The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah and the West.

The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West, by Daniel Pipes (Birch, 213 pp., $18.95)

IF EVER there was a literary controversy without a hero it has been the seemingly endless affair of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses. Readers in doubt are directed to The Rushdie Affair and The Rushdie File, two hastily cobbled tomes on the events surrounding what may prove to be the most talked about, least read best-seller of all time.

Salman Rushdie, an accomplished literary stylist and entertaining if somewhat laborious storyteller, is much too intelligent not to have known that what he had written would raise the hackles of many of the world's 860 million Muslims, most of whom are semi-literate at best and easily roused by clerical demagogues. Mr. Rushdie may be a victim, but the catalyst for his suffering was of his own concocting. His subsequent decision to go into hiding under Scotland Yard protection, especially after having depicted the British police as racist brutes and sociopaths in the very book that triggered the crisis, is the act of a scared survivor rather than a courageous crusader. No laurels for Salman.

The enraged Muslim demonstrators who rampaged around the world--some of them actually dying in disturbances in India and Pakistan--were protesting a book few of them had read and even fewer would be capable of understanding. If they acted on conviction, it was a conviction grounded in ignorance. They were pawns, not martyrs. As for the late Ayatollah Khomeini, as hate-consumed as he was cunning, he may well have been more angered by passages in The Satanic Verses centered on a Mad Mullah closely resembling himself than he was distressed by the short sections of the book he claimed were blasphemous.

The need to re-animate a depressed, war-weary Iranian people, and Shia followers outside Iran who had begun to lose faith in the Ayatollah's Islamic revolution, provided a motive more political than religious. In any case, as most reputable Islamic scholars and jurists agree, Khomeini had no moral authority unilaterally to issue a fatwa (judgment) condemning Rushdie to death without a trial and encouraging pious Muslims to commit wanton murder.

Nor was l'affaire Rushdie the finest hour for much of the publishing industry, ignobly torn between its lust to exploit a global best-seller and its terror of bombs and boycotts to follow. By far the most absurd bit players in these satanic farces, however, have been the scores of pundits and literary and academic hacks who have used the Rushdie case as an excuse to peddle their own ideology or the politico-cultural line of the moment.

A cascade of self-congratulatory banalities has showered from the likes of Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag via rallies, readings, petitions, and other acts of paper courage that have done little if anything to help Salman Rushdie or clarify the reasons why his work lit such a fire. Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland's The Rushdie File, an anthology of speeches, articles, and official documents related to the furor, abounds in examples of the above, with the award for solemn silliness going to Iris Murdoch, whose message of Salmanic solidarity ("Wars end. The night will end.") ranks right up there with comedian Jackie Vernon's admonition that "A wet bird never flies at night." One of the few glitterati to offer sensible advice, and end with a note of gentle irony, is Ralph Ellison, who counseled the fugitive Rushdie:

Keep to your convictions.

Try to protect yourself.

A death sentence is a rather harsh

review.

Granted that Salman Rushdie does not deserve to be snuffed out by a Khomeini hit man, is his book blasphemous? Certainly not literally, since the names have been changed to protect the blasphemer; all of the relevant characters in The Satanic Verses are allegorical, and most of the action--including all of the allegedly blasphemous passages--is seen through the eyes of a madman, not recounted in the author's voice. Indeed, the Koran itself, in distorting key Biblical passages and denying the basic Christian interpretation of Jesus, is far more offensive to the beliefs of the world's 1.6 billion Christians than Salman Rushdie's convoluted fantasy is to its 860 million Muslims.

At most, The Satanic Verses merely hints at what the non-Muslim majority (82.8 per cent) of the global population has always held: that the Koran is not the final revealed word of God, but a religious message consciously or subconsciously formulated by Muhammad. To believe otherwise, you would have to be a Muslim yourself.

What drives the Rushdie controversy, then, is the tension between the Western world's concept of free speech--more specifically, what might be called the right to express disbelief--and the conviction of many Muslims that to raise even the slightest doubt about Muhammad as the Messenger of God or the Koran as the literal Word of God is impermissible --especially on the part of someone who, like Rushdie, was born a Muslim.

Some experts--and this, to some extent, includes Daniel Pipes, author of The Rushdie Affair--have attempted to use this innate but limited conflict between Islam and the nominally Christian West as the basis for a far wider condemnation of the former. The implication is that Islam and "civilized" values may be incompatible, that there is an incurable canker in the crescent, setting it beyond the pale. This blanket indictment is especially appealing to those who wish to see conflict in the Middle East as a one-dimensional struggle between a solidly "Western" and democratic Israel and an incurably "Eastern" and despotic Arab and Muslim world, but it overlooks some basic truths.

While democracy has not fluorished in most of the Muslim world (or, for that matter, most of the so-called Third World, regardless of religion), the Islamic way of life teaches brotherhood, compassion, and charity, as well as toleration for non-Muslim monotheists. As for present-day Israel, its diplomatic obduracy and state-sanctioned brutality toward its unwilling Palestinian population, while perhaps understandable in view of the Israelis' sense of isolation and insecurity, are certainly not up to the best standards of Western civilization.

Mr. Pipes attempts balance but betrays a certain distate for the Muslim masses and tends to see an Ayatollah under every Muslim bed. At times, his forebodings about mounting Muslim immigration to Europe sound an alarmist note:

Rightists in Europe may resist the

idea of letting such aliens in,

fundamentalist Muslims may shudder at the

thought of taking up residence in a land

of blasphemy and lewdness, but the two

are almost fated to join each other.

Indeed, there are probably cases already of

neo-fascist [my italics] German

employers hiring fundamentalist Muslim

workers, with both parties hating the

relationship, but accepting it nonetheless.

. . . Unfortunately, the presence of the

Muslims in the West encourages the

worst in each camp: ugly nativistic 

reactions from those who resent the growing

number of dark-skinned, poor foreigners

with strange eating habits and less-developed

notions of hygiene; and arrogant

fundamentalist Islamic ambitions among

emigrants culturally unprepared for

immersion in an alien civilization and

therefore prone to insist on the most

dogmatic version of their faith.

Ironically, this is much the same sort of stuff that Protestant bigots and ethnic chauvinists of an earlier era wrote about the successive immigrations of Irish, Italian, and Slavic Catholics (not to mention Polish Jews) that were supposedly going to engulf traditional Yankee values and undermine the American way of life. Mutual adjustment and accommodation are never easy, but they happened in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. There is no reason why they shouldn't happen in twenty-first-century Europe, too--in spite of the fulminations of the occasional Mad Mullah and the irreverence of the occasional Salman Rushdie.

Mr. Bakshian writes and broadcasts on history, politics, and the arts. His "The Crescent and the Flag," an analysis of Islam and nationalism, appeared in the January 1990 issue of History Today.