66th IFLA General Conference - Guest Lecture - August 14, 2000, Jerusalem, Israel

Speaking Earnestly about the Rushdie Case

By Arne Ruth
Swedish journalist and visiting professor of journalism at Stockholm University, Sweden.

Mr Arne Ruth was born 1943 in Berlin and came to Sweden 1945 by the Bernadotte Aid. He has studied philosophy, English and political science at Gothenburg University and journalism at the University of South Florida. Ruth has worked at several dailies and Swedish Radio and Television Corporation. In 1977 he became cultural editor at the daily Expressen and in 1988 he became editor-in-chief for culture at the leading liberal daily, "Dagens Nyheter". Mr Ruth left Dagens Nyheter in 1998. Mr Ruth has published works on European culture and politics. He is the author of "Trans Europe Express" with essays on cultural and political trends in Europe and co-author on "Samhället som teater" (Society as Theatre), which analyses the aesthetics of Nazism as a means of social persuasion. During the Balkan wars in the 1990s he was strongly engaged in writing about and supporting cultural activity in solidarity with Sarajevo. Arne Ruth is an internationally well-known advocate for freedom of expression and was the chair of the Swedish Rushdie Committee.

I

Speaking in a city which is the site of David´s kingdom and of the Jewish temple, of the crucifixion of Jesus, and of Muhammed´s ascent to heaven, and where history is relentlessly evoked to fuel support for some particular vision of the future, is deeply symbolic for me. I´m an agnostic, which means that I´m an outsider to all arguments based on religion. Yet, as a secularist, I recognize that art inspired by religion is part of my identity as a human being. You don´t have to be a believer to be inspired by the beauty and mystery of visions of the sacred formed by artists rarely known by name. Jerusalem, regardless of conflicting religious claims, belongs to that universal heritage. Sharing Jerusalem is surely the only way of uniting it. Even as an outsider, I want my part of its universality.

I count on your profession as allies in a never-ending effort: making knowledge, including artistic visions, accessible to every human being as part of a universal heritage.

I don´t have to tell you that such a vision is still utopian. And the Rushdie case, of course, is a case in point. I’ll start by quoting from a British novel, published two years ago, "Fatima’s Scarf", indicative of several aspects of the problems we are now facing in the cultural field. The scene is a public square in Bruddersford, an imaginary English town with a large Muslim population:

"The silence of three thousand tongues is awesome as the satanic book is held aloft by Mustafa Jangar. Intently the all-male crowd observes the fastening, the pinning (as if a wild animal has been trapped), the dousing of fuel - the sudden spurt of flame which brings a vast exhalation from six thousand lungs.... As the flames take hold and the devil’s oily smoke rises from the blackening pages, so the breath of the crowd grows hotter. God is great, Allah akhbar!"

Does this ring a bell? In the early nineties, a novel was burned by militant British Muslims in Bradford, a real town in the north of England, as part of an ideological battle started by a dictator proclaiming to have a direct line of communcation to heaven. Through a strange sequence of events, its author was projected onto the world stage, seemingly drawn into the centre of a "clash of civilizations", described as inevitable by a political scientist-turned-apocalyst, Samuel P. Huntington.

The author of "Fatima’s Scarf", former literary editor of the New Statesman, David Caute, makes no bones about the fact that he’s written a satirical roman à clef . "The Satanic Verses" is reinvented as "The Devil: An Interview" in his novel, and elements of the plot clearly link the main character, the Egyptian-born author Gamal Hamel, to the real-life Salman Rushdie. In both cases, books are burnt, a fatwa is delivered, and the author goes into hiding. Gamal Hamel has a vision of himself as a writer-turned-superstar. His conceited, talented and provocative presence dances in and out of the plot.

The title is taken from another character, a troubled, anorectic fifteen-year-old schoolgirl staging her own protest against the book by wearing a Muslim headscarf, a hijab, in defiance of her school’s regulations. Symbolically, this is central to Caute’s perspective: the paradox that an act of aquiescence to the norms of a minority culture, performed in support of the banning and burning of a novel, could also be regarded as a liberating manifestation of protest against a brand of racism masquerading as emancipation.

And in a strange way, by satirizing the hypocrisy of Western liberal permissiveness, Fatima’s Scarf unintentionally presages its own publishing fate. According to the accompanying publicity material, this book is "the novel no British publisher would print". Twenty-five publishing houses turned it down, and Caute had to publish it himself.

That seems to be only the tip of the iceberg. British writer Jenny Taylor has made a study of unofficial censorship affecting books dealing with Islam. It is doubly depressing: tacit submission to religious pressure on the part of publishing houses and university departments, and no public outcry over their lack of commitment to the principles of open discussion.

I’ll make no bones about my own position on the issues raised by Fatima’s Scarf, both by its content and its fate. I’ve been chairman of the Swedish Rushdie Committee until all the committees were dissolved in late 1998. Symbolically, I’m among the targets of David Caute’s satire: a member of the smug liberal-establishment circle trying to elevate its status by appearing morally committed while neglecting the concerns of a downtrodden minority.

