The Impossible Fundamentalism of Doubt

If Salman Rushdie's taunt has caused much distress in the Muslim
heart, the Muslim reaction has given the Western Leviathan good
reasons for celebrating its own cult of tolerance. For the West can
now self-righteously declare itself as the community of saints which
gives life to the free word and castigate Muslims as a confederacy of
sinners who are bent upon killing it. It can triumphantly proclaim
that while book-composing is sacred, book-burning is sacrilegious;
that whereas defending Rushdie's right to freedom of expression is
godlike, condemning him to silence is diabolic. Further, though the
West has supplied no clue as to the intellectual and moral foundations
of this judgement, save a ferocious display of its civilizational
might, its insistence on the righteousness of its claim has become
more adamant, the more the conflict has escalated.

What has been lost in the furor over the Fatwa, however, is the
immorality of Rushdie's gospel of doubt. What his supporters have
glaringly overlooked is the fact that the basic premise of the novel,
if taken seriously, undermines the possibility of any moral
arbitration between two contenders, if it does not deny moral and
cognitive judgement altogether. For without squabbling over the
literary worth of Rushdie's work, both his supporters and critics
should be able to agree that the cardinal moral claim of the novel is
that what distinguishes the Divine from the Satanic is, at best,
arbitrary. Cognitively, all cats are grey and, morally, all cows are
unholy in Rushdie's world.

Rushdie’'s existential plight in the wake of the Fatwa, however, has
forced him to 'plead for his life' on the grounds that the Ayatollah's
writ is a diabolic piece of writing which 'must be banned'. Thus,
while he contends that the publication of his novel is a matter of the
sacred right of free expression, which every moral person in general
but the liberal Western world in particular, is under moral obligation
to preserve, he is also adamant that the Jurist's legal opinion, which
incarnates a Satanic commandment, enjoys no such privileges. Indeed,
he insists that it must be silenced, by the force of economic
sanctions and other measures that fully demonstrate the might of
tolerance. If so, our quandary is: by the exercise which higher norm
may we allow one text the right to free expression and publication but
deny it to the other? Why must we, in short, arbitrate between these
two contending texts?

The irony is that Rushdie's own fundamentalism of doubt does not allow
him, or us, to make any kind of judgement. For, if Rushdie really
believes, as he brazenly propagates in his novel, that Divine and
Satanic are arbitrary labels, attached by simple believers to texts
which may be easily switched and interpolated, then the same holds
true for the two contemporary texts, his own and that of Khomeini. We
cannot distinguish between the 'murderous' text of the Ayatollah and
the merely vituperative one of the novelist. Without any moral ground
for judgement, we can neither condemn the Jurist nor defend the
novelist. For a world of arbitrary, contingent or undeterminable
standards is a world without action and choice, a world bereft of the
moral imperative.

If this conclusion appears drastic and unkind and if we are obliged,
on moral grounds, to unequivocally affirm Rushdie's 'right to life',
then it also becomes irrefutable that his art incarnates a colossal
lie. For the scandalous novel propagates a doctrine of doubt which
canonizes inaction and indecision, whereas the safeguard of the
novelist's existence demands faith and commitment. No fundamentalism
of doubt can bridge the divide between Rushdie's art and his life,
between a fictitious lie and an existential truth. Only a categorical
imperative, which cannot be derived from any ethic of contingency and
relativism, can summon the moral will to action. Whether the moral
imperative of defending the novelist's right to life, which devolves
on outsiders, also makes it incumbent upon the writer himself to
recant his irredeemable 'fundamentalism of doubt' may be left
unsaid. What cannot be given over to reticence, is the fact that
Rushdie can lay no moral claim on those who accept his postmodernist
gospel. Only those who discard the intellectually facile and morally
paralysing relativism which is the gist of Rushdie's novel can be
summoned to his defence!

There could be yet another, more candid and revealing reading of
Rushdie's polemical text. It is permissible to see him as not
proclaiming the impossibility of moral judgement altogether, but
recounting a story about a historical event. He could be construed as
merely insisting that the Prophet of Islam could not/did not
distinguish between the Divine Text and the Satanic Verses. More
plainly, he could be understood as claiming that though the
possibility of distinguishing right from wrong, genuine from
counterfeit, Divine from Satanic, exists, it was not available to the
Prophet, or that he could not exercise it on one particular
occasion. In other words, Rushdie' controversial novel is a reflection
not on the problem of the possibility of choice but on the actuality
of a particular choice. (Curiously, though Rushdie would deny the
Prophet the possibility - or actuality - of right choice, he
entertains no doubt regarding the ability of his contemporaries to
adjudicate between his text and the Fatwa and come to his rescue!)

