478
PARTISAN REVIEW
Is this so? Are Islamic fundamentalists persuading others to join with
them in an exclusive value system? Certainly the revolution in 1979 which
brought to power the regime of the ayatollahs in Iran was a significant
challenge to the values pertaining to pluralist societies such as Western
democracies. People in Iran were to be condemned to penalties, including
death, when their "fault" amounted to not belonging to the ruling Shia
majority.
The
Jatwa
pronounced against Salman Rushdie for publishing his novel
The Satanic
~rses
provided the Islamic fundamentalist challenge with a focus,
an issue. The Iranian leadership had granted itself authority to condemn to
death a citizen of another country, and one who had broken no law that he
was supposed to obey. If ever there was an act of reverse colonialism, this was
it. The explanation of the
Jatwa
lies at least partly in a wish to be avenged for
perceived slights and humiliations in the past, but coupled with that was the
prospect of maximizing the reach of Islamic fundamentalism by mobilizing
the British Muslims-in the simplest terms, testing out whether Islam could
provide for Tehran the basis of a productive foreign policy.
Demonstrations of one or two thousand-but not more--British
Muslims followed, and copies of the book were burned for the benefit of
press photographers. In similar pursuit of reverse colonialism, an Iranian,
Dr. Kalim Saddiqi, appointed members of what was intended to be a sepa–
rate Muslim parliament in Britain, with the aim of disregarding British
law and legislating instead to put in place the
sharia,
or Islamic law. Paid for
by Tehran, Saddiqi was evidently the agent of a foreign power. His brand
of separatism survived his unexpected death.
The Runnymede Trust is one among other pressure groups seeking to
define racism as an exclusively British characteristic. One of this trust's
reports in 1997 tried to popularize a new coinage, "Islamophobia." There
is no such thing. Some psychological guilt is in play, a mysterious self–
accusation akin to the type of fellow-traveling between the wars which
inverted reality, defining Soviet communism as progressive and democracy
as decadent. British people now know almost nothing about their own
religion, let alone anyone else's, and they care even less. Islam as such
arouses no response, for or against.
But the unelected and separatist Muslim parliament was quick to
capitalize on this new coinage, hosting a conference to accuse the
British of ancient hate and prejudice. According to these separatists, an
eternal struggle does indeed exist between truth, that is Islam, and false–
hood, that is the West, and this clash of civilizations can be resolved only
when the West submits to Islam. Islamophobia to them is bad,
Britanophobia only natural. They do not grant the tolerance that they
demand.
