A Comment on the 'Eulogy' of Ashwin Desai to Professor Fatima Meer.

Firstly, I did not know 'Auntie' Fatima Meer well at all, but my late Mother, Hawa Halima (born Nagdee, married name Gool), and the two other elder Nagdee sisters, Aysha, and Amina, had made contact with her father, M.M. Meer, the editor of the Durban-based "Muslim Views" newspaper in the early 1930s [as a result of doing archieval research into my extended Family, I came accross correspondence between Mr Meer and the elder Nagdee sisters]. This resulted in strongly-worded 'Letters to the Editor' that were penned under the pseudonym, "A Muslim Girl", demanding schooling for Muslim girls and social rights of Indian women, possibly penned collectively by the three sisters. Halima, an autodidact writer without formal education, began later to write a series of articles in 'Muslim Views', under the name "Hawa H. Ahmed". This was an early attempt at indigenous 'feminist writing' that originated from our 'Non-White' community. I understand that from this time on there was a strong bond and friendship between the women of the families. I also know that other members of the extended family had contact with her future husband, I.C. Meer, during his time in Johannesburg as a student - the generation of my two uncles Issy Dinath and Saul Desai, who both served as officials in the Transvaal Indian Congress of the later 1930s and 1940s. So there were links, both personal and political between our families. Secondly, I had met personally with Professor Fatima Meer for the first time in 1978, in Uppsala, Sweden [I was a student and later researcher there], at a World Congress of Sociology and was warmly received by her due to the above mentioned family 'connections' but time was short. But I visited her home in Durban years later and her office at the University of Natal (as it was then).


I feel that I should mention that there was one occasion that I held a totally opposite viewpoint to hers. I do this not to belittle her many achievements against so many odds in the segregationist and conservative ethos of our highly stratified colour-caste societies (in fact her academic work allerted the latter to me, as these evolved in the political economy of a mining and agrarian society), but as it touches upon the issues of freedom of speech, of religeous tolerance and political pluralism and the development of democratic traditions in our parts of the world. Like many of her generation, in my family the women were also 'heads of the households' as well as great readers and who sent their children on to tertiary education, and like Auntie Fatima were independent, brave, opinionated and headstrong, complex personalities with very definite views on society, politics and social relations. But she, like they, could also be wrong. The case in point was the 'Salman Rushdie affair' as it played itself out in the South African context from the late 1980s. This sticks in my mind, as it was at the height of 'the strugle' and the issues being debated then were to have repercussions into out present-day era. This is my interpretation of the issues: I felt that she and others in the United Democratic Front (UDF) in South Africa, had made 'concessions' and bowed to the global hysteria against Salman Rushie personally and the chorus of voices against the publication of Salman Rushdie's 'The Satanic Verses' in 1989 (published September 1988 by Penguin) in the lynch-mob atmosphere of the time.

Salman Rushdie's previous best-seller 'Midnight's Children', which won the Booker Prize in 1981, was a work of genius: a sprawling, panoramic, humorous and delighfully entertaining mock-epic of post-independence India. A literary sensation and instant classic of modernist prose, interlacing dream, fantasy, myth and reality in a huge historical sweep, yet directly adressing highly charged contemporary political issues.

'The Satanic Verses' was very different, not being held together by a conventional narrative but a sub-structure of related themes, of cross-referenced names, images and allusions. The result is a hugely complex, at times baffeling and chaotic novel, whose sheer bravura sweeps the reader along, but also invites for a second or third reading. The very unruliness and ungainliness of the novel, its reworking or reinterpretation of both religeous and secular themes, confronted many issues within world history, Islamic culture and present day life in the diaspora. Western critics rarely saw beyong a migrant's tale. While many Muslims were blind to anything aside from what they perceived as a gratuitously blasphemous assault on their faith, resulting in book-burnings and an eventual 'fatwa' by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran soon after its publication - 10 years after the Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979.

