D

O WE HAVE TO FIGHT THE BATTLE FOR THE  

E

NLIGHTENMENT ALL OVER AGAIN

? 

B

Y 

S

ALMAN 

R

USHDIE

 

D

EMOCRACY IS NOT A TEA PARTY

.

 

I

N THE END

,

 A FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 

HAS TO BE MADE

:

 DO WE WANT TO LIVE IN A FREE SOCIETY OR NOT

? 

22 January 2005

I

was in Washington just before the Iraq war began and was invited to

speak to groups of senators of both parties. The most obvious distinction
between the Democrats and the Republicans was that the Republicans
used exclusively religious language. They discussed why they hadn't
seen each other at a certain prayer meeting. One Senator said to me, in
tones of genuine horror, that what he disliked most about Osama bin
Laden was that he called America a Godless country. He said: "How can
he call us Godless? We're incredibly God-fearing!"

I said: "Well, Senator, I suppose he doesn't think so." But his outrage at
being presented as un-Godly was undeniably sincere. He meant
business. And the increasing power of God-fearing America - of the
Christian coalition, Mel Gibson variety - subsequently determined the
result of last November's presidential election.

Now I come back to Britain and discover another kind of "anschluss" of
liberal values in the face of resurgent religious demands. It seems we
need to fight the battle for the Enlightenment all over again in Europe
too.

That battle was about the church's desire to place limits on thought. The
Enlightenment wasn't a battle against the state but against the church.
Diderot's novel La Religieuse, with its portrayal of nuns and their
behaviour, was deliberately blasphemous: it challenged religious
authority, with its indexes and inquisitions, on what it was possible to
say. Most of our contemporary ideas about freedom of speech and
imagination come from the Enlightenment. We may have thought the
battle won, but if we aren't careful, it is about to be "un-won".

Offence and insult are part of everyday life for everyone in Britain. All
you have to do is open a daily paper and there's plenty to offend. Or you
can walk into the religious books section of a bookshop and discover
you're damned to various kinds of eternal hellfire, which is certainly
insulting, not to say overheated.

The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people
will never be offended or insulted, have the right to call on the law to
defend them against being offended or insulted, is absurd. In the end a
fundamental decision needs to be made: do we want to live in a free
society or not? Democracy is not a tea party where people sit around
making polite conversation. In democracies people get extremely upset
with each other. They argue vehemently against each other's positions.
(But they don't shoot.)

At Cambridge I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never
personalise, but you have absolutely no respect for people's opinions.
You are never rude to the person, but you can be savagely rude about
what the person thinks. That seems to me a crucial distinction: people
must be protected from discrimination by virtue of their race, but you
cannot ring-fence their ideas. The moment you say that any idea system
is sacred, whether it's a belief system or a secular ideology, the moment
you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision,
or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

With their "incitement to religious hatred law", this government has set
out to create that impossibility. Privately they'll tell you the law is
designed to please "the Muslims". But which Muslims, when and on
what day?

The ability of this law to protect "the Muslims" seems to me arguable. It
is entirely possible that instead it will be used against Muslims before it's
used against anyone else. There are identifiable racist and right-wing
groups in this country who would argue that Muslims are the ones
inciting religious hatred, and these groups will use, or try to use, this
law.

There is no question that there also are Muslim leaders who are anxious
to prosecute - for example - The Satanic Verses, and will try to do so if
this law is passed. So this law will unleash some major expressions of
intolerance.

Already rioting Sikhs have forced the closure of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's
play, Behzti, in Birmingham and the government has said nothing to
criticise what was effectively criminal action. Hanif Kureishi made one
of the best comments about all this, when he noted that the theatre was a
temple, too - just as much as the fictional temple in the play. Evangelical

Christians caught on quickly and protested against the BBC's screening
of Jerry Springer. The Opera.

I took issue with the Granta editor Ian Jack when he declared that he
was perfectly happy for the British police to defend Wapping when
print workers were striking, but not the Birmingham theatre from the
offended Sikhs. Forgive me for not seeing the logic of the principle of
"restraint" he invoked. It seems to me to be a liberal failure to say that
even though we don't understand what is upsetting the offended, we
shouldn't upset them. That's condescension. That's saying "you can have
your little religion over there in the corner and we won't fool with you."

What this kind of attitude ultimately does, and what the Government's
law will do, is to undermine a principle of free expression which affects
everyone in this country, religious or not. If we cannot have open
discourse about the ideas by which we live, then we are straitjacketing
ourselves.

It does matter that people have the right to take an argument to the
point where somebody is offended by what they say. It's no trick to
support the free speech of somebody you agree with or to whose
opinion you are indifferent. The defence of free speech begins at the
point when people say something you can't stand. If you can't defend
their right to say it, then you don't believe in free speech. You only
believe in free speech as long as it doesn't get up your nose. But free
speech does get up people's noses. Nietzche - as Matthew Parris recently
reminded us - called Christianity "the one great curse" and "the one
immortal blemish on mankind". Would Nietzsche now be prosecuted?

There is a long tradition of irreverent, raw, and critical remarks about
religion in this country, some by very eminent thinkers, some by our
favourite comedians - like Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder muttering
"Bad weather is God's way of telling us we should burn more Catholics."
Even if the Government doesn't think that such remarks will find their
way into court prosecutions, the very possibility that they might, at the
discretion of the Attorney General, will be enough to bring down the
curtains of self- and corporate censorship.

It will be a sad day if this bad law comes into effect. If it does, we shall
have to break it and have it tested in the courts which one hopes will
recognise its manifest absurdity.

Salman Rushdie is President of American PEN, and a supporter of English

PEN's Free Expression is No Offence campaign

GL