Yet, I´m perfectly willing to readFatima’s Scarf as a novel of the times. It deals with a hidden malaise in late twentieth century democracies: the idea of emancipation turning in on itself. Its fate in the publishing industry proves the relevance of its subject. The Enlightenment has begun to vacillate and its liberation perspective to dim.

Part of that is the result of social changes in the Western world. Increasingly, traditional material motivations intermingle with newly formed ethical, religious and aesthetic attitudes connected to differences in sex, ethnicity, age and social appearance – all of them far less stable than ideologies based on the class divisions of the traditional industrial society. Especially in the Nordic countries, the emergence of a spectrum of minority positions, only partially connected with the normal political process, is a confusing new phenomenon. The logic of social and political behaviour based on the idea of similar motivations is becoming more and more nebolous. These changes are now very influential in defining the aesthetic field.

The number of styles seems to be constantly increasing, innovation and relinquishment appearing almost simultaneously. Even the most dominant of the post-religious mythologies has evaporated: the sense of historical progression. Punks and skinheads spotlighted the social phenomenon of reconstituting the loss of conventional identity by a provoking personal style. Their attitudes were poles apart, but they shared the method of aesthetic invention. Styles within the youth culture arise on the spur of the moment, changing and disappearing in ways that cannot be anticipated. Their network spans the world, regardless of distance. And the inventions very often become the rallying cry of some part of the fashion industry, rapidly destroying any challenge originally present. Commercially, even the middle class has been infected by the lifestyle germ. In this entire field, confusion is surely the only stable tendency.

What has been lost in this muddle is the core of the modernist project: the idea of creating art of universal significance. If aesthetics is nothing more than a myriad of personal identity characteristics, the concept of guarding its free development becomes irrelevant.

Commercial art, now increasingly handled by globally based multimedia empires, has no problem about being defined in strictly instrumental terms. André Schiffrin, the American publisher who left the once legendary Pantheon Books when Random House, the new owners, requested a very high profit level as the set basis of operations, has told an illuminating story. In 1997, he lunched with the New York editor of Playboy Magazine. They discussed the success of Playboy ventures in Communist China. The "bunny", Playboy´s visual image, was now a marker on a range of products from T-shirts to condoms. Of course, the editor told Schiffrin, in order to develop the market, Playboy would be very careful not to offend Beijing´s old men. Sure enough, a week after their lunch, Playboy cancelled a contract to print an excerpt from author Paul Theroux´ outspoken book about Hongkong.

Rupert Murdoch´s infamous decision not to broadcast BBC on his Chinese cable televison network and the extravagant launching of an unreadable book by Deng Xiaoping´s daughter by his American publishing house Bantam Books - a hundred thousand dollars were invested to bring her to the United States - prove the dangers of book publishing becoming part of global media empires. Controlling the market also means reducing choice. The mechanism of Retail Display Allowance, the money paid by American publishers in order to have their presumptive bestsellers prominently exposed by giant book-store chains like Barnes & Noble, effectively eliminates the chances of readers choosing from a large range of titles. André Schiffrin´s new publishing house, The Free Press, continues to publish translations of high quality world literature. On average, Barnes & Noble, with approximately 1000 stores, used to order 300 copies and sell about one tenth. When Schiffrin publicly pointed to this absurd situation, Barnes & Noble stopped ordering his line of books altogether.

They also blocked the sale of The Satanic Verses for a while after the fatwa was issued, ostensibly to guard employees and customers (two more U.S. book chains did the same). And in Europe, several publishing houses bowed to pressure. The worst case is Kiepenheuer & Witsch in Cologne, Rushdie´s traditional German publisher. When the German edition finally emerged, it was the result of a collective author´s publishing effort, led by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass.

William Nygaard, director of the Aschehoug publishing house in Oslo, is a model contrasting case. A fortnight after the fatwa, he was publicly threatened, following a mass demonstration by militant Muslims on the streets of Oslo (Norway has a large Pakistani community). His home, office and staff were placed under police surveillance after continued threats. Yet, within two months, Aschehoug launched The Satanic Verses in Norwegian translation, six weeks ahead of schedule. When the book was launched, two Norwegian bookstores were set on fire and a third received a bomb threat. Muslim organizations in Norway then brought the matter to court, using a blasphemy paragraph still to be found in in the Norwegian constitution. The matter was dismissed by a civil court two and a half years later. In the meantime, a year after the fatwa, Aschehoug had published the first paperback edition in the world (U.S. readers had to wait another year and British readers three more years for their paperback editions). In 1993, Nygaard narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. He never bowed one inch in his support for his threatened author.

Viewed against the wider tendencies in the publishing world, Nygaard seems to represent a threatened species. He acts in accordance with a very special tradition: regarding literary innovation as the core element of his trade, to be guarded against both political and commercial pressures. And the second kind of threat may be more insidious than the first one, beacuse it´s rarely admitted.

One of the short stories in Salman Rushdie’s collection, East/West, deals with the relationship between finance and serious art in the late 20th century, in East and West alike. It tells how the magic of the fairy-tale is transformed into a financial product and thereby loses its power to liberate. A pair of red slippers are to be sold at an auction in New York. They possess a magical power straight out of The Arabian Nights. Whoever wears them can be whisked home in an instant. But the slippers have long been inaccessible except as an investment for the super-rich. They are forever locked away behind glass and armour plating. The magic of the fairy-tale is transformed into a commercial product and thereby loses its power to liberate.

