I’m just in the middle of reading this book - it’s available for free, legally, online here.
It is a scathing indictment of Islam - from what I can tell, way worse than anything Salman Rushdie wrote in The Satanic Verses. So why is there no fatwa, or death sentence, against the authors?
(I’m also tempted to open a GD thread to have the contents debunked or confirmed…)
Well, I’m kinda guessing that it’s because they’re not Muslims, they’re not members of an Islamic culture, nor citizens of an Islamic country, and because scathing criticism is not the same as blasphemy. At least two of the above apply to Rushdie, and I think he is an apostate. Fatwas are not, I think, generally issued against foreign infidels.
Also, Rushdie is a very good, very influential writer. He’s harder to ignore.
And the Ayatollah Khomeni is dead.
In the book they claim that Mohammed was a terrorist, pedophile and rapist, among other things. How can that not be blasphemy? They also say that Allah is Satan - isn’t that the ultimate in blasphemy?
On the other hand, the fact that they aren’t muslims occurred to me too. I was also wondering if it’s due to a global change in the way muslims interact with the west, post-9/11. It’s as if things are more “out in the open” now, so a single inflammatory book doesn’t have the weight it would have back in the days of “Satanic Verses”.
Technically, blasphemy can only be committed by a member of the religion, although that’s not the definition in common use. After all, anything an outsider says is blasphemous. In any case, the fatwas of the past have made clear that they can only be applied to Muslims.
There was also a lot more (political) action gong on behind the condemnation of Satanic Verses than is generally understood. When Satanic Verses was first published, it received a fair amount of favorable literary criticism throughout the Muslim world–including in Iran. However, Rushdie’s background is Indian and in that country there were protests against the book. (I have never discovered whether the protests were more along the lines of Muslims, locked in conflict with Hindus, considering the book “traitorous” or whether some Hindu reviewers actually used it to attack Islam.)
A few months later, Ayatollah Khomeini was looking around for a good symbol to hold up to indicate the evil nature of “the West,” (the American Great Satan having begun to run out of steam, even in Iran), when he noticed the flap going on in India. Here was an actual conflict between Islam and another group, in a country with strong cultural ties to the West, over a book published in English by an author living in Europe, without direct ties to the U.S. (so he could point to a general hostility to Islam without being accused of simply more America bashing). So he condemned Rushdie. (This is not to say that Khomeini was not personally offended by the book; he appears to have been a sincere bigot defending his values. However, he was also a pretty shrewd politician and the book provided a number of ways to promote his own agenda.)
The fatwa against Rushdie caught a lot of the Muslim community by surprised. Certainly there are groups within Islam that would like to take a Wildmon-like approach to suppressing “bad” publications, but there is not a general trend in Islam to go around condemning everything they find offensive. (Such a trend may develop, based on Khomeini’s action, but it has not yet become a widespread phenomemon.)