Posted by Eugene Volokh:
"Twenty Years On: Internalising the Fatwa":
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_12_21-2008_12_27.shtml#1230130632
A very interesting [1]column in the Spiked Review of Books by Kenan
Malik, author of the forthcoming From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie
Affair and its Legacy. An excerpt:
For many, the controversy seemed to come out of the blue. For many,
too, especially in the West, the image of the burning book and the
fatwa seemed to be portents of a new kind of conflict and a new
kind of world. From the Notting Hill riots of the 1950s to the
Grunwick dispute in 1977 to the inner-city disturbances of the
1980s, blacks and Asians had often been involved in bitter
conflicts with British authorities. But these were also, in the
main, political conflicts, or issues of law and order.
Confrontations over unionisation or discrimination or police
harassment were of a kind that was familiar even prior to mass
immigration.
The Rushdie Affair seemed different. It was the first major
cultural conflict, a conflict quite unlike anything that Britain
had previously experienced. Muslim fury seemed to be driven not by
questions of harassment or discrimination or poverty, but by a
sense of hurt that Salman Rushdie�s words had offended their
deepest beliefs.
Twenty years later, the Rushdie Affair seems equally like a
conflict from a different age -� but for the opposite reason. Not
only have the issues that it raised -� the nature of Islam, and its
relationship to the West; the meaning of multiculturalism; the
boundaries of tolerance in a liberal society; the limits of free
speech in a plural world �- become some of the defining problems of
the age. But the politics of the pre-Rushdie age are now what seems
anomalous.
It has now become widely accepted that we live in a multicultural
world, and that in such a world it is important not to cause
offence to other peoples and cultures. As the sociologist Tariq
Modood has put it: �If people are to occupy the same political
space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to
which they subject each others� fundamental beliefs to criticism.�
References
1. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6019
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