Posted on 08/27/2005 8:44:05 PM PDT by freedom44
SALMAN RUSHDIE, the writer, has called Britain’s Muslim leaders a “joke” and accused them of allowing radicalism to flourish.
The writer said there had been a “backsliding into bigotry” among Muslims both in Britain and around the world.
“In this country Muslim leaders are a kind of joke,” said the writer during a talk about his latest novel yesterday evening at the Edinburgh Book Festival. “Nobody follows them. There is no genuine organisation representing the Muslim community.”
Rushdie spent nine years in hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini, then leader of Iran, issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for his death over his novel The Satanic Verses and his words last night show his willingness to continue attacking intolerance in the Islamic world.
He said that while most Muslims opposed fundamentalism, the same could not always be said of the religion’s leaders in Britain. He called on what he called the “silent majority” of believers to take on the radicals.
“It [the majority] needs to stop being silent,” he said. “There is no genuine leadership and no genuine organisation that represents the majority. [Islam] needs to remember it is all right to disagree. It needs to take on board the basic tenets of a democratic country. The majority needs to make its voice heard.”
Senior Muslims who have recently appeared to support terrorism include Yaqub Zaki, deputy leader of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, who said earlier this month he would be “very happy” if there were a terrorist attack on Downing Street.
Rushdie argued: “Islam is going backwards very fast.”
Rushdie also talked about how, when he was younger, Islam had been a pacifist religion. “It’s not a religion of peace at the moment as it used to be. The jihadists have come in instead.”
Rushdie, who won the Booker Prize with his novel Midnight’s Children, went on to blame President George Bush for much of the radicalism in the Muslim world and said he had managed to spark a jihad — religious war — against the West.
“In the 1950s and 1960s, in Kashmir, there was no radical Islam,” he said. “It was a tolerant, a mystical type of Islam. Bush has now done what Bin Laden failed to do in starting a jihad.
“Our cities used to be amazing cosmopolitan places, now in the last half century this terrible thing has come and severed these places.”
The author also spoke about the insurgencies in Iraq and Kashmir, the territory disputed between India and Pakistan where his new novel, Shalimar, The Clown, is partly set.
Rushdie drew some parallels between insurgents in these conflicts and the French resistance movement in the second world war.
“It’s exactly the same thing but the context is different. I let the reader make the decision,” he said.
I see he's still not afraid to speak out. What does he fear? Another fatwa?
Tell that to the families of those killed on the subways and buses in London.
I like Rushdie. I'm not saying he'd vote for Bush, but he's got guts and he called the Muslims out a long time ago, faced the consequences and is in a position of some authority [some, not 'the'] to speak out on these matters, and when he speaks it seems to make sense. He tries to speak to Muslims on their terms, and so is a valuable ally.
NOTE: I am sure someone will Google a Rushdie atrocity, and that's fine with me, I haven't done my research. I am also not suggesting we limit our military actions in any way, just that this is a long term war to be fought on all fronts and with many weapons - soft, firm and hard.
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/rushdies/shalimar.htm
Shalimar the Clown is, ultimately, a very old-fashioned revenge saga. The book begins near the end: the first section quickly gets the central act of retribution over with, with most of the rest of the book then describing what led up to it.
Rushdie concentrates his story on four characters, each at the fore of one of the book's five sections (with one a central figure twice). A story of love, passion, honour, betrayal, much is intimate and personal -- but Rushdie frames this story within geopolitical and contemporary contexts, attempting to tie it in with something much larger (though part of what he is trying to do is to show that history is always also very personal). Max Ophuls, for example, is a statesman, the diplomat who replaced John Kenneth Galbraith as ambassador to India in the 1960s; he was also a hero of the French Resistance. Shalimar the Clown, born Noman Sher Noman (a doubled no-man), the wronged man who exacts his revenge, is long active in an international Islamic terrorist network. Even Max's daughter is burdened with more than just a name, one which is also a place-name, India.
Rushdie doesn't focus on the most prominent festering insurgencies of our time -- Palestine, Afghanistan, now Iraq -- but rather on Kashmir, an area of tension since the India-Pakistan partition, and one in which violence escalated dramatically in the past two decades. The books best scenes are set in these parts, and describe the destruction of this idyll. It is, if not entirely a paradise on earth, at least a place where people do get along, coexisting relatively happily (and humbly).
