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PARTISAN REVIEW
are against freedom of speech. Salman is reported to have written
this book specifically to provoke the fun damen talists, and to air
their bigotries. Would he have written it if he had known he
would provoke them to this extent? That seems to me a key ques–
tion, but the answer may have to wait until things have calmed
down a bit. If they do. Salman was brought up in a family where
the English influence was strong, has been in England since he
was a child, at an English public school, and then university.
Nothing has been more instructive than to see him on television,
and then to see some representative of Islam: two parallel lines,
two worlds that don't touch, two sets of assumptions, two civiliza–
tions.
The tragedy is that the worst of Islam is being put forward as
all of Islam: emotions not felt since the Crusades are surfacing.
Yet Khomeini and what he stood for is loathed by most of the
Islamic world, which regards his death threats outside Islamic
law. Khomeini was, to use old-fashioned language, a wicked
man. His rule was marked by mass killings in the prisons, of
women and children as well as of men, by mass tortures, by ar–
bitrary arrest-a reign of terror. To say nothing of that terrible
war and its cynical brutalities. You could not find a more
barbaric regime anywhere in the world. Yet you heard ignorant
people talking as if this evil old man and his junta represented
Islam, soft-minded people saying that if we believe in freedom of
thought we must listen to him. It would help if other Islamic
countries would speak out, not only a brave individual here and
there. Those of us who have Moslem friends know what they
think. This united front of Islam goes back to the Christian–
Saracen Wars, long centuries of them. Surely it is time these
frozen attitudes should thaw and new links be made between
Christian civilizations and Islamic ones.
It
is not impossible: the
past shows it is not. Once, in Spain, under the Caliphs, in Cordova
and Toledo and Seville and other great Islamic cities, Moslem
and Christian and Jewish poets and savants lived and worked to–
gether, and the civilization they made inspired and influenced
all Europe.
Meanwhile, the Rushdie affair rolls on .
It
has done great
damage to this country. People working in the community for
better relations with our local Moslems-there are two million of
them-say they have been set back ten years, more. It is as if