This story is a striking metaphor for present-day commercial realities. According to Souren Melikian, arts correspondent for the International Herald Tribune, the targeting of paintings and art objects by investors, including funds, means that traditional connoisseurs are being driven out of the market. Objects are rarely bought out of desire, and handling them has nothing to do with estimating their quality. In Melikian’s words: "The consequences for the living culture are incalculable. Whether the talk is about paintings, sculpture or objects, a certain form of intimate acquaintance with the art that can only develop from tracking objects and assessing them out of personal desire is vanishing (_) The end of spontaneous collecting is not just sapping the foundations of traditional connoisseurship. It will alter the relationship of those brought up within Western culture to the heritage of the past, which will seem infinitely more remote."

This pessimistic message has been pointedly illustrated by a surrealistic train of events culminating in Japan last year.

In the spring of 1990, at the peak of the art market boom, Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet was sold to a Japanese paper magnate by the name of Ruoei Saito, then 75 years old. He paid a cool 82.5 million dollars, which is still a record for any work of art.

Mr. Saito passed away in 1996. Before he died, he made a public statement declaring that he wanted the canvas to be cremated with him. On hearing this, a representative of Amsterdam’s van Gogh museum, while conceding that there was no legal way of blocking the wish of the owner, appealed to Mr. Saito’s conscience, declaring that "a work of art remains the possession of the world at large, even if you have paid for it".

Mr. Saito’s creditors were probably more narrow-minded in their definition of the matter, but they decided to keep the asset to safeguard their interests. The canvas was left in the warehouse where it had been kept wrapped in cotton ever since Mr Saito bought it. It had, of course, been purchased as an investment, not for display.

A year ago, however, while dozing to the BBC World Service’s morning news bulletin, I heard an item that brought me instantly awake. The BBC reported that the painting had apparently disappeared, and there was now speculation that the inheritors might, after all, have followed the wish of the deceased.

Luckily, this proved unfounded. A few days later, it turned out that Dr. Gachet is alive and well. And it’s not the first time that he has been resurrected. The former Wall Street Journal reporter Cynthia Saltzman has traced the painting’s history in a book named after it. In 1933 it was, it seems, owned by Frankfurt’s Städtische Gallerie, and the directors hid it in the museum attic to save it from being burned by Nazi leaders. Eventually, Göring got hold of it and used it to fund his collection of tapestries. It was sold in Amsterdam in 1938 for what at the time was a staggering sum of 53,000 dollars, and it finally escaped to the United States with the new owner, Jewish financier Siegfried Kramarsky. It was his heirs who sold the work to Mr. Saito at Christie’s 1990 auction.

Had the news of the final destruction of the painting proved correct, I would have had second thoughts about my general revulsion to harsh punishment. My desire for revenge, however, would have been in vain. The destruction of art works should have been on the list of the Nazi leaders’ crimes against humanity. Morally, they are. But capitalism is a different matter. Owners may do whatever they like with their legal possessions, with the very limited exception of the buildings classed as belonging to a common heritage.

On the national level, pride and shame would block the kind of arrogance shown by Mr. Saito. A Dutch or Flemish financier might think twice before declaring that he wants to bring a van Gogh painting with him into heaven. To me, the problems inherent in globalization do not lie in the process as such. The interlinking of the economies of the world is an inevitable process, driven onwards by the technological leap of electronic communication which we are all benefiting from. The real danger is the reductionism used to legitimize the emerging global power constellations.

The logic of accumulation inherent in the dominant school of economics has no ethical basis except existing legal formalities, varying from country to country. The ideology presently defining the rules of the game says that only the market can judge the true value of anything, including art.

I have this on the best authority. Deirdre McCloskey is an American economist deeply indebted to the so-called neoclassical Chicago School, the founding institution of the economic approach that presently holds sway in the world. She has, however, recently changed her position. In a brilliant essay, Missing Ethics in Economy, she makes the following observation of her former line of thought: "In policy questions the ethical position that economics recommends is that of the social engineer, who provides plans indifferently for full employment or extermination camps. The social engineer will protest that he would have nothing to do with extermination camps. But then he must ask where he draws the line, an ethical deliberation that economists are reluctant to undertake." McCloskey makes a strong case for reviving the original bourgeois virtues, enlightenment ideals of discussion, openness and fairness far beyond the reduction of every decision to market procedures.

McCloskey is one of several economists who have started to confront the orthodoxies presently held by our establishment as eternal truths. The role of culture in relation to the economy is a crucial aspect of this way of thinking. I got an inkling of what’s going on by staying in Amsterdam for three weeks last August. Arjo Klammer is the world’s only Professor of the Economy of Art and Culture, holding this chair at Amsterdam University. And he seems to be a driving force in a concerted effort to remove the arts from the present grip of reductionists.

Klammer has published an anthology on this entitled The Value of Culture - On the relationship between economics and the arts, where, among others, McCloskey’s essay can be found. The cover is fittingly covered by Van Gogh´s Portrait of Dr. Gachet.