Shalimar and the girl called Boonyi, whom he falls in love with, are from Pachigam, a small but renowned town of entertainers and caterers. They are of different religions, but the biggest problem that poses is how their wedding ceremony should be performed: the villagers are understanding, flexible, and there is solidarity against outsiders -- be they the nearby competing village of Shirmal or more sinister forces from farther afield, the Indian army or the insurgents.
Shalimar and Boonyi's love looks to be a fairy-tale story, but it sours quickly: Boonyi realises -- a bit too late -- that marrying Shalimar condemns them: "to a lifetime jail sentence". She has grander ambitions than the small town she'll be stuck in for the rest of her life allows for. So from that moment on she's on the lookout for a chance to escape.
Opportuntiy finally comes in the form of Max Ophuls, newly appointed American ambassador to India, who comes to visit Kashmir and is immediately taken by the beautiful dancer. Ophuls was born in Strasbourg, in the Alsace, another area that, like Kashmir, has been fought over and to which different countries lay claim (Germany and France, in this case). Before the war his Jewish family was in the printing business, giving him hands-on knowledge of how to forge papers that eventually proves useful in the Resistance. (Rushdie occasionally gets carried away, having Ophuls first learn "about blowing things up" and actually carrying out a bombing himself; the Resistance would never have risked a man with his precious talent (forgery) on such a task.) He is a wartime hero, his exploits the stuff of legend -- and he also marries another Resistance legend, Peggy Rhodes (known as the Rat -- or, affectionately, Ratty), who unfortunately proves not to care too much about sex (while Max certainly does).
Rushdie does the international-conflict scenes of World War II quite well as well, but Ophuls' (and the Rat's actions) are basically simply described, without any regard for the moral implications. (Having him toss a bomb - one of Rushdie's missteps -- is one of the few occasions morality comes up, allowing him to claim: "he personally could not get over the moral hurdles required to perform such acts on a regular basis" -- an odd take on morality that isn't explored any further. And again Rushdie does not follow through: the fact that debonair Ophuls has no problem facilitating considerable carnage (as he does throughout his career, even if for arguably the right reasons) as long as he doesn't literally get his hands dirty needs to be addressed but isn't.) Ophuls is clearly in the right -- the Nazis are an evil that must be brought down at all cost -- but Rushdie makes no effort to consider how the other conflicts addressed in the book -- all morally more ambiguous -- are to be considered. The beliefs -- often sincere, even if misguided -- that lead the terrorists and other actors to do the horrendous things they do perhaps deserve no respect, but they are barely even considered in Rushdie's equation. The militants, mullahs, and officers are all obviously second-rate figures (while Ophuls' only real flaw is his womanising), not worthy of being taken seriously. Rushdie doesn't worry nearly as much about the human toll in World War II: outrages serve as a trigger, but the consequences are glossed over, Rushdie going so far as to basically airlift Ophuls out of Europe before the war is even over, so that the devastation left behind can simply be left behind. Not so in Kashmir, revisited again and again.
Many of the militant figures in India are ridiculous, and many are active on one side or another (or at least go to the lengths they do) for what are obviously largely personal reasons: for example, the Indian Colonel (later General) Kachhwaha, responsible for the military actions in the region, was rejected by Boonyi (and the locals), and his crack-down seems motivated almost solely by these experiences. An Islamic radical is literally a tin-pot mullah -- though he is one of Rushdie's more inspired inventions in this novel, iron mullah Maulana Bulbul Fakh. And the biggest fraud of all is, of course, Shalimar the clown, who joins the fundamentalist terrorists not because he believes in their cause but for the sole goal of eventually having an opportunity to get at Ophuls.
Shalimar is also wiling to do some terrible things, and gets involved in conflicts that have nothing to do with him, blinded by his one obsession. For a novel in which terrorism and militancy are so central, Rushdie does not explore the motivation behind it very seriously (not does he bother much with the personal consequence -- Shalimar is merely a revenge-machine; what he thinks about at night after he's committed some atrocity isn't bothered with).
The novel moves along in fits and spurts, but Rushdie tells the local tales -- Ophuls' war exploits, events in Kashmir -- well and it remains fairly compelling throughout. The scenes in Pachigam and Kashmir, and the collapse of the town, are the strongest in the novel, Rushdie evoking place and slowly unfolding catastrophe well (with only a bit too much reliance on the supernatural). Ophuls' story, more broken up (only life in France and his time in India are really described; much of what he did after, though relevant, barely mentioned), is interesting enough, but not always comfortably fit into the narrative. Daughter India, yet another character who vows revenge, living in Los Angeles, also isn't ideally tied in.