Now, in the decade between Khomeni's return to Tehran and his imposition of his fatwa on Rushdie, saw the emergence of 'radical Islam', Islamism, which mutated from being a minor irritant to Aran nationalst regimes into a major threat to the West. The 'Rushdie affair', and the fatwa in particular, seemed like a warning to nationalist regimes that the seeds of the Iranian revolution were being successfully scattered across the globe. Throught the nineties, Islamist parties grew in influence in Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon and Algeria, shaking the very foundations of secular governments. The Iranian theocracy had decreed death to the 'apostate' Rushdie, having pronounced him guilty of a 'colonial atheistic challenge to holy Islam'.

Now, it is important to understand that as in the historic squabble over Muhammad's succession, so today's conflict between Sunnis (85% of the world's world's 1.4 billion Muslims are Sunni) and Shias (there are some 150 million Shiites), and between Sunni and Shia strands of 'fundamentalism', is to be seen as political as much as theological, shaped as it is by the struggle between the states of Saudi Arabia and Iran for leadership of the Muslim world. The religious philosophy of the House of Saud is drawn from the 18th Century writer Muhammad ibn Adb-alWahhab ("Wahabbism"), a 'Salafi' (the name comes from the Arabic word meaning 'predecessor' or 'first generation'), who believe, like the Khomeinists, that Islam was perfect and complete during the time of Muhammad, but has been corrupted since, and needs reviving by restoring the 'true Prophetic tradition'.

In the 1970s, buoyed by money from the oil boom and 'petro-dollars', the Saudi government started funding Salafi organisations worldwide (including those in South Africa). The Iranian revolution of 1979, when the Shiite Khoimeini toppled the Shah and grabbed political power, challenged the political supremacy and hegemony of the Saudis within the Muslim world. The very meaning of 'fundamentalism' became part of that political struggle.

In South Africa, if you remember, the United Democratic Front (UDF) was formed by a diverse community of grassroots interests and organisations in 1983. One of the more 'activist' groupings was the Muslim Youth Movement, and the regional Indian Congress organisations in Natal and the Transvaal, with leading members of the Muslim community in the leadership in the provinces. This is important as the UDF soon found itself divided between conflicting viewpoints during the book week in Cape Town and Johannesburg in October/November 1989, organised jointly by the Weekly Mail (then a leading anti-apartheid weekly), the Congress of South African Writers (Cosaw, affiliated to the UDF) and various South African publishers.

At issue was the following: The leading speaker was to have been Salman Rushdie, speaking on censorship. At the moment when Rushdie was due to embark for South Africa he found himself the focus, or more correctly a human 'target', of a process of censorship: firstly, certain leading Muslim elders and Muslim organisations threatened Rushdie with death, and to bomb his meetings etc, should he have the temerity to arrive in South Africa to speak on censorship. The Muslim Judicial Council (MJC) demanded that the apartheid government ban Rushie's book (which they did), and called on Muslim's to boycott the book week. Rushdie was at the last moment 'dis-invited' [formally told not to come] by Cosaw, the very people who had invited him, on the grounds that they could not 'guarantee his safety'. This provoked a first-rate row in Cape Town among pannelists and participants of the book-week, many of whom were shaply critical of the decision not to allow Rushie to speak in South Africa, giving their own 'experiences of censorship' as the cause for their protests (novelists/ cultural workers such as J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, Don Metera, Andre Brink, Pikita Ntuli and Barney Simon more precisely). Now, the Transvaal and Natal Indian Congresses (which for decades had been allied to the ANC, at least since the 'Doctor's Pact of 1949) threw their weight behind the MJC's call for banning, censorship and boycott of Rushdie.

Professor Fatima Meer, originally on the pannel, then withdrew from the book week in solidarity with the call from the MJC, et al, and in a press statement, she denounced Rushdie as someone who played the 'colonizer', despite Rushdie's strong and outspoken anti-colonialist views and writings.

This is what she wrote: "In the final instance, it is the Third World that Rushdie attacks, it is the faith of the Third World itself, ... its institutions that he denigrates" .... (Rushdie) has made "a malicious attack on his ethnic past", in defiance of millions "who combat the tyranny of materialism by their faith in an ideal or ideology for whom ... the absolute is imperative". (Cape Times, 4 November 1989).

