Tony Blair has designated Sir Iqbal Sacranie to be the face of
moderate Islam in Britain. He is an outrageous choice, writes Salman Rushdie in Sunday’s Washington
Post. Sacranie is not at all moderate, according to Rushdie,
who is still sore that Sacranie considered the fatwa on Rushdie’s
head after The Satanic Verses to be a very good idea.
“Death is perhaps too easy” for Rushdie, said Sacranie at the
time. Rushdie also reports Sacranie’s recent outlandish comment
that “there is no such thing as an Islamic terrorist,” and notes
that Sacranie “boycotted a Holocaust remembrance ceremony in London
commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago.”
What’s newsworthy about Rushdie’s op-ed is his willingness to
define orthodox, not simply heterodox, Islam as the problem. This
is a rarely taken position among liberals who out of politically
correct sensitivities are loath to call mainstream, orthodox Islam
illiberal though they don’t hesitate to slap that label on the
religious tradition of Western civilization.
Rushdie writes that Blair’s selection of Sacranie proves either
his government’s “penchant for religious appeasement or a
demonstration of how limited Blair’s options really are….If Sir
Iqbal Sacranie is the best Blair can offer in the way of a good
Muslim, we have a problem.” In other words, orthodox Islam is
militant Islam, according to Rushdie, and hence the selection of
Sacranie to combat radicalism will be useless: “The Sacranie case
illustrates the weakness of the Blair government’s strategy of
relying on traditional, essentially orthodox Muslims to help
eradicate Islamist radicalism.”
Since 9/11 the calls for Islam’s “reformation” have always
implied that mainstream Islam is the problem — were it a religion
of peace, why would it need to be reshaped? — but Rushdie is
spelling this attitude out more explicitly and calling on Muslims
to undertake the most ambitious reformation of all, namely, that
they stop being Muslims. That’s not how he puts it but that is what
he means. His calls for reform amount to saying that Islam needs to
remove its traditional Islamic content and replace it with his
liberalism.
The assumption underlying Rushdie’s agenda of reform for Islam
— a secularist assumption, by the way, that he would apply to all
religions — is that Islam is man-made, and whatever man makes he
can unmake. “It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able
to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside
history, not supernaturally above it,” Rushdie writes.
Rushdie speaks of Islam like judicial activists speak of the
Constitution, as a blank slate on which to write the liberal values
of this generation. “Laws made in the seventh century could finally
give way to the needs of the 21st,” he writes. “The Islamic
Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance of the concept
that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered
realities.”
Again, Rushdie’s appeal is more honest than the ones liberals
normally make. Liberals usually suggest that there is a tradition
of Islam as a religion of peace to go back to. No, there isn’t,
Rushdie is in effect saying. Tradition is the problem, he is
arguing, and the solution is a brand new religion embodying modern
liberalism.
Rushdie, who no doubt would be quick to denounce Christians for
urging Muslims to convert to a new religion, is himself approaching
Islam as a missionary — a secular one who is calling for the
conversion of Muslims to liberalism. Missionaries are often accused
of naivete — a naivete that leads to martyrdom — and there is a
lot of that in Rushdie’s apostolic work on behalf of secularism. As
his own incredulity at Blair’s selection of a radical as the
“moderate” leader of the Muslim Council of Britian should tell him,
liberal Europe, by trying to steer the tiger of Islam toward
liberalism, is just putting itself into a position to be eaten by
it.
That is, liberal Europe is not going to change Islam; but Islam
will change liberal Europe. The reason Muslims are attacking
liberal European countries that were already accommodating them,
such as Spain and England, is that they know these countries will
become even more accommodating to them after the attacks. In the
name of defusing these crises and liberalizing Islam, these
governments will elevate Muslim leaders like Sacranie to privileged
government positions.
France, reeling from its own Islamic crisis, established the
“French Council for the Muslim Religion” in 2003. The purpose was
to bring Islam into line with “French values” and take Islam out of
the “cellars and garages,” which just meant that radical Islam
would henceforth be operating out of the French government. Like
Blair, who has to call a radical like Sacranie a “moderate” because
he can’t find anyone else, the French have watched passively as
radical Muslims entered positions on their government-approved
Islamic council. According to Time, when Nicolas Sarkozy,
the French government official then responsible for the council,
appeared at a conference of 10,000 French Muslims and urged them to
embrace liberal reforms, he “reaped jeers and whistles.”
Rushdie’s work as a secular missionary to Islam won’t produce a
different reaction. It is more likely to produce another fatwa.
