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reading, and Mo just tensed.I'm not too hot on body language; I miss a lot, I know (you see - I do listen
to what you say), but it was like Mo suddenly became an ice statue, and these waves of cold antagonism
started flowing across the table at me.The others noticed too, and went quiet.
So I'd takenThe Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie out of the old daypack, hadn't I?And Mo's sitting
there like he expects the book to bubble and squirm and burst into flames right there in my hands.
Now, I don't know how much you've heard about the kerfuffle surrounding this book - it hasn't exactly
been front page news, and with any luck it won't be - but since it was published quite a few Muslims
have been demanding it be banned, withdrawn or whatever because it contains - so they say - some sort
of semi-blasphemous material in it relating to the Koran.I'd talked about this general area of authorial
freedom and religious censorship with a couple of classes, but still hadn't read the novel, and it just hadn't
occurred to me somebody like Mo - who hadn't been in either of those classes - might be on the side of
the bad guys.
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'Mo; is there a problem?'
'That is not a good book, Mr Munro,' he said, looking at it, not me. 'It is evil; blasphemous.'
(Embarrassed silence from the others.)
'Look, Mo, I'll put the book away if it offends you,' I told him (doing just that). 'But I think we have to
talk about this.All right; I haven't read the book myself yet, but I was talking to Doctor Metcalf the other
day, and he said he had, and the passages some people found objectionable were a couple of pages at
most, and he couldn't see what the fuss was about.I mean, this is a novel, Mo.It isn't a religious tract;
itmeans to be fiction.'
'That isn't the point, Mr Munro,' Mo said.He was looking at my little red rucksack as though there was a
nuclear bomb inside it. 'Rushdie has insulted all Muslims.He has spat in the face of every one of us.It's as
if he has called all our mothers whores.'
'Mo,' I said, and couldn't help grinning as I put the rucksack down on the floor, 'it's only a story.'
'The form is not important.It is a work in which Allah is insulted,' Mo said. 'You can't understand, Mr
Munro.There is nothing you hold that sacred.'
'Oh no?How about freedom of speech?'
'But when the National Front wanted to use the Students' Union, you were with us on the demonstration,
weren't you?What about their freedom of speech?'
'They want to take it away from everybody else; come on, Mo.You're not denying them freedom of
speech, you're protecting the freedoms of the people they'd persecute if they were allowed any power.'
'But in the short term youare denying them the right to state their views in public, are you not?'
'The way you'd deny somebody the freedom to put a gun to another person's head and pull the trigger,
yes.'
'So, clearly your belief in freedom generally can override any particular freedom; these freedoms are not
absolute.Nothing is sacred to you, Mr Munro.You base your beliefs on the products of human thought,
so it could hardly be otherwise.You might believe in certain things, but you do not havefaith. That comes
with submission to the force of divine revelation.'
'So because I don't have what I think of as superstitions, because I believe we just happen to exist, and
believe in science, evolution, whatever; I'm not as worthy as somebody who has faith in an ancient book
and a cruel, desert God?I'm sorry, Mo, but for me, Christ and Muhammed were both just men;
charismatic, gifted in various ways, but still just mortal human beings, and the scholars and monks and
disciples and historians who wrote about them or recorded their thoughts and their lives were inspired all
right, but not by God; by something from inside them, something every writer has in fact something every
human has.Mo; definitions.Faith is belief without proof.I can't accept that.Now, it doesn't bother me that
you can, so why does it bother you so much that I think the way I do, or Salman Rushdie thinks the way
he does?'
'Clearly, your soul is your own concern, Mr Munro.Rushdie's is his.To think blasphemous thoughts is to
restrict the sin to oneself, but to blaspheme in public is deliberately to assault those who do believe.It is to
rape our souls.'
Can you believe this?This guy's heading for a First; his father's an astro-physicist, for Christ's sake.Mo's
probably going to be a lecturer himself (he already puts 'clearly' at the start of his sentences; good grief,
he's halfway there!).It's very nearly 1989 but it's midnight in the dark ages just the thickness of a book
away, the thickness of a skull away; just the turn of a page away.
So, an argument, while the leafless trees and the cold brown fields stream by beyond the carriage's
double-glazing, and the inevitable wailing child howled somewhere in the distance.
But what do you say?I asked him about the kids who rode across the minefields on their Hondas,
clearing the way for the Iranian Army, the hard way.Insane, to me.To Mo?Maybe misguided, maybe
used, but still glorious.I told him that while I hadn't readThe Satanic Verses, I had read the Koran, and
found it almost as ludicrous and objectionable as the Bible and after that I got a bit loud, while Mo went
very quiet and forbidding and curt, and one of the others had verbally to separate us. (Coincidence; I
read the Penguin edition of the Koran - edited by a Jew, Mo claims, and unholy too because it puts the
passages in the wrong order - and Viking, who publish 'TSV, are part of the same group fertile ground
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for a conspiracy theory?)
Mo and I shook hands, later on, but it spoiled the day.
Good place to pause.They've just called us.
Hi again.Well, here I am, Bloody Mary in one hand, pen in the other, using Rushdie's book to lean
on.Got an aisle to one side, empty seat to the other, so I can spread myself out (already taken my shoes
off).Bit less crowded than I'd expected at this time of year.Jacksonville here I come. (I guess if it had
been Harvard they'd have paid for Clipper Class, but you can't have everything.)
Right.The coincidences I was talking about.I started readingThe Satanic Verses in the departure lounge
there, and how does it begin?With two guys falling through the air after being blown up in a jumbo
jet.Great.I mean not that I'm a nervous flier or anything, but this is not what one wishes to read before
boarding a plane, correct?So that's one.Plus those other two instances; of travel, a
conversation/argument started by a book (by two books), reason against faith both times, somehow
seem to belong together with this journey; bus, train, plane, a travelling trinity of functioning technology to
compare and contrast with the paranoid psychoses of religious belief.
What do you do with these people? (Never mind what they might do to us, if they ever get the whip
hand; what chance would I have to teach 'Reason and Compassion in Twentieth-Century Poetry' in
Tehran?) Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.
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