Klammer´s book introduced me to one of the most interesting attempts recently made to define the interaction between the material and creative aspects of aesthetic innovation. Drawing, among others, on Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s theory of human play, outlined in his book Homo Ludens from 1938, the German economist Michael Hutter points out that economic activities can be regarded as a game, given meaning and structure by a general compliance with a firm set of rules. The apparent objectivity of the game is ended whenever a crucial element ceases to function. Money is such an element. The inflation present in the Weimar Republic meant that regardless of what may have been printed on the banknotes, people had to learn bartering in a pre-capitalist fashion. This predicament has reappeared in present-day Russia.

The arts are a different sort of game, very much what Huizinga defined as the essence of play. Huizinga suggested a number of basic criteria for a game: it should be unnecessary and thus involve free action; it should be outside of ordinary life; it should involve the instant gratification of needs and desires; and it should be closed and limited, running its course and thus having a meaning in itself, but also embodying rules for its actual execution; and it should contain an element of tension and chance.

Truly innovative art, the aesthetic discoveries which might eventually influence the commercial sector as well, have to be based on a different set of criteria than market expectations. It should be regarded as a game in which a sense of quality is generated among those taking part. And they have to be risk-takers. The innovative artist puts his or her career on the line in developing specific artistic forms, which means changing established rules. Obviously, this process is never totally independent. If the artist is to reach an audience, market forces, benefactors and/or authorities will have to be involved. But the crucial question is to what extent the Homo Ludens definition of the act of creating can be supported by social institutions.

The orthodoxies which lack concern for posterity - the Saito type of attitude - and are now eliminating playfulness in the arts field will have to be combated with the kind of energy shown over the past forty years by those involved in the environment movement. A new, heretical way of thinking among economists is probably a sign that a seemingly impermeable structure of thought is beginning to crack.

In my opinion, the concept of universality has to be rediscovered It is closely linked to quality. And there is no other way of judging the significance of a work of art than making it the subject of public discussion. This has been a major element in advancing artistic freedom in the after-war period. Media conventions, however, work against serious reflection on such issues once the controversies spread beyond the national realm.

II

The Rushdie case is a vivid illustration of the failure of international media to come to grips with occurrences that defy classification in traditional news terms. CNN-style television creates and destroys events on a minute by minute basis. Its shroud of objectivity is based on the assumption of immediacy, instantly leaving behind what was last reported and leaving the audience with little chance to check the records. The quality dailies, once the main coordinators of the public agenda, cannot escape the same predicament. The ever-narrowing time frame of TV-dominated news increasingly leave hindsight and analysis out of the picture. Rushdie was an early victim of this game.

When he had evaded the death threat for a thousand days, he described his predicament in a tongue-in-cheek essay entitled A Thousand Days in a Balloon. He was, of course, living underground, constantly forced to move from place to place. At the same time, he felt suspended high above reality, unprotected and constantly under scrutiny.

Rushdie the human being and author had vanished from sight. What remained was a symbolic figure by the same name, saint to some, devil to others, protagonist in a global drama.

The first time he broke his isolation, on 12 December 1991, his imprisonment had lasted for one thousand and thirty-two days. Rushdie turned up in New York, and addressed the students at the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Bill of Rights.

For this particular audience, he extended the metaphor of his life one more step in the direction of playful absurdity: the balloon that had kept him shut away had actually been a soap bubble. Now he was bursting the bubble, stepping forward anew as a visible figure, an author with a tongue-in-cheek attitude to his strengths and weaknesses who refused to play the part of the living legend.

In November the following year, Rushdie visited Stockholm and received Swedish PEN´s Kurt Tucholsky award for exiled authors from Bengt Westerberg, deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party. At the award ceremony, Rushdie wore a button portraying Franz Kafka. When I asked him what it stood for, he replied that he had always regarded Kafka as the greatest humorist of them all. Laughter, he said, deserves to be taken seriously.

Two and a half year later, in 1995, nothing about the terms of Rushdie´s imprisonment had changed. But his laughter bubbled up just as readily. Salman transformed a May evening in Copenhagen to a surrealistic happening, making members of the Rushdie Committees let go, as if we had been fifth graders on a school outing.

We rode the big dipper at the Tivoli fairground, yelling in unison on the bends and the steep inclines. It was a giddy, hair-raising experience. The glow of the coloured lights made the early summer twilight magical. The air was mild and saturated with the the scent of flowers.

Salman was at the centre of the party. He whooped louder than anyone as the dipper rushed down from the heights, crashed his dodgem head-on into all and sundry, wearing a fiendish grin, and took his seat in the big wheel with an utterly infectuous smile of delight. For once, we were all able to laugh at ourselves. Giving ourselves up to play we were totally in the present.

Security was governed by Danish pragmatism. The bodyguards allowed us to improvise in our enjoyment of the place´s attractions. They themselves remained discreetly in the background. Anyone not in the know would never have guessed their true role.

This was eminently human. Who would have expected to bump into Salman Rushdie in a dodgem car at the Copenhagen Tivoli? It did not matter particularly if someone recognized him - the important thing was whether people knew in advance when and where he would be popping up. Salman enjoyed three hours leave from the prison of the fatwa.

