Talal Asad - on secular cruelty

Talal Asad wrote, in response to the Rushdie crisis:


In the West today, intolerance of Europe's Others has again become more strident. Collective cruelty is, of course, neither new nor confined to the West. Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians continue in our day to perpetrate acts of violence and cruelty. But it is the secular moder state's awesome potential for cruelty and destruction that deserves our sustained attention - as citizens and as athropologists of modernity.
from Genealogies of Religion, 1994, p. 306

Has subsequent history confirmed his analysis? It is hard not to think so. It is interesting that opposing cruelty is the very thing Rorty thinks secular liberalism has to offer the world...

Criteria for success?

An important task for the writer of a thesis is to set himself some criteria by which the success of his argument might be rated.

In my case, I am setting up my argument as a response to a Rushdie-led attack on the life which is given shape by Christian martyrdom. How will I be able to measure my success in this?

1 - If I can show that Rushdie has mis-described Christian martyrdom, or at least, that his account of martyrdom, while fitting for some religious and even some Christian martyrdoms, does not fit for authentic Christian martyrdom. It is just not accurate. So, his critique won't stick, though we may welcome the chance to clarify things.

2 - Further, Rushdie's concerns for human life and identity that he thinks are corrupted or negated by Christian martyrdom are actually affirmed by them. The human aspirations and longings that he records are actually fulfilled or better fulfilled in the Christian self-understanding.

3 - But: we don't necessarily want to accept the terms of the discussion as set by Rushdie and others. My aim is not to win according to the terms he sets, but to through his terms into question. This I fear happens with a number of theological accounts of martyrdom where the concept is so broadened to include people who die for liberal or democratic or tolerant values. To include someone that Rushdie accepts is not my idea of victory. Gandhi was not a Christian martyr, however noble he was. Neither do I want to be reduced to a consequentialist debate. That would undo the whole point of martyrdom, which is a witness to 'another' reality.

4 - If I can show that the martyr's life and death has an explanatory power that continues to be compelling for human life, then I will have succeeded (I like to imagine). That is, to show that martyrdom is a form of 'piety', but that 'piety' is utterly transformed under the acid of martyrdom, so that we accept the challenge of the Rushdies but do not accept entire their framing of the challenge...

Charles Taylor and difference-blind liberalism

There's a form of liberalism that imagines it can offer a neutral ground on which people of all cultures can meet and co-exist. And it polices that ground - the prosecution of the 'Catch the Fire' ministry for saying some pretty awful things about Muslims in Victoria is a case in point.
On this view, it is necssary to distinguish public and private, religion and politics and so on, so that you can put contentious difficulties into a non-political sphere as far as possible.

Taylor writes:

...a controversy like that over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses shows how wrong this view is. FOr mainstream Islam, there is no question of separating politics and religion the way we have come to expect in Western liberal society. Liberalism is not a possible meeting ground of all cultures, but is the political expression of one range of cultures, and quite incompatible with other ranges. Moreover, as many Muslims are well aware, Western liberalism is not so much an expression of the secular, postreligious outlook that happens to be popular among liberal intellectuals as a more organic outgrowth of Christianity - at least as seen from the alternative vantage point of Islam. The division of church and state goes back to the earliest days of Christian civilisation.

(Taylor, 'The politics of recognition' p. 62)

Charles Taylor on Salman Rushdie

For purposes of my thesis I was delighted to discover a comment by Charles Taylor on the Rushdie controversy of the late 80s. What Taylor rightly observes is that The Satanic Verses 'is a profoundly Western book', whatever its exotic subject matter.

In Rushdie's book, one has the comfortable sense that exactly the things which repel him from religion...are the things its devotees cherish. They experience exactly the same spiritual realities, and just reverse the sign. Rushdie's book is comforting to the western liberal mind, which shares one feature with that of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the belief that there is nothing outside their world-view which needs deeper understanding, just a perverse refection of the obviously right. To live in this difficult world, the western liberal mind will have to learn to reach out more.

