Why all the fuss?

In 1981, an advertising executive turned author named Ahmad S. Rushdie published his second novel. Midnight's Children is a terrific read, a wonderful journey into the lives of ordinary Indians and how independence and partition affected them.

It's perhaps Rushdie's best novel. Or so I've been told. You see, despite being a child (or at least grandchild) of the Indian partition, I've actually never read the novel. In fact, I've never read any of Rushdie's novels, including his fourth, best selling (and I've been told, his worst) The Satanic Verses (let's call it TSV from now on).

Now, this might have been one very ordinary novel. Yet thanks to Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, TSV became Rushdie's biggest seller. So big a hit that the British government was forced to show its appreciation by throwing in a few security guards to keep Rushdie company.

And how many Muslim protesters actually read TSV? No prizes for guessing. The great Muslim mathematicians of yesteryear didn't invent the zero just to make arithmetic easier.

Strangely enough, TSV was regarded by some over-sensitive Muslims as a work of blasphemy. Which begs the question: how on earth can a work of fiction be regarded as blasphemy? Heck, it isn't real. It's just fiction. You read it knowing it doesn't describe real events. Nor is it meant to.

But then, where does fiction end and reality begin? Or vice versa? I ask myself this question each time I scan the opinion pages of some of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers. So much fiction in such a small space!

Some days back, Murdoch's only Australian broadsheet (he prefers tabloids), The Australian, published an article by a woman who would like to be Salman Rushdie if only she could write better. Irshad Manji is a Canadian Muslim writer who thrives on controversy and is desperate to get a fatwa to improve her own book sales.

Her major claim to fame is that she rediscovered the concept of ijtihad (roughly translated as independent juristic reasoning), a claim she shares with Osama bin Laden and a host of other Muslim controversialists.

Manji's article laments the recent response of some Pakistani lawmakers to the recent award to Rushdie of a Knight Bachelor for his services to literature. What on earth made them so angry? Were they jealous Rushdie could still be regarded as a bachelor despite being married to a Bollywood actress and swimsuit model?

What made Manji particularly upset was that Pakistani MPs spent so much time worrying about Rushdie and so little time focusing on issues of poverty and women's rights. Quite wisely, Manji did not blame Islam but rather "hypocrisy under the banner of Islam". I doubt many Muslims would disagree with her, though that didn't stop cultural warrior sub-editors at The Australian from giving this article the headline "Islam the problem".

In fact, I'm not aware of any time during the thousand-year-plus Muslim renaissance when Muslims had a problem with allegedly blasphemous books. Muslims almost turned blasphemy into an art form.

On the eve of the Crusades, one Syrian Muslim scholar named Abul Hasan al-Ma'arri (his surname indicating he was from the town of Ma'arra in Syria) was told about these nasty uncivilised European crusader thugs who even resorted to cannibalism. And his response? "There are only two classes of people in this world - those with lots of religion but little intelligence and those with lots of intelligence but little religion."

Around the same time, in the Spanish Muslim city of Cordoba, one Sheikh Musa bin Maymoun bin Abdullah al-Qurtubi was placing the finishing touches on his famous Arabic theological text called Dalalat al-Ha'irin (Guide to the Perplexed). The Sheik-cum-physician devoted part of the book to comparing the three Abrahamic faiths - Islam, Christianity and Judaism. He concluded that Judaism was superior to its younger spiritual twins.

You'd think that, writing this kind of hubris, Qurtubi thought himself some kind of rabbi. Indeed, he was. Jews regard him as Moses Maimonides. Muslim rulers of his day honoured him. Among them was Saladin, who appointed Maimonides Chief Medical Officer of his army. Yep, the Muslims liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders with the help of an allegedly blasphemous rabbi!

Returning to Rushdie, it isn't just Muslim militants who campaign against his books. Rushdie's masterful 1996 book The Moor's Last Sigh dealt with Hindu religious chauvinism in India, and lampooned the head of Mumbai's Hindu fascist party, Bal Thackeray. The Indian government of the day banned the book, and Hindu militants threatened Rushdie with their own "fatwa".

I've looked everywhere on Google News. Apart from Iran, Pakistan and followers of a Malaysian opposition party, I haven't heard a peep about Rushdie's knighthood. Perhaps the hysterical minority of Muslims who love wasting their time and energy on protesting against writers have realised banning books and threatening authors achieves little more than making these authors damned rich!