The following day, we were to meet with three Danish ministers who it was hoped would be willing to plead his cause with the EU as part of the new strategy. His liberation was still nothing more than a distant ray of hope.

As the big dipper slowed to a halt on that evening in Copenhagen, Carmel Bedford - coordinator of the international campaign - turned and whispered in my ear: "This is a bit like our struggle against the fatwa. Twists and turns that noone can foresee. A long slow haul and then everything happens at lightning speed. And suddenly we´re back where we started."

Neither she nor anyone else could have known that, though beset with unpredictable developments, the campaign was about to turn a corner. It would take another 760 days before the Joint Rushdie Defence Committees could issue their final statement. We met at the Voksenåsen Conference Centre in Oslo, run by the Swedish Ministry of Culture. After consultation with Salman on the phone, we agreed to dissolve the network.

Three weeks earlier, on 25 September1998, I had watched a smiling Salman Rushdie raise his fist in front of more than a hundred journalists and photographers at the ARTICLE 19 offices in Islington High Street in London. It was a gesture of victory but also of defiance. During two chaotic and exuberant hours facing the media he redefined the terms of his existence. The room was packed, but the only guards in sight were the two police officers positioned at the entrance. Symbolically, Salman defused the impact of the fatwa. Having been very much present as a writer during the fatwa decade, he now reappeared in person.

The day before, Iranian Foreign Minister Dr Kamal Kharazzi and his British counterpart Robin Cook had adressed a press conference at the UN General Assembly in New York. In an official declaration, issued jointly with a statement by the British government, Dr Kharazzi promised that the Iranian government had "no intention nor is going to take any action whatsoever to threaten the life of the author of The Satanic Verses or anybody associated with his work."

The International Rushdie Defence Committee had been formed in London a week after the fatwa, since then using the ARTICLE 19 offices as its campaign centre. In 1992, the Norwegians had started the process of forming nationally based committees. Now, in our final statement, we told the world that "the aims of the campaign had been fulfilled".

We all realized that taking this position was a gamble. It was the end result of a redefinition of the conflict that had increasingly influenced our strategy from1994 onwards. Rather than focusing on the fatwa as a religious edict, we had targeted its political implications. Expert consultants from the Muslim world had told us that we could possibly force the Iranian government into issuing a political declaration that it would abstain from implementing the fatwa, but we would never succeed in making it formally revoke it in religious terms. It is normal Islamic practice to let the power of a religious edict dissipate over time. By settling the issue politically we could start to deescalate the symbolic confrontation and hope that the religious malediction would fade.

In 1997, Benoît Mély, a member of the French Rushdie Committee, drew our attention to a book recently published in France, La fatwa contre Rushdie, by Ramine Kamrane, an Iranian-born political scientist at Paris University. Distinguishing between the theological, political and strategic aspects of Khomeini´s thinking, Kamrane claimed that it had been a major mistake in the Western world to accept religious terms as the defining elements in the conflict. Rather than relating the fatwa and the ensuing acts of violence against the Italian and the Japanese translators of The Satanic Verses and its Norwegian publisher William Nygaard to the theology of Khomeini, we should see it as a result of his concept of state.

In Kamrane´s view, Khomeini´s "sacralization of the game"should be viewed as traditional political power play using unconventional means. The Iranians could argue that the conflict emanated from an attack on Islamic sacred values, incomprehensible to any outsider, rather than from a position taken by a totalitarian government using religion to legitimize its hold on power. As a result, the defence of Rushdie and the principle of freedom of expression was deadlocked into an issue where arguments based on international law could be dismissed as irrelevant by the Iranians. And many Western intellectuals fell into the trap of seeking to solve the conflict by means of dialogue with supporters of the fatwa, in the false hope of some kind of compromise eventually emerging.

In Khomeini´s political theory, the power to govern rests on a direct relationship with divinity, making religious authority the only legitimate source of leadership. According to Kamrane, it is a mistake to view this as a traditional Islamic concept. Rather, Khomeini´s political theory mirrors traditions of Western Enlightenment while claiming to represent their opposite. In its acceptance of formal elements of modern constitutionalism, like the establishment of a representative parliament, while at the same time leaving the ultimate political decisionmaking to a religious leadership, including the choice of who is allowed to enter the political arena, it should be viewed as a declaration of war on secularization as an aspect of modernity.

The campaign eventually left the sacralized version of the conflict to one side, accepting only secular terms of argument as relevant to a political solution. While the Thatcher government vacillated by half applying the concept of a sacred religious space, the Norwegian government initiated the political change at state level in 1992 by allowing government ministers to meet Rushdie and, through diplomatic channels, by consistently opposing the fatwa with arguments based solely on international law. In Britain, the Blair government eventually made this approach the core of the British position. In doing so, it finally forced the Iranians into formally recognizing the secular element of the conflict, while symbolically preserving the purely religious definition.

In political terms, the leadership of a theocratic state had finally been forced to accede to international rules, no longer able to use a different concept of universality, the binding force of religion, as its source of legitimacy in foreign relations.