Quite. But, can it? The western liberal mind always already has ordered views other than its own, either by means of a progressivist narration ('oh, they are so primitive, we got over that years ago') or by demonising it as 'intolerant'. So, why will the western liberal even see the need to reach out? Isn't it rather a matter of teaching the world to behave in the right way?

Rushdie and the Shi'ites at Hawkes Bay

More on the Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie:

The tragic confusion of good and evil is intensified in the novel’s 8th chapter ‘The Parting of the Arabian Sea’. Gibreel this time dreams of an ill-fated pilgrimage of the villagers of Titlipur lead by the mystical and mysterious girl Ayesha. The events of this part of the narrative are based on a real incident which occurred in 1983: thirty-eight Shi’ites marched into Hawkes Bay in Karachi, Pakistan at the instigation of their spiritual guide who had taught them that the sea would part as in the days of the Exodus, enabling them to journey to the holy city of Kerbala, in Iraq.[1]

In The Satanic Verses, Ayesha, strangely surrounded by butterflies which are interpreted as some kind of divine sign, determines to reach Mecca by marching through the Arabian Sea. Mirza Saeed tries to persuade his very ill wife Mishal to abandon the pilgrimage; but like most of the devotees, she will not be swayed despite her declining physical condition. Even the deaths of several elderly pilgrims have little effect: they are now called ‘martyrs’ by Ayesha. Increasingly, Ayesha’s fanaticism makes her more and more tyrannical and brutal, condoning the stoning to death of an abandoned baby as ‘the Devil’s Child’ out of religious fervour. Mirza Saeed can only look on helplessly as his wife and her companions stride into the sea and are drowned: or, at least, that is what Mirza himself witnesses. Others present, more devout than he, claim that the sea did in fact miraculously open as prophesied by Ayesha.

Rushdie, with his self-consciously postmodern narrative technique, appears to relish the ambiguity: the miracle both did and did not happen, and it ‘happened’ in a dream sequence in any case. But it is not the triumphalist, miraculous and religious version of events that we the reader are inclined to believe. The tragedy is as much the willingness of the faithful to ignore the death of the naïve and the innocent. It takes religious fanaticism – the ‘eyes of faith’ – to make a sign of divine benevolence out of such willful self-destruction; and Rushdie despairs of ever convincing those who look with such eyes on the world. Those who would be, and would have, martyrs are (as far as he is concerned) beyond the pale.

[1] The tragic story is told in Akbar S. Ahmed, "Death in Islam: The Hawkes Bay Case," Man 21, no. 1 (1986)

The Trouble With Principle - Stanley Fish (review)

It must be hard to be liberal in a world full of extremists, hard-liners and fanatics. Liberalism – the ideological offspring of the eighteenth century Enlightenment – is the convictional pattern that today governs practically all public and intellectual discourse in the Western world. Liberals appeal to a set of principles that they hold to be incontrovertible, even “self-evident”: free speech, equality, tolerance, freedom of belief, democracy, the right of the individual to make independent and autonomous moral decisions. These are the dogmas of liberalism.

Yet every now and again the smugness and complacency of liberal thinking is exposed for the sham it is - usually when people whose rights liberals advocate won’t behave. For example, when indigenous or third world peoples speak against homosexuality, western liberals are quite plainly confused as to how to respond without appearing racist, as was the case with the Episcopalian bishops at the Anglican Lambeth conference in 1998. Likewise when David Irving, the historian who claims that the Holocaust was largely a hoax, sought permission into Australia, his right to freedom of speech was denied it because it was thought he might inflame racial hatred. Further, when novelist Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by the Ayotollah Khomeini, this was deemed by Western observers as taking free speech too far. The principles of free speech and the tolerance and protection of minorities are plainly at cross purposes.
The trouble is, liberals appear to advocate a comprehensive tolerance when in fact they do nothing of the kind. They would advocate freedom of religious belief – so long as that freedom does not transgress its carefully proscribed limits. Religious belief, for example, should not be a matter for parliaments or courts, nor should it have any influence there. And yet for any person holding such a religious belief, this caveat will seem hilarious. How can any truly and firmly held belief be discarded as if of no relevance in one sphere of life?