Ophuls' assassination isn't the final act: the novel goes more than full circle, continuing beyond it (as the vow Shalimar made extends beyond just the man who took his wife away from him), the ending a slightly disappointing showdown. It's not unexpected, but Rushdie has his characters jump through very unlikely hoops to set it up, making it seem slightly ridiculous, a final letdown.
Bit by bit Shalimar the Clown is fairly successful. Local scenes and episodes are very well-done, and Rushdie offers some solid flights of fancy. The characters are also fairly compelling, from smaller local figures to Ophuls, Boonyi, and Ratty. (A major exception is Shalimar, who remains more of a shell than person, Rushdie unwilling to really consider his feelings and thoughts). Interestingly, few of the major characters are sympathetic, aside from the charming womaniser Ophuls. The women (though admirably very independent-minded), in particular, fare quite badly: both Boonyi and Ratty are bitches who do things that inflict great hurt (Ophuls does too, but almost always with great charm), though each is sympathetic at times. Ophuls is to blame for their worst troubles, but they got themselves into these messes. (The two central marriages in the novel -- Shalimar and Boonyi, and Ophuls and Ratty -- are both catastrophic; it's no surprise that Rushdie makes India wary of any relationship and, even when she falls in love, is happy to keep her man at a distance much of the time.)
(The temptation to read autobiography into aspects of this is hard to resist: the public image of Rushdie's personal life is certainly very Ophuls-like (fatwa -- of a different sort -- and all), and his previous experiences with marriage (and the women involved) would seem to inform the marriages (and women) he describes here.)
The bigger picture of Shalimar the Clown is less convincing. The basic story is relatively simple (love, betrayal, revenge), and the connexion to contemporary geopolitics uneasily grafted onto it. The severely underdeveloped character of Shalimar the clown is perhaps the major problem, but the refusal to consider why people kill each other in any depth also hurts the novel. Rushdie is consumed by the idea of killing for honour and revenge (the central reason for most of the many killings in the book), and even if all the conflicts he addresses could be reduced to that, he doesn't delve deeply enough into the passion honour and revenge can arouse in people.
At times the book is poignant and convincing, the scenes in Kashmir seeming heartfelt and written with deep conviction. Moving elsewhere -- Los Angeles, in particular -- Rushdie seems far less sure of himself and what he wants to do (or rather: how to go about it). More significantly, Rushdie seems unsure of what kind of book he wanted to write: that simple tale of love, betrayal, and revenge, or a book that considers local armed conflict in the contemporary world. In imitation-epic style he picked both, but he should have chosen one or the other; the mix makes for a decent novel, but not an exceptional one (and some of the parts -- and some of Rushdie's previous work -- suggest he has the exceptional in him).
Title: Shalimar the Clown
Author: Salman Rushdie
Genre: Novel
Written: 2005
Length: 398 pages
Availability: Shalimar the Clown - US
Shalimar the Clown - UK
Shalimar the Clown - Canada
Shalimar der Narr - Deutschland
Paragraph-friendly version:
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/rushdies/shalimar.htm
Shalimar the Clown is, ultimately, a very old-fashioned revenge saga. The book begins near the end: the first section quickly gets the central act of retribution over with, with most of the rest of the book then describing what led up to it.
Rushdie concentrates his story on four characters, each at the fore of one of the book's five sections (with one a central figure twice). A story of love, passion, honour, betrayal, much is intimate and personal -- but Rushdie frames this story within geopolitical and contemporary contexts, attempting to tie it in with something much larger (though part of what he is trying to do is to show that history is always also very personal). Max Ophuls, for example, is a statesman, the diplomat who replaced John Kenneth Galbraith as ambassador to India in the 1960s; he was also a hero of the French Resistance. Shalimar the Clown, born Noman Sher Noman (a doubled no-man), the wronged man who exacts his revenge, is long active in an international Islamic terrorist network. Even Max's daughter is burdened with more than just a name, one which is also a place-name, India.