The fact that this meant a distancing of the political sphere from religious prescriptions was noted in Iran as well. Three weeks after the declaration by the Foreign Ministers the Union of Hezbollah Students, a leading bastion of orthodoxy in Iran, issued a statement defining the British-Iranian declaration as an illegitimate separation of religion and politics, causing "deep regret and sorrow among Iranians and all the Muslim world". The Hezbollah Students accused the Khatami government of overstepping a crucial boundary, taking a decision which "belongs exclusively" to the spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who, it was declared, "hasn´t retreated a single step from (the late) Ayatollah Khomeini´s decree".

This position may enjoy support in parts of the Iranian power structure. But in formal terms, it seems to be based on an illusion. Ayatollah Khamenei´s total silence on the matter indicates that the separation of religion and politics in relation to the fatwa has been acceded to by Khomeini´s successor. If this situation holds - and it has now done so for almost two years - it seems to indicate a fundamental change in the Iranian definition of state and religion. In their recently published book Iran: comment sortir d´une révolution religieuse, islamologist Olivier Roy and political scientist Fahrad Koshrokavi interpret the official statement as a definite sign of the emergence of an autonomous political sphere in Iran.

Looking back now at our playful excursion with Salman to the Copenhagen Tivoli, we in fact, without realizing it, had started to reduce the impact of the fatwa. We claimed the right to have fun regardless of the weight of authority. Play and fiction are two related ways of using the imagination. Throughout history, they have been anathema to monolithic structures.

III

One day before the campaign ended, on 18 October 1998, the Rushdie Committees hosted a seminar entitled "The Fatwa Decade - an Acid Test of Universal Values" at the Voksenåsen Cultural Centre in Oslo, established as a gift from the Norwegian government to the people of Sweden in recognition of Swedish support during the years of occupation.

Among the speakers at the seminar were the German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger - who, as I stated earlier, was instrumental in launching a collectively backed German edition of The Satanic Verses when Rushdie´s publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch backed down in 1989 - the Syrian philosopher Sadik Al-Azm, the Iranian author Faraj Sarkoohi, now in German exile, and the Iranian literary scholar Haideh Daragahi, living in Sweden and a consultant to the Swedish Rushdie Committee. The playful role of literature as a universal value regardless of national borders and religious and ethnic differences figured prominently in the discussions.

Throughout the fatwa decade, starting in his 1990 essay The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie, Al-Azm held that the main reason why The Satanic Verses caused such violent reactions was its literary sophistication in treating its theme. Al-Azm reminds us that James Joyce’s Ulysses was prosecuted for blasphemy, obscenity and subversion, and was banned in the United States until 1933, and in Britain until 1936. He makes the case for a universal definition of aesthetic modernism as an integral part of the Enlightenment project.

By using religious mythology as elements in a powerful piece of fiction, appropriating a canonical Muslim story for his own creative, artistic and literary purposes, Rushdie started a process of literary emancipation in the Muslim world. He pointed to a door opened a century ago by literary modernists in the West, but up until now largely inaccessible in Muslim countries. In Al-Azm´s view, this modernist avenue will never be closed again, regardless of the fatwa.

Authors with a Muslim background will, inspired by Rushdie and without asking for permission, use the history and symbols of Islam as fictional ingredients, as Western authors have done for centuries, many of them prosecuted until recently. The Finnish author Hannu Salama´s novel The Midsummer Dance was banned for blasphemy and sentenced to be burned by Finland´s Supreme Court as late as 1968 It was released only by a special decision from Finland´s president Kekkonen.

Haideh Daragahi offered an argument related to Al Azm´s perspective in another essay written in 1990, Reclaiming The Satanic Verses as Literature. In her view, The Satanic Verses can be read as a configuration of the process by which humans are faced with "the knowledge that truth is not unitary and eternal, but time-bound and contentious within itself - the truth not of religions, but of art." Since every reader will interpret it differently, a work of fiction is an invented vision which can never pretend to be anything but transient. By establishing fiction as an alternative method of interpretation, authors raise the perspective that even sacred books can be read as invented visions of human existence, created collectively at specific points in history. This quality of transience makes sophisticated literature anathema to authorities that base their power on singular interpretations of religious texts.

At one point in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie deals jokingly (and presciently) with the risks involved in using religous mythology in a work of art. The actor Gibreel Farishta, who has miraculously recovered from a fatal disease, is to appear in another Indian "theological" film, this time exploiting core ingredients of a sacred text. The two producers involved try to assess the risks:

"It would be set in an imaginary and fabulous city made of sand, and would recount the story of the encounter between a prophet and an archangel; also the temptation of the prophet, and his choice of the path of purity and not that of base compromise...It is a film...about how newness enters the world. But would it not be seen as blasphemous, a crime against...-´Certainly not,´...´Fiction is fiction; facts are facts."

The idea of creating a work of art defined according to its inner laws means taking all sorts of risks. When Hannu Salama made his speech of defense at the mid-sixties Helsinki trial, he defined the core of this position: that art should be judged in relation to its inner qualities.