This, in Stanley Fish’s words, is “boutique multiculturalism”. A boutique multiculturalist will “always stop short of approving other cultures at a point where some value at their center generates an act that offends against the canons of civilised decency as they have either been declared or assumed.” (p.56) A boutique multiculturalist suffers from an inability to take seriously the core values of the cultures he or she tolerates. He or she apparently enjoys diversity, but only when divergent cultures and views are presented in sanitised or tame versions.

A “strong multiculturalist”, on the other hand, makes a genuine effort: tolerance is stipulated as the first principle, and tries to accord all cultures a deep respect at their core. However, as Fish points out, strong multiculturalism founders when it encounters the very intolerance it loathes at the centre of another belief system. How do you respond to Muslim intolerance of Rushdie? You might tolerate it, in which case tolerance is no longer your core principle; or you might condemn it, in which case you turn out to be another boutique multiculturalist after all.

Stanley Fish’s aim in his book The Trouble with Principle is to unpick the rhetoric of liberalism and expose it as dishonest at the core. As he explains it, the really dangerous thing about the liberal appeal to principles is that it uses the rhetoric of neutrality and distance while being nothing of the kind. It takes the moral high ground, aloof from irrational evils like “dogmatism” and “fanaticism”, all the while being just as dogmatic, fanatical and irrational. It is “a wolf in reason’s clothing”. (p.187)

The strategy of liberalism is to clear a public space, free (allegedly) from ideological (and especially religious) concerns, and in which only agreed truths, such as “two plus two equals four”, may prosper. Other beliefs may be held, but only in private. The curriculum for a secular education, for example, should be absolutely free from religious influence. However, Fish points out that what is and what is not ideological is itself a matter of dispute: “Christ is risen” may be such a truth for some and not for others. In addition, in late twentieth century Western democracies, the values and ideology of liberalism are held to “go without saying”. The values and ideology of Christianity may only be held in a private way. They must be set aside in the public sphere.

The double standard of this seems obvious to me now that Fish has pointed it out! Whenever Christians enter into the public sphere as Christians they are exposed to ridicule and held to have transgressed the sacred boundaries traced by liberalism. David Marr’s book The High Price of Heaven is an example of just such a sustained and bitter attack on Christian interference in public affairs from an openly liberal perspective. He wears his boutique multiculturalism on his sleeve: he is completely – unashamedly - intolerant of Christian social policy in all its forms.

Stanley Fish is a delightful scallywag; but he is far more than that. Over four decades he has established himself as a world-class Miltonist, a philosopher of law, and a literary theorist. His books are always provocative and argued with an intense and vigorous logic. His texts are full of closely worked examples and case studies, where the implications are meticulously teased out. He does not like a snow-job: and he is happiest untangling and exposing them. Perhaps liberalism is the biggest snow-job of all.

Fish’s extensive study of the Christian poet John Milton has given him an understanding of what it is to believe. Indeed, he rightly sees that none of us is without “beliefs” – shaped by history and context and other beliefs - that stand prior to rationality. In fact, our beliefs actually condition our use of reason, more than we are conscious of. There is something deeply internal to true beliefs. They claim our souls and change our lives. Liberals, despite their rhetoric, want to hold all other belief systems at arms length – to admire, but not to really understand from within. They draw a wedge between “belief” and “reason”, and with extreme prejudice. Of course, this is all done by appeal to apparently neutral “principles”. The sleight of hand is obvious in the slow motion replays Fish allows us with his careful analysis: these “principles” are not neutral at all, but suit the vested interests of those who hold them.

The lessons to learn from Stanley Fish are many. We Christians have perhaps grown ashamed of our commitments and beliefs in the public sphere. We have perhaps bought the liberal rhetoric of neutrality too readily. We have perhaps hoped that we could easily shed our most deeply held beliefs when we needed to speak in public. We have perhaps allowed ourselves to be marginalised as “fundamentalists” and “fanatics”. We are perhaps embarrassed to cause a fuss and call the bluff of the liberals who sanctimoniously call on people with beliefs other than their own to hide them in public. What the rigorous analysis of Fish reveals is that the impressive edifice of liberalism is in fact a mirage; and that we need pay it far less deference than we do.

