told that you are superior to the fuzzy-wuzzies and the wogs, leave their stain on you all; that such a stain seeps into every part of your culture, your lan- guage and your daily life.... British thought and British society have never been cleansed of the Augean filth of imperialism. It is still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends. . . . For the citizen of the new, imported empire, for the colonised Asians and blacks of Britain, the police force represents the colonising army, those regim- ents of occupation and control. . . .
What is it like, this country to which the immigrants came, in which their children are growing up? This is not the England of fair play, tolerance, decency and equality maybe that never existed anyway, except in fairy tales. In the streets of the new empire . . black families are afraid to go out after dark, and human and animal excrement arrives through their letter boxes. The police offer threats instead of protection, and the courts offer small hope of redress. . . . We have a police force that harasses blacks every day of their lives.
And so he pilgers on, for five pages: 'It is believed that 50 per cent of all telephone calls made by employers to employment agencies specify no blacks. Black unem- ployment is infinitely higher than white. Such anomalies do not arise by accident.'
Perhaps the real debate is not so much whether Rushdie should be executed for having insulted the prophet Mahomed, but just how much we should exert ourselves, as deeply stained white imperialists, to protect him from his own people. A police inspector at the Central Television debate made the point that dedicated as we all are to improving community relations, we must also abide by the rule of law. That, of course, is true, but the law, like kidney machines, must somehow be apportioned according to the resources available. Rush- die himself makes the point that the concept of multi-culturalism is an insulting one if it means 'little more than teaching the kids a few bongo rhythms and how to tie a sari'. I really do not think it unreason- able, in the circumstances of Rushdie's having made several million pounds through insulting Islam, to suggest that he should pay for any police protection he may judge advisable.
Auberon Waugh this week won the Grana- da Television 'What the Papers Say' award for the columnist of the year.
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