Islam and Controversy

Abstract

Please respect intellectual property rightsThis material is copyright and its use is restricted by our standard site license terms and conditions (see http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/connect/info/terms_conditions.html). If you plan to copy, distribute or share in any format including, for the avoidance of doubt, posting on websites, you need the express prior permission of Palgrave Macmillan. To request permission please contact rights@palgrave.com."A highly perceptive analysis of the grounds and moral -but not necessarily legal -limits of free speech. It both retains and goes beyond the important insights of liberalism. Its theoretical discussion enriches and is in turn enriched by a shrewd analysis of concrete cases. A most welcome and timely book." -Lord Bhikhu Parekh, author of 'The Parekh Report: The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain' and 'Rethinking Multiculturalism' "In contrast to much journalism and commentary on these issues, this is an important, reasoned and patient account of these infl ammatory matters. Mondal's book is crucial reading for those interested not only in the work and impact of Salman Rushdie, not only for those working in contemporary literature more widely, but also those with a concern for issues of freedom, expression and the future of cosmopolitan and multicultural democracy." -Professor Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London "Anshuman Mondal has performed the considerable service of puncturing the unexamined clichés and self-serving cant that characterise the freedom of speech debate. He refuses to accept at face value the assumed contention between liberal secular notions of free speech and the supposed censorious strictures of Muslim intolerance, as played out in numerous recent controversies. Instead, he strips the discussion back to fi rst principles, pointing out how all speech and writing is a dialogic act of communication that anticipates a response from its recipient. Offence is seen as the product of the relationship between speaker, addressee and all-important contextual power relations. In an era when 'liberals' from both the right and left have come together to denounce Islam as an intolerant force and a geopolitical enemy, Mondal reveals how professions of liberal reasonableness and neutrality mask an absolutist cultural supremacism wherein the 'right to offend' is separated from its consequences. He demonstrates how the central traditions of Western liberalism are each blind to the power relations which mark all societies and which take a particularly intractable form in multicultural ones.At the heart of the book is the question, what is free speech for? Is it an end in itself? Or does it serve a higher purpose, such as safeguarding democracy, as is often claimed? In a brilliant, forensic analysis of some of the rhetoric around freedom and offence, Mondal asks how notions of a good and fair society can possibly be furthered by the deliberate denigration of a portion of its membership. Recognising e...

Secularism and the death and return of the author: Rereading the Rushdie affair after Joseph Anton

“…That “Rushdie” was placed in the protective custody of the British state may be read as a sign of how the body of the author was subject to the sovereign power of Iran’s religious leader. Yet the British state protection granted to Rushdie also exemplifies how the author can be both a subject of power as well as being subject to power (Mondal, 2014: 197−98). The act of placing Rushdie’s body in protective custody from the death sentence issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini was simultaneously an act of defending the individual author’s right to a certain absolutist idea of free expression.…”

“…In his illuminating reading of Rushdie’s fictional reworking of Islamic history in The Satanic Verses , Mondal (2014) highlights many of the difficulties with Rushdie’s self-consciously presentist interpretation of Islamic history, and how this reading generated further misreadings in some of the responses from self-identified Muslim readers. Specifically, he points to Rushdie’s conflation of Islamic history and Islamism, and his suggestion that one can trace an unbroken historical line between the foundation of Islam in the seventh century and the authoritarian interpretation of sharia law associated with Muslim fundamentalists such as Ayatollah Khomeini; he also offers some subtle reflections on Rushdie’s rather glib treatment of Islamic history, and his conflation of different cultural and historical understandings of the satanic (2014: 97−146).…”

“…In an attempt to think through and beyond the implications of the many and varied responses of self-identified Muslim readers to The Satanic Verses , as well as Rushdie’s own defence of the novel, Mondal (2014) has raised some important questions about Rushdie’s use of historical sources, and his equivocation between anti-foundational claims about revelation on the one hand and more straightforwardly empirical claims about Islamic history on the other. The realist account of Islamic history and the apocryphal story of the “satanic verses” episode presented in Joseph Anton can be seen to further exemplify this empirical approach to history, as I have already suggested.…”