The world has reacted angrily to the stabbing incident of the author Salman Rushdie. He was attacked by a young American of Lebanese origin as he was about to give a lecture in western New York on Friday 12 August 2022. He was rushed to hospital with injuries to vital organs and recovering now in a stable condition.
His novel The Satanic Verses led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s.
While the anti-religion narrative has become common in the Western world, it’s essential that we analyse different perspectives of the story.
Salman Rushdie wrote the book “The Satanic Verses” more than 30 years back, which insulted the Prophet of Islam. Except for a brief written statement when the Iranian President suggested that he may be forgiven if he apologised and withdrew his book, he did not show remorse. The book continued to be published and sold in many Western countries.
Salman Rushdie was born and raised in a Muslim family in the conservative Muslim surroundings of Bombay in India. Unlike French satirical cartoonists and others, he knew very well how emotional and sentimental Muslims were about their Prophet.
He knew that if not for Muslims living in the Western world, it would cause unrest in South Asia, and many may get killed during protests. They did, but he continued to show total disregard for his own people.
The British government and its court system, while providing him with the protection and rightly so, following the Fatwa by the Iranian supreme leader, Imam Khomeini, did not allow a fair trial of him in court.
In the UK and most Western countries, the right to religious belief is protected under Human Rights Act 1998, which allows its people the right to profess any religion or belief. Part of any belief system is to have the highest regard for the founders of their religions.
Many religions consider their founders as gods, while in Islam, God is one, but they hold the holy prophet in the highest possible esteem. They love and respect him more than their own parents or any other person ever born on the planet.
It’s part of their religious belief which is protected by International Human Right conventions. If a person engages in insulting, mocking and disgracing the holy prophet or, for that matter, any other religious god, he/she deeply hurts the sentiments of the religious followers.
In the West, such people are not questioned but honoured and protected under the false premise of freedom of speech which is very selective. According to Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the right to speech is subject to certain restrictions, which includes the reputations of others.
Having constructive criticism of a religion or any ideology makes sense however, mocking, abusing and insulting other prophets or gods for the sake of it should fall under this Article.
England’s High Court rejected a Muslim group’s request to prosecute Salman Rushdie and the publishers of his novel ”The Satanic Verses” on charges of blasphemy and seditious libel in 1989. The panel of three judges upheld a lower court ruling not to take legal action against Mr Rushdie and Viking Penguin, the publisher of ”The Satanic Verses.”
London’s Chief Metropolitan Magistrate ruled in March 1989 that England’s blasphemy law applied only to Christianity, not other religions, including Islam. At that time, Muslims were the second largest religious group in Britain. The case was brought by the British Muslim Action Front, an organisation that said it represented Britain’s two million Muslims.
”We have no doubt that as the law now stands, it does not extend to religions other than Christianity,” said Justice Watkins. The judge further added, ”Where the law is clear, it is not the proper function of this court to extend it. Parliament alone can change the law. Even if the courts had such power, extending the blasphemy law to other religions ”would pose insuperable problems and would likely to do more harm than good.”
It sounds so unreasonable to an independent person that the legal system of Britain, the champion of justice, failed to incorporate appropriate law for other religions, which were followed widely in the country. Such exclusive law for Christianity only was clear discrimination against the minorities.
Justice Watkins also dismissed a contention by counsel for the British Muslim Action Front that ”The Satanic Verses” amounted to seditious libel by engendering discontent and hostility and contributing to the breakdown of diplomatic relations between Britain and the Governments of Islamic countries.”
The court said that for seditious libel to be proven, the evidence must show – ”and it did not” – that an attack was made ”against Her Majesty or Her Majesty’s Government or some other institution of the state.”
Obviously, British law placed the Queen above the historical figures who were admired by people around the world. Surely such a law would not be considered just by the global community.
Anthony Lester, the Counsel for Viking Penguin, argued that if Mr Rushdie and his publishers were successfully prosecuted, their rights to freedom of expression and other rights guaranteed by the convention would be violated. It was another silly argument where you would not persecute a person for a grave crime to protect his ill-founded freedom.
Section 5 of Britain’s Public Order act makes it illegal to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour …. likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress thereby.”
However, this law did not seem to apply in this case where an author insults a historical figure admired by hundreds of millions of people and causes distress to them.
The British government is willing to deport Julian Assange to the US for persecution, not giving him the journalistic freedom. Obviously, all conventions and human rights are followed to suit the political agendas of their own while undermining others.
While it’s unfortunate that Salman Rushdie has been attacked, such an incident could have been avoided if the British legal system and Western media would have taken into consideration the religious and humanitarian perspective of faith and sentiments of ordinary people.
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