Like the Wizard of Oz, the very real power of liberalism rests on the illusion of substance.

Agaphour's Reading of "The Satanic Verses"

In Andrew Agaphour’s essay ‘Identity and Religion of the Status: The Rushdie Affair in the West’ he claims that, in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie outlines three types of ‘identity formation’: the ‘religious’, the ‘secular’ and the ‘postmodern’. The religious Agaphour defines in terms of traditional assignations of identity according to some transcendent ground; the secular is an identity that is utterly rational; and the postmodern (so-called) is seen in terms of ‘individual agency’. In Agaphour’s reading, then, Rushdie clearly favours the ‘postmodern’ over the other two. This a badly drafted typology, however: the ‘secular’ identity scarcely appears at all in the novel (as Agaphour defines it) and whether ‘postmodern’ is the most enlightening term for the identity Rushdie favours is extremely dubious. In fact, even Agaphour has to admit that Rushdie’s strident critique - in blatantly moral terms - of the religious identity is at odds with what may be termed a ‘postmodern’ critique. Rushdie’s analysis of identity and selfhood is contemporary (and in that sense perhaps ‘postmodern’) in that it is situated in the contemporary experiences of religious violence and of the massive movements of people-groups across the globe. However, it also solidly rooted in the Enlightenment and in the liberalism of the mid-twentieth century. There are echoes, too, of existentialism in Rushdie’s celebration of the individual forging his identity in the teeth of the circumstances, and especially death. Rushdie is perhaps a postmodern narrator, but he is no Foucauldian. The self in Rushdie is unsettled and unstable, but certainly not decentred.

Rushdie and evil, or is it good?

The problem, for Rushdie, apart from the savagery that he sees is the outcome of this way of thinking, is an epistemological one: how does one know that what is experienced as a revelation from God is in fact just that: from God? The novel tells of a moment in which Mahound/Muhammed himself was taken in for a time by the ‘Satanic Verses’ – verses of prophecy that in fact had a diabolical rather than divine source – undermines the terrible certainty with which religious believers assert their beliefs. God and/or Satan: which is it? Or is it both? In fact, may not both stem from the same origin? Rushdie puts these words in the mouth of a vision Gibreel has of Rekha Merchant, later in the novel:

This notion of separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may be straightforward enough in Islam…but go back a bit and you see that it’s a pretty recent fabrication. Amos, eight century BC, asks: “Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?” Also Jahweh, quoted by Deutero-Isaiah two hundred years later, remarks: “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.” It isn’t until the Book of Chronicles, merely fourth century BC, that the word shaitan is used to mean a being, and not only an attribute of God.’

This is a rather unlikely bit of biblical scholarship (which takes on the tone of an encyclopedia entry); but it illustrates what for Rushdie is so problematic in the religious worldview. It is impossible for the believer to be certain that the voice that she is hearing is that of the divinity and not that of some more sinister force; or that the God in whom she believes is not somehow to be found in two guises in any case. With more than a hint towards the classic philosophical problem of evil, Rushdie intimates that the religious believer has to accept, ultimately, that either that good and evil are both committed by the same God, or that the this God is not truly God in the way that the monotheist religions have imagined. But, more than that, good and evil are perhaps not so easily distinguished as the religious traditions have thought; it is not so easily a case of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The victim mentality, which accuses the other of evil on a diabolic scale, ignores the evil within; it does not admit the possibility of its own complicity in evil. Victims are also perpetrators, though this is an unpalatable truth; and this means that causes cannot be pursued in expectation of some triumphal, final vindication. Evil and good form a complex web in which human beings and communities are entangled with one another.

Rushdie doesn't like martyrdom much...

