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the complete review - current events

From Fatwa to Jihad

by
Kenan Malik

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : solid, sobering look at the aftermath of the Rushdie/The Satanic Verses-affair

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "It is not just a sociocultural critique but also a personal memoir by an Indian-born, British-raised research psychologist and journalist who has toiled in the trenches of the culture wars." - Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs
  
  
• "Malik's book is a riveting political history of contemporary Britain and the changes that have taken place over the last 30 years. (...) In tracing the legacy of the Rushdie Affair into our post-9/11 present, Malik marries the attributes of a clear-eyed investigative journalist and a sensitive political analyst. (...) Impeccably researched, brimming with detail, yet razor-sharp in its argument, this book provokes a necessary re-examination. It demands, particularly, to be read by faint-hearted politicians and all those worried by the ongoing erosion of our liberties." - Lisa Appignanesi, The Independent
  
  
• "The legacy of the incident, Kenan Malik contends in this cogently argued and approachable polemic, is the current fearfulness of any expression that may insult Islam, coupled with a contrasting suspicion or fear of Islam itself." - Lesley McDowell, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "From Fatwa to Jihad is a powerful critique of both Islamic fundamentalism and Britain's multicultural policy." - Lindsay Johns, New Humanist
  
  
• "From Fatwa to Jihad sags in its last third. Up to then, Malik does a terrific job of making points through stories; after that he descends into mere argument. This narrows his focus when it should be broadened. It also means that he effectively evades the biggest issue of all." - Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
  
  
• "From Fatwa to Jihad attempts to extract a message but leaves me as confused as ever: I see conflict everywhere, but few signs of understanding. If this sounds pessimistic, at least Malik’s book proves that conflict rarely leads to enlightenment." - Nicholas Blincoe, The Telegraph
  
  
• "Few writers have untangled the paradoxes and unintended consequences of political Islam as deftly as Malik does here. But in the end his real subject is not Islam. It is Britain's mismanagement of immigration and the way in which this has led to the weakening of its purchase on Enlightenment values and, most particularly, free expression." - Maureen Freely, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       From Fatwa to Jihad considers the disturbing narrowing of free speech and the attendant consequences of this in -- in particular -- Western Europe over the past two decades, and the role the controversies surrounding The Satanic Verses and then the Danish cartoons (published in Jyllands-Posten in 2005) have played in this. For Malik, these two controversies had little to do with what the fuss was ostensibly all about -- insults to Islam -- but rather were politically motivated, serving (very successfully) to advance the profile and agendas of specific interest groups that are hardly representative of those they often claim to represent. In addition, Malik argues that reactions, especially by governments (especially the British government) meant to foster 'multiculturalism' and tolerance have instead resulted in a further fragmentation of society, and made for an additional incentive for individuals and groups to define themselves in narrow terms of otherness and separateness.
       As Malik notes, both The Satanic Verses and the Danish cartoons did not immediately lead to violent overreaction: it took quite a while, in each case, to carefully stoke the fires before a small number of opponents had managed to fan the flames in just the right way to make for the conflagrations that followed. In both cases, reckless generalizations prevailed over whatever substance there was to any complaints: The Satanic Verses was often condemned before it was read and in the case of the cartoons in Jyllands-Posten, Malik repeatedly notes the irony that many American and British publications refused to republish them even though one of the first newspapers to republish some of them (in a highly critical article about them) was the Egyptian newspaper El Fagr -- something which was not condemned locally, much less protested against. El Fagr did what any good news-provider should: give their readers as much information about the matter as possible (even as they roundly condemned the cartoons); meanwhile, in a case that came too late to be included in Malik's book (including, disappointingly, the newer US edition ...) Yale University Press shamefully refused to print the cartoons even in Jytte Klausen's (academic) book about the cartoons, The Cartoons that Shook the World. (Malik has commented on this elsewhere -- including in conjunction with the Index of Censorship's mind-boggling, self-castrating decision not to publish the cartoons to go along with their interview with Jytte Klausen about Yale University Press' decision not print the cartoons in the book -- the ultimate example (to date ...) of what Malik is concerned about.)
       Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a turning- and rallying point; the reactions to it, especially by European governments, suggested that such intemperate actions were a great way to get attention -- and to get one's way. And, as Malik shows, many have continued to play right into the hands of the small but very vociferous extremist minority:

In the twenty years since the fatwa, Western politicians have continued to show greater willingness to lecture Muslims about the importance of liberty, freedom and democracy than to defend such values in practice. Indeed, the responses of Western nations first to the fatwa and subsequently to jihad have helped undermine civil liberties, erode freedom of speech and weaken democracy.

Western liberals had become much more attuned to Islamist sensitivities and less willing to challenge them. They had, in the post-Rushdie world, effectively internalized the fatwa.

Rushdie's critics lost the battle in the sense that they never managed to stop the publication of The Satanic Verses. But they won the war by pounding into the liberal consciousness the belief that to give offence was a morally despicable act.

     In the two decades since the Rushdie affair what has emerged is an auction of victimhood, as every group attempts to outbid all others as the ones feeling most offended.

It is also a morality tale: be careful what you campaign for. The kind of censorship of offensive thought that the anti-Rushdie protestors demanded was the very kind of censorship of offensive thought that imprisoned the anti-cartoon protestors. Restrictions on speech, the aims of which were supposedly to protect the culture and dignity of minority communities, are now exploited to undermine the civil liberties of those very same communities.

     Once political power and financial resources became allocated by ethnicity, then people began to identify themselves in terms of their ethnicity, and only their ethnicity.

     The growth of many contemporary forms of faith, then, whether radical Islam or the Pentecostal Church, marks not a return to traditional religion but a break with it. A traditional Muslim would be as appalled by the rituals of radical Islam as that Catholic worshipper was by the New Age-ishness of charismatic Christianity.

Islam, like all religions, is being reinvented and redefined in order to meet secular, not religious needs

- M.A.Orthofer, 27 June 2010

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Links:

• Atlantic Books publicity page
• Melville House publicity page

• Christian Science Monitor
• City Journal
• Foreign Affairs
• Guernica
• New Humanist
• politics.co.uk
• Tendance Coatesy
• The Washington Post

• Kenan Malik's home page

• Salman Rushdie's own account of the fatwa-years in his memoir, Joseph Anton
• Olivier Roy's Secularism Confronts Islam
• See Index of Law-related books
• See Index of Literary Essays
• See Index of books dealing with Religion

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About the Author:

       British author Kenan Malik was born in 1960.

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© 2010-2022 the complete review

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