You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom Read Online Free PDF Page A

a circus of magical realism, with sub-plots, dream sequences, fantasies, pastiches, sudden interruptions by the author, a bewildering number of characters, and a confusion of references to myths and to the news stories of the day. If you insist on nailing down its political message – and trust me, you will whack your thumb with the hammer many times before you do – you will discover that the novel is ‘about’ migrants from India to the West who, like Rushdie, are contending with their changing identities and their dissolving religious and cultural certainties.
    The protagonists – Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood movie star who plays Hindu gods in religious epics, and whose fans worship him as a god, and Saladin Chamcha, an actor who has left India and makes a living doing voiceovers for London advertising agencies – confront the pressures on the psyche migration brings. Somewhat prophetically given what was to happen next, the Anglicised Saladin tells his Indian mistress, who is trying to find what remains of India inside him:
    ‘Well this is what is inside … An Indian translated into English-medium. When I attempt Hindustani these days, people look polite. This is me.’ Caught in the aspic of his adopted language he had begun to hear in India’s Babel an ominous warning: don’t come back again. When you have stepped through the looking glass you step back at your peril. The mirror may cut you to shreds.
     
    If people wanted reasons to find offence – and as we will see, there are people who are offended if you don’t give them reasons to find offence – then the British police and immigration services might have issued death threats, because Rushdie showed them as racists and sadists. When the controversy broke and he needed police protection, supporters of law and order complained about the lack of ‘respect’ for the British state Rushdie had displayed in his writings. The cops, however, took his satire on the chin and went on to guard him from assassins. If you wanted to be fussy, you could also notice passages which showed that Asian shopkeepers in London were not always comradely soldiers joined with their Afro-Caribbean brothers in the struggle against white prejudice, as the anti-racist orthodoxy of the 1980s said they must be. Rushdie’s Asian Londoners are contemptuous of the black youths they assume must be criminals. Britain’s black community once again lived with the offence.
    But, and here is the second large point, to go through The Satanic Verses with the squinting eye of a censor searching for thought crimes, or even to seek to see it in the round, as I have tried to do, is to blind yourself to the real reason why the fatwa against Salman Rushdie became the Dreyfus Affair of our age. That reason is as brutal now as it was then.
    Globalising Censorship (1)
     
    Terror is why The Satanic Verses is still the novel that all modern arguments about the silencing of sceptical and liberal voices must deal with first. The terror unleashed by its opponents and the response of the inheritors of the liberal tradition to their enemies’ demands for censorship and self-censorship. No terror, and The Satanic Verses would be one of several great works by a great novelist, rather than shorthand for a battle whose outcome defined what writers can and can’t say.
    Rushdie did not understand what he was fighting. ‘The thing that is most disturbing is they are talking about a book which does not exist,’ he said as the protests grew. ‘The book which is worth killing people for and burning flags is not the book I wrote. The people who demonstrated in Pakistan and who were killed haven’t actually read the book that I wrote because it isn’t on sale there.’ He had not grasped that reactionary mobs and those who seek to exploit them have a know-nothing pride in their ignorance. It was sufficient that clerical authorities said that the book was blasphemous, and could quote a passage or two to prove