If so, then the novel is not about metaphysics or philosophy but about
history, and, contrary to Rushdie's lame protestations after the
Fatwa, it does make a moral judgement on the Prophet. But then how
could a moral judgement be based on a fictional account? Either
Rushdie wishes to pass a moral judgement on the Prophet, in which case
a strictly historical discourse would have been de rigueur, or he
intends no moral appraisal of the Prophet, which makes his entire
fictional enterprise, complete with its confounding juxtaposition of
meticulously reproduced Sirah texts with gross, obscene, images of his
own conjuring, totally incomprehensible. Little wonder that Muslims
find him diabolically disingenuous!

And this brings us to the heart of the Muslim argument against the
novelist, namely that moral judgement is possible only on a historical
ground, and that where the ground is sacred such as the Sirah of the
Prophet, not only profane imagination but also pious devotion must
remain within the bound of historical reality. Of course, the
traditional saying that 'the devil cannot impersonate the Prophet, not
even in a dream' expresses this insight graphically and sets limits to
any public discourse on the Prophet. Whatever that one says of the
Prophet must be attributable to the historical personage and not to
any shadowy figure of individual imagination. In sum, the root cause
of this conflict is the Islamic commitment to history and morality (a
trait that it shares with other Abrahamic faiths) that is inimical to
the mythic, polymorphic and essentially amoral imagination of the
postmodernist novelist.

The availability of choice, or the possibility of error in human
judgement, is a banal fact that cannot be sanctified into a paralyzing
theory of moral relativism. Only those who espouse an oppressive
doctrine of the polymorphous, nay polytheistic, nature of the ultimate
truth are prone to doing so. For others, our capacity to act morally
serves as a strong shield against any such perverse fundamentalism of
doubt. It is thus not accidental that Muslim tradition which
confronted the spurious tale of 'Satanic Verses' in all its bloody
seriousness was never scandalized by it. For it clearly recognized
that the routinely observed fact that choices can be wrong does not
prove that they cannot be right! The existence of error and falsity in
the world is no proof of the non-existence of accuracy and
truth. Thus, the traditional reading of the 'satanic verses' episode
is the exact opposite of that of the modern missionary and his
deracinated proteges like Rushdie. For what the story reveals is that
distinctions can be made and right choices can be exercised. Instead
of abdicating the claim of human reason and brooding over the 'eclipse
of God', Islamic tradition vigorously affirms the possibility of right
knowledge and right action and proclaims the ultimate triumph of
Divine Text over Satanic interpolations.

Of course, no one is suggesting that rabid postmodernists, or
confounded novelists, have inaugurated a reign of relativism and
abolished moral and judicial judgement altogether. No, their
debilitating and paralyzing ethic has had little impact on the
contemporary theory and practice of politics. What they have
accomplished instead is to lend respectability to the inegalitarian
and elitist doctrines that accept the current hierarchy of powers and
privileges as the natural state of affairs. Fundamentalism of doubt
has not paved the way to any genuine pluralism, all it has done is to
facilitate the perception of the political world as an arena of
'clashing civilizations' and double standards.

The world of double-standards represents, of course, a world where
Nazism would be completely at home and where no one would be
inconvenienced by the problem of distinguishing the Divine text from
its Satanic forgeries. To speak of Nazis in this connection is, to
express it candidly, neither fortuitous, nor disrespectful of the
suffering of their victims. For one of the moral issues at stake is
the affiliation of truth to history. In the face of the emerging
neo-Nazi revisionist school of historiography, it has been earnestly
proposed in various parliaments of Europe that the denial of the
historical reality of the Holocaust be declared a criminal
offence. Such an attitude towards a great human tragedy and moral
failure of our times, it has been argued, does not constitute an issue
of individual freedom, whether of conscience or of expression. Such an
attitude appears to me to be fully justified. A moral lie, after all,
presupposes a historical lie. Let those who want to accept the lie of
Nazism have 'free consciences'; let them possess any judgement on Nazi
teachings that they will. But they must not be allowed to base this
judgement on fraudulent history, or to vindicate their choice on the
grounds that genocide never took place, or that gas chambers are 'a
Jewish fantasy'! Unfortunately, this is exactly what Rushdie does in
his novel: From a narrative that is as close to the truth of the Sirah
as is neo-Nazi revisionism to that of the Holocaust, he solicits a
judgement on the Prophet of Islam.