Remember too that Professor Fatima Meer was a prominent member of the United Democratic Front in the years of urban insurrection from 1984 to 1987, and had published a biography of Nelson Mandela only a month previously. The principal speaker at the launching of her book was Winnie Mandela.

Officially, the ANC (then still a 'banned' and exiled organisation), took no real stand on the threat to Rushdie's life as a guest of Cosaw, nor to the banning of his book by the South African State, nor to his forced exclusion from South Africa by organisations informally but politically allied to itself. Wally Serote, as the ANC's Arts & Culture representative in London, at short notice replaced Rushdie as pannelist in Cape Town, via a telephone link-up from london. When the book week, continued later in Johannesburg, Rushdie spoke for himself by telephone from London to the audience.

The point is that Salman Rushdie was the first major world cultural figure to be invited to the country, while still under white supremacist rule, by supporters of the 'broad democratic movement' Mass Democratic Movement, who then recinded, or withdrew their invitation while some of their leading members joined the international lynch-mob chorus against Rushdie and for the suppression of his book. Unfortunately, Professor Fatima Meer was one of them!

Now, I am of the opinion that the "Rushdie affair" and subsequent controversies globally, was never (or was hardly ever) about religion, but it was more about 'Politics': it was not a battle about blasphemy but a battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran about winning the 'hearts and minds' of Muslims globally.

Kennan Malik * writes: "The Rushdie affair was the moment at which a new Islam dramatically announced itself as a major political issue in Western society ... it was the first major cultural conflict, a controversy quite unlike anything that Britain had previously experienced. Muslim fury seemed to be driven not by questions of harassment or discrimination or poverty, but by a sence of hurt that Salman Rushdie's words had offended their deepest beliefs. Where did such hurt come from, and why was it being expressed now? How could a novel create such outrage? Could Muslim anguish be assauged, and should it be? How did the anger on the streets of Bradford (and elsewhere, my insert) relate to traditional political questions about rights, duties and entittlements? (xvii-xviii).

Also, in his conclusion: "Angels and devils. Myths and monsters. These are at the heart of 'The Satanic Vesres' ... Not just in 'The Satanic Verses', but in the 'Rushdie affair', too, angels and devils have been conjured up, myths and monsters created. For at the heart of the controversy, as much as of the novel, there has been a struggle over what boundries may be transgressed, whether the unsayable can be said, and how to dissent from the end of dissent.

There is a scene in the Satanic Verses in which Saladin Chamcha finds himself in an immigration centre. All the inmates have been turned into monsters ... water buffalows, snakes manticores.'How could they do it?' Saladin wants to know. 'They describe us', comes the reply, that's all. They have the powers of description and we succum to the pictures they construct. Rushdie was portraying the way racism demonizes its victims.

He could equally have been describing the way that the response to the Rushdie affair has created its own monsters. The Rushdie affair is shrouded by myths - that the hostility to The Satanic verses was driven by theology, that all Muslims were offended by the novel, that Islam is incompatible with Western democracy, that in a plural society speech must necessarily be less free. In describing the controversy in this way, by ignoring the political heart of the Rushdie affair, the diverse character of the Muslim communities and the Muslim response to The Satanic Verses, and the importance of free speech to minority groups, and by abandoning their attachment to Enlightenment universalist values, liberals have not just created a particular picture of the Rushdie affair, they have also ensured that Western societies have succumbed to the picture they have constructed.

They have helped build a culture of grievance in which being offfended has become a badge of identity, cleared a space for radical Islamists to flourish, and made secular and progressive arguments less sayable, particularly within Muslim communities.

The myths about the Rushdie affair have helped create many of the post-Rushdie monsters. If we want to slay the monsters, we have to bury the myths." (pp. 208-210)

I cannot but agree! And therefore I think that the above story, after 20 years, still has some lessons to teach.

* Kennan Malik: 'From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy', Atlantic Books, London, 2009.

Selim Gool

ISSN 1753-6839  Fahamu