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

their case. The vast majority of religious fanatics who murdered or threatened to murder publishers, translators, booksellers and innocent bystanders did not want to read the book in the round, or to read it at all. Most would not have understood it if they had tried.
    Their violence rolled around the world. The brutality of the reaction was beyond anything that Rushdie or his publishers anticipated or could have anticipated. Penguin released The Satanic Verses in 1988. Without pausing to consider its contents, President Rajiv Gandhi put it on India’s proscribed list. The opposition MP who demanded that Gandhi ban the book had not read it either, but decided, ‘I do not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is.’ Gandhi was frightened of communal riots and of losing the Muslim vote, and perhaps remembered how Rushdie had excoriated his mother, Indira, in Midnight’s Children .
    In India and Pakistan and later in Britain, Jamaat-e-Islami organised the protests. Its enmity was a compliment to Rushdie, for Jamaat’s supporters were enemies any liberal should be proud to have. Jamaat’s founder, Maulana Abu’l Ala Maududi, began agitating in British-occupied India in 1941, and had a good claim to be the first of the Islamists. He combined his version of a ‘purified’ Islam with European totalitarianism. From the communists he took the notion of the vanguard party, which would tell the masses what they wanted, regardless of whether the masses wanted it or not, and vague notions of a just future where all would be equal. From the Nazis, Jamaat, and its partners in the Arab Muslim Brotherhood, took the Jewish conspiracy theory. They explained that Muslims were weak because they were victims of the plots of sinister Jews, or ‘Zionists’, as they came to call them, who were everywhere seeking to undermine their faith and morals. Muslims would free themselves by building a caliphate, where the supreme ruler of a global empire would not be a Nazi führer or communist general secretary but a theocrat ruling with total power in accordance with Koran and Sharia.
    After the British withdrew from India in 1947, leaving millions to die in the slaughters of partition, Jamaat supported the new Muslim state of Pakistan, which was split between its Bengali east wing and the Punjabi-dominated west. When the Bengalis of East Pakistan revolted against a system that made them second-class citizens, the Pakistani army’s retaliation stunned a twentieth century that thought it had become inured to genocide. Jamaat aided the army’s campaigns of mass murder and mass rape because it believed in the caliphate, and hence could not tolerate the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, because it broke Islamic unity. At the time this book went to press, Bangladeshi prosecutors were beginning war crime proceedings against Jamaat leaders they claimed were members of the paramilitary squads Pakistan recruited to help with killing.
    Rushdie had already noticed that the Pakistani military dictatorship of the 1980s needed the Jamaatists to provide a religious cover for tyranny. ‘This is how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked,’ he said, as he gave Jamaat reasons to hate him as well.
    The next countries to ban The Satanic Verses were Sudan, Bangladesh and apartheid South Africa. If you find the alliance of militant Islamists and white supremacists strange, then you have yet to learn that all the enemies of liberalism are the same. In its dying days, the regime tried to uphold the apartheid state by co-opting mixed-race and Asian South Africans into the system, the better to deny South Africa’s black majority the vote. Most coloured and Asian South Africans refused to cooperate. But Islamists saw the chance to use apartheid’s censorship laws against Rushdie. The left-wing Weekly Mail and the Congress of South