Rushdie doesn't focus on the most prominent festering insurgencies of our time -- Palestine, Afghanistan, now Iraq -- but rather on Kashmir, an area of tension since the India-Pakistan partition, and one in which violence escalated dramatically in the past two decades. The books best scenes are set in these parts, and describe the destruction of this idyll. It is, if not entirely a paradise on earth, at least a place where people do get along, coexisting relatively happily (and humbly).
Shalimar and the girl called Boonyi, whom he falls in love with, are from Pachigam, a small but renowned town of entertainers and caterers. They are of different religions, but the biggest problem that poses is how their wedding ceremony should be performed: the villagers are understanding, flexible, and there is solidarity against outsiders -- be they the nearby competing village of Shirmal or more sinister forces from farther afield, the Indian army or the insurgents.
Shalimar and Boonyi's love looks to be a fairy-tale story, but it sours quickly: Boonyi realises -- a bit too late -- that marrying Shalimar condemns them: "to a lifetime jail sentence". She has grander ambitions than the small town she'll be stuck in for the rest of her life allows for. So from that moment on she's on the lookout for a chance to escape.
Opportuntiy finally comes in the form of Max Ophuls, newly appointed American ambassador to India, who comes to visit Kashmir and is immediately taken by the beautiful dancer. Ophuls was born in Strasbourg, in the Alsace, another area that, like Kashmir, has been fought over and to which different countries lay claim (Germany and France, in this case). Before the war his Jewish family was in the printing business, giving him hands-on knowledge of how to forge papers that eventually proves useful in the Resistance. (Rushdie occasionally gets carried away, having Ophuls first learn "about blowing things up" and actually carrying out a bombing himself; the Resistance would never have risked a man with his precious talent (forgery) on such a task.) He is a wartime hero, his exploits the stuff of legend -- and he also marries another Resistance legend, Peggy Rhodes (known as the Rat -- or, affectionately, Ratty), who unfortunately proves not to care too much about sex (while Max certainly does).
Rushdie does the international-conflict scenes of World War II quite well as well, but Ophuls' (and the Rat's actions) are basically simply described, without any regard for the moral implications. (Having him toss a bomb - one of Rushdie's missteps -- is one of the few occasions morality comes up, allowing him to claim: "he personally could not get over the moral hurdles required to perform such acts on a regular basis" -- an odd take on morality that isn't explored any further. And again Rushdie does not follow through: the fact that debonair Ophuls has no problem facilitating considerable carnage (as he does throughout his career, even if for arguably the right reasons) as long as he doesn't literally get his hands dirty needs to be addressed but isn't.) Ophuls is clearly in the right -- the Nazis are an evil that must be brought down at all cost -- but Rushdie makes no effort to consider how the other conflicts addressed in the book -- all morally more ambiguous -- are to be considered. The beliefs -- often sincere, even if misguided -- that lead the terrorists and other actors to do the horrendous things they do perhaps deserve no respect, but they are barely even considered in Rushdie's equation. The militants, mullahs, and officers are all obviously second-rate figures (while Ophuls' only real flaw is his womanising), not worthy of being taken seriously. Rushdie doesn't worry nearly as much about the human toll in World War II: outrages serve as a trigger, but the consequences are glossed over, Rushdie going so far as to basically airlift Ophuls out of Europe before the war is even over, so that the devastation left behind can simply be left behind. Not so in Kashmir, revisited again and again.
Many of the militant figures in India are ridiculous, and many are active on one side or another (or at least go to the lengths they do) for what are obviously largely personal reasons: for example, the Indian Colonel (later General) Kachhwaha, responsible for the military actions in the region, was rejected by Boonyi (and the locals), and his crack-down seems motivated almost solely by these experiences. An Islamic radical is literally a tin-pot mullah -- though he is one of Rushdie's more inspired inventions in this novel, iron mullah Maulana Bulbul Fakh. And the biggest fraud of all is, of course, Shalimar the clown, who joins the fundamentalist terrorists not because he believes in their cause but for the sole goal of eventually having an opportunity to get at Ophuls.
Shalimar is also wiling to do some terrible things, and gets involved in conflicts that have nothing to do with him, blinded by his one obsession. For a novel in which terrorism and militancy are so central, Rushdie does not explore the motivation behind it very seriously (not does he bother much with the personal consequence -- Shalimar is merely a revenge-machine; what he thinks about at night after he's committed some atrocity isn't bothered with).