In martyrdom we find victimhood and religious self-identity combined in a potentially lethal way: it is not an accident that Rushdie opens his novel with the act of a person claiming martyrdom for herself. He has elsewhere written: ‘[O]nly fanatics go looking for martyrdom’. It is for him an inauthentic and dangerous way to establish one’s identity. In the chapter entitled ‘Ayeesha’, Gibreel has a vision that he, as an angel carries ‘the Imam’ – a character strongly resembling the Ayatollah Khomeni – back to the capital city of Desh. Gibreel notices the streets swarming with people, converging in a regular pattern upon a grand avenue leading towards the palace of the Empress (who echoes the hated Shah of Iran, disposed by the Islamic revolution of 1978). The people march in their hundreds towards the gates of the palace:

Seventy at a time, they come into range; the guns babble, and they die, and then the next seventy climb over the bodies of the dead, the guns giggle once again, and the hill of the dead grows higher. Those behind it commence, in their turn, to climb. In the dark doorways of the city there are mothers with covered heads, pushing their beloved sons in to the parade, go, be a martyr, do the needful, die. ‘You see how they love me,’ says the disembodied voice. ‘No tyranny on earth can withstand the power of this slow, walking love.’

This scene of ‘slow, walking love’ is viscerally awful, especially from the point of view of a secular individualist like Rushdie: the filmic quality of the narration adds to the revulsion that the reader must feel. That the mothers approve of the death march adds to its horror, that people could be so possessed of an irrational desire to self-destruct. For his part, Gibreel lamely suggests to the Imam that they are in fact driven not by love of him, but rather by hatred for the Empress: a revolutionary zeal in other words, rather than a religious devotion. The Imam replies:

They love me…because I am water. I am fertility and she is decay. They love me for my habit of smashing clocks. Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty, and also the sense of His boundless time, that encompasses past, present and future; the timeless time, that has no need to move. We long for the eternal, and I am eternity. She is nothing: a tick, or a tock.

The religious emphasis on the transcendent, in other words, enables the appalling scene before us, because it holds out the promise of something even more substantial than one’s own life. It promises a substance more solid than the power of empires, which come and go along the ebb and tide of history. The cost of offering oneself to the Imam – life itself – is nothing compared to the reward that he promises.

A Rushdie of Blood to the Head

The act that begins the action of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is a sadly familiar act of religious terrorism. A group of Sikh fanatics have hijacked an airliner and its passengers, the Boeing 747 Bostan. Tavleen, their female leader, is heard saying to her colleague as she executes a hostage:

Martyrdom is a privilege…We shall be like the stars; like the sun. (p. 86)

Even though her fellow-terrorists fight her, in the end it is Tavleen who explodes the bomb as they fly over the English Channel, ‘and the walls come tumbling down’ (p. 87): she herself is killed and the plane destroyed; and frenetic and bizarre narrative is strangely propelled as the two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha fall towards the earth.

It is of course somewhat old hat to say that Salman Rushdie’s fiction both represents and expresses the clash of religious and secular world-views in an unprecedented way. His 1989 book The Satanic Verses provoked outrage from Muslims which culminated in the Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa. Ironically, the book itself was a thinly-veiled attack on the kind of murderous religious fanaticism that it provoked. Though Rushdie took aim at the excesses of Sikhs and Christians in the book (and has attacked Hindu extremism in others of his works), Muslims were right to feel that they were its chief target, especially given the extended passages that related to the revelations given to the Prophet Mohammed (called ‘Mahound’ by Rushdie).

However, it would be a mistake to characterize Rushdie as merely an anti-religious zealot. Discussion of religion naturally emanates from the discussions of identity-politics that are more deeply entrenched in his work. Rushdie is witness to a world in which personal and communal identities are constantly shifting against a backdrop of massive and rapid historical, cultural and political change. The drawing of borders on maps has enormous – sometimes enormously destructive – consequences for individuals on the ground and how they identify themselves (the partition of India in Midnight’s Children being but one example). It is a world of immigrants and exiles, no longer at home and yet deeply homesick. This fluidity of identity is experienced with delight by some Western individualists; yet is easy to see how this ‘freedom’ is frequently experienced as anxiety. Those who are in situations where they are (or feel themselves to be) on the outer as a minority or a perhaps a disempowered majority struggle to find the capacity to assert their identities alongside those given more easy access to a satisfactory identity. The question that Rushidie’s characters - who are frequently thrown in to new situations that make their former understandings of themselves impossible to sustain - continually ask of each other, themselves and even of God, is ‘what kind of idea are you’?