" As I see it, the outcome of any creative process leading to a work of art is by no means dependent on whatever my intentions may have been when I took up my pen, but on what that work of art – which pursues its own course – may require in order to assume the shape demanded by my sense of form and my capabilities, a shape from which the slightest deviation in one direction or another would necessitate changes in other parts of the work as well. In my personal opinion, I managed to write a work that corresponded to the demands placed on it by my sense of form. The fact that this work may not be of the highest quality is not due to any lowering of artistic standards on my part, for instance by interrupting the narrative to give free play to any blasphemous motives I may have had, but to my limitations as a human being."

Salman Rushdie has made exactly the same point: "you have the sense that the universe is writing your book. The idea of pragmatism simply doesn´t feature on the scale of what you are doing." He stated this in reference to his latest experience of the consequences of practising artistic freedom. Amongst other things, his novel The Moor´s Last Sigh has caused one of India’s most colorful political entrepreneurs – a man who has established mafia rule in Bombay by playing the xenophobia card – to explode in fury at what he views as a malicious portrait of himself in the novel (nowadays, it is hard to get hold of it in the very city where its main events are set).

Rushdie has said that he took the trouble to make the character as unlike this Mr Thackeray as possible. To make absolutely sure that no-one should take the satire seriously, he chose to make the character an impassioned lover of cricket. He could not imagine anything that might be further from Mr Thackeray’s domain. But it was precisely this that infuriated Bombay’s mafia boss more than anything else. Rushdie, verily a man of sound literary instincts, had unwittingly hit him where it hurts most. Cricket, it turned out, was Mr Thackeray’s secret passion.

This illustrates very clearly what is so special about the imaginative talents of a truly gifted author. Without realizing it in advance, he touches the most sensitive spots in contemporary life. In Europe, only a handful of people know who Mr Thackeray is. And – outside Britain and Ireland and possibly Malta – who cares about cricket on our continent? But we read the portrait of Mr Raman Fielding in the novel as an intimate study of the archetypal villain; and we shudder at the thought of what can happen when politics becomes a business approach using the exploitation of prejudice as its marketing concept.

Conventional British wisdom holds that Rushdie was driven to challenge fate by arrogance and hubris rather than by artistic vision (a suggestion made by thriller writer John le Carré in 1997). Public comment in Britain has had an accusatory undertone, even from the lips of supposedly radical intellectuals. To me, however, Rushdie´s main problem seems to be that he has mastered the British style of writing better than most natives. He can be mistaken for an insider. This makes him an even more dangerous outsider. The general lack of support for his case from the English literary elite and the revulsion among Britons with a nostalgic feeling for the Empire, like Mrs Thatcher, seem to prove my point.

Imagine for a moment that a thoroughly British author like Graham Greene or William Golding had suffered the same kind of fate as Rushdie. I supect that this would have been ranked a national disaster. From this perspective, the attempted satire of David Caute´s novel Fatima´s Scarf - the one I referred to at the beginning of this lecture - turns in on itself.

Sadik Al-Azm´s choice of title for his essay on the Rushdie affair, The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie, should be viewed against this background. By using the title of an Oscar Wilde play as a metaphor for Western double standards, Al-Azm points to the potentially liberating role of the outsider among us.

To understand his point, one should look at Wilde's Christian names: Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills, born and raised in Dublin.

His mother, Jane, who used the pen-name 'Speranza' (from the world of Dante, her idol), set the tone and pointed the way. She defied all imaginable conventions, including the golden rule that the English were divinely entitled to Ireland.

Wilde the Irishman was the very incarnation of the artist as heretical outsider. His true crime was to have outshone every native Englishman in the art of being English. He so mastered the social conventions that he could make them appear ridiculous. He raised the mannered chatter of the English upper classes to the level of near-absurdity. By seeming to focus on the surface plot, he made his real theme society's double standards. The ruling classes constantly tempt fate by flouting their own conventions. Time and again, Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest reiterates her inflexible system of rules, only to violate it in the next instant. To make life endurable, Algernon and Jack use double identities. And Gwendolyn and Cecily raise superficiality to new heights by refusing to marry anyone who is not called Ernest.

The Irish had been denied access to their own language. They avenged this by cultivating sarcasms about the "mother country" and using the English language as dynamite. Swift, a Dubliner by birth, had set the satirical tone back in the 18th century.

Wilde and Yeats and Joyce and Beckett all belong to this community of outsiders. In time, the circle has widened. The quarter of the world that the British suppressed is now exacting its tribute from the suppressor. Talented writers from the former colonies are ridiculing the conventions in the same way as their Irish predecessors did. Like Wilde, Salman Rushdie is an immigrant who has mastered the English style better than the natives. That is why a satire like The Satanic Verses scourges Thatcher's and Major's Britain at least as hard as Khomeini's Iran.

The heart of the paradox lies in the language and the diction. Rushdie attended Eton and Cambridge and assimilated the tone of the upper classes. Wilde arrived at Oxford as a 21-year-old and rapidly suppressed his Dublin accent. And he absorbed the style so totally that with his extravagant flourishes in both language and dress he was able to provoke the fury of "real" Englishmen. His appearance and behaviour constituted a permanent satire on the circles to which he belonged, including the shadow world of the homosexuals.

But there was also a more profound reason for playing the dandy. During his years in Oxford, he perpetually ridiculed the university's religious rituals. At an exam where he had said something particularly offensive he was ordered by way of punishment to do an impromptu translation of the story of Judas and the thirty pieces of silver from the Greek. He accomplished the task with such panache that the professor wanted to let him go after only a couple of verses. "Hush, hush," replied Wilde, "let us continue so that we may know what befalls the poor fellow".

To treat the Bible as a fascinatingbook of stories rather than god-given truth, as Wilde did, bordered on blasphemy. But Wilde stood his ground to the end. In De Profundis, the long, harrowing letter he wrote from prison to his former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, there is a passage about how he views Christ. Whether or not this saviour figure was holy was unimportant. Christ was above all a pioneer of artistic freedom, a free man in all things who would not let his actions be governed by any conventions whatsoever. And in his remarkable essay, The Soul of Man under Socialism, in which he rejected the idea of the right of ownership as a basis for society — an extremely provocative position to take in England in those days — Wilde advocated the right of the free development of the individual irrespective of class. The goal of history was to make the artistic freedom that Christ had been the first to achieve available to all.

In the same way, Rushdie provoked the fatwa by describing the prophet Muhammed as a free-thinker struggling with all the paradoxes of human existence. It was no almighty god who determined his worth but his own actions. The lives of both Christ and Muhammed gave rise to narratives that defined historical eras.

Most of us Europeans had forgotten the controversies over blasphemy in our own history and thus were utterly surprised when the Rushdie case came along. But there is a distance netween myth and reality when it comes to real freedom of the arts. Right now, there is a battle going on not only in Egypt - where the Syrian author Haydar Haydar has been accused of insulting the Prophet Mohamed with his novel A Banquet for Seaweed - but in Greece as well (the fact that a number of prominent Egyptian intellectuals have taken a strong stand in support of Haydar proves the relevance of Al-Azm´s perspectrve). The novel M to Nth Degree, by Greek former left-wing MP Mimis Androulakis, has been banned by a local court.

In 1993, the European Court of Human Rights upheld a decision made seven years earlier by an Austrian court to stop the film "Das Liebeskonzil" ("The Council of Love). The original judgment clearly reveals a religious bias: "The public projection...of ´Das Liebeskonzil’, in which God the Father is presented both in image and in text as a senile, impotent idiot, Christ as a cretin and Mary Mother of God as a wanton lady with a corresponding manner of expression_came within the definition of the criminal offence of disparaging religious precepts as laid down in section 188 of the Penal Code."

There is an historic irony in the fact that such a decision has been upheld at the European level. The film is based on a play by the Bavarian author Oscar Panizza, a rediscovered turn-of-the-century modernist who made religious and political hypocrisy his main target. In Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, he found no lack of inspiration. His play was banned by a Munich court in 1895, and Panizza was sentenced to a year in prison for blasphemy. In the Austrian film version, the director Werner Schroeter used a performance of the play by Teatro Belli in Rome as a basis and set it in the context of a reconstruction of the writer´s trial.

The fact that the court’s decision passed almost unnoticed shows the lack of a European perspective on such issues. In support of its ruling, the European Court applied the principle of giving national definitions of human rights a certain latitude, regardless of the symbolic implications of upholding outright censorship at a European level. In the case of blasphemy, this increases the danger of a broader definition in the future. As long as the act of satirizing Christian symbols can be regarded as an offence, there is no valid argument against giving other religions the same kind of protection. The U.S. Supreme Court provided a classic explanation of why this trap must be avoided in its 1952 decision to free Roberto Rosselini’s film "The Miracle" for showing in the United States:

As long as the act of satirizing Christian symbols can be regarded as an offence in a European country, there is no valid argument against giving other religions the same kind of protection. The U.S. Supreme Court provided a classic explanation of why this trap must be avoided in its 1952 decision to free Roberto Rosselini’s film The Miracle for showing in the United States:

In this respect, The United States is more deeply modern than Europe, despite the fact that religious attitudes there are more closely related to politics. The Supreme Court decision was influenced by the fact that to be an American also means to be a member of a minority. European Nation States were largely shaped by a concept of homogeneity, often both in terms of ethnicity and religion. But we have now reached a stage where parts of the American experience are relevant in defining European social and cultural issues.

In his essay, Is Nothing Sacred? about images of divinity as at once inhibiting and liberating metaphors - published soon after the Fatwa - Rushdie writes:

"Literature is the one place in in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, rteaders and writers and citizens and generals and godmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary."

The essence of modernism in the arts is really a redefinition of the idea of a sacred space. And it’s exactly this aspect which fuels the anger of religious powerholders, fearing the emergence of an inevitable plurality, incompleteness and contradictoriness in modern interpretations of the human condition.

In Salman Rushdie´s book for children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written for his son while the Fatwa kept them separated, the boy asks his father: "What´s the use of stories that aren´t even true?" The best answer to that question lies in the act of creation, which doesn´t end with the writer, but includes the reader as well. Utopia still rests where it has always been found – in people’s imaginations and powers of creativity.

In order to be truly liberating, works of art have to be accessible to all, guarded against commercial, political and religious infringements. Librarians can have a key role in making this possible in East and West, North and South.