Posted by: Captain Haddock June 18, 2007
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Salman Rushdie awarded knighthood. Iran, Pakistan, amongst others angry:
- http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-06/18/content_6258496.htm
ISLAMABAD, June 18 (Xinhua) -- The Pakistani parliament Monday unanimously adopted a resolution, condemning the British government for awarding the title of 'Sir' to Salman Rushdie.
In the British Queen's birthday honors list, published Saturday, Rushdie received a knighthood for services to literature.
"The National Assembly is dismayed and protests over the title to blasphemer Salman Rushdie from the British government for his book, based on the desecration of the Holy Qura'an and Sunnah," the resolution passed by the lower house of the parliament said.
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The Guardian (and many others) says it was "well deserved":
Rushdie's honour is richly deserved
The controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie's knighthood cannot obscure that he is one of the greats of British literature.
It is hardly unexpected, yet nonetheless bizarre, that the Queen's recognition of Salman Rushdie's achievement by honouring him with a knighthood should raise such a storm of controversy.
Judged purely in cultural rather than in political terms after all, Rushdie is undeniably amongst the greats of British literature. He is the Dickens of our times. A visionary realist, his superbly inventive, grandly comic stories chart the great social transitions of our globalising, post-colonial world, with its migrations, its teeming hybrid cities, its clash of unlikenesses, its extremes of love and violence. They do so with a richness of language and narrative which is unsurpassed.
When Midnight's Children, his novel of partition, won the Booker Prize in 1981, it raised the prize, itself, to international prominence. Together with Shame, his satire on Bhutto's Pakistan, and The Satanic Verses, in the first instance a hallucinatory satire on Thatcher's Britain, Rushdie's work also gave birth to a major strand in British fiction. Zadie Smith, Kiran Desai, and a host of other young writers are Rushdie's children, liberated by Rushdie's fiction to find their own voices. His "services to literature", for which the honour is awarded, are in that sense exemplary, even without beginning to list Rushdie's labours on behalf of persecuted writers around the world.
For Iran's foreign ministry to wade into our honours system and portray the decision to honour Rushdie as "an orchestrated act of aggression directed against Islamic societies" is to repeat the mistake which began with Ayatollah Khomeini's Fatwa. That killing review chose utterly to misunderstand the place fiction occupies in the west and subject it to a fundamentalist jurisdiction which essentially recognizes only one book, and that one holy. The journalists, writers and academics who languish in Iran's prisons are a mark of that regime's intolerance of any form of dissent. This is hardly the Islam that most Muslims in Britain would wish to support.
Nor, one hopes, would they wish to echo the condemnation of the honour by Pakistan's national assembly and the demand for it to be withdrawn. (Pakistan banned Shame on its appearance.) Similar pressures from the subcontinent were instrumental in rousing Muslims here to riots and book-burning at the end of 1988 when The Satanic Verses appeared. Few then involved paused to read Rushdie's books - which in fact exposed the very racism and intolerance from which minorities suffered. Indeed, labelling fiction as "blasphemous" is to surrender to those pressures on our cultural life which have historically sought to gag all criticism of the status quo and constrain that dissent which is a necessary part of a mature and plural democracy.
It is surely a mark of the Queen's and her advisors' brave, good judgment that they are prepared to recognize Rushdie for what he is: a great writer of international repute who has long spoken the truth to power, whether that power is political, religious or simply a prominent assembly of right-thinking voices. The fact that Rushdie's work has consistently proved controversial is a sure sign of what is a singular and valuable imagination.
- http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/06/an_honour_richly_deserved.html
It is hardly unexpected, yet nonetheless bizarre, that the Queen's recognition of Salman Rushdie's achievement by honouring him with a knighthood should raise such a storm of controversy.
Judged purely in cultural rather than in political terms after all, Rushdie is undeniably amongst the greats of British literature. He is the Dickens of our times. A visionary realist, his superbly inventive, grandly comic stories chart the great social transitions of our globalising, post-colonial world, with its migrations, its teeming hybrid cities, its clash of unlikenesses, its extremes of love and violence. They do so with a richness of language and narrative which is unsurpassed.
When Midnight's Children, his novel of partition, won the Booker Prize in 1981, it raised the prize, itself, to international prominence. Together with Shame, his satire on Bhutto's Pakistan, and The Satanic Verses, in the first instance a hallucinatory satire on Thatcher's Britain, Rushdie's work also gave birth to a major strand in British fiction. Zadie Smith, Kiran Desai, and a host of other young writers are Rushdie's children, liberated by Rushdie's fiction to find their own voices. His "services to literature", for which the honour is awarded, are in that sense exemplary, even without beginning to list Rushdie's labours on behalf of persecuted writers around the world.
For Iran's foreign ministry to wade into our honours system and portray the decision to honour Rushdie as "an orchestrated act of aggression directed against Islamic societies" is to repeat the mistake which began with Ayatollah Khomeini's Fatwa. That killing review chose utterly to misunderstand the place fiction occupies in the west and subject it to a fundamentalist jurisdiction which essentially recognizes only one book, and that one holy. The journalists, writers and academics who languish in Iran's prisons are a mark of that regime's intolerance of any form of dissent. This is hardly the Islam that most Muslims in Britain would wish to support.
Nor, one hopes, would they wish to echo the condemnation of the honour by Pakistan's national assembly and the demand for it to be withdrawn. (Pakistan banned Shame on its appearance.) Similar pressures from the subcontinent were instrumental in rousing Muslims here to riots and book-burning at the end of 1988 when The Satanic Verses appeared. Few then involved paused to read Rushdie's books - which in fact exposed the very racism and intolerance from which minorities suffered. Indeed, labelling fiction as "blasphemous" is to surrender to those pressures on our cultural life which have historically sought to gag all criticism of the status quo and constrain that dissent which is a necessary part of a mature and plural democracy.
It is surely a mark of the Queen's and her advisors' brave, good judgment that they are prepared to recognize Rushdie for what he is: a great writer of international repute who has long spoken the truth to power, whether that power is political, religious or simply a prominent assembly of right-thinking voices. The fact that Rushdie's work has consistently proved controversial is a sure sign of what is a singular and valuable imagination.
- http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/06/an_honour_richly_deserved.html