Trying to get a handle on my project...

Some people seem to be able to trot out their complete doctoral thesis outline at an early stage.

This is not me. My work seems to be more evolutionary... I am try not to lose my nerve over this of course! The worst moments are when someone asks you 'so, what is your thesis on?' and nothing much coherent or convincing comes out of your mouth. Arghh!

However: here is an attempt to get my thoughts together at this stage, almost a third of the way through (!). Please feel free to chip in your two cents worth, and please excuse the academic-ese:

What kind of self is a Christian martyr? This dissertation seeks to explore and expound Christian identity via the motif of martyrdom. Martyrdom is the possibility latent in the Christian identity, for all Christians are called to the ‘witness’ or ‘testimony’ (martyrion) that might result in bloody martyrdom.[1] As Balthasar writes:

…this does not mean that every single Christian must suffer bloody martyrdom, but he must consider the entire case as the external representation of the inner reality out of which he lives.[2]

Christian baptism is a symbol of the offering of the old self over to death which is what every Christian does as an identification with Jesus Christ. It is a kind of proto-martyrdom, with its act of testimony to Christ and renunciation of the world, the flesh and the devil.[3] The martyr ‘externally represents’ the church’s way of understanding both the world and the situatedness of the self in that world. It is an understanding which the martyr shows is not merely theoretical, for in the act of offering of the body to its own destruction it is revealed as concrete. At the point of the sword, the testimony of the martyr to another reality intersects – fatally – with the material world. An analysis of martyrdom thus suggests itself as a way to understand Christian identity, both on its own terms and in comparison with alternatives.

However, we must surely be aware of how dissonant this witness is with non-theological conceptions of human meaning and purpose. Part of this dissonance lies in the inevitable association of martyrdom with the spectacle of horrendous religious violence that is the signs of our times. As the suicide bomber shows, the line between killing and dying for a cause is all too thin: to the secular mind the two are barely distinguishable as species of insanity.[4] The association of martyrdom with fanaticism, religious violence and the spectacle of suffering complicates discussion about the meaning of martyrdom as a self-narration. It is a problematic and contested discourse – perhaps supremely so. How might a discourse characterized by the notion of the ‘authentic’ self (for example) accommodate the possibility of self-abnegation to the kind and degree that the martyr demonstrates? Martyrdom – even the possibility of martyrdom – seems to be the enemy of human potential. True, it may be freely determined (though only as a form of suicide), but it is given away too cheaply; it has too little regard for the ties of family and friends; it is too committed to a notion of ‘truth’ which has fallen into disrepair...

In order to elucidate martyrdom as a way of seeing the self, this study makes use of T.S. Eliot’s martyrological drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935) as a lens by which to focus the theme. In the instance of Eliot’s literary creation Thomas we are given an imaginative reflection on martyrdom in the Christian tradition as a whole.


[1] See e.g. Mt 10:18f.
[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness, Communio Books (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), p. 22
[3] Origen makes the connection between the baptismal promises and the test of martyrdom explicit in his Exhortation to Martyrdom. Origen, An Exhortation to Martyrdom; Prayer; First Principles, Book Iv; Prologue to the Commentary on 'the Song of Songs'; Homily Xxvii on 'Numbers', trans. Rowan A. Greer, The Classics of Western Spirituality. (London: S.P.C.K, 1979), iii.17, p. 157-8
[4] As Salman Rushdie puts it:: ‘Only fanatics go looking for martyrdom.’ Salman Rushdie, Step across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002 (London: Vintage, 2003), p. 240