Knighting Salman Rushdie means Whitehall is willing to offend the mullahs, says a s h smyth |
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Tehran's condemnation of Salman Rushdie's knighthood illustrates yet again the theocracies of the Islamic world still cannot tolerate the fundamental democratic concept of free speech.
In response to Sir Salman's inclusion in the Honours List, Ali Hosseini, the Iranian Foreign Minister, remonstrated that the honour was indicative of civil service Islamophobia, and muttered now-familiar veiled threats about setting Britain at 'odds with Islamic societies'.
It is too generous to suppose that within political Islam it is only the most extreme who take umbrage at freedom of expression. In 2006 the 'democratic' Jordanian parliament formally called for (Danish) foreign nationals to be punished for drawing cartoons of Mohammed, and the Syrian police state tacitly permitted the burning of the Danish embassy.
In 'secular' Turkey, meanwhile, the government only wound up its trial of novelist
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There is no truer understanding of democracy than the acceptance one cannot always get
one’s way |
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Orhan Pamuk (on charges of ridiculing the state) because the EU initiated an inquiry into Turkey's legal system.
Outside Muslim-majority nations, Islamic organisations have begun and lost numerous civil proceedings against publications that dared reprint the Danish cartoons, and in several instances demanded (successfully) the removal from bookshops of 'disrespectful' volumes on Mohammed demonstrably based on Islam's own renderings.
Of course, Muslims take offence because free 'expressions' target the Islamic faith per se; but it is time they learned free speech is never more essential than when it concerns what we hold most dear. There is no truer understanding of democracy than the acceptance one cannot always get one's way.
There's a silver lining to this rumbling cloud, though. Rushdie is vociferous in condemning Islamic totalitarianism, and someone in the timidity of Whitehall is willing to offend a few mullahs in order to recognise this.
In the West's shaky defence of the right to free speech, all, perhaps, is not lost. 
FIRST POSTED JUNE 18, 2007
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