The novel moves along in fits and spurts, but Rushdie tells the local tales -- Ophuls' war exploits, events in Kashmir -- well and it remains fairly compelling throughout. The scenes in Pachigam and Kashmir, and the collapse of the town, are the strongest in the novel, Rushdie evoking place and slowly unfolding catastrophe well (with only a bit too much reliance on the supernatural). Ophuls' story, more broken up (only life in France and his time in India are really described; much of what he did after, though relevant, barely mentioned), is interesting enough, but not always comfortably fit into the narrative. Daughter India, yet another character who vows revenge, living in Los Angeles, also isn't ideally tied in.
Ophuls' assassination isn't the final act: the novel goes more than full circle, continuing beyond it (as the vow Shalimar made extends beyond just the man who took his wife away from him), the ending a slightly disappointing showdown. It's not unexpected, but Rushdie has his characters jump through very unlikely hoops to set it up, making it seem slightly ridiculous, a final letdown.
Bit by bit Shalimar the Clown is fairly successful. Local scenes and episodes are very well-done, and Rushdie offers some solid flights of fancy. The characters are also fairly compelling, from smaller local figures to Ophuls, Boonyi, and Ratty. (A major exception is Shalimar, who remains more of a shell than person, Rushdie unwilling to really consider his feelings and thoughts). Interestingly, few of the major characters are sympathetic, aside from the charming womaniser Ophuls. The women (though admirably very independent-minded), in particular, fare quite badly: both Boonyi and Ratty are bitches who do things that inflict great hurt (Ophuls does too, but almost always with great charm), though each is sympathetic at times. Ophuls is to blame for their worst troubles, but they got themselves into these messes. (The two central marriages in the novel -- Shalimar and Boonyi, and Ophuls and Ratty -- are both catastrophic; it's no surprise that Rushdie makes India wary of any relationship and, even when she falls in love, is happy to keep her man at a distance much of the time.)
(The temptation to read autobiography into aspects of this is hard to resist: the public image of Rushdie's personal life is certainly very Ophuls-like (fatwa -- of a different sort -- and all), and his previous experiences with marriage (and the women involved) would seem to inform the marriages (and women) he describes here.)
The bigger picture of Shalimar the Clown is less convincing. The basic story is relatively simple (love, betrayal, revenge), and the connexion to contemporary geopolitics uneasily grafted onto it. The severely underdeveloped character of Shalimar the clown is perhaps the major problem, but the refusal to consider why people kill each other in any depth also hurts the novel. Rushdie is consumed by the idea of killing for honour and revenge (the central reason for most of the many killings in the book), and even if all the conflicts he addresses could be reduced to that, he doesn't delve deeply enough into the passion honour and revenge can arouse in people.
At times the book is poignant and convincing, the scenes in Kashmir seeming heartfelt and written with deep conviction. Moving elsewhere -- Los Angeles, in particular -- Rushdie seems far less sure of himself and what he wants to do (or rather: how to go about it). More significantly, Rushdie seems unsure of what kind of book he wanted to write: that simple tale of love, betrayal, and revenge, or a book that considers local armed conflict in the contemporary world. In imitation-epic style he picked both, but he should have chosen one or the other; the mix makes for a decent novel, but not an exceptional one (and some of the parts -- and some of Rushdie's previous work -- suggest he has the exceptional in him).
Title: Shalimar the Clown
Author: Salman Rushdie
Genre: Novel
Written: 2005
Length: 398 pages
Availability: Shalimar the Clown - US
Shalimar the Clown - UK
Shalimar the Clown - Canada
Shalimar der Narr - Deutschland
All right, that did it.
We keep hearing about this silent majority, and most of us really want to believe it exists. But to date there has been very little evidence of it's existence. But assuming it is there, if it does not assert itself then it has abdicated the leadership of Islam to the radicals, and they therefore should not complain when the world sees and reacts to Islam as if the radicals are the majority.
Oh please! Radical Islam had been around long before George W. Bush ever got in to politics. It began to flourish when the State of Israel was founded, and the destruction of Israel has been its focus ever since. Anyone seen to be helping Israel is considered an enemy to Islam.
It long predates the re-establishment of Israel as well. The first Islamic terrorist was Mohammad - from the moment he got his "vision" he turned into a murdering, lying, booty-plundering, slave-taking, child-raping terrorist. What can you say about a religion whose sole prophet spent almost his entire